Ei-iE

In a context of cuts and attacks on public education, the National Federation of Secondary School Teachers (FENAPES) of Uruguay has been at the forefront of resistance against the regressive policies of the right-wing coalition government. In this article, FENAPES will explain how it has defended education, its teachers and students in these difficult times. It will also give details about its renewed campaign to ensure that 6% of GDP is allocated to public education and 1% to research, in line with the global Education International campaign Go Public! Fund Education.

Over the last five years, during which Uruguay has been led by a right-wing and far-right coalition, FENAPES has vigorously defended public education, its teachers and students. The government tried to make three adjustments: a budgetary adjustment that aimed to implement a cut of around 300 million dollars; an educational adjustment, through a regressive reform that impoverished content and made it harder to democratically access knowledge, and a rights adjustment, through the brutal persecution of teachers and students, of which unfortunately our federation was one of the main victims, and which led to an international complaint made to the International Labour Organization.

Faced with this situation, far from being on the backfoot, FENAPES, together with other organisations from the education community and the people’s movement in general, decided it would confront the model of inequality imposed on us by the conservative coalition. One of the battleground was communication, where we had to counter an intense campaign demonising us whilst also trying to inform the population about our demands and complaints. For example, during the first quarter of 2021, when teachers were being persecuted, the El País newspaper, with a history of publishing the propaganda of Uruguay’s rural oligarchy, published more than fifty negative articles about the union.

The decision to strategically counter the government in the media did not go unpunished but it did allow us to consolidate a number of gains. It also put us at the forefront of trade unions in the public conversation. An impact study from early 2022 showed that FENAPES’ presence in the media was similar to that of Frente.

Amplio, the largest political party of our country, and the PIT-CNT, the central union of workers, have grown. In numbers, we have grown exponentially on social media, going from 8,000 followers in 2019 to around 60,000 in 2024. We have also started to take up space in the mass media, with airtime on TV and radio and where there are large audiences, such as the football championship or the Carnaval competition. We also developed a press strategy to further consolidate and improve our presence across different broadcasting and information channels.

In this way we were able to make a series of gains in terms of communication, including bringing together an exponentially bigger and more loyal audience, creating a series of alliances with other unions and organisations to unify our message and actions, and establishing our union as one of the main voices speaking about education in the media. We were also able to communicate our complaints and demands to the general public, including the drastic budget cut and the failure of the “educational transformation” reform. The slogan we used in 2023 was “This isn’t a transformation, it’s a cut”.

In 2024, we renewed the communication campaign, maintaining the messages we had created but integrating the Go Public! Fund Education global campaign and keeping in mind that elections will be held in Uruguay this year. That is why one of our aims was to include education issues in the campaign so that our proposals could be heard. At this stage, the central idea was “Let’s make a deal for public education – Commitment 6+1 – Go Public! Fund Education”, which brought together Education International’s campaign with one of the longstanding demands made by education groups in Uruguay: to have 6% of GDP for state education and another 1% for research and science.

In line with the campaign, in September, education unions developed and presented our programme that expressed workers’ vision. Thus, with a mass media communication strategy that proposed a deal, in other words, a discussion, and with the landmark achievement of presenting the plan together, grassroots organisations were able to lead the public debate.

The next government will have to decide whether to take up the challenge, organising real social dialogue that is as open as possible, or explain why it is against participation and our proposals.