A report from various communities in Honduras where the regime imposed by a 2009 military coup has opened up an all-out attack on the country's teachers. Honduras' teachers are, in the eyes of many, the most organized sector of the anti-coup resistance movement. Over recent months they have had their pensions stolen, their wages cut, their labor rights suspended, and a new education law passed which they believe is the beginning of the privatization process. In response, the teachers and the National People's Resistance Front have occupied institutions, roads and highways across the country, to which the regime has responded with brute force.
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VIVAR: The teachers in Honduras are one of the only--or of the few sectors that have achieved a decent living. By this I mean they have decent housing, they have--well, they can send their kids to college, they have healthy food, etc. Since the coup, that livelihood has been, well, heavily attacked. A hundred million dollars was robbed from their pension fund and hasn't been returned. Last September, Pepe Lobo went to New Orleans in order to study the charter school system design, and he brought it back to Honduras, and that's what he's giving us now.
KLEIN: And one of the people who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was Milton Friedman. He said New Orleans schools are in ruins; the teachers, families, parents, are scattered throughout the country. This is a tragedy, he wrote; it is also an opportunity. Then he proceeded to explain that this was the moment to transform New Orleans' education system into a charter school system, which means public money going to private schools, many of them run for profit. They busted the teachers union completely. They fired 4,700 teachers--they don't have a contract anymore. This was the opportunity.
FREESTON: During our September visit to New Orleans, Pepe Lobo's assistant, Mayra Pineda, was quoted by the student newspaper The Tulane Hullabulloo as saying, quote, "We've had a huge problem with teachers unions. . . . Charter schools are certainly one option to try to solve the union situation."
Just two weeks after meeting with New Orleans authorities, Lobo signed an agreement with the International Monetary Fund. In exchange for a $200 million loan, he promised to cut the country's education budget. A little over three weeks after that, the regime cut the teachers' salaries, while announcing increases for the budgets of both the military and the police. One month later, an IMF evaluation declared things were, quote, "broadly in line with expectations".###
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6635They're murdering students & teachers:
ZAVALA (SUBTITLED TRANSL.): This is the continuation of the coup. We see here a disrespect for human rights. Every day, we see deaths, youths murdered, teachers beaten and shot. As teachers, we can't put up with this any longer.
So my question is, why aren't we bombing them?
My second comment is, can anyone doubt that education deform is a *global* ruling class initiative, part of the *global* austerity/privatization program being imposed by the ruling class?
Who is the IMF, & how is it that they can dictate social policy?
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