(no subject)
The more I read about the fight between miners and police last month in Huanuni, the sadder I get. The miners, who are a fairly militant heavily unionised bloc of people who can be relied on to turn out in any protest and bring dynamite, were blockading the highway between Oruro and Cochabamba to put pressure on the government, so it would include the demands of the biggest worker's union in its new pensions law. Miners are tough people anywhere in the world, and in Bolivia, where there are a lot of mines, they've often formed the vanguard of revolutionary movements. A group of miners' wives is credited with having brought about the end of the Banzer dictatorship, for example, and the nationalisation of the tin mines in the 50s was a major driving force of the revolution back then. Anyway, miners are used to being listened to, because they're not above marching on the capital with explosives in their hand. A classic headline in 2006, when there was a conflict between co-operativist and state-employed miners read, 'When the dynamite talks, Evo shuts up' (Cuando la dinamita habla, Evo calla'.)
So what I'm saying is, there was a law which the union wanted modified. Of course, the union is composed of its members, so its members were also committed to getting their demands included in the law, and so they came out onto the streets to demand it. And in the case of the miners of Huanuni, they blockaded the highway. The President despatched the police to 'desbloquear', and apparently they were to use nothing stronger than tear gas. They approached the protest camp in the morning, while it was still dark. It was in Caihuasi, up there in the altiplano, where the early morning air is thin and clean and cold; there would have been a queue of dozens of buses and lorries parked up along the highway, tailing back on either side of the blockade. The miners were guarding the barricades. What happened then is still muddy. According to this report, the police advanced in riot gear and began to use tear gas. The miners responded by detonating dynamite and retreating. When the police advanced more, some ran up the side of the mountain and some went back along the road, strewing explosives in their trail. After the main retreat had been forced, some of the miners went to the nearest bridge and planted explosives underneath it. Blowing it up would semi-permanently disable the route, even if they couldn't hold the blockade. Several of their charges went off, damaging the legs of the bridge. At this point the miners started using another kind of explosive, which you use in smaller quantities closer up. In Spanish they call it anfo. This would have meant a nasty, dangerous experience for the police, but they were protected by riot gear. The miners were just wearing their normal clothes, leather jackets and woolly hats, but they're men who work with the power of explosives every day. Somewhere in the middle of this, Hernan Montero Claros, who was a 26-year old electrician with a baby daughter called Margarita, and Roberto Caceres Fabrica, who was only 23, fell down and didn't get up. They were both shot. I don't know who shot them, but I'll edit when I track down the ballistics report. The police deny it was them.
There's no-one in this situation who wins. Those two guys, my age - what were they martyred for? The fucking pensions law? Oh, you can sew their faces onto a banner and call them heroes who sacrificed themselves so that older people could live in dignity, but really, what a waste. What a criminal waste. As for the rest of the protest, I lost sympathy when they blew up the bridge. I've been in bloqueos where kids were throwing boulders hundreds of feet off cliffs down onto the highway to block it off, and everyone around me was cursing them for the damage they were doing to the fabric of the road. 'You little punks, the highway won't stand up to it!' raged a housewife, and middle aged gentleman joined in, 'Do your bullshit, but don't damage the highway!'. Bolivians don't take infrastructure for granted. It's a country where only 5% of the roads are paved, and where each major city only has one highway which links it with the others, hence the effectiveness of blockades. God knows it doesn't have enough bridges to start with, so it's especially counterproductive to go about blowing up the ones which are already there.
There were 40 other miners hurt in the confrontation, and 5 police. Some of them won't be working for a while. And all the violence overshadowed the other important developments in the country so much that the COB, the umbrella union, called them off until afterwards. So what did it all achieve?
(The details in this story are lifted from coverage by La Prensa newspaper.)