Oaxaca, Mexico – Hundreds of parents stood guard Tuesday outside schools that have reopened amid an ongoing five-month-old teachers strike in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Here in Oaxaca city, the state capital, several more schools opened Tuesday to join the hundreds that in the past few days resumed classes in Mexico’s second-poorest jurisdiction.
“We decided as parents to hire a private security service because we’re afraid of acts of violence,” EFE was told by Esperanza Garcia, one of the mothers taking their children to Francisco J. Mugica School in the old historic part of town.
Another educational facility that reopened Tuesday was the Francisco Zarco School in the Pueblo Nuevo municipality, just west of Oaxaca city.
Students’ parents are not allowing teachers and the social organizations that support them to keep schools shut by force.
“We are here watching over our children to make sure receive classes in the normal way,” said one of the parents, Justino Bohorques, adding that they have organized a rotating guard system so as not to neglect their jobs.
In the city of Tuxtepec, parents stopped members of the teachers union – which is talking about ending the strike by Oct. 30 – from going back to the classrooms.
Giving lessons in their place are private teachers employed by the state government, City Hall and the parents themselves.
Oaxaca city, whose colonial architecture and pre-Columbian ruins in other times were a magnet for tourists, has been virtually under siege by teachers and their allies in the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, or APPO.
The APPO threatened Tuesday to reinforce the barricades they have set up at strategic points around the city to defend themselves from possible intervention by police and to demand the resignation of the state governor, Ulises Ruiz, a controversial figure accused of rigging the 2004 election that brought him to power.
