On the work front this month, I made several trips around Bolivia, including trips to Trinidad, Oruro, Potosí, Sucre, and Cochabamba, to hold meetings with the newly elected governors (Prefectos) to verify that they were on-board with our on-going jointly funded rural electrification projects. We were curious because the new governors hadn’t made any payments toward the projects since taking office. Anyway, on our trip to Trinidad we had to fly Amazon Airlines since the national carrier, LAB, went out of business. Amazon is not my favorite airline since it only flies in fair weather, only has non-pressurized airplanes, and has crashed a couple of planes just since I’ve lived in Bolivia. This trip we flew on a Fairchild “Metro”, locally called the “cigarette” or “pencil” because it’s so skinny. I had to stoop over to walk down aisle and as I sat in my seat my head was right up against the roof (and I’m only 5'-6"); this plane has one seat on each side of the aisle, and is nine seats long. But we made the flights to and from Trinidad without incident. I was leery of this trip, since we’d been forewarned by our friends that it was a trap – we’d been advised that the governor didn’t just want to be informed about the status of our current on-going projects, but that there was a group of angry beneficiaries from a former project from back in the 90’s congregated and laying in wait to pressure us into forgiving the million dollars in counterpart payments that they never made (now we require that counterpart payments be made prior to initiating projects.) And sure enough, after we’d made our presentation to update the governor and departmental council on the status of our current project, in they came to yell and deride and criticize Fernando and I about some ancient projects that were executed before our time. After they were done we just left, letting them know that they’d wasted their time on us. And of course, since we were down in the tropics, I came home the next day with itchy puss-oozing bug bites up and down my legs. I just love working in the tropics.
For our trip to Potosí the next week we decided to travel overland – Potosí is too high and windy for airplanes to land there comfortably, so you have to fly to Sucre and drive to Potosí anyway. I was a little worried about the drive because the day before we traveled there had been three different blockades on the road between La Paz and Potosí – one demanding the release of the community leaders who stoned and then burned their mayor last year, one protesting a comment that the fish in Lake Titicaca are contaminated, and one demanding supplies for a local kindergarten. But according to the evening news report all of the conflicts were resolved so we decided to risk the trip. It was a very long and winding road, over 500km across the altiplano, but without event, until just 45km away from Potosí when we hit a major blockade. This blockade was to demand the replacement of their non-MAS party mayor with someone from the MAS. At the end of the line, just ahead of us, were the support vehicles for the US Ambassador and the head of USAID – but the diplomats themselves were nowhere to be seen. After hanging out for a while at the end of the several kilometer long line of stopped vehicles, we decided to drive up to the front of the blockade to see if we could find a way across – the time for our meeting was fast approaching. So we threaded our way between the stopped buses and trucks who parked so haphazardly that it seemed like they were part of the blockade until we got to the blockade itself. At the blockade, the campesinos were so thick that they not only massed on the road, but they were also spread out around the edges of the surrounding canyon walls so that they looked Sitting Bull’s braves surrounding Little Big Horn. Just as we got to the front of the line of stopped traffic, at the blockade itself, the blockaders let us through – as they waved us through it looked like they were laughing at us for having fallen into their trap.
There in Potosi we headed directly to the governor’s palace on the main plaza downtown. As we unpacked our laptops, data projector, and documents from our vehicle parked across the plaza from the governor’s palace, a big herd of protestors came marching past the front of the palace, complete with exploding sticks of dynamite. It turned out that they were teachers’ college students asking the governor to buy furniture for their college. After the march went past the front door and rounded the plaza, we took our chance to go in but found the palace locked up tight like the old Spanish fort that it is. Fortunately someone came along and showed us the emergency entrance around back where we had to wind our way into the palace through the narrow back passages, more like a crack in the wall. Inside the courtyard of the palace we passed a troop of heavily armored riot police – I guess in case the protestors succeeded in blasting open the front gates. Eventually we were shown in to the governor’s office. This US-educated newly elected governor is a member of the MAS party but was very cordial and accommodating in spite of my being a gringo and was very receptive to our presentation on our joint project. It was, however, somewhat distracting during our meeting to have the marchers congregated outside and chanting and yelling at us. That night, after our meetings, Fernando and I tried to leave town and drive to Oruro, where we had a meeting scheduled with that governor the next day, so we wouldn’t get stuck in any more blockades, but the blockade that had let us through earlier that day was back in place – apparently they had only opened the road for thirty minutes – so we had to turn around and sleep in Potosí.
We got up dark and early the next morning to see if we could run the blockade in the dark, by the light of a gorgeous full moon – but no such luck. The blockade was well manned all through the night with 500 campesinos and another 500 in reserve just off the hill. This darn blockade was strategically placed on the road through a canyon, so that the shortest detour around it would have taken over 12 hours to get to the next nearest city to La Paz (Cochabamba.) The blockaders in this area all wore their local uniform of either black or white pants, black jacket, red woven poncho, and these funky hats that you almost have to see to believe. The hats came in two layers – the bottom layer looked like a knit cap in the shape of a pointy dunce cap with ear flaps with little dingle balls hanging off the ears. On top of the knit cap was perched a white straw bowler style hat with a black ribbon hat band. And whereas Fernando and I shared a chuckle at the funny chapeaus, being stuck in the blockade was no fun. After sun up we decided to go forage for food, the benefit of being in a private vehicle instead of being stuck on a parked bus – we found a little store down the road a ways (back toward Potosí) that sold us some buns, a can of pâté, and a bottle of orange drink. When we drove back to the blockade we found the area hopping with pedestrians – people were getting off the buses, walking through the blockade, and then getting on the buses on the other side. As the buses filled up with their new passengers they turned around and went back to their points of origin, now destination. Some local boys were showing their entrepreneurial spirit by carting luggage back and forth in their wheelbarrows. After several hours of waiting, at around 10AM, the people still stuck behind the blockade started getting restless and started shouting at the blockaders to let us all through. A while later the blockaders got the party started in earnest by setting off a series of dynamite explosions – the blasts really reverberated off those canyon walls.
Several times over the course of the day Fernando walked up to the site of the blockaders to see what was happening – I chose to stay in the car since I didn’t think that I could pass for anything other than a gringo and I didn’t want to become a permanent “guest” of the blockaders, to be used as a bargaining chip later. Even so, Fernando tells me that I wasn’t invisible to blockaders who walked by – he said that there was a stir among the blockaders about the gringo sitting in a car working on a laptop. Fernando carried my camera with him and acted like a press photographer and took a few photos of the blockade and blockaders. At around 11:00 a host of blockaders came storming up to our car – that was a bit disconcerting, but I didn’t let it show. As it turned out they weren’t coming for me – they were coming for the taxis that were picking up passengers who had walked across the blockades. First they chased away most of the taxis, brandishing big sticks – Fernando, who got up close to where he could hear what they were saying, reported that they were berating the taxi drivers for gouging the passengers crossing the blockade on foot. Then they took one taxi driver (who was rumored to be the brother of one of the local politicians) and his car prisoner – we didn’t see him again. At noon we observed a pickup drive up to the blockade and serve the blockaders a nice lunch of soup and bread and then a dessert of coca and alcohol.
The scariest event in the day was just after I’d used up the batteries in my laptop and was reading the Old Testament when all of a sudden I heard shouting and running and looked up and saw the blockaders stationed up on the hill throwing rocks down at the people walking across the blockade. As the rocks rained down, the people were running and shouting – I saw at least four people with bloody head wounds run by. Since Fernando was out scouting just then, I started scooting over to the driver’s seat so I could drive the car out of the way of the flying rocks. But just then I looked up through the windshield and saw this huge rock flying straight for me. Too late, I thought. Fortunately, Bolivians are all soccer players and not baseball players and the rock fell a couple of feet short of the car – it shattered on impact with the pavement and fragments bounced up and rattled around on the windshield and hood of the car, but without enough force to break anything. Then the blockaders came running after everyone, chasing them with big sticks. One young guy stuck his head into my window and cursed at me – I couldn’t understand him through his thick Aymara accent except for the cuss words. Shortly after the dust settled Fernando came back and told me that the blockaders were mad because some of the women pedestrians had given them a good cussing, which prompted the hail of stones.
After waiting a few hours more (there was a rumor that the blockade would be lifted by 2:00PM) we decided to head back the opposite direction, back to Potosí, and from there to Sucre, and then on to Cochabamba. Between Potosí and Sucre we noticed a large congregation of campesinos along the road and jokingly commented that they were probably getting ready to set up another roadblock, hence totally isolating the city of Potosí. Ha ha. But we made it to Sucre without incident. For the next leg, the road between Sucre and Cochabamba was under construction/repair, so it was only open after 5:00 in the evening, so there was no sense in trying that route any earlier. The mostly unpaved road was very long, winding, dusty, bumpy, and boy did I get car sick – the Dramamine that I had taken at 4AM that morning was well and truly worn off before we got anywhere near Cochabamba. It was also over 600km to Cochabamba – we finally arrived to our hotel at about 12:30AM. I was still so sick even the next morning that I couldn’t even eat breakfast (which is my favorite meal of the day.) Since we had a meeting with the Prefecto of Cochabamba that evening, we took advantage of working there that day. I worked with my local engineer, Percy, who lives there while Fernando had a series of meetings. Percy told us that we were lucky to get out Potosí when we did since the campesinos set up a blockade of the road between Potosí and Sucre right after we made that drive. Whew.
After working in Cochabamba all day we had our meeting with the Prefecto at 6:30 that evening. We introduced ourselves and explained several ideas for projects to which the Prefecto was very receptive. Finally, at about 8:30 that evening we headed for La Paz. It was all smooth sailing until just over halfway back to La Paz we ran into a major blockade on the highway. Fortunately we could observe that several trucks were making their way cross-country around the blockade, so we followed them. But just a couple of miles up the hill we ran into another blockade which had been set up to catch those who were going around the main one. Fortunately, Fernando was able to negotiate a price with these guys and we bought our way through – we were told that we had to drive with our lights off – thank heavens for the full moon. A few miles later, when we got to a bridge on the little road, we found a gaggle of campesinos blockading there too – they said that they had built that bridge and needed to take care of it. Fernando asked them if 10Bs ($1.25) would help maintain that bridge – they said yes – and we rolled on our way. Our little detour around the blockaded highway took us to Oruro, at least two hours out of our way, so we ended up getting home at 2AM this morning, after making a trek of over 1600km. The next day we learned that the miners from Oruro blockaded the highway to La Paz, so we narrowly avoided being stranded in Oruro, which, like Potosi, doesn’t have a commercial airport.
Word from people who know is that these blockades are being organized and funded by the MAS party, in order to pressure the recently elected non-MAS mayors into resigning their posts in favor of a successor from the MAS party. Also, it’s interesting to note that Evito has proposed a law that would allow him to appoint any new Prefecto in the case that one of the elected Prefectos were to die or resign. I think it’s obvious that the MAS is working in an organized and concerted fashion to consolidate all of the power in their party. When that is complete I look for a new law allowing Evo to stay in office indefinitely, ala Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.
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