Leonardo Garnier

Former Education Minister Leonardo Garnier on Wednesday evening said that a backlog in payment of public teachers’ salaries did not originate from the transition to a new computer system, but rather from problems caused by the old payment system.

In his first national televised address Sunday night, President Luis Guillermo Solís asked public school teachers to end a two-week strike and return to the classrooms, despite a failure to reach agreement on when teachers would receive their back pay.

Thousands of teachers filled San José’s Second Avenue Monday, marching from the Parque de la Merced to the Finance Ministry to protest a new government-run payment system that has left them without salaries for months.