“Elba, the Teacher, was toppled,” wrote a columnist for the newspaper Tabasco Hoy, Leobardo Perez Marin. “Nothing is impossible!”
As Joe Biden would say, "This is a BFD." It is the story that everyone is taking about here. La Maestra has been arrested. She is easily one of the most despised people in Mexico and representative of so many things that people have been complaining about for years. The details behind the scene are amazing. And you can see the union money spent to keep her looking exactly the same as when she took over in 1989 really did the job. And that is just the most minute of things as to how the money was spent. The jokes abound.
By jailing Mexico’s most powerful woman, President Enrique Pena Nieto removed a potential political obstacle and fired a warning shot at other union leaders not to get in the way of the ruling party.
Mexico’s political world still rippled Wednesday from the imprisonment of Elba Esther Gordillo, the 68-year-old “president for life” of the 1.5 million-member national teachers’ union, the largest such union in the hemisphere.
Gordillo’s arrest Tuesday on corruption charges heartened Mexicans who widely envied her opulent lifestyle, feared her power as a political kingmaker, loathed her stranglehold on the struggling public schools and referred to her by her nickname, La Maestra, or The Teacher.
“Elba, the Teacher, was toppled,” wrote a columnist for the newspaper Tabasco Hoy, Leobardo Perez Marin. “Nothing is impossible!”
Gordillo, who’s ruled the powerful teachers’ union for nearly a quarter century, was the mightiest of the union bosses opposed to education, financial and energy reforms that Pena Nieto proposed when he took over the presidency Dec. 1.
Her detention in the Santa Martha Acatitla women’s prison may galvanize support for the government as it implements reforms, enacted Monday, that give it the ability to hire and fire teachers from the union and set minimum standards for classrooms.
But some analysts and education reformers saw the arrest as more about sweeping away opponents of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party – known as the PRI, for its Spanish initials – than about changing education.....
Gordillo has plenty of dirt on politicians across the political spectrum, and some analysts worried that her eventual successor in the teachers’ union would follow in her footsteps.
“Let’s see if they create another little monster,” said Carlos Loret de Mola, a popular television news anchor and activist for educational reform.
“The great risk is that the PRI recovers control of the union leadership and uses it again for electoral purposes as it has done in the past,” said Monica Tapia, a political analyst who’s a founder of the Citizens’ Coalition for Education. “It’s a good moment for the teachers’ union to democratize. But the Gordian knot is that the union controls the teachers’ jobs. . . . Teachers live under the yoke of their leaders.”Hope springs eternal.
1 comment:
Wowwww! Finally, because the last two presidents of mexico, neither had the balls to confront her or the brains to handle her properly.
Saludos
K
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