It's been an intense day.
Today is the three-year anniversary of the resignation of then-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, or Goni, at right in his official presidential photo, the culmination of La Semana Negra (The Black Week) in which 59 people officially died. (Unofficial estimates reached the 80s.) I spent this morning covering a march for the deceased and injured of the Gas Wars of that month, and many of the sentiments of those I talked to have had little chance to abate over the last three years.
I spent Friday, October 17, 2003 in Cochabamba glued to the TV, waiting for and then watching while Goni's resignation speech was read to an emergency session of Congress, all the while trying frantically to pack up everything and say good-bye to my host family because the U.S. State Department had put a travel warning on Bolivia and our study abroad program insisted on "evacuating" us for insurance reasons.
That Sunday before on the 12th, I remember coming home from one of our group trips to find my host mom listening very anxiously to the radio in the kitchen. Granted, she was a nervous person in general, but even still, she usually watched the news in the evening in her bedroom, and here she was hovered over the radio in the cold, empty kitchen. She told me that 24 protesters and one soldier had been killed in El Alto. The details weren't clear at that time as to what specifically had been the catalyst. People in El Alto had been protesting Goni's decision to sell contracts to Bolivia's natural gas reserves to foreign companies since September, but the protests, led in large part by MAS, had become more intense by mid-October and cut off access to La Paz's airport, which is only accessed by going through El Alto.
(Today, I got to talk to one man who'd said that he'd been on the sides of one of the roads on that afternoon with a bunch of other guys, throwing rocks at a yellow tractor/tank that had come out of the gas plant, when armed soldiers stepped out and started shooting at them. He got shot in the leg and had it amputated the next day in the hospital, where he spent the rest of that strange week.)
The next day, Monday, we went to school, and about 45 minutes before we were about to go home for lunch, one of our directors came in to tell us that we all had to go home right then because protests calling for Goni's resignation had erupted in the center of our city about three blocks away, and they had started gassing people. (Not the easiest thing to explain to your mom on the phone and keep her fears assuaged.) That afternoon, the economic minister resigned, then-Vice President, Carlos Mesa, officially separated himself from Goni, saying he couldn't continue to align himself with someone who pursued such policies ("políticas así"), and the U.S. Embassy issued a statement of support for the "democratically elected" president.
Throughout the week, the situation kept dragging painfully on with Goni repeatedly denouncing vitriolically the "narcotraffickers who were trying to derail the country," the death toll mounting, and the same statements being issued. My upper-class host sister and her boyfriend fumed over the uncouthness of the protesters, frequently calling them delinquents ("maleantes"), and asking why they didn't go back to their pueblos. Three-year-olds of friends played pretend Soldiers & Protesters. When the one little boy pretended to be a protester shooting the soldiers, one of the mothers interjected, “No, what we want is dialogue.” “What’s ‘diálogo'?” her daughter asked. I can’t tell you what the mother’s response was, though, because I was stuck on the thought that "dialogue" was certainly not part of my vocabulary at three years old. Another night, my friend and I went with her host brothers into the center of the city to see the eerily empty streets, littered with glass from broken windows and tires still smoldering from the day’s protests. We also wore running shoes, just in case we ran into some lingering and likely inebriated protesters, but the only person we saw in the end was a dummy of Goni, hanged, charred and dangling from a lamppost. Suffice it to say, I left this part out when talking to Mom.
You knew it was bad when, by Thursday, hunger strikes had started across the country, and the wealthy urbanized Bolivians were marching for peace in their pressed white button-down shirts. It was, in short, one country's excruciatingly long breaking point. People were more than ready for Goni, whose popularity rating had fallen to 8% in preceding weeks before any of the violence had started, to announce his resignation when it was finally read on Friday. Mesa was sworn in as president, and the whole country pacified immediately. Of course, the State Department's travel warning was still in effect, and hence our program's insurance concerns, which meant that we had to still go to Buenos Aires the next morning at 5 a.m. (We came back the following week once the travel warning had been lifted.)
That was Cochabamba. Today was all about what happened in El Alto itself. The march was a (slightly awkward?) Gringo March in support of families of the deceased and injured, and also to support Evo's calls for the extradition of Goni, who's been living in Chevy Chase, MD, doing the social bit on Capitol Hill and periodically giving presentations and lectures at various colleges.
Legally, the question of whether or not Bolivia can demand his extradition from the U.S. is, to some degrees, an irrelevant one. Goni could plausibly be extradited to face charges for either 1) ordering the soldiers to shoot the protesters, or 2) taking money as he and his ministers fled Bolivia, estimated (but unconfirmed) at about $40,000. At the same time, it would be nearly impossible to guarantee Goni a fair trial here in Bolivia, should he be extradited. (Bolivia's judicial system is a mess, simply put.) Hence as an official at the US Consulate here said, as far as the U.S. is aware, Goni is not illegally residing in the U.S. Different government and advocacy groups are working to file the necessary requests and petitions, although responses have been muddled and the process is only slugging along.
Legality aside, the U.S.'s support of Goni is much more of a symbolic one, especially to families of those who were killed or injured. What it basically boils down to is that Bolivia doesn't have enough leverage to make the U.S. give Goni back, and so the U.S. will let him stay up there, not the least of reasons is because the U.S. is arguably responsible for the fact that he's so hated here. (Goni has said that the U.S.'s denial of his request for funds in early 2003 led to serious unrest in February, when about 20 people were killed, a precursor to the subsequent events and continued unrest of October. Also, the U.S.'s continued statements of support throughout la Semana Negra only further embittered many Bolivians towards the perceived U.S./Goni ruling bloc in their country.)
So the march, which started in a plaza and ended a few blocks away at the U.S. Embassy was set up 1) to let families of the deceased and injured bring their complaints to the ambassador's door, and 2) for gringos to voice their disapproval of the U.S.'s failure to extradite, and moreover respond to calls for the extradition of, Goni.
Usually, I like to describe cholas, which is basically the term for Bolivian women who still wear traditional dress (although it does not necessarily have anything to do with economic status), as colorful volcanoes, with their little bowler hats on top of long black braids running over bright shawls on narrow shoulders, down to big wide printed and often sparkly skirts. Today, though, the hats, shawls, and skirts were all black and grey. Ashy, in a way. Some of them made the morning greetings with a very normal and composed buen dia, but some were already starting to well up. There were also a few of the men who'd been injured, in all their cases lost a leg and on crutches.
The campesinos led the march down to the embassy, and the Gringos followed behind carrying crosses for each of the deceased. When we got to the embassy, the campesinos went right up to the steps, and the guards quickly came down the steps and set up in barricade position, with their arms crossed, holding each other's batons. The initial sentiments were ones of intense anger. One of the campesinas, who didn't look over 25, with a baby on her back and a toddler by her side, hit one of the guards, breaking his glasses. Another older lady kept asking the guards, who were all Bolivian, why they weren't "supporting your compañeros in our own land." One woman who'd been talking to me, stopped to tell me that she was shaking with rage. The climax was when the father of one seven-year old girl who'd died from a bullet that went in her house and killed her in the middle of the night vowed that they would not stop protesting because "we don't have any fear left: our dead are already in their tombs." I was standing there, trying to take notes, trying to keep from losing it and having serious doubts about my fledgling future as a journalist, until I saw a TV reporter who was crying as she held the microphone up to his mouth. People quieted and the mood became much more somber as the march directors read the names of the people who'd been killed. The march then went back up to the plaza where it'd begun and people headed home.
I got frustrated trying to think of a type of article I could pull together from all of this. It'll get dismissed as some young 20-something's leftist (hey, at least according to the truism I have a heart, right?) my-government-is-evil phase, tiresomely impassioned and idealistic, and hopelessly impractical plea for wrongs to be righted, I thought. And then I got frustrated with my own resignation. Why did I need to think of some spin, some new twist, to this story of grieving widows and dead children? Why was I concerned that simply relaying their grief and the lack of response to that grief, which was the sum of what I observed, wouldn't be enough? At what point does the pain become cliché?
Throughout the morning, the protesters chanted for Goni to "show his face", for the U.S. ambassador to come out and say something, and, the most common, for justice. When interviewing, I tried to ask most of them what "justice" would mean, more or less, in practical terms. The injured asked for rehabilitation services. A lot said that they wanted Goni in jail. (No one said they wanted him dead.) Others, looked at me and simply said, "Just that they'd respond to us."
I asked one man what the third anniversary meant. He caught his breath a bit, and his face dropped. "It's been three years of massacre."
