Despite considering it illegal, the National Federation of Secondary Education Teachers (Fenapes) chose to go to Parliament on Tuesday and present a formal defense before the Investigative Commission that, in the Chamber of Deputies, analyzed the complaints regarding the irregular use of certifications by some teachers to justify absences in various high schools in the country.
The union submitted to Parliament a 12-page document in which it makes its “disclaimers” regarding the accusation against six of its members: Graciela Almeida, Alejandra Vespa, Virginia García Montecoral, José Olivera, Ana Pescetto and Marcel Slamovitz. The document, which was accessed The Observer and whom the leader Emiliano Mandacen defined as a “political plea” insists on an illegal action by the commission, from the moment that the law itself prohibits it from investigating the actions of people. “Strictly speaking, the task it is carrying out is none other than meddling in the internal life of the union, in flagrant violation of the Constitution and international conventions, with the unlawful purpose of attacking freedom of association,” the text says.
Among them, it is stated, attacking the right of the unions to organize their administration and their activities, or to formulate their program of action, in addition to refraining from any intervention that tends to limit that right. Fenapes appeals there to what is established in the agreement 87 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), signed by Uruguay. The federation also maintains that the agreement 151, that prohibits discriminating against public officials for being affiliated to a union or coercing them not to do so.
Fenapes also questioned that the official members of the commission have attributed “jurisdictional powers” by listing in its conclusions a series of crimes committed by its members. In the document, the federation raises a warning: if the House of Representatives endorses the researcher’s actions, it runs the risk of “be subject to civil liability for a manifestly unlawful legislative act”.
Olivera, one of the defendants, had already overtaken The Observer that the investigator had opened a “pandora’s box” and that the union I had a civil lawsuit on the table against the Legislative Power. In this framework, Fenapes made a specific request: that Parliament “repair the injury” to the legal system and reject the actions of the “illegal” commission.
The report of the deputies included among the defendants the six trade unionists and the former directors of Secondary School Celsa Puente and Javier Landoni. About them he marked “acts of criminal appearance” around the validation of the certificates of absence: fraud, fraud, forgery, omission of the duty of public officials to report crimes against the administration and concealment. A “salad”, as defined by the union’s legal adviser, Marcelo Domínguez, in which “each one will have to choose which crimes they will have to respond to. It is legal nonsense.”he expressed.
There Fenapes questions a particular point: the commission fails to specify what crimes each one would have committed. The absence of a precise accusation is also marked, which would make it impossible for them to exercise a defense. All of which, he points out, flagrantly violates the constitutional principle of due process. “They cannot defend themselves if they do not know what they are being accused of, much less present exculpatory evidence,” it is stated.
“Witnessing how legislators shamelessly overwhelm fundamental rights when, at the time of assuming their positions, they swore to defend the Constitution, is a clear sign of the disrespect that is shown to the institutions and the people they claim to represent,” concluded the document.
Mandacen said Tuesday that the commission’s action is in line with a “rights adjustment” that is part of the “triple adjustment” that the government has been applying in education. It runs parallel, he said, to “pedagogical setting” given by the curricular reform whose “mother document” has just been presented by the authorities and which, according to the leader, has already been rejected by “hundreds of teachers throughout the country.”
The trade unionist referred to the “budget adjustment” that in his vision implied a cut of US$ 80 million in the educational budget and that has resulted in a salary loss of 8% for workers, in addition to the impoverishment of educational conditions and the limitation of access to food in the centers public.
Mandacen further alluded to a “daily chase” to which teachers are subjected, which even reaches the violation of union billboards. So much “censorship and violence,” he maintained, led to a “greater rebellion” among teachers, which has been manifested precisely in the massive rejection of the curricular transformation proposed by the authorities.
“We went from fear to conscious rebellion that we have to face this adjustment process,” concluded the leader.
