Mexico: Missing student struggle reflects deeper issues

David T. Rowlands writes that Missing student struggle reflects deeper issues in Mexico.

Post-NAFTA Mexico is an increasingly apocalyptic wasteland of crony capitalism and violent state-directed political repression. The embattled, chronically under-funded network of rural teacher training colleges, to which thes abducted students belonged, represents one of the last remaining bastions of the progressive ideals of the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution.

Addressing the problem of structural, ethnically-based inequality, a problem common to all Latin American societies, was one of the key aims of the revolution.

At the core of the revolution, which started in 1910 as an armed revolt against an autocratic ruler, was a strong vein of democratic aspirations and social reform.

Many of leading activists recognised that building a strong public education system was one of the essential keys to bringing the impoverished and largely indigenous masses into the fold of a new and fairer nation. Close to 50 normal rurals were established in the 1920s to train the children of illiterate farmers from small communities to become teachers.

After graduating, these normalistas — often the first members of their family to receive any sort of education — returned to their villages and towns to helping to educate the next generation.

Politically, these colleges have always been associated with left-wing political views. The students see themselves as the vanguard of a revolutionary wave that would undo the indigenous dispossession that was the founding sin of modern Mexico and Latin America in general.

When a student is selected to attend one of these colleges, they are inculcated with the idea that a public educator is by their very nature a social activist, dedicated to the improvement of the lives of others.

Emphasis Mine

This is why Capitalist fear free, public education: it creates people who want to change the system, instead of compliant workers and consumers.

But therein lies the contradiction in the current Capitalist economy—the jobs that compliant, unthinking workers can do are disappearing as the jobs are being automated or sent off-shore. The well-paying jobs that remain require a highly educated workers who are creative and flexible thinkers. The problem for the Capitalists is how to control these workers?

As always, when the state runs out of incentives to maintain control, it reverts to naked force.