Thanksgiving and La República

Thanksgiving morning is sunny, after a rainy night trying to figure out where our friends coming in from the campo are. Our Peace Corps security coordinator calls to say they are still stuck in a blockade a few hours outside Sucre, sounding as cheerful at 8 a.m. as he did at 3 a.m. when we called to report them missing. It’s another protest in the wannabe Capitalia Plena - routine marches, blockades, boycott of session by opposition members of the Constituent Assembly, etc.

Then the majority party of MAS locked out the boycotting asambleistas and voted to approve the framework of the constitution, details to be worked out for the December 14 deadline. The new constitution addresses everything from abolishing the term limit on the presidency to whether private property goes to the state. Sucre exploded. Even my neighbor, a tranquila mother of 4, was out in the streets rioting.

In record time the roads and airport were blocked and the air black with smoke from burning blockades of tires and trash on every corner within a 10-block radius of the town center. The city itself was fairly quiet, since the Constituent Assembly had been moved outside town to the military base. The volunteers who could get out of town left and the rest of us ventured out for food. Then came the calls from Peace Corps, people boarding up store fronts, rumors of the first deaths, and trucks full of flag-bearing young men tearing out of the city. The marches continued the entire night, even passing by my neighborhood where it’s usually always calm.

A few of us spent Sunday holed up in my apartment or sitting on my roof watching the progress of smoke across the sky while trying to filter information from the storm of “news”. 3 confirmed dead, over 100 injured, 100 prisoners escaped from the San Roque jail, and the police in Sucre fled to Potosí. Meanwhile, 3 of the national news channels cut their feed and a 4^th had “live” coverage showing everything as peaceful in Sucre. It was actually footage from earlier in the week; volunteers that already left Sucre for Cochabamba were on the tape sitting in the plaza!

Today the sun is out, buses are running, and people are out walking like we didn’t have a massive breakout at the jail and still have no police in the city. This will always bewilder me. Bolivia can be like T.V. magic, where all hell breaks loose and then is wrapped up before the hour spot is over. Except here the situation isn’t necessarily resolved, but gets shelved for the next blowout. I went to work today but the office shut down in the afternoon for the burial of Gonzalo Durán, the first death in the weekend siege. The plaza crowd is angry, chanting “Evo asesino”, but otherwise peaceful out of respect for the mass taking place before the burial. The prefectura building is scrawled in graffiti of varying political wit, but it shows a change of mood against the current administration and the influence of Venezuela. Instead of putting up Christmas decorations I pack a few boxes with my most important belongings here, in case of evacuation. But with the holidays coming up it´s more likely we will be waiting until 2008 for this to be pulled back off the shelf.

FUN FACT / QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Chavez manda, Evo cumple” – graffiti on the walls of Sucre´s prefectura
[Hugo (Chavez) commands, Evo fulfills - a play on Morales campaign slogan]