• Argentina campaign: hunger as political booty

Five teachers in a car in the middle of the cold and closed night of Patagonia. There is no light on the road, the driver loses control and the vehicle overturns. Two of the teachers die and the other three suffer significant injuries, although they are recovering. The story is part of a major tragedy, that of the teachers of Chubut, a province of Argentine Patagonia that lives on oil and tourism, but is unable to pay the salaries of its teachers. That is why Jorgelina Ruiz Díaz, 52, and Maria Cristina Aguilar, 55, the two victims , were in that car and on the road: they returned home after demonstrating, shouting against the Government of a province that He pays his salaries with an eyedropper.

"My mother had to explain that her vocation as a teacher was not enough to pay the bills. She wanted to be in the classroom and live with dignity, something so basic. What are the times to explain the obvious?" daughter of one of the two dead teachers in a comment on social networks.

With the country immersed in the campaign towards the presidential elections next month, the national teacher union announced a national strike tomorrow. The context in Chubut is explosive : upon learning of the death of the two teachers, who was close to becoming pensioners, a group of protesters, who spent the night camping before the provincial Legislature, burned and destroyed the entrance hall to the building , in addition to confronting the police violently. The fires were repeated in other cities of the province, which has half the extent of Spain and only half a million inhabitants.

It was the end of a long day and hot spirits, because hours before it had been known that the governor, the Peronist Mariano Arcioni , had sent to the same legislature a bill to increase his salary by 100%. The same for much of the Government. In contrast, teachers are collecting their salary in installments, the Government claims not to have money to meet the full salary. The question was automatic: how, then, do they propose to increase their salaries by 100%?

Argentine teachers are one of the most obvious symptoms of the country's long decline. According to 'La Nación', they charge one of the worst salaries among 37 countries revealed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In 2017 figures, the average salary of an OECD teacher is $ 38,000, with Luxembourg, 90,000, as the country that pays the best. It is in Spain and Argentina 40,000, 17,000, although the figure predates the weight megadevaluación initiated in 2018: Today, the average teacher salary of Argentines below $ 10,000 annually.

Teachers' salaries are not uniform in the country, they depend on the jurisdictions of the 24 provinces. Chubut, magnet of tourists who arrive every spring (austral) for whale watching in the Valdés Peninsula, is in theory one of the best paid to their teachers. Patagonia, extensive, hard and unpopulated , used to offer better salaries to compensate for those disadvantages. It is no longer the case in one of the great oil provinces of the country. According to local press, "a group of tankers literally passed over teachers who cut routes to the deposits in Comodoro Rivadavia." Teachers denounced behind the tankers was Governor Arcioni. A week later, the tragedy escalated to another level.

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