Mexico City, Jun 3 (EFE).- Police reinforced several points of the Mexican capital Friday to prevent hundreds of protesting teachers from following through on a threat to march to the international airport serving this metropolis, EFE confirmed.

More than 4,000 police were taking part in the operation launched early Friday to contain the teachers, who reject an education overhaul enacted in 2013 by President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Hundreds of members of the militant CNTE teachers union went to the headquarters of the Government Secretariat in Mexico City to demand the start of a negotiation process.

The union’s leaders had threatened to march to the airport and cut off all access routes to it if the government refused to agree to immediately begin talks on Friday.

But police prevented the protesters from carrying out their threat and kept them contained on the downtown Paseo de la Reforma thoroughfare, near the Government Secretariat.

Enrique Enriquez, a CNTE leader, said the protesters would not budge until the government agreed to sit down for talks and urged the educators not to fall into provocations.

Teachers with the CNTE, one of Mexico’s most powerful unions with nearly 200,000 members, began a protest on May 15 in Mexico City to press for a rollback of the overhaul.

The next day, they launched an indefinite strike in the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacan and Oaxaca.

That latter state is a major battleground in the conflict between the teachers and authorities, and on Wednesday CNTE members briefly held six police officers in the southern city of Oaxaca, the state capital.

The CNTE opposes new federally mandated teacher evaluations that are part of a sweeping education overhaul enacted in 2013 over the strenuous opposition of the teachers union and grassroots organizations.

Many teachers say the education “reform” seeks to make them scapegoats for the failings of Mexico’s chronically underfunded schools. EFE