For years the Honduran education system has ranked among the worst in the Americas. It suffers from low-quality teaching, frequent strikes, inadequate resources, over-centralization, and partisan teacher selection.1 The political crisis triggered by the coup d’état on June 28 took a massive toll on an already weak education system. While international media have rightly focused on the human rights abuses committed in Honduras since the coup, they have rarely mentioned the shutting down of the country’s education system and the bitter conflicts it generated, particularly between parents and teachers.
Immediately after the coup, Honduran teachers’ unions rejected Zelaya’s ouster as unconstitutional and declared a strike. Schools in Tegucigalpa were then closed for as many as 50 schooldays.2 Organized teachers became a pillar of the anti-coup resistance movement, drawing the ire of the largely pro-coup Honduran media, the de facto government, and many parents throughout the country. Some angry parents said they were not taking sides in the political conflict and simply wanted to ensure their childrens’ continued schooling; the government and the media, however, quickly zeroed in on the school closures as an opportunity to bash the resistance, taking aim almost daily at the teachers’ “criminal” behavior.3
With the media’s help, the Micheletti government framed the teachers’ actions as a violation of children’s right to education, threatening to dock striking workers’ pay and extend the school year. This threat proved empty, however, perhaps because Micheletti did not want to give the unions more grounds for striking. Implicitly acknowledging its inability to sanction teachers, the government reversed itself on October 5, issuing a decree to close schools one month early. This caused students to miss even more class.4 Micheletti hoped that this measure would clear the schools of disruptive teachers ahead of the November 29 elections, since schools in Honduras are used as polling stations. Students automatically moved on to the next grade, with marks based on their first three quarters of the year. The government also announced plans to begin the 2010 academic year early to offer “reinforcement” of material from 2009, though this appears to have failed.
This schooling fiasco gave rise to a third actor on the stage of Honduran education politics: parents’ organizations. Whereas one federation of public school parents existed in 2008, four now claim to represent the parents of Honduras: the Federation of Fathers and Mothers for Education in Honduras (FAPAMEH), the National Federation of Parents for Education in Honduras (FENAPAEH), the Association of Parents of Honduras (ASOPAFAH), and Let’s Go Back to Class (Volvamos a Clases). As in most of Latin America, parents have rarely played a significant role in Honduran education politics. They face a classic collective-action problem—the difficulty of getting a group (in this case, with little economic and human capital) to act in pursuit of shared goals, often due to the diffuse nature of potential benefits and the likelihood of free-riding. It is thus unsurprising that parents have never formed federations to pressure the government and unions for better education.
“Before, we [parents’ associations in schools] were just a decorative figure,” said Héctor Rivas, president of FAPAMEH. Until 2009, parents stewed in solitude whenever strikes kept schools closed.
The de facto government and the pro-Micheletti media seized on these groups’ emergence as a way to delegitimize the teachers’ unions. Most newspaper articles on education now quote parent leaders as important players, never mentioning that most of these organizations are less than a year old, with little presence beyond the capital and nothing resembling the scale of organization of the smallest teachers’ union.
FAPAMEH and FENAPAEH claimed to include the parent leaders of between 15 and 20 public schools, while the other two groups—both created around the time of the coup—were unwilling or unable to provide me with documentation to support their claims to have thousands of members. Nonetheless, Micheletti’s government hailed these new actors, even suggesting the creation of a national parents’ federation through a state entity, the National Convergence Forum (FONAC), which aims to agglomerate Honduran civil society.
On November 9, FONAC—whose leader, Leonardo Villeda (a Zelaya appointee who later supported the coup), told me the teachers’ unions were behaving like “terrorists”—hosted a presidential forum with three of the four parent organizations and all four pro-coup presidential candidates. Participants signed a National Education Pact in which they pledged to meet various goals in education if they were elected, including ensuring 200 schooldays per year and increasing parental participation in schooling. The signing of this pact gave the parents significant media attention and political legitimacy, while the politicians celebrated the arrival of new, more manipulable, actors in education politics.
Meanwhile, the teachers’ leaders tend to see the parent groups as pawns, if not the direct creations, of the coup government. “These [parents’] federations don’t emerge spontaneously,” said Saturnino Sánchez, head of the country’s largest teachers’ union (COLPROSUMAH). Rather, he argued, the parent organizations have little interest in contributing to education and serve mainly to confront the teachers and delegitimize the resistance.
Yet some parent leaders were aware of what the Micheletti government was trying to do. “Yes, the government wants to use us against the unions,” said Juan Pablo Mejía, vice president of FAPAMEH, in September. Yet FAPAMEH leaders felt they could use government resources to strengthen their organization. Mejía continued: “We’re going to receive trainings and support to be able to work in the 18 departments. The timing is right.” Gloria Rodas, secretary of Volvamos a Clases, said her organization was simply being pragmatic. “We have to take the tools from wherever we can get them,” she said.
The leaders of all four parent organizations have further insisted that their interest in their children’s education is apolitical—a claim that union leaders find hard to believe, given that parent leaders from at least three of the national organizations have publicly criticized the unions since the coup. Nevertheless, leaders from both FAPAMEH and FENAPAEH said they would support the teachers if the government did not pay teachers on time, a long-standing point of contention for the unions. FAPAMEH president, Héctor Rivas, explained: “The problem is that whoever hires the mariachis gets to pick the music. FONAC wants us to go fight against the unions. But no, we’re the ones who support the schools, we’re not going to fight [against the teachers].”
Parent leaders said they intended to remain independent and active in education policy, working with both unions and the government. As FENAPAEH president Yaneth Molina asserted, “We can’t be guided by a biased political interest.” But the de facto authorities’ enthusiastic support for the parents reveals how key political co-optation remains as a political tactic in Honduras and a major obstacle for the country’s civil society and the exercise of citizenship. Following the country’s landmark 1954 banana plantation strikes, Hondurans have enjoyed relative freedom to form peasant and labor organizations, as well as other civic organizations. The Honduran government, however, has historically controlled these organizations by rewarding pliant, non-Communist organizations while repressing more oppositional groups.5
The Cold War landscape may be gone, but the coup authorities’ contrasting treatment of both the teachers’ unions and the parent organizations reveals a powerful continuity. And despite some parents’ and teachers’ avowed interest in negotiating, if not always in collaborating, they became pitted against each other in the country’s politically charged environment. This led to sometimes dramatic -confrontations—such as when parents occupied a handful of closed schools, or when teachers at one school posted guard dogs at the entrance to prevent anyone from entering and undermining their strike.6
Particularly in the days following Zelaya’s surreptitious return to Honduras, teachers participating in the resistance faced serious consequences. And as November approached, the drama in the schools had the potential to take its ugliest turn yet. As the pro-Zelaya teachers’ unions insisted they would keep schools open and disrupt elections unless Zelaya was restored to power, the specter of violence emerged.
Constitutionally placed under the Supreme Electoral Tribunal for the month before the elections, the military openly expressed its willingness to confront the teachers and any other election boycotters with the full weight of the law (voting is obligatory in Honduras). These were ominous words from the armed forces—having already committed widespread human rights abuses in the preceding months, they continued to threaten civilians while presenting themselves as the ultimate defenders of democracy. These threats only strengthened the teachers’ claims to be defending Honduran democracy against a repressive regime.
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The Honduran teachers’ position against the coup is consistent with the historical role of Latin American unions, which have been at the forefront of struggles for citizenship rights and democracy in the region. Five of the country’s six teachers’ unions became central players in the resistance, using a combination of weapons that other groups lack: significant disruptive capacity, tens of thousands of members, a national network, and financial resources. The resistance would have folded without the unions’ resources, according to several Honduran education experts.
“The teachers have sustained this movement,” said Alejandro Ventura, former president of the one teacher’s union (PRICPHMA) that has not participated in the resistance and current minister of education under President Porfirio Lobo. Ventura suggested, as many of the anti-coup teachers’ opponents have argued, that the unions were bankrolling and supporting the resistance movement, which otherwise would not have existed. Sánchez denied that COLPROSUMAH had spent much money supporting the resistance, but he acknowledged that his and the other unions were “a determining social sector in this struggle.”
The teachers’ unions, known as colegios magisteriales, are technically professional associations but act as de facto unions. They were established by the 1962 Law of Obligatory Professional Association, which mandated that all teachers belong to a colegio, lending strength to the unions by providing a steady stream of members and dues.7 But the measure remains controversial because Honduran law does not permit other unions to require participation. Thus, the legislation allowed the colegios to exploit a legal loophole, according to Napoleón Morazán, a founding member and former leading member of COLPROSUMAH.
Teachers in Honduras have gained considerable political and economic strength in the last 15 years. Their efforts in recent years have focused on defending the Teachers’ Statute (passed in 1997), which promised them scheduled pay increases and benefits. In the 1990s the unions united under the Honduran Federation of Teaching Organizations (FOMH) to pressure then president Roberto Reina (1994–98) to sign the statute, to push President Carlos Flores (1998–2002) to implement it, then to force President Ricardo Maduro (2002–06) to accept its provisions, and finally to ensure that President Manuel Zelaya (2006–09) deliver on his promises to respect it.8
In recent years, education reformers and experts have become exasperated with the teachers’ unions, whose strikes have closed schools for dozens of days annually. Critics argue that teachers worry more about their own salaries than the nation’s education system and that the terms of the statute are too generous, given the scarcity of education resources, and will bankrupt the state.9 Honduran labor historian Mario Posas writes that in recent years, teachers’ “struggles and mobilizations have lost sympathy across a broad spectrum of the Honduran public, who reproaches their lack of commitment to the quality of Honduran education and their excessive focus on salaries and economic issues.”10
Union leaders respond to critics by saying that the government must obey the law and pay them their legally stipulated salaries on time. And if there is not enough money, Saturnino Sánchez told me, then the government should increase its budget by raising taxes on the wealthy—a perpetual challenge for governments in vastly unequal Latin American countries.
In the week before President Manuel Zelaya’s nonbinding poll on convening a constituent assembly scheduled for June 28, which triggered the coup, Zelaya offered a financial settlement for striking teachers.11 In addition, he garnered teachers’ union support for the poll by promising that any new constitution would not reduce teachers’ rights as stipulated in the statute, according to Marlon Brevé, Zelaya’s minister of education.12 Thus, when the pro-Zelaya unions went on strike after the coup, demanding Zelaya’s reinstatement, the pro-coup media portrayed them as cynically acting out of self-interest, calling for Zelaya’s return only because he had backed the Teachers’ Statute.
But Sánchez, who was later beaten during a protest against the November election, rejected these critiques. “The teachers didn’t take to the streets to defend President Zelaya, but to defend the Constitution. . . . Zelaya was elected by the Honduran people, and all of the teachers’ organizations’ internal bylaws say that we have to permanently struggle to strengthen our democratic system.”
Although the teachers’ unions appreciated Zelaya as a president who, from the beginning, expressed his commitment to honor the statute, they went on strike frequently during his term, according to Sánchez. After the coup, when union leaders claimed to be going on strike to defend democracy, vocal detractors responded that the unions have been closing schools for years—including extended periods in 2009 before the coup—and it had nothing to do with democracy. The teachers’ unions struggled to convince the public of their democratic credentials, since so many Hondurans perceive unions as self-interested actors willing to sacrifice children’s well-being for their salaries—which are very generous compared to what most Hondurans earn. (The Teachers’ Statute includes provisions to increase salaries according to degrees held and years of experience, as well as bonuses given to those who work in remote areas. Many public school teachers with whom I spoke earned several times the minimum wage.)
Historically, though, struggling for democratic freedoms and self-interested behavior have not been mutually exclusive. For some, the Honduran teachers’ behavior will recall unions’ early struggles in the region: Even where these organizations principally struggle for their own rights and interests, they can ultimately strengthen democracies.13
But after being lambasted in the Honduran press, union leaders offered justifications that few parents seemed to accept.14 First, various leaders claimed that keeping schools open from Monday to Wednesday, leaving Thursday and Friday for protest activity, would provide children enough time to learn. This claim undermined their claims to care about Honduran children’s education. Similarly unhelpful were leaders’ assertions that teachers were in fact continuing to instruct their students in the streets, ostensibly giving them practical civics lessons. Moderate detractors responded that if the teachers wanted to protest, why could they not do it after one o’clock, when school is over?15 In the end, many parents were more frustrated with teachers’ unions than impressed with their democratic credentials after the coup.
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It now appears that Honduran parents’ attempt to form a cohesive political bloc has failed. By September, divisions among the parent organizations had become clear. Interviews with the leaders of all these groups revealed that, first, FENAPAEH split from FAPAMEH because of a leadership dispute. Then, ASOPAFAH refused to participate in the FONAC forum with the other three groups because it had organized a similar forum weeks earlier. Finally, the leader of Volvamos a Clases, Mercedes Saravia, alienated all the other leaders with her belligerence and thinly veiled pro-Micheletti politics—in November she presented a plaque to General Romeo Vásquez, under whose command the coup took place, on behalf of Honduran parents.16 Simply put, the leaders of each organization did not get along, and each one believed their group should lead the national battle. These divisions will likely make the parents a pliant political force for politicians invested in challenging the teachers’ unions.
Meanwhile, the de facto government’s futile attempts to assert its power over the teachers’ unions mirrored its inability to convince its opponents—both in the international community and the domestic opposition—of its legitimacy. As for the Micheletti government’s decision to close schools early, this too seems to have been a failure. First, the decision drew the ire of parent groups, who for months advocated extending the school year to make up for lost schooldays. Then, the last two weeks of school in 2009 were marred by disorganization, as teachers struggled to adjust their lesson plans and improvise an end-of-year schedule. Moreover, teachers’ unions denied the decree’s legitimacy and vowed to finish the school year as scheduled—provoking further disruption—before the de facto government was finally able to gain control of the schools.
Teachers also ignored the government’s call to begin classes early in 2010, meaning that the lost days will not be recovered. In any case, the early start could never have worked in many rural areas. January is peak coffee-picking season, and children from many of the country’s 18 departments spend the month working to contribute to their family’s income. As one district director of education in the coffee-growing department of El Paraíso explained to me in October: “Normally, kids don’t even come to school in February. . . . This January idea is going to be a failure.”
Lobo has inherited the government’s conflict with the teachers. The focus of this conflict, in which the government will likely look for support from the incipient parent organizations, will now shift back from Zelaya-related issues to the unions’ typical demands—punctual payment and the creation of new teaching jobs. Lobo’s appointment of Ventura, a union insider, as minister, could change the tenor of government-union relations.17 Still, if the government continues to lag in paying teachers’ salaries, the unions will rely on their economic and logistical capacity to paralyze the education system. In 2010 as in 2009, therefore, the unions will likely remain a thorn in the government’s side, and education will remain at the center of Honduran politics.
Daniel Altschuler is a Rhodes scholar, pursuing a doctorate in politics at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on participatory development initiatives, and his dissertation explores the dynamics of parental participation in community-managed schools in Honduras and Guatemala.
1. For a comparative look at education indices in the Americas, see, for instance, Quantity, Without Quality: A Report Card On Education In Latin America (Washington, DC: PREAL, 2005). Thanks to Jeff Lansdale and Michael Lisman for their comments on this article.
2. Estimates for days lost in the whole academic year range from 40 to 100. The higher estimates, however, appear to include days lost due to teachers’ strikes before the coup. See, for instance, Eliot Brockner, “An Early End to Classes in Honduras,” Latin American Thought (latamthought.org), October 18, 2009; “Maestros no quieren alargar año escolar,” La Prensa (Tegucigalpa) October 27, 2009.
3. For examples of typical media critiques of the unions, see Jaime Martínez Guzmán, “El magisterio nacional,” La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa), October 14, 2009. See also “Es un crimen lo que está pasando en Educación,” La Tribuna, August 11, 2009.
4. Several Latin American countries submitted a resolution to UNESCO expressing their concern with the school closures, as well as violations of press freedom, since the coup. The draft resolution can be viewed at unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001849/184935e.pdf.
5. Rachel Sieder, “Honduras: The Politics of Exception and Military Reformism (1972–1978),” Journal of Latin American Studies 27 (1995): 99–127.
6. “Padres de familia asumen control en escuelas,” El Heraldo, August 11, 2009.
7. The full text of the law is available at colprocah.com/docsPDF/LeyColegiacion.pdf.
8. For more on former president Maduro’s efforts to freeze the provisions of the Teaching Statute, see “Premian a maestro del año y no descartan revisión a Estatuto del Docente,” El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa).
9. Explanation of the contours of this debate came from the interviews with Napoleón Morazán, Alejandro Ventura, and Saturnino Sánchez, as well as additional informal discussions with Honduran education experts in September–October 2009.
10. Mario Posas, “Sindicalismo y gobierno. Una agenda para el diálogo en torno a la reforma educativa. El caso de Honduras” (2003), available at nupet.iuperj.br/arquivos/Posas.pdf. Translation by the author.
11. “No darán clases, irán a asambleas informativas,” El Heraldo, June 21, 2009.
12. Saturnino Sánchez and Alejandro Ventura confirmed this.
13. See, for instance, J. Foweraker and T. Landman, Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2000).
14. For examples of media opposition to the union’s pro-Zelaya stance, see “Exigen a docentes no imponer doctrinas políticas a los alumnos,” La Tribuna, September 1, 2009, and “Dirigencia magisterial sepultó el año lectivo,” El Heraldo, October 10, 2009.
15. This characterization of the post-coup union debate derives from interviews cited above with Napoleon Morazán, Alejandro Ventura, and Saturnino Sánchez, as well as additional informal discussions with Honduran education experts in September–October 2009.
16. “Tributo a FFAA,” El Heraldo, November 6, 2009.
17. “Ventura ofrece diálogo con maestros y padres,” Tiempo, January 28, 2010.
