Sitting around a table in a dimly lit room, teachers and campaigners plot disrupting today’s midterm elections in an impoverished southern Mexico town fed up with corrupt politicians.
The town of Tlapa de Comonfort is home to some of the fiercest protests by radical teachers who have vowed to block the elections for the Mexican federal Congress, governor and mayors in the state of Guerrero in anger at authorities.
However, unlike their peers in Guerrero, or in Oaxaca and Chiapas states, the main gripe of Tlapa’s teachers is not Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s controversial education reform.
Photo: AFP
In this town surrounded by mountains where criminals grow opium poppies and marijuana, locals are tired of elected officials who collude with drug gangs. Walls are covered with graffiti calling for a boycott.
“No to narco-elections,” a message spray-painted on a wall reads.
Another says: “Don’t cast a secret vote for someone who will rob you publicly.”
“We want to block the elections because of the effects of the tyrannical relations between politicians and criminals. It would be giving power to the state to operate like criminals,” said Elmer Pacheco, leader of the Popular Guerrerense Movement (MPG), a group formed by radical teachers.
While the teachers refuse to reveal what they have planned for today, protesters clashed with riot police on Friday, throwing rocks at officers while a car burned in the middle of the road.
WIDE-RANGING
In the southern state of Chiapas, teachers broke into the regional offices of the nation’s main parties, removing furniture and documents that they burned outside.
Similar actions were taken this week against political parties in Oaxaca and Guerrero states.
It was in the Guerrero city of Iguala last year that prosecutors said local police — under the orders of a crooked mayor — rounded up 43 college students and handed them over to a gang which slaughtered them.
The Iguala case prompted teachers to seize the municipal government buildings of several Guerrero towns last year.
Tlapa was the only town where teachers still had control of government offices until Monday last week, when about 100 people, including local politicians, armed with bottles, sticks and stones forced them to leave.
Before their ouster, the teachers had grabbed 80,000 election ballots from a house and torched them in the street, illuminating walls with graffiti demanding the safe return of the 43 students in several indigenous languages.
The MPG emerged in 2012 to reject Pena Nieto’s education overhaul but the movement grew after the Iguala tragedy.
‘DEMAND TO SEE THE 43’
“First and foremost, we demand to see the 43, but at the same time [we want to block the elections,] because we have allowed these people to get into power,” teacher Antonio Vivar said.
The teachers said they would take action overnight yesterday to deal a “hard blow” that could “destabilize the elections” in the town of 100,000 people, Vivar said, holding a book about Cuban revolution icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Teachers call Tlapa Mayor Victoriano Wences of the leftist Work Party and his wife the “imperial couple.”
She is running for his seat while Wences is a candidate for Mexico’s Congress of the Union legislature.
The “imperial couple is the same nickname Mexican media outlets gave former Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, who was also eyeing her husband’s office and was accused of criminal ties.
POPULAR COUNCILS
Instead of elections, the teachers of Tlapa propose to create popular assemblies that would create government councils in each community, emulating indigenous customs.
They are inspired by similar systems in towns dominated by the EZLN Zapatista rebel movement in the southern state of Chiapas, and in Cheran, an indigenous town in the western state of Michoacan.
“Unfortunately, this mountain region has the worst poverty numbers in the nation, while being one of the biggest producers of opium poppies,” Pacheco said.
Tlapa is near Cochoapa El Grande, the poorest municipality in Mexico, with 82 percent of the population living in extreme poverty.
“We are light years away from the image of the developed countries that the technocrats who govern us have,” he said, fixing his glasses. “That is why we do not understand each other.”
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