Mexico's drug gangs aim at new target teachers

This is horrible.

- Patricia

By TIM JOHNSON | McClatchy Newspapers
December 12, 2010

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- At least once or twice a day, sirens blare here as firefighters in this violent border city speed to the latest store or restaurant that gangsters have firebombed for ignoring extortion demands.

Boarded up businesses and abandoned restaurants give parts of the city a ghostly look as organized crime strangles economic activity.

Now as Christmas approaches, mobsters have chosen a new target, turning their sights on humble schoolteachers.

Painted threats scrawled outside numerous public schools demand that teachers hand over their Christmas bonuses or face the possibility of an armed attack on the teachers - and even the children.

To make the point clear, assailants set fire to a federal preschool in the San Antonio district a week ago, leaving the director's office in smoldering ruins.

Scribbled on the wall in gold paint was the reason: "For not paying."

The targeting of teachers in Juarez's 1,270 preschool, primary and secondary schools is a sign of the depravity that rules in a city whose name has become synonymous with homicide.

Gangs already have shaken down other parts of the municipal social fabric - doctors, dentists and even ambulance drivers.

Now with the targets being teachers, parents have pulled thousands of children from schools where heightened security already had turned them into seeming prisons, enclosed with coils of barbed wire atop concrete walls.

Three schools have closed for fear they might come under armed attack.

"We are scared," admitted Maria de Jesus Casio, principal of the Ramon Lopez Velarde Elementary School. But she also said teachers don't want to pay. "Teachers don't have much money. The salaries are just enough for survival."

Teachers in this city earn an average of $650 a month. Christmas bonuses vary but the average is about a month's pay.

Casio, 53, a veteran teacher with close-cropped reddish hair, said teachers arrived at school one day in late November to find this graffito painted on the outside wall:

"For the well-being of everyone, and the children, pay 50,000 pesos."

That same day, assistant principal Jorge Alberto Palacios said that he found a notice on his pick-up truck that "talked about a massacre of children" and indicated where to drop the money.

A third message came in a school telephone bill.

The threats arrived at a dozen schools, perhaps more, according to news reports, though a senior school official would speak only in general terms.

"The educational system is under threat by criminal groups," Javier Gonzalez, the under secretary for education in northern Chihuahua state, said in an interview. "We're just praying to God that there never is an event of this nature."

Gonzalez said parents want police cruisers posted outside each school "but this kind of possibility doesn't exist" because there aren't enough patrol cars.

Authorities have kept secret when bonuses will be deposited into teachers' bank accounts in hopes of making it more difficult for gangsters to strong arm the teachers.

The lime-green school that Casio leads is awash in graffiti, although inside its fenced grounds, children play merrily.

After the threats arrived, Casio called her teachers together, the 23 from the morning shift and the 13 from the afternoon.

"We explained everything to them. We took a few measures, like trying to leave school all in a group. We set up a phone tree. We told parents to pick up their children promptly," she said.

Security got even tighter. The playground and basketball court that once stayed open till late in the evening now close promptly at 6 p.m. A municipal police officer painted over the threat on the fence.

As in many parts of the city, the block around the school is suffering. A glass store and its glazier owner recently shut down.

"He closed it and moved to El Paso because of extortion," said Palacios, referring to the Texas city across the Rio Grande from Juarez.

Hardly anyone is free from extortionate demands. They come from either of the two major crime groups fighting for control of the Ciudad Juarez area, the Sinaloa Federation or the Juarez cartel. Or they come from the myriad of street gangs who work for the cartels and also battle one another. This year, Juarez has chalked up more than 2,950 homicides, a pace of nearly 10 per day, making it one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

Faced with the threat of having their businesses strafed with gunfire or hit by Molotov cocktails, some owners shut or pay extortion but no longer pay city taxes. City revenues plummeted 8 percent this year and are projected to fall 15 percent in 2011, a sign of reduced economic activity, the local El Norte newspaper reported.

"We have 50,000 fewer jobs in Juarez than we did in 2008," said Guillermo Soria, director of the local branch of the National Chamber of Commerce. "Every day, at least two people come to say, 'They are extorting me. What do I do?' "

Soria voiced sadness at the pre-Christmas spate of extortions.

"I think even criminals should have some ethics," Soria said. "Taking away people's Christmas bonuses is really low."

Even as crime gangs target teachers, they are also hitting at the city's 4,000 or so physicians. So far this year, 20 doctors have been kidnapped, and two killed, said Dr. Leticia Chavarria as she emerged from a funeral mass for a beloved surgeon slain by drug gangs last weekend even though his family paid a ransom.

Emergency room doctors are particularly unnerved. Six times this year, armed gangs have burst into hospitals to finish off victims wounded on the street, Chavarria said.

"Every doctor who leaves Juarez leaves a hole," she said. "There is a lack of cardiologists now, and no specialists like this are arriving anymore."

Dr. Alfonso Sanchez Brito, a vascular surgeon, bemoaned how crime had touched most all of the 1.3 million residents of Ciudad Juarez.

"Everyone from the most humble street vendor to high society people are victims of extortion," he said. "The only thing I know is that it is terrorism."

At the pre-primary school hit by arson Dec. 5, director Norma Pena said her school had been sacked of anything valuable.

"They constantly rob from us - the metal bars from the fence, the air conditioners, even the swing sets," Pena said. "The laws are so soft. The laws are no good. When they catch someone, they let them go right away. The criminals threaten the authorities."

Casio, the principal at the elementary school across town, has spent 27 of her 34 years as a teacher and administrator at the same neighborhood school.

"We feel the caring and love people have for our school. This is what keeps us going," Casio said. But the crime gangs are sapping hope. "They respect no one. What is there to rob in this school? And we teachers, with our salaries, have even less."

Mexico Will Offer Online-Degree Programs to Citizens Living Abroad

By Marion Lloyd | The Chronicle of Higher Education
Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Mexico City

The Mexican government will begin offering online college-degree programs this month to its citizens living abroad, many of whom are suffering the effects of stricter immigration controls in the United States.

The project is being run by Mexico's Public Education Secretariat, which opened its own virtual university in August 2009. Since then, 33,000 students have enrolled in 15 different undergraduate majors at the National Open and Distance University of Mexico, said Rodolfo Tuirán, the country's under secretary for higher education.

He said the decision to expand the online-degree opportunity to Mexicans living abroad is partly a response to the raft of anti-immigration laws recently passed in the United States. The legislation—the most punitive of which is Arizona's SB 1070, which criminalizes illegal immigration within that state—has made it more difficult for undocumented immigrants to attend college in the United States.

Mexicans account for more than half of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, according to U.S. government estimates.

"Mexico has to look after its citizens abroad; it's only natural," said Mr. Tuirán, a sociologist who has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. "The goal is to improve their ability to compete, so that they have better conditions there or if they eventually return home."

The Education Secretariat, Mexico's equivalent of the U.S. Department of Education, began receiving applications from expatriates in July. It will initially offer spots to 1,000 students, who can choose from among five undergraduate majors: tourism administration, community development, small and medium-size business administration, engineering and environmental technology, and international marketing.

The programs were chosen based on a combination of demand and compatibility with online teaching models, Mr. Tuirán said. He added that Mexico had sought advice from the Colombian government, which runs its own online university catering to thousands of students living in the United States.
A Small Beginning

The initial 1,000 spots in the Mexican program represent a "symbolic offering, given the scale of the problem," Mr. Tuirán said in an interview. But he added that the government planned to expand the program after the pilot phase. He estimated that hundreds of thousands of Mexicans living abroad might be interested in earning college degrees online.

"As we wait for the situation of our fellow citizens to be resolved, we must make an ever-greater effort" to attend to their educational needs, said Mr. Tuirán, a former research professor in demography at the College of Mexico, one of Mexico's most prestigious institutions of higher education.

He added that numerous immigration bills are making their way through U.S. state legislatures, many of which would prohibit illegal immigrants from attending institutions of higher education in the United States.

Still, Mexico's top higher-education official was optimistic that many of those potential laws, along with the one that took effect in Arizona last month, would be ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Sooner or later, the United States will have to face up to this massive problem," he said. "You can't do without the 12 million undocumented workers, of which seven million are Mexicans."

The Mexican government, he argued, "must not only guarantee their rights but also ensure that they have the best possible conditions, and offering distance education is an adequate response."
Crushing Demand at Home

The Mexican government is also facing increasing pressure to expand spots at public universities at home. Mexico's gross college enrollment rate—a measure used by Unesco, which is calculated by dividing the total number of college students by the number of college-age students—is among the lowest in Latin America.

Since President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006, Mexico has seen the creation of more than 75 public institutions of higher education and 33 new campuses and extension programs at state universities. Another 23 institutions of higher education, mostly technological institutes, are scheduled to open this year.

Mr. Tuirán acknowledged that those efforts remain insufficient to meet demand for spots at traditional universities. The National Autonomous University of Mexico, the country's largest public institution of higher education, accepted a record low of 9 percent of applicants last spring, according to university officials. The university, known as UNAM, has some 150,000 students.

Meanwhile, hundreds of high-school graduates who were rejected from UNAM and the two other main public universities in the capital have been holding daily protests outside the Education Secretariat in hopes of gaining admission.

Mr. Tuirán argued that the technological institutes and the government's new online university could absorb many of those applicants. Open University's budget for 2010 is $21-million. But the government hopes to increase that figure to $34-million for next year and to enroll a total of 40,000 students in online programs.

"No other virtual university in Mexico can match that growth in its first year," Mr. Tuirán said.