since earlier this spring to stop implementation of the government’s education reform program. While strikes in Mexico are hotly contested, there is no precedent for firing teachers in such massive numbers just for striking. The night of the firings, federal police attacked and removed the encampment that teachers had organised outside Mexico City’s education secretariat . On June 11, the police in Oaxaca City moved to dismantle a similar encampment in front of the state’s education office. When 500 heavily armed police advanced shooting tear gas, confrontations spilled into the surrounding streets, reminiscent of the way a similar strike in 2006 was attacked, and then mushroomed into an insurrection that lasted for months. One controversial provision of the federal government ’s education reform requires teachers to take tests to evaluate their qualifications. Those not making good marks are subject to firing. This year, when the government tried to begin testing, teachers struck in protest. In March, when Nuño tried to give awards to ‘distinguished and excellent teachers’, one of them, Lucero Navarette, a primary-school teacher in Chihuahua, told him, ‘The results can depend on many factors and the personal circumstances each one of us live through…many don’t get the result they deserve, because the job they actually do at school is very different from what comes out in the test’. Journalist Hernández Navarro says educators have a tradition of egalitarianism and mutual support, and believe that ‘there are no firstor second- or third-class teachers. Only teachers’. On March 22 Nuño also announced a measure that would spell the end to Mexico’s national system of teacher training schools, called the ‘normals ’. Instead of having to graduate from a normal , he said, anyone with a college degree in any subject could be hired to teach. Since the Mexican Revolution and before, the normals have been the vehicle for children from poor families in the countryside, and from the families of teachers themselves, to become trained educators . Returning to rural and working-class communities , teachers then often play an important role in developing movements for social justice. The normal schools themselves have historically been hotbeds of social protest and movements challenging the government. Guerrero’s normal school in Ayotzinapa was the target two years ago of an attack that led to the disappearance and possible murder of 43 students , which has since galvanised Mexico. Recently a commission of international experts criticised the Mexican government for refusing to cooperate in efforts to identify the fate of the students , and pointed to the possible involvement of officials at very high levels in their disappearance. ‘The leaders of Sección 22 (of the National Union of Education Workers) are hostages of the federal government’ INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 20 Volume 23 Issue 2 2016 DAVID BACON is a journalist and photographer in San Francisco. He is a member of the Editorial Board of International Union Rights O n Sunday, June 19, Federal armed forces fired on teachers, students and supporters in Nochixtlan, a town in the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca. Nine people were killed, and many more wounded. Twenty-three were detained by the police. Demonstrators had blocked a highway, a common form of protest in Mexico, after the federal government had arrested leaders of the teachers’ union in Oaxaca. On June 12, as Ruben Nuñez, head of Oaxaca’s teachers’ union – Seccion 22 of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE, English: National Union of Education Workers) – was leaving a meeting in Mexico City, his car was overtaken and stopped by several large king-cab pickup trucks. Heavily armed men in civilian clothes exited and pulled him, another teacher, and a taxi driver from their cab, and then drove them at high speed to the airport. Nuñez was immediately flown over a thousand miles north to Hermosillo, Sonora, and dumped into a high-security federal lockup. Just hours earlier, unidentified armed agents did the same thing in Oaxaca itself, taking prisoner Francisco Villalobos, the union’s secondhighest officer, and flying him to the Hermosillo prison as well. Both joined Aciel Sibaja, who had been sitting in the same penitentiary...