The news from Mexico is that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has halted efforts to reform Mexico's underperforming education system.

According to Reuters:

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) — Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday he will freeze an education overhaul enacted under his predecessor so that consensus can be sought for a new law, delivering a boost to a teachers' union faction that has spent months demanding its repeal.

That's significant for us, because Mexico has already sent us large numbers of the products of this educational system.  And the World Bank confirms that Central America's educational system is pretty much just like it.  For Democrats here, though, it's the perfect formula for new voters.

It's not that its people are poorly educated, though that's a major issue, actually.  It's that a good look at that system shows that pretty much the only education they receive at all is Marxist indoctrination.  Combine that with sub-literacy, and the people who are the products of this system are as malleable as clay in the hands of leftist demagogues.

How very convenient for the leftist political parties there that produce such people.  And how even more convenient for Democrats up north, waiting to welcome them as they flee.

An alert reader of American Thinker sent us a disturbing Wall Street Journal report dating from 2013, documenting in 2,200 words just how politicized the educational system is in southern Mexico, with a grotesque Marxist teacher union effectively indoctrinating the students in Marxism instead of actual education.

José de Córdoba's excellent piece, titled "Radical Teachers Union CNTE Gives Mexico a Harsh Lesson," begins:

SAN LUCAS QUIAVINI, Mexico — During a recent teachers strike in this Zapotec Indian town in the poor southern state of Oaxaca, parents who brought in replacement instructors discovered that the children hadn't been taught the words to Mexico's national anthem.  Instead, they had been trained to sing a popular leftist song which acts as an unofficial anthem to a local chapter of the teachers union.

"We don't know the words to the Mexican anthem," said Leticia Diego, a student, apologizing to a visitor one recent morning.  About a dozen seventh-graders then shyly sang the leftist anthem, "The People United Will Never Be Defeated."

The union here is the National Coordinator of Educational Workers, or CNTE, a radical and powerful wing of the country's national teachers union.  Analysts say it has long maintained an iron grip over some of Mexico's poorest states — one that goes beyond what children are taught, and extends to lengthy strikes, disruptive protests and violent clashes. 

That opener was just a taste of the rabid left-wingery Mexico's teacher unions are shoving down the throats of their innocent students, willing or not.

De Córdoba writes that the teachers go on strike for so long that it amounts to an effective school year, depriving students of any education at all.  They are massively overpaid, too, and strike because they want more.  Like true commissars, they penalize any teachers who resist their efforts to strike or indoctrinate, with lost privileges, loans, job changes, and promotions.  They collude with leftist guerrilla groups aiming to overthrow the government.  And they steal like thieves — forcing the government to shovel cash into their left-wing projects.  They scream about "privatization'' and any effort to set school standards.  They also abuse any parents who resist.  Instead of learning to add or subtract, the students are forced to don black balaclavas and re-enact the Marxist Chiapas Zapatero uprising of years ago.  And these leftists treat their jobs as sinecures, allowing their ignorant offspring to inherit them like cash cows, never mind the students who will have to endure such incompetent teachers.

I barely scratch the surface. 

Mexico's illegal immigration rate has leveled off, but in the U.S., there are huge numbers of illegal aliens who are products of this repulsive educational system, which just happens to be the dreamscape of Democrats' teacher unions running America's blue cities.

The news is compounded by the fact that Central America's incoming arrivals to the U.S. has schools that are...even worse.

I found a fairly recent World Bank report on the state of those and learned that Central America's schools are at the bottom of the barrel.  I knew there were problems, given that with the entire region dreaming of moving to America, they nevertheless retain the lowest English language skills in all of Latin America, according to SIPRI.

But the signs are all there that the system is just as politicized and even worse.  The World Bank documents low teacher time — "average time on instruction" in classrooms, and in Honduras, 11% of teacher time is spent on unrelated 'social interaction,' which could easily be Marxist politicking.  There's also low classroom engagement, irrelevant topics taught for "today's global economy" (Honduras ranks rock bottom among Latin nations for that), and more than 30% of them need to be thrown out through the region for their 'low quality' of performance (page 28). Their pay, incidentally, is 30% above the average for comparable profesions in the private sector. And, oh, in Honduras, they've all got 'one laptop per child' same as the Bill Ayers-influenced leftist teachers unions in the states advocate. (Ayers of course has spent lots of time in Latin America.) It all stinks of the Marxist teachers union described in the Mexican system by the Wall Street Journal.

And the background to this is well known. In the wake of the Spanish civil war, rabid leftists fled the country and first landed in Puerto Rico. Some stayed, but Mexico extended to them the entire educational establishment at the university level, and from there, they spread into the school system, to the earliest levels. They converted what had been education to Marxist indoctrination, and in the absence of any other education, it was all the children of these countries ever learned.

It was Lenin's and Pol Pot's dream - a society built from the ground up on solely Marxist indoctrination.

And now with low levels of educational achievement in hand and a shockingly useless Marxist education, which is perfect for degrading these countries' economies, they are heading here.

No wonder Democrats stand ready to welcome them with open arms. They are the voters Democrats want. And with AMLO moving to strengthen the teachers' union, it's pretty obvious he's working the starting end of the illegal immigration chain, not the end run at the border. He's preparing the illegal immigrants of tomorrow as Central America sends its indoctrinated people today.

Image credit: Nick Youngson, via Blue Diamond Gallery, Alpha Stock Images // CC BY-SA 3.0