January 11: An Eyewitness Account

Readers:

It has been two weeks since January 11, the day when the streets of Cochabamba turned deadly violent, leaving two people dead and more than 160 others wounded. Reasonable people can debate the true roots of those events. Was it Manfred Reyes Villa throwing down the gauntlet to MAS backers by saying he would call for a re-vote on autonomy six months after Cochabamba voters soundly rejected it? Was it the labor unions and campesino groups that filled the Plaza in protest, and who blocked roads coming in and out of the city?

There is, however, little room for debate about when and where a tense political situation exploded into widespread violence that overtook the center of Cochabamba. That was just after 4pm two weeks ago at the end of Cochabamba’s tree-lined Prado. I walked through that area just a few minutes beforehand, interviewing people from all sides of the battle that was about to explode.

Since then I have also spoken to a half dozen people who were eyewitnesses to those events. One of those accounts, from a non-participant, Jonas Brown, a US citizen who lives in the exact spot where the fighting began, stands out. I asked him to write it up for our readers and he agreed to do so. I post it here, unedited. I think it is an important contribution to the record of what happened here two weeks ago today.

[Note: The photo here, of supporters of Manfred Reyes Villa, was taken from the balcony of our office.]

Jim Shultz

January 11: An Eyewitness Account

When I returned to Cochabamba from summer vacation on January 9, a group of about fifty police officers were all but living on the street just outside my apartment. They were guarding the intersection of Avenida Ramon Rivero and Calle Antezana, just before it crosses Antezana Bridge to the northern part of the city. Since Cala Cala Bridge and most main roads through the city were blockaded by the protesting campesinos, this was a critical intersection to control if there was to be any flow of traffic back and forth across the river in the downtown area.

My apartment window looks out over this intersection. Over the next two days, when cooking or eating, I glanced down at the police from time to time. It was a picture, mostly, of boredom. If there was anyone benefiting from the blockades financially, it had to be the ice cream man, hawking from the shade of his pushcart’s overhanging umbrella. When the sun came out, he had faithful patrons in the idle, over-heated police. Only a few officers at any time were needed to direct traffic. The others sat on the curbs, their body armor half-off or lying on the grass behind them. Their superior roused them at intervals to stand in formation on the street. They would refasten their armor, assume their positions, then, quickly dismissed, retreat into the shade and peel off the layers again.

I did see them called into action once. On the 10th, a crowd of campesinos with sticks began moving tentatively from La Plaza de las Banderas down Ramon Rivero, possibly with the intent of taking and blockading the Calle Antezana intersection. The police formed a wall and marched to meet the campesinos halfway, at the intersection of Avenida Ramon Rivero and Calle Lanza. As I stood watching, a man in business clothes with a black eye and a cut on his face approached me and warned me to be careful. He had been beaten up by campesinos the day before when he was caught taking photographs of a blockade. According to him, he had absorbed some 30-40 kicks and punches.

This standoff ended without violence. After a brief, tense interval, the campesinos retreated back to the plaza. The police went back to sitting on the curbs. They nodded or said hello when people walked past. They congregated in the limited shade of a small tree, chatting away the empty hours, hitting each other’s body armor playfully with their clubs. Then, abruptly, in the middle of the afternoon on the next day, January 11th, their struggle with boredom ended.

On one side, the campesinos had approached again from La Plaza de las Banderas, a few young men trying to arm themselves en route by ripping branches off the trees. The energy level in the crowd was higher than it had been the last time. They yelled in unison and some leaped up and down. Firecrackers were set off. From the other side, the Los Jovenes por la Democracia demonstration in favor of Manfred Villa Reyes was about to cross Antezana Bridge onto Avenida Ramon Rivero. This small group of police officers stood between two opposing, electric, stick-waving protests.

They lined up in the street, listening to their superior’s orders, their faces now icy and nervous. For the first time, it occurred to me that they didn’t have shields or helmets. In fact, some didn’t even have billy clubs, only sticks and heavy wires like the protesters. Not all had body armor. Most importantly, of course, they were severely outnumbered. Reinforcements had arrived, but not enough to make much difference.

The force split into two. One formed a wall, as they done before, and marched down to the meet the campesinos where Calle Lanza intersects Avenida Ramon Rivero. Even to one who knows nothing about crowd control, it seemed a precarious situation. The police line was thin, only one officer “thick” at most points. The other half of the force formed a line at the south foot of the bridge, their arms interlocked to prohibit the pro-Manfred demonstration from exiting the bridge onto Avenida Ramon Rivero. This equally thin second line, charged with repelling a much larger, more concentrated crowd—and one which was already moving—looked even less tenable than the first.

My apartment is on the empty block that was being used as a buffer between the two police lines. A few of my neighbors and I stood outside our gate watching as the pro-Manfred crowd flowed across the bridge chanting slogans, thrusting their sticks into the air. Some paused to throw stones down toward the river, presumably at campesinos, who may have been throwing stones back. I don’t know who provoked whom, but this was the first hint of violence that I saw.

At the front of the march, the crowd was mostly young men armed with clubs of some type or other: wooden staffs, branches, baseball bats, metal rods, etc. The police line flexed as the foremost marchers pressed into it. It wasn´t clear if the leaders were pushing themselves into the police or if they themselves were being pushed by the momentum of the crowd. Either way, the police quickly realized they couldn’t hold the crowd on the bridge and adjusted their line to funnel the crowd onto Avenida Ramon Rivero to the east, away from the campesinos.

The crowd now had a road down which to continue marching, but they didn’t move. For a few moments, nothing happened. Then, in a sudden surge, the source of which was indiscernible, the front of the crowd burst through the police line and, waving their sticks wildly, broke into a full run down Avenida Ramon Rivero in the direction of the campesinos. My neighbors and I were in their path. We ran and ducked behind our apartment gate.

The pro-Manfred march had been billed as peaceful, and there were reasonable, non-violent people who participated in it. But the contingent at the front of the crowd evidently had something else in mind. They didn’t march toward the campesinos in the style, even, of an aggressive protest. Once through the police line, either acting on plans made beforehand or giving in to the angry chaos of the moment, they launched an assault that bore no resemblance to civil protest.

From behind the gate of my apartment, I couldn’t see what happened when the pro-Manfred group clashed with the campesinos, a relative smattering of police officers wedged between them. Apparently, tear gas was released. A few minutes later, I walked back outside. The campesinos, outnumbered in that particular area, had retreated and most of the fighting was now taking place in La Plaza de las Banderas or on El Prado. Only a few scattered melees continued nearby on Avenida Ramon Rivero.

The police’s mission had changed from violence prevention to violence management. Some campesinos had become separated from their comrades and were caught among the pro-Manfred marchers. Some had been too slow or just unlucky. Others had been injured. The police, using their own bodies as shields, ferried them one by one or in small groups through the pro-Manfred marchers to empty streets or to ambulances. These panicked campesinos hurried through corridors of screaming, stick-waving marchers to safety, a few sustaining blows from sticks even as they ran.

I saw men using their sticks to threaten young and middle-aged campesinas—even one with a child on her back—yelling at them. Expressions of terror flashed on the faces of the women. One campesina, pursued by marchers, fled into the gated front yard of a nearby establishment. The person guarding the gate shut it behind her. A crowd gathered around yelling at her. They dispersed when someone behind the gate escorted her safely out of sight.

As the fighting moved down the street, the middle and back ranks of the pro-Manfred protest continued to arrive. They appeared to be trying to size up the situation. Some gathered in small groups. They had a decision to make. Should they keep marching? Was this even a march anymore? What exactly was happening? Did they support it?

Some turned back immediately when they saw the violence. Others milled on the street or sat on the curbs holding their signs, bewildered expressions on their faces. Still others went ahead to witness or perhaps even join the fighting. A few armed men were on motorbikes zooming back and forth, brandishing their sticks. An organizer appeared trying to rally the uncertain marchers at the back, yelling something like, “Let’s go. We’ve cleared out the plaza. It’s all safe up ahead.”

Though Avenida Ramon Rivero was still hostile territory for the campesinos, its access to unblocked streets must have made it the best way to get casualties to the hospital. From the direction of the fighting, police officers led exhausted, terrified, limping, half-conscious and/or bleeding campesinos one by one down the sidewalk past our apartment.

The police continued shielding the injured with their own bodies until each person was safely inside an ambulance or a truck. At one point, they had to hold a small crowd of yelling pro-Manfred supporters back from a campesino man on a stretcher. My Spanish is not good enough to know exactly what was being yelled at the campesinos out in the crowd, but I made out one statement hollered by my very own neighbor at an injured man: “Go home, Indian!”

Even a man whose face was a river of blood—whose T-shirt was soaked-through so that the entire front of it was crimson, whose eyes were foggy with shock—was yelled at as he staggered by dripping a trail of blood.

An adolescent campesina had become separated from her family. She came and sat down by our apartment building, weeping quietly. She was trying to gather herself, but each time an injured campesino was led past, she broke into tears again. I went over and awkwardly asked her how she was doing. She looked at me in terror and turned away. Finally, a policeman led her away and put her into a truck for her own safety.

I’m an American. It’s not my place to take a side in the political disagreements that caused this fighting, or to try to judge, following the events on January 11, which side holds the moral high-ground. I have only written what I saw. This is an account by one shocked witness of one interval in which a large number of “normal” citizens somehow lost track of their humanity. The same phenomenon was echoed tragically throughout the remainder of the afternoon by people on both sides.

Before I went to sleep that night, I looked out the window. The police had returned and were sprawled on the patches of grass along the street, which was littered with garbage, abandoned sticks, and used-up fireworks. The next day they would receive military reinforcements.

Written by Jonas Brown