What’s left unsaid

Via Latino Rebel:

This week the Associated Press reported the following story, “Mexico Raids Seized Campus, Battle Protesters.” As with most of the stories the AP publishes, this online article appeared in countless of major American media outlets, like CBS News and TIME. However, even though the story chronicled how the police in Michoacán, Mexico raided three teachers colleges in response to student protesters who had been “hijacking buses and trucks for a week to protest curriculum changes,” the AP story did not include any of the images from the Michoacán raids that have gone viral through social media networks.

THE issue, as reported by AP, is that Normal College students object to adding English and Computer classes to the curriculum. That is AN issue, but there is much more to it the situation than that.  Rural teachers’ colleges have long been seen as a hotbed of “leftist” activism, and — with both PAN and PRI administrations seemingly more focused on policies that work against the interests of the rural regions (removing agricultural subsidies and support for small farmers, for example) and the impoverishment of the rural regions have led to years of simmering discontent.  In addition,  for many of the rural teachers, the incoming administration is seen as one likely to stint rural education and  support for the working poor in favor of more “neo-liberal” policies that benefit mostly the urban upper classes.  And, the Normalistas support CNTE, the dissident union which opposes the “offical” SNTE:  not only because they believe Esther Elba Gordilla is hopelessly corrupt, but also because they see the SNTE as having been co-opted by the PAN-PRI establishment, serving the needs neither of teachers, nor students.

But reporting that opposition to the incoming administration (and the outgoing one) is being met with brute force is a spin the AP and “mainstream media” would prefer to avoid.

Disturbing pictures after the jump…