For the third May in a row, the daily downpours that mark the onset of Mexico City’s rainy season arrived alongside a flood of tents erected by striking teachers from the Coordinadora Nacional de los Trabajadores de la Educación (National Coordinator of Education Workers, CNTE). The CNTE, a dissident current within Mexico’s official teachers’ union (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, SNTE), commands one of the most significant nationwide mobilizing capacities in the country, with its strongest bases in some of Mexico’s poorest regions. It is precisely this mass, popular character that has lent the organization decisive political weight throughout nearly five decades of anti-neoliberal resistance.
Since 2007, the movement’s central demand has been the repealing of the 2007 Institute for Social Security and Services for State Workers (ISSSTE) reform, which replaced public pensions with individual retirement accounts managed primarily by private Retirement Fund Administrators (Afores). The reform raised the retirement age and reduced pensions to an average of 7,000 pesos ($400) a month—roughly 30 percent of teachers’ pre-retirement earnings. Repealing the reform was a key campaign promise made by both Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaum. Years later, that promise remains unfulfilled.
In response, the CNTE has escalated their mobilizations. Since the 2024 presidential elections, their annual May 15 Teachers’ Day march has evolved into a nationwide strike and encampment in the center of the capital. This year, the indefinite strike began on May 25 with nearly 16,000 teachers from Oaxaca’s Section 22, expanding on June 1 as thousands more from Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Mexico City joined the movement. The encampment—spread out beneath a web of ropes and tarps that, for weeks, successfully disrupted the commercial pulse of the city—became the center of a national protest movement unfolding on the eve of one of Mexico’s most important international events: the 2026 World Cup.
For many of the movements protesting the World Cup, opposition to the event is predicated on a broader rejection of an economic arrangement that converts public wealth into private profit, with the majority of gains channeled to elites in the Global North. These questions are inseparable from Mexico’s assertion of national sovereignty and lie at the heart of the CNTE’s struggle.
The National Strike Becomes A Social Movement
In addition to their longstanding call for the total repeal of the 2007 ISSSTE reform, teachers demand a 100 percent wage increase; an end to short-term contract work; reimbursement to families for school uniforms; school equipment funding; additional personnel to fill chronic staffing shortages; and official recognition and funding for alternative pedagogical projects.
Though the teacher’s strike and their demands had been announced months in advance, it wasn’t until Oaxaca’s section 22 took to the streets that negotiations began. It was ultimately the CNTE’s formidable mobilizing capacity—amplified by a broader front of popular resistance that includes Madres Buscadoras (“searching mothers”), families of the Ayotzinapa 43, anti-gentrification groups, transport workers, and farmers—that forced the confrontation out into the open. Despite mainstream media that has expressed otherwise, what unites this coalition is not opposition to the ruling MORENA party but rather a class position and corresponding shared experience of bearing the costs of an economic model whose benefits are concentrated elsewhere. The World Cup has simply provided a stage upon which these deeper social contradictions have become impossible to ignore.
In the weeks leading up to the tournament, the city erupted into a chaos that served as a physical expression of these class divisions. On one side stood the CNTE alongside some of Mexico’s most historically important popular movements, camping on the streets, occupying toll booths, and carrying out highway blockades that together physically obstructed passage through the most transited arteries of the city. On the other side stood a heavily policed mega-event surrounded by touristification projects, corporate advertising, and a two-kilometer security perimeter around the stadium. While police were deployed to suppress social protests, there was also an indiscriminate use of law enforcement to defend World Cup venues and restrict access to the stadium, where ticket prices were set at around 50,000 pesos ($2,870)—five times the country’s minimum wage.
Speaking from the CNTE encampment, Felix Moreno Peralta, a teacher and former secretary general of CNTE Section 14 in Guerrero, argued that the World Cup is a “fairground for big businessmen” that serves only to increase profits for the world’s ultrawealthy, “while deteriorating economic, social, cultural, and infrastructure conditions for everyone else. For those of us who live here, it’s like we fatten the pig so others can eat it, while we become increasingly pauperized, increasingly poor.”
His criticism points toward a broader reality. Although the conflict around the tournament unfolds within a national context, the contradictions are shaped by global systems of capital accumulation and Mexico’s position within them—systems that cannot be understood without taking into account the structural underdevelopment of the global south.
Public Spending, Private Earnings
As the joint hosting of the games between Mexico, the United States and Canada unfolded, so did negotiations over the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), the trilateral trade pact negotiated during Trump’s first term to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Although Trump declined to renew the treaty during its first mandatory review, the decision neither terminates nor alters the trade rules codified within it. Rather, it will initiate a decade of annual reviews that Washington is expected to use as recurring, asymmetrical leverage to extract more favorable terms. This is already taking shape. Trump’s early demands include restrictions on Mexico’s commercial ties with China and reorienting supply chains around U.S. imports, both of which serve to widen Mexico’s trade deficit and bind its commercial and foreign policy decisions to U.S. strategic interests.
The distribution of benefits for hosting the World Cup has proven just as unequal as the treaty’s economic architecture.
The distribution of benefits for hosting the World Cup has proven just as unequal as the treaty’s economic architecture. Mexico has incurred huge debts to host the games, investing approximately $1.3 billion of public funds in public infrastructure for the tournament. While, in Mexico, FIFA is slated to earn between $1.8 and $2.8 billion, the organization, its subsidiaries, broadcasters, and corporate partners like Coca-Cola, Adidas, Aramco, and Visa will be paying no taxes in Mexico this year. This is due to the Ley de Ingresos 2026, which provides fiscal concessions to strengthen Mexico’s competitive edge during the game’s hosting bid. In the U.S. and Canada, in contrast, FIFA will pay taxes on all profits and revenue it generates, yielding a huge windfall for host country treasuries that Mexico will not share.
The wider struggles raised by the World Cup over who pays, who profits, and who controls the nation’s wealth are tied directly to the question of Mexico’s sovereignty. This same question lies at the heart of the CNTE’s fight against the 2007 ISSSTE reform and their demands to strengthen public education by and for the nation’s poor
CNTE Demands Economic and Ideological Sovereignty
At stake in the struggle over the 2007 ISSSTE reform is the broader question of whether the economic surplus produced by Mexico’s workers will remain subordinated to global financial accumulation or be redirected toward national social reproduction. Under the Afore system, workers’ savings are channeled into financial circuits controlled by foreign capital such as BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager—and a small group of the country’s wealthiest individuals, with no demonstrated link to GDP growth or workers’ welfare. Reversing this reform would repatriate decision-making over a pool equivalent to 21.3 percent of the GDP, redirecting social wealth away from financial accumulation and toward public and labor institutions.
Likewise, public education is a mechanism through which societies either reproduce dependence or develop autonomous capacities. As Moreno Peralta explained, “The education currently provided in Mexico is a banking education, a neoliberal education. It is not an education for freedom.”
In this regard, the CNTE’s demands concern not only financing and resources for public education but also self-determination over how communities imagine their future, the world, and their collective place in it. This includes demands for recognition and financing for alternative pedagogical projects like Oaxaca’s Plan para la Transformación de la Educación de Oaxaca (PTEO), part of a broader network of grassroots educational initiatives promoted across CNTE strongholds such as Guerrero, Michoacán, and Chiapas. These alternative educational projects are adapted to the concrete conditions of each state with the common goal of promoting critical consciousness, environmental stewardship, and community-based learning. As Moreno Peralta explained, “We propose that the school should be a space where our people and the communities where we work can develop economically, politically, socially, and culturally. We are popular educators committed to the interests of the people, of Indigenous communities, and of our homeland.”
The Costs of the Struggle
The CNTE has remained resolutely committed to their demands, advancing the struggle despite immense sacrifice. For nearly three weeks, teachers spent their nights sleeping on pavement beneath tarps in the rain and their days suffering severe repression. Within the first few days of the encampment, one teacher died of a heart attack that CNTE leadership later attributed to exhaustion. In Oaxaca, clashes with police left at least fifteen teachers injured.
In this regard, the CNTE’s demands concern not only financing and resources for public education but also self-determination over how communities imagine their future, the world, and their collective place in it.
On June 1, as teachers from across the country marched to the Zócalo to install their encampment, they were greeted with tear gas and rubber bullets. During clashes with police, two teachers from Guerrero—Proceso González Columbo and Octavio Guerrero Jerónimo, both active supporters of MORENA—were severely injured; the first left blind after being shot in the eye by a rubber bullet; the second with a perforated cheekbone after being struck by a metal rod.
Adalberto Lozada Palacios, a teacher from Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, explained the significance of the struggle from the Section 22 division of the CNTE encampment: “Look, if we start explaining the conditions under which we work, little by little you’ll come to understand why we bear these costs.” Lozada—who has been imprisoned twice for his activism and once required reconstructive surgery after a rubber bullet ruptured the veins in his foot—went on to describe a daily existence in which families can’t pay for their basic needs, children arrive hungry, and teachers manage the cost of everything from school supplies to medicine. As Lozada explained, it is these concrete class conditions, not individual ideology, that fuel the CNTE’s struggle: “It builds our character. It gives us resilience and determination. It gives us the strength to take part in our movement.”
As repression against the teachers heightened, so too did a campaign of defamation. Official government correspondence accused demonstrators of engaging in “acts of provocation” and “violence aimed at projecting an image of chaos and instability in Mexico.” Yet the most insidious media distortions surrounding the movement emerged from the negotiating table itself. The Interior Secretary claimed restoring the solidarity-based pension system would cost 20 percent of the GDP but did not disclose the actuarial methodology behind the estimate, which critics argued likely reflected cumulative obligations spread over four decades. MORENA announced a 9 percent salary increase, omitting that only 4 percent represented actual salary increases; the remaining 5 percent covered benefits, amounting to roughly 20 pesos per day with no improvement to retirement prospects. The Education Ministry began citing salaries of 20,000 pesos ($1,140) without acknowledging that mandatory deductions cut take-home pay to approximately 8,000 pesos ($456) per two-week period.
On June 20, the CNTE voted to suspend the encampment and end the national strike—a decision its leadership framed explicitly as a tactical pause, not a concession. Although their principal demands were left unresolved, they secured one crucial victory: 800 million pesos for schools in Oaxaca. Meanwhile, sections from Guerrero, Chiapas, Mexico City, and Michoacán won commitments on teacher permanency, benefit standardization, and the installation of permanent state-level negotiating tables. These victories, though partial, are just the latest in the CNTE’s decades-old struggle against the plundering of public resources under the neoliberal economy. Most importantly, however, they remind us that the social institutions upon which Mexico’s working class depends have not survived the neoliberal era on their own; they have been fought for and defended through decades of organized struggle.
Isabel María Villalón is an independent scholar and Latin Americanist currently pursuing a master’s degree in Latin American Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Her recent work focuses on the intersections of neoliberalism, labor, and migration in Central America.