Buenos Aires, March 12 (NA) – Roberto Baradel, the general secretary of the teachers' union SUTEBA, will leave his position after nearly 22 years in office and will not run in the internal elections on May 13. The 58-year-old Baradel will hand over leadership to his current deputy, María Laura Torre, but will remain as deputy secretary of the Confederation of Education Workers (CTERA) and as Secretary of International Relations of the CTA. The leader, who has been at the helm of the Single Union of Education Workers (SUTEBA) since May 2004, gained special prominence in teacher strikes during the governorships of Daniel Scioli and María Eugenia Vidal. Since 2019, his management has been in good tune with Governor Axel Kicillof, although recently SUTEBA has been on strike within the framework of collective bargaining negotiations in which the education sector considered the salary proposals insufficient. According to what the Argentine News Agency could learn, the leadership of SUTEBA is betting on expanding its hegemony in the Buenos Aires province, where it competes with the Multicolor list, which is referenced by FIT deputy Romina del Pla, who controls the districts of Bahía Blanca, Tigre, Berazategui, and Marcos Paz. In the last authority elections in 2022, the Celeste-Violeta list headed by Baradel achieved a resounding 81.3% of the votes, defeating Del Pla's Multicolor list. Now, about 100,000 educators from the province of Buenos Aires will be eligible to vote. The History Baradel's militant career began in the district of Lanús, where he is from, in the student center of the National College 'Luis Piedrabuena', an institution where he studied from 1980 to 1984. In the early '90s, he participated in the White Tent in front of the Congress, one of the most emblematic protests in the education sector that extended from 1997 to 1999, demanding more funding for public education. Baradel studied part of Biology at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), but then leaned towards Law and graduated as a lawyer from the National University of Lomas de Zamora (UNLA) in 1995.
