My first roadblock

One week in Bolivia and I came across my first road block, a popular means of protest in this part of the world.

I was in a taxi on my way to work when the driver and I saw that traffic was suddenly going against us, despite the fact that the lanes only went one way. He was intelligent and didn’t try to go further, asking me to walk the short distance that remained to work. Other cars tried to go around the oncoming traffic. But as I saw while walking, they ended up just reaching the road block, and having to turn around with more difficulty.

The roadblock was just a little bit down from my office. I didn’t come too close. Last time I messed around with a roadblock in Ecuador, my mom and I were held by the protestors. The fireworks, which sounded like a gun, scared me off as did the story of a manager in Cochabamba who recently lost an eye by being at the wrong place during a civil disturbance.

I could see that tires were placed across the road, as were Bolivian flags. There didn’t seem to be so many people – about ten on either side of the road. Yet these few people were able to force hundreds of cars to turn around on the major thoroughfare leading to the airport.

When I asked what was going on, one person said it was the passengers from LAB airlines, who are still stuck at the airport and haven’t gotten their money back. I was amazed how disgruntled airline passengers, many of them not from this area, could organize a roadblock.

The more believable story, told to me by several others, is that the blockers are from a nearby barrio and are protesting the lack of a stoplight. There is a high school on one side of the road. Being a major causeway, the traffic moves quickly and there is no safe way to cross. Recently, a woman was hit and killed.

That seemed to me to be an understandable reason for a protest. But what I didn’t understand was how so few people could inconvenience so many without consequence.

“Couldn’t the police move them?” I asked my colleague Maria.

“Yes, but they will take at least an hour to arrive,” she said. “People here don’t have much respect for public officials.”

“But they seem to have respect for the blockaders. No one complained. Everyone, including giant trucks, turned around.”

“Yes, that’s true. Sometimes passing cars even cheer the blockaders.”

I wondered why the blockade wasn’t used very often as a means of protest in the States. I figured people might be afraid of going to jail. I asked Maria if they didn’t have the same fear here.

“If they are brought to jail, it’s just for an hour or so. Then they are let go,” she said.

For about an hour, no traffic at all passed the office. We wondered if we’d be stuck there. But by 10:30, the road was open again. By the time I went out for lunch, it was hard to even tell where the blockage had been. Most locals seemed pretty inured to it, but I found it scary.



Today, during my Spanish lesson, Oscar read me an article about the Canadian Mennonites, who are marking the 50th anniversary of their arrival in Santa Cruz. They live in a village called Pailas, about 30 kilometers from Santa Cruz.

These Mennonites are more modern than others. They can wear modern clothing and they have cars, tractors, and electrical appliances. They are very light-skinned, with many blonds and blue or green eyes – quite a contrast to the rest of the population. They came to Santa Cruz from Paraguay, where they had been limited to growing peanuts and cotton. Here they had greater options in agriculture. Currently they specialize in corn, soy, sorghum and dairy farms.

Their young study German, math, Spanish and the Bible for six months per year. Girls graduate at age 12, boys at 14. They believe the greatest lessons are taught by the land. Oscar told me they have a reputation for being very hard workers.



Another coworker today told me a about a very interesting opportunity for locals here. When I asked how he spent his weekend, he told me he was looking for a new house to live in. But the catch is this. He will pay the owner $2500 upfront to live in his house. He will live there 12-18 months. At the end of the period, the owner returns the $2500 to him and he moves on. During that time, he can save more money in order to be able to buy his own house.

In effect, he is giving a loan to the home owner, with the interest being the ability to live in his property for free. I don’t know why someone with a spare house wouldn’t just apply for a loan and put the house as collateral. But it’s certainty a nice opportunity for a forward-thinking young man like my colleague.

Orientation

My Spanish teacher, Oscar, didn’t have time to prepare my lesson for this morning, having stayed up too late for the comedy club performance. So rather than reschedule the lesson, we decided to have a mobile lesson.

He started out by showing me the Montsenor, the café district, where locals like to go out for a couple of coffee. We stopped by an Italian café for a morning drink and pastry. While there, I saw a Mennonite man walk by, dressed in dark navy, neat overalls and a straw hat.

Oscar told me there are Mennonites here from the United States, Mexico, Germany and Canada. I asked about their relations with the local population.

“They used to be very closed and kept themselves separate,” he said. “They couldn’t marry Bolivians. But now there are two types. The conservatives continue as before. The revelados can marry Bolivians. They still maintain the clothing, but the spouse doesn’t have to.”

He also told me about some Japanese colonies near Santa Cruz, where almost the entire population is Japanese. His sister married one of these Japanese men. I’d like to visit one of the villages, as a Japanese world in the middle of Bolivia sounds pretty surreal to me.

We drove around town and Oscar helped me to orient myself a bit more. Santa Cruz is divided into rings. Ring 2 wraps around the center, ring three around ring two, and so on. Each ring is divided into different neighborhoods.

He told me that my neighborhood is called Equipetrol, which is known as a wealthy area. It was the first wealthy barrio in Santa Cruz. Now it’s known as a popular street hangout for young people. On Thursday through Saturday nights, they park trucks along the road and drink beer, blasting music from oversized speakers. It’s the kind of low-cost, 1980s, means of meeting other young people that I saw around the Minneapolis lakes growing up.

We drove across the Pirai river, which separates las Colinas del Urubo, the very wealthiest part of Santa Cruz, from the rest of town. Brown water flowed only through a very narrow part of the wide, brown bed. Oscar said that from December to February, it rained daily and the river was swollen. But now they are expecting a drought to follow and the water has largely dried up.

From the bridge, we could see the fancy white homes with red tiles of Urubo. I asked who lived there and Oscar said mostly owners or employees of petroleum and gas companies, cattle owners and large farmers.

We saw some residents biking on quality mountain bikes and a group of young people driving an open-air 4-wheel vehicle, for the fun of it.

“There are very large class differences here,” Oscar said. “We have both very rich and very poor.”

As we drove down the streets lined by the large-leaved chapeo tree and mango trees, Oscar pointed out to me a few of his favorite restaurants. Then we stopped by the zoo. The zoo has quite a good collection of tropical birds – 150 species and almost 1000 birds. Though the conditions for many are very side – small, square wire cages.

The macaws – the endangered blue-throated macaw, and the rainbow colored scarlet macaw, among others – screeched around us. Their sound couldn’t be contained in the little cages. They needed the vast expanse of a dense jungle to call across and to drown their desperate sounds.

I had to remember that while Santa Cruz is a sunny, plains town, we are actually quite close to the Amazon. Some of the animals were saw were purely fantastic, as though they’d come from a unique world of their own.

The quiet, black and white toucans, with huge, bright yellow beaks, tinged with red, were so perfectly groomed as to appear fake. The harpy eagle looked like a combination of an owl and an eagle, with huge claws of spun golden-brown threads. The Andean Condor was a larger than life-size bird in the vulture family. And my favorite of all was the sloth, a freaky looking creature with a small head, a runted tail, and long arms with strong, curved claws. It looks like a very primitive ape, or an ancient antecedent to the human. Due to its snail’s pace of movement, it was allowed to roam freely on the zoo grounds. Watching this creature move, one slow stretch at a time, disgusting and beautiful and captivating all at once, was the most fascinating thing I’ve seen in Santa Cruz so far.

In the evening, we ate at one of the nicest restaurants in Santa Cruz, el Candelabro. A combination French-sushi-piano bar place, we ate on finely covered tables by candlelight. This was a place where one could feast on gazpacho, grilled seafood, and chocolate cheesecake, the entrees served under platters that resembled medieval caps of armor. A group of waiters gathered around the table to reveal the entrees to the diners all at once, so there could be a collective exhale of awe. Again, not a scene I expected to encounter in Bolivia.