When, at the beginning of August, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, announced that due to the contingency caused by the covid-19 pandemic, classes in Mexico would be through television, a new challenge opened up for educational authorities: to achieve that more than 161 million school books reached the homes of 36 million students who needed them for the beginning of the course, including remote areas of a huge country.
It is a titanic job on which the success of the new normal of the course depended.
"We developed an intensive program to sanitize warehouses, books, and distribution trucks," explains Antonio Meza, director of the National Textbook Commission (Conaliteg).
“The difficulty that arose is that the schools are closed.
The distribution to detail depends fundamentally on the support of the Army, which enters the most remote areas, ”added the official.
With more than 1.9 million square kilometers, the Army is possibly the only institution in Mexico that can fulfill the task of guaranteeing that the books reach regions so far from the production plants located in Querétaro and Mexico City.
Last year the books were sent by airplanes to the Yucatan Peninsula, more than 1,370 kilometers from the capital.
For distribution to the different islands of the country, Navy ships and boats were used to transport the boxes to the most remote schools and also pack animals.
It was a gigantic challenge, which had raised doubts about the capacity of the López Obrador government, who began his six-year term on December 1, 2018.
“The pandemic forced us all to change our ordinary ways of working.
The first decision during the contingency was to protect the students and teachers and we did not want to interrupt the learning of Mexican students, ”says Meza, an experienced official who already held the position between 1994 and 1999, in the Ernesto Zedillo government.
For the textbook to reach the hands of Mexican students, it is necessary to develop a long production chain that involves 27 publishing houses, 28 printing plants, two huge federal warehouses and hundreds of state warehouses where the books are kept.
The production includes 117,000 books in Braille and 267,000 in indigenous languages, in addition to 16.6 million texts for preschool, 102.5 million for primary and 33.6 million for secondary.
The manufacturing cost of each book is 20 pesos (about a dollar) for the primary and 40 for the secondary.
Mexican educational authorities attach great importance to the free distribution of textbooks in a country where for many families this represents a heavy economic burden that can keep children away from school.
Around 60 million people, out of a total of 127, are poor in Mexico and the minimum daily income, according to data from the Ministry of Labor, is from 123 to 185 pesos, so the purchase of books is not among the priorities of thousands of families.
For the production and distribution of school textbooks the State invests more than 3,000 million pesos annually (139 million dollars).
This is a tradition that has reached its 61st anniversary, since Conaliteg was created in 1959 by a decree of then-president Adolfo López Mateos to combat the enormous educational gap that prevailed in the country.
A lag that continues despite the progress, if Mexico is compared with other OECD countries: the results of the 2018 PISA report, the international test that assesses the world's educational systems, reveal that, out of almost one and a half million of 15-year-old students tested, only 1% showed advanced skills in reading, math, and science.
Furthermore, the country still has more than five million illiterates, mainly indigenous women.
To combat this lag, the Mexican authorities are betting on technology.
On the official Conaliteg site, 250,000 books have been digitized for the students to consult, a huge increase if one takes into account that last year the site had 3,000 digitized books, explains Itza Morales, deputy director of the Institution's Operating System .
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this website has also experienced an increase in the number of inquiries made by students, teachers and parents: more than nine million visits between August 24, when the course was resumed, and August 6 September.
A fact that is not surprising is that the majority of those who consult are women between 25 and 34 years old.
"Those who are playing a central role in remote education are women, who carry the burden of getting ahead so that learning is not interrupted," says Meza.
The education authorities are proud to have complied with the distribution of books, despite the criticism that television learning has generated in the teachers' union.
"One of the positive things that this [the pandemic] is going to leave us is the approach to technology and the Ministry of Education has had to develop ingenious, innovative methods to guarantee learning," concludes the official.