May 24, 2008, 11:29PM
'The Teacher' holds sway in Mexico
Powerful union boss may be thorn in Calderon's education plan


By MARION LLOYD
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

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MEXICO CITY — She has a passion for Chanel suits, luxury real estate and political power play.

She has been accused by some critics of embezzlement and worse — but she has never been charged with a crime. And she holds the future of Mexico's beleaguered education system in her hands.

Meet the most powerful woman in Mexico: Elba Esther Gordillo, the 63-year-old president-for-life of the 1.6-million-member National Education Workers Union.

In her 19 years at the head of Latin America's largest union, Gordillo — an elementary school dropout, college graduate, and divorced mother of two who's popularly known as "The Teacher" — has extended her influence into the highest echelons of Mexico's politics. She has even started her own political party.

She has also gained a reputation as a throwback to Mexico's authoritarian past, when labor bosses traded political favors for power and wealth.

Her support has been seen as critical to President Felipe Calderon's razor-thin 2006 election victory, and he has since appointed her allies, including her son-in-law, to top posts in the Public Education Secretariat, Mexico's equivalent of the Department of Education.

But by returning the favor to Gordillo, experts inside and outside of Mexico said, Calderon may have set back his own drive to overhaul the country's education system.

The teachers union "is without doubt the major obstacle facing the Mexican education system now," the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank said in a recent report.

It accused the union, known by its Spanish acronym as the SNTE, of blocking government efforts to implement a system of teacher accountability and evaluation, which is key to Calderon's proposed education reform.

In a survey last year on corruption in education worldwide, UNESCO, the United Nations' education agency, went further, accusing the union of selling teaching positions, and other corrupt practices. Despite meager starting salaries of between $300 and $550 a month, teaching jobs are coveted in Mexico as a guaranteed source of income.

Gordillo, who got her start teaching elementary schoolchildren in a Mexico City slum, shrugs off such criticisms. "I challenge UNESCO to show proof," she said in a written response to questions.

She acknowledged problems in the country's education system, but said they were the shared responsibility of the government and the teachers. "Enough with blaming the union," she wrote.

Some education experts disagree.

"The SNTE is so powerful, literally, that you cannot make an educational policy decision if they're against it," said Laura Moodey, an education specialist at the Mexico City-based IDEA Foundation, a public policy think tank.

Changes to Mexico's General Education Law in 1946, three years after the union's founding, gave it sweeping control over public elementary and middle school education. For example, the union oversees the hiring of 50 percent of new teachers. It also has the exclusive right to sanction or fire teachers, which experts say rarely happens.

In the union's six decades of existence, its officials also have amassed enormous privileges.


Huge sums of money
They include the right to continue collecting their teacher paychecks, even while earning fat salaries working for the union. They also are allowed to hand over their teaching jobs to family members or friends.

Then there are the financial stakes.

The federal government has disbursed more than $10 billion in public funds to the union for teacher training, subsidized housing and other programs since Gordillo took control, according to a study by Noe Rivera Dominguez, a former close collaborator who now leads a dissident movement in the union. Other estimates by independent scholars put the figure at twice that.

"These are stratospheric sums," said Rivera Dominguez, who served as Gordillo's chief political operator from 1999 to 2003. "No union in the world handles that kind of money."


Vast property holdings
The teachers union also takes in an estimated $5 million a month in member dues, Rivera Dominguez said.

Its property includes some 20 hotels and recreation centers around the country, according to Rivera Dominguez and union documents.

But the exact state of the union's finances is not known, because the results of infrequent government audits have not been made available to the public.

"They handed the control of primary education to the union in 1946, and that control has only grown stronger," said Ricardo Raphael, the author of the 2007 book about the union leader, The Partners of Elba Esther.

"If the state doesn't recover the autonomy and tear control away from the union's fiefdom," he said, "there is no way to reform the education system."

During recent interviews, top education officials declined to comment about Gordillo, deferring to their boss.

The federal education secretary, Josefina Vazquez Mota, declined repeated requests for an interview for this article over a one-year period.

Unlike other veteran Mexican labor leaders, Gordillo managed to survive the collapse of the country's one-party system in 2000, positioning herself as a key ally of the democratically elected governments of Vicente Fox and his successor, Calderon.

After he took office, Calderon named Gordillo's son-in-law, Fernando Gonzalez, a union member, to the powerful post of undersecretary of basic education.

Calderon also appointed Gordillo's allies to head the Mexico City Education Secretariat, the State Workers' Social Security Institute and the National Lottery.


Critics call for audit
Meanwhile, in the Senate, rivals have been pushing for a congressional audit of the union's finances. They have seized on thousands of documents amassed by dissident union members to support their accusations of malfeasance against Gordillo, who they say has personally handled billions of dollars in federal funding.

There are other accusations against her. The union leader's lavish lifestyle — in stark contrast to her humble origins — has drawn frequent allegations of corruption, charges she denies.

The daughter of a rural schoolteacher in southern Chiapas state, Gordillo dropped out of school at age 11 to work. She later resumed her education and graduated from the National Teachers' College in Mexico City.

She joined the teachers union in 1960 and quickly became a union representative in Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl, a teeming slum on the outskirts of the capital. She was a key ally of the union's iron-fisted leader, Carlos Jonguitud Barrios.

When Barrios ran afoul of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1989, the Mexican leader installed Gordillo in his place.


Penthouse, properties
Nineteen years later, different estimates put her fortune at between $50 million and $100 million.

In addition to her penthouse apartment in the exclusive Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City, Gordillo owns properties in the capital, luxury apartments in Paris and New York and a $2 million home in the exclusive Coronado Cays area of San Diego, according to a 2003 investigation by the news magazine Proceso.

She also is famous for her designer tastes, particularly Gucci, Ferragamo and Chanel.

Gordillo has never publicly revealed the size of her fortune. But she says it stems from a single $800,000 inheritance in 1973 from her grandfather, a coffee plantation owner in Chiapas.

"They say I'm very rich. I want to clarify that I'm not that rich," she said in the earlier interview. "I live well. My grandfather amassed a fortune.

"And I've worked very, very hard."

marionlloyd@gmail.com






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