Bloqueo

We left for the clinic this morning, drove out of town and through the first big town of Warnes, then passed the stressful stretch to Montero where there's no shoulder and you have to pass very slow trucks hauling two trailers of sugar cane if you ever want to reach your destination. After getting through the town, we found a bloqueo preventing us from continuing on the main road to Cochabamba. There was a fire in the road and a small pile of people standing around, and a bunch of cars turning around after realizing they couldn’t get through. We saw a couple of motorcycles try to get through and get beaten by the crowd for their attempts, but there were no threats to cars that kept their distance.

After chatting with a local journalist and a dude from town who had come to watch the chaos, we learned that the crowd assembled by university students who are protesting the conditions of the new local university that has no infrastructure and very few teachers. I knew that blocking a road is a very common way of making your voice heard here, but I hadn’t seen it first hand. We called Douglas, the clinic director in Santa Cruz, to see if he had any more information about how long it would last and what we should do. While waiting for his returned call, we waited and watched the scene. People who had been in buses that couldn't cross the town were walking across the blockade to get new transport on the other side. After watching for a while, we walked up to the protesters to explain that we work for a clinic that helps rural patients and that they were waiting for medications. They told us that they could let us pass, but that the back-up of trucks that have been waiting since midnight the night before (10 hours) might prevent us from reaching our destination.

Douglas called and didn’t have much more information except that this wasn’t the first student protest in Montero, and he suspected it would be over by noon. We decided to get some coffee and found a great shop that sells delicious empanadas con queso and all sorts of products from women’s cooperatives. While in town we found that they were shutting the market and blocking the road on the other side of town, on the way back to Santa Cruz. We decided to try and beat the crowd so that we wouldn’t end up stuck in Montero. This time we saw a huge crowd of people, mostly older women in traditional clothes—a very different crowd than the students. They were women from the markets “supporting” the students (or had been intimidated into abandoning their shops). We couldn’t get through that crowd, but were told that there was a back road out of town and followed a rich-looking woman also desperate to get out of town, and finally found our way back to Santa Cruz! Fortunately, we made friends with the owner of the coffee shop and got his number to find out if the blockade has ended and we should make another attempt tomorrow.

Maybe this is a good excuse to check out the new Harry Potter flick....