Emir Olivares and Alonso Urrutia
Newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, June 29, 2022, p. 5
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador defended the model of the country’s rural normal schools, as they represent the option for the children of the poor, especially peasants, to have professional training.
To an express question in yesterday’s morning conference on the criminal proceedings undertaken by the authorities of Puebla –with a government emanating from Morena– against 44 students, 36 of them women, from the Normal Rural Carmen Serdán, located in Teteles, after a series of demonstrations held last year, the president asserted that the normalistas have his support.
I am with them; it’s just that there are still those inertias and we must continue to put them aside, not give up and move on. And those folders (on research in Puebla), remove them, only that the young people help and understand that the doors to dialogue are open, that part of the new educational policy is that, by finishing the normal one, they can have an entrance, their base, that they do not I miss them
.
He recognized that in the transformation process
that your government has undertaken there are still powders of those muds
of the regime of the past. However, he compromised: We are going to continue, together, promoting change, despite the obstacles
.
He underlined that during the years of neoliberalism, one of the objectives was to disappear the rural normal schools, as happened with the one in El Mexe, Hidalgo. He said that although there is no such claim in his government, remnants of those policies still remain.
“It is a process. As it happened during the government of (Benito) Juárez, who had the best cabinet that there has been in the history of Mexico, it was said at that time, men; now we have to add women and men, but back then it was said ‘men who all looked like giants’. And there were two positions, there were no more conservatives, but there were moderate liberals and radical liberals: Ignacio Comonfort was moderate and Melchor Ocampo was radical. And so. In all governments. That happens to us.”
