Feminists in Resistance
August 27, 2010
Bulletin No. 22 (my translation)

Women teachers are fighting...they are also teaching! Everyone rise up against military repression!

As women and feminists in resistance in Honduras we stand in strong support of the struggle of the Teachers' Unions of Honduras who were brutally attacked with toxic gas, beatings, and arrests by police forces in the city of Tegucigalpa yesterday August 26th. In these repressive actions many men and women teachers were hurt, along with their young children who accompanied them. It has been reported that teachers have received bullet wounds and have suffered respiratory problems due to the toxic gases. According to reports, Hospital Escuela has refused to give them medical attention.

At present, the struggle of the teachers' union, of which approximately 80% are women, is focused on defending the INPREMA (Teachers' Savings and Loan and Pension Fund) from privatization, the demand for the return of millions of lempiras from that institution [IMPREMA] that were utilized by the de facto government for unspecified purposes, and preventing the passage of the dangerous General Law of Education, which among other things removes kindergarten and pre-kinder, along with high school [note: prekinder and kindergarten would only exist as private tuition-based schools; grades 1-6 would remain; grades 7-9 would be accessible, but parents would have to pay for classes like music and art; everything after 9th grade would be fully privatized and tuition based] This Education Law has already passed through two revisions in the National Congress and awaits final approval. If this law is approved, each student will have to pay a monthly fee to remain in school. In other words, the oligarchy in Honduras will be taking a giant step toward the privatization of education, which will primarily affect the poor of our country. This is why the fight of the teachers is also our fight. AGAINST DICTATORSHIPS, WE REMAIN IN RESISTANCE!

Did you know?

• Each teacher gives INPREMA 7% of her or his base salary monthly. If a teacher earns 8,960 lempiras as a base salary, she is giving 627.20 lempiras per month and approximately 9,000 per year to the institution. Since there are 60,000 teachers in Honduras, INPREMA receives nearly 97 million lempiras monthly. Now INPREMA wants to take away pensions, increase interest on loans and privatize the institution as a first step toward privatizing education in the country.
• After the coup d'etat, the de facto government took 2,600,000,000 lempiras from INPREMA. What did Micheletti and his minions do with the teachers' money?

• Feminists in Resistance (FER) Bulletin
• Text and design: Jessica Isla, Adelay Carías
• Photos: Sue Ocampo/FER
• Illustration: www.venasabiertas.com
• sources: FER

Slogans of the teachers:

To the army and police:

• How awful it must be to have to beat up the people for a living!
• You can take our salaries for a thousand days, but you will never see us on our knees!
• We must study, we must read, to never have to become police
• [rhyming] It's Honduran, it's Radical, it's National Resistance!

As feminists we support the teachers' struggle for the transformation of national education. We join with the cause, because we also struggle for the transformation of culture through education—through an education based in respect for the dignity and human rights of all people, regardless of their age, gender, race, social class or place of residence. We have seen how the growth of the presence and power of religious fundamentalisms and conservative forces within the structures of the state and in all of society put everything we have achieved in the field of education in danger; specifically in terms of sexual education and the formation of values that permit greater equality between men and women.

Although the draft bill of the General Education Law proposed by the golpista government of Pepe Lobo includes articles in which the secular character of education is reaffirmed, a principle that has been part of the ideals of the Morazanist project for nearly 200 years, we know that those in power will not allow that a secular, scientifically-based sexual education with a gender perspective be taught in schools. We know that stemming from their antiquated ideas and hypocrisy, they will promote fundamentalist christian "values" that attack our freedom and sexual and reproductive rights, that don't allow women to make decisions about our own bodies and sexuality, to have information about and access to birth control methods, to decide when we want to be mothers, to oppose practices that enslave us, violate us and discriminate us. We also know that this bloody chapter of the coup d'etat will be manipulated in history classes, that they will speak of "constitutional succession," of freedom and defending democracy in texts and classrooms, and not of the death and repression that the coup d'etat has left in its wake.

Because of this:
FEMINISTS STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH TEACHERS WHO CONTINUE TO BE IN RESISTANCE!