One by one, Salvadoran students stop since August 20 in front of the director or director of their school or institute so that they can Check your haircut and decide if it is “adequate” to enter the classroom. In case they do not see it well, they are forced to turn and go to the hairdresser until a hairstyle that meets the demands of the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, and her new Minister of Education, the captain general of the Karla Trigueros army, a controversial decision that seeks to “strengthen the discipline” and “the order” of the students. “If we want to build the country we deserve, we must break paradigms. The new minister, in her double condition as Captain and Doctor, has demonstrated the capacity, leadership and commitment necessary to boost a deep transformation in our educational system. His mission will be to prepare future generations to successfully face the challenges of tomorrow and reach the highest standards of quality that the new El Salvador that we are building,” X.
Just three days after being appointed on August 15, Trigueros sent a letter to all directors of public schools and institutes in the country with the order to impose in their centers “disciplinary measures” for students. The army captain forces them to “receive students daily” at the entrance doors to “supervise” that all students carry a “clean and tidy uniform”, an “proper hair cut” and a “correct personal presentation.” Some demands that confirm the risk of the Salvadoran Master’s Front, an organization that defends the human rights of teachers, students and other people linked to education. “It is worrying that the new Minister of Education is a military agent, because we can already talk about the unfortunate militarization of Salvadoran public education, as happened during military dictatorships“The agency said in a statement after Bukele’s decision.
For the anthropologist and award -winter of Salvadoran Juan Martínez D’Aubuisson, this is “One of the most ridiculous measures of the dictatorship“.” Demanding students a military aesthetic expresses that Mesoamerican, entrupted and counterproductive obsession, with homogeneity. All the same, all crouched, all silent, no one different, “he wrote on social networks. The newspaper chief of the newspaper El Faro, Óscar Martínez, believes that” at least “the imposition” is consistent with the dictatorship. “Meanwhile, the Guatemalan journalist Carlos Kestler throws a curious question:”Why does the minister demand a rigid image if the president uses caps and jeans in official acts?“
There are those who see well the measure of trigueros. For example, Javier Hernández, the president of the Association of Private Colleges of El Salvador. “The Mrs. Minister of Education has done very well. In private schools we took more power that had been taken from us and that is why what we are going to be able to do with is to apply the regulations more rigorously,” said a Hernández Contrary to “artificial eyelashes, acrylic nails” or “excessive makeup”. In its statement, the Magisterial Front also considered that the decision of the new minister “is a blow more than the ultra -right Bukelista is perpetrating against the area of education, and that it is blatantly aimed at deepening the deterioration of public education with the objective of the privatization of education, when returning a danger to students to attend public education institutions.”
But the right haircut, without specifying anywhere which is right or not, is not the only one of the impositions of the new minister. Trigueros has also ordered that all schools and institutes celebrate at the beginning of the week what has called “Civic Monday.” As of September 1 and “during the first half hour” of each start of the week, the educational centers They will have to organize “civic acts” that “will include, at least, […] Training in order and discipline, intonation of the national anthem, prayer to the Salvadoran flag “ and the “presentation in charge of a student about an illustrious character of El Salvador or a relevant historical fact.”
