Peru Faces Crises in Politics and Education.
| Autor | Jana, Elsa Chanduvi |
A series of events--including a teachers' strike lasting more than 70 days; Congress' questioning and censure of the education minister 90 days after doing the same against her predecessor; its refusal to grant the vote of confidence requested by the prime minister, and the resulting reorganization of the Cabinet--shows that Peru's president is facing a political crisis. Continuously fueling this crisis is an already tense relationship between the executive branch and the opposition-controlled legislature.
In mid-June, public school teachers from the southeast department of Cusco, members of the Cusco unit of the Sindicato Unitario de Trabajadores de la Educacion Regional, began a strike that was joined by other regional unions until it went national a month later.
On July 12, teachers from guilds from 13 regions began an indefinite national strike led by teacher Pedro Castillo, who had been elected president of the of the strike committee by regional units of the teachers union, the Sindicato Unitario de Trabajadores en la Educacion del Peru (SUTEP). The SUTEP is controlled by the leftist Patria Roja party and is led by Alfredo Velasquez.
Thousands of teachers from different parts of the country moved their protest to Lima, Peru's capital, where they held rallies and blocked avenues and sections of strategic highways. Police responded with repression, and several teachers were injured.
The teachers' two main demands were an increase in salary to 2,000 soles (US$615) a month in the short term and 4,050 soles (US$1,246) by 2021, and the repeal of the General Education Law 28044 and the Education Reform Law, approved in 2012, which requires performance evaluations they say are designed to allow massive teacher layoffs.
A campaign promise
The salary increase was a campaign promise of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, also known as PPK, who vowed to deliver on that promise by the end of his first year in office, in other words, by the end of July 2017. According to a 2016 national survey of educators conducted by the Ministry of Education, 95% of public school teachers are dissatisfied with their salaries, and 27% hold a second job to be able to make ends meet. The survey also revealed that 63% of teachers are graduates of an institution of higher education, while 36% of teachers have studied at a university, a figure that drops to 24% in the rural sector.
As long as the dialogue between leaders of the strike committee and the Ministry of...
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