Rural teacher drowns, prompting strike call

Martinelli's labor relations problems begin

Rural teachers' strike
by Eric Jackson

President Ricardo Martinelli is not a fan of labor unions and Minister of Education Lucy Molinar is from the religious right, a member of the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei. There is a docile alleged teachers' group, the Teachers United Coordinator (CUM) that was promoted by the former PRD administration, but most of the nation's teachers' union leaders, who are allied in the Teachers Action Front (FAM) are of the left. It would be expected that the teachers, who were defeated in the 2006 contract renewal process, might be looking for a confrontation with Molinar and Martinelli, and vice versa. And indeed, there has been a war of words between the FAM unions and the government from the start.

How serious the gestures are, and how eager the sides are for a fight, should be known soon enough.

The incident that could set things off came to light on August 14, when the militant Veraguas Educators Association (AEVE) was informed that one of its members, 25-year-old elementary school teacher José Dominguez Solís, who taught at the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca school of Rio Piedra north of Santa Fe, Veraguas, had been swept away by a flash flood in the Rio Piedra. The government sent out the SINAPROC disaster relief agency, but by the time they got there a group of volunteers from the community where Dominguez taught had already found and recovered his lifeless body.

Teaching in remote areas that are not served by roads is a dangerous occupation and Dominguez was far from the first AEVE member to drown while crossing a river going to or coming from work. Some of the organization's members have also lost children to the special hazards of teaching in the roadless wilderness. The last incident was in 2007, when teacher Doris Dixon, her son and a family friend were drowned not far from the scene of the latest death. The union has been agitating for a series of safety measures for years, but it has been a long time since Panama has had a government that takes public school teachers seriously and there has been little progress.

AEVE buried their dead colleague and then an assembly of 400 rural teachers demanded a meeting with Molinar to discuss a list of 15 demands concerning teachers serving in the officially designated "Areas of Difficult Access." These demands had been hammered out over several years of meetings of unionized teachers assigned to remote rural areas.

The teachers' delegation arrived for a scheduled meeting at the Ministry of Education headquarters on August 20, but Molinar chose to send a subordinate, education director and former legislator Raymundo Hurtado Lay, to meet with the teachers. He said he didn't have authority to negotiate, that Molinar would be willing to consider "some" of the 15 points, and warned against a strike.

With that, AEVE's members teaching in Areas of Difficult Access decided that they would not report to work on August 24. How long or widespread the walkout might be, and what the government might do in response, all remain to be seen.

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