Striking Teachers Block Streets in Mexico City

Protesting reforms like performance evaluations

Thousands of striking teachers seized two of Mexico City's central thoroughfares on a double-pronged march to the president's residence Wednesday, spawning choking knots of traffic chaos after definitively losing their battle to block new educational reforms less than 24 hours earlier.

The teachers disrupted the center of one of the world's largest cities for at least the 14th time in two months, decrying a plan that tries to break union control of Mexico's dysfunctional education system by requiring regular standardized teacher evaluations.

President Enrique Pena Nieto dashed the teachers' hopes of blocking the overhaul when he signed the new testing system into law Tuesday. But the protests seem to be morphing into a near-daily feature of life in many Mexican cities, a form of political theater increasingly independent of the struggle that triggered them in the first place.