Zona de Fascistas

Really everything just seems to be falling apart, all over the country. Cochabamba is shut down by protestors and at least 2 people, one on each “side,” were killed yesterday. In La Paz, 6 Prefects were meeting at the Hotel Europa (where the spa is) and got blockaded in by protestors while the city flooded from the rains. In Potosi the 30,000 cooperative miners called a “state of emergency,” I don’t know what that means, in response to Evo nationalizing the mines. And hail in Sucre has ruined all the peaches and grapes. I really like peaches.

I don’t really know how to process all that’s happening. I spent more time watching TV yesterday and today than I have in a month and its just made me feel far more disconnected and confused. Watching folks beat the shit out of each other, with smiles on their faces, doesn’t give me a lot of hope that the situation will improve.

I’ve been to a lot of protests in the last 8 years. I know that getting shot with rubber bullets, tear gassed and pepper sprayed is not fun, but its always been the police acting violently against the protestors. It’s a whole different story here, protestors are battling each other while the police haul away the wounded and occasionally arrest people wielding guns. .Journalists are getting pounded equally by both sides. There are no street medics or legal observers. There are just a lot of angry people with loosely defined demands who want something, anything, to change.

There are two groups of protestors but neither is a cohesive, ideologically united side. Class, race, where you live, whether you used to be in government, what you do for a living (or what your parents do) and party affiliation play a part in choosing your side, but that doesn’t mean when someone shouts “Autonomia!” that everyone around that person would be able to agree on a definition for that demand. It’s so much clearer when everyone is confronting the state, but here people are fighting about which government will be able to rule; the state governor who has aligned himself with lowland opposition parties and is supported by the upper classes in the city or the MAS central government who has the support of the majority of people in the state.

On my walk to work, I passed by several large masses of military and national police guarding plazas (one just 2 blocks from my house), bridges and attempting to keep roads blockade free. Once I got to the neighborhood of my office, a bit north of downtown and closer to the wealthy neighborhoods, things seemed to be calmer. There were even a few people out in the streets and an internet place was open. I spotted a young couple, maybe 14 or 15 years old, scrawling some graffiti on a wall. It was not uplifting to read “Zona no masistas,” and then to watch the boy draw a swastika made me angry. Very, very angry.