Tamara Pearson - Merida
At 5pm I got a text from my friend saying he couldn’t make it because “there are protests in the centre and they are shooting, I even had to run when I was at the bus stop.”
I went home, but passed street 26, where a large crowd was gathered, and decided to have a look.
A block down there were about 4 police, and a block down from there it looked like about 30 opposition students with their tshirts off and over their heads like balaclavas, firing and throwing rocks at the police, and the police firing back. Amongst them, scattered garbage bags (Friday night is one of the garbage pick up nights).
The police had shields, the youth had one of the Carlos Leon (mayor of Merida, chavista) billboards. The youth would throw something or fire something and the police would respond or duck, and the crowd edged close and closer to watch (still a good block away), and the police near the crowd made a half attempt to keep us back.
I walked a block over, and then down to where the fighting was. Stupidly, it wasn’t until I was right amongst the opposition that I realised I had a red tshirt on and my camera was very obvious (they don’t like being photographed). Oh well, I got out a pen and took some notes. There were a good 100 or so opposition people there- all men, young, and most of them covering their faces with balaclavas or improvised t-shirts. They had empty glass bottles, rocks, broken bricks and guns.
They also had 2 old blue ULA (Los Andes University) buses, which they drove around recklessly, frequently driving up to where the crowds were, skidding over corners, turning around, and heading back to their crowd.
The battle between the police and opposition/movement 13 went for ages. Soon it started to get dark and cold and a lot of the crowd went home. The police were getting a bit over it I think (they were not armed, they only had guns which fired these plastic gas canister things), and one cop walked back up to the crowd looking sad, “I was hit here, and here and here” he said, pointing to various parts of his leg. Most of the crowd was sympathetic and moved into listen to him describe what was happening. I think it was about then that people started thinking they should back the police up.
The police started pulling out and the opposition was turning on the crowd, throwing rocks. People started chanting “Alerta, alerta, alerta que camina, la espada de Bolivar por America Latina” (Warning, those who walk, the sword of Bolivar goes about Latin America), and picking up bricks, breaking them on the ground to make throw-able rocks, and going back after the opposition. It had become a Chavista/opposition battle now.
The opposition would retreat, collect their rocks, glass bottles or bits of glass and I think Molotov cocktails (it looked like they were throwing fire at us), then suddenly line up and attack, we would run back a bit, then people found rocks and would chace them and throw stuff back. The ‘line of battle’ would move up and down the street, and at one point when the Chavistas were running back, I turned down a side street instead, but found the opposition following and suddenly I was caught amongst them. I guess being female, they decided to completely ignore me, so I sat huddled against a wall as they kicked at shop doors, threw rocks at just one guy who’d done the same thing as me, and yelled out “hijo de puta” at him and the chavistas (son of a bitch). Rocks were flying everywhere, another chavista woman with her boyfriend yelled out ‘family’ to the opposition, signalled to me to come with her, and we ducked out back to where everyone else was.
By now it was pretty dark, too dark for photos. The shooting was constant. The police had completely gone- down a few blocks away, sitting down with their truck. Amongst the Chavistas it was almost only men left (and people I knew kept coming up to me (as a women I guess) and saying ‘be careful’ so I told them to be careful too). The police waited for people to disperse more, then they made a line behind their shields and started walking towards the opposition, with us behind them. There were almost no opposition ‘fighters’ left, they retreated behind a tall fence, and the Chavistas started chanting ‘alerta…’ again. There was a sense that we had almost won, we had made them leave ( I should add that by now there were probably about 100-150 Chavistas).
The police line continued down the road, advancing a block at a time. At one point I went up to the police line and looked around the corner where I think a small opposition still was, it was full of tear gas- from which side or why, I’m not sure. I put my notebook over my face (not that that helped) and walked back again and felt the tears coming, my eyes and face stinging, my throat hurting.
The line of police walked down another block and everyone yelled out ‘lets go’. We were now walking over where the opposition had been. Large street lights and poles were knocked right over on the road and smashed. The road was covered in broken glass, rocks, half bottles, toilet paper for some reason, burnt out tires and other unrecognizable burnt things. We arrived at the uni campus/student centre where the two opposition buses that they had been driving crazily around, were parked. Some people went in and started taking the air out of the tires and doing something to the engines. One guy threw a rock and broke a glass window and everyone got angry at him and told him not to do that.
There was little media. Before there were a few people filming and one guy from a newspaper, now there were just the TAM (Andean Television of Merida) media. No doubt Globalvision (very openly pro opposition TV channel) will say some crap about violent police attacking students, but they weren’t even there.
It was over. The Chavistas chanted “The people united will never be defeated” and one guy gave a speech, “…Today we defended the city and the people…the movement 13 don’t respect human life but we will defend it…Fascists don’t rest and neither will we…we are chavista!” and more chants of “We are the Chavistas of the university!”
Then there was “Venceremos!” (We will overcome) and everyone left.
-
Yesterday, Saturday, the Chavists mobilised in Plaza Bolivar ‘in defence of the Revolution’ – basically a show of numbers to prevent any further violence.
We used the opportunity to chat and catch up and exchange opinions about the previous days events…and then as it started to rain a few hours later, people went home and to meetings and the day finished off peacefully.
I noted down a few people’s opinions, although I really should have got more. One friend, a Tupamaru, said the Chavists shouldn’t have fallen into doing what M13 does- that is, throw rocks back etc, and that “The governor had a role in it all, he didn’t send enough police on purpose…and anyway the police don’t want to go out in the street because they are angry with Chavez because their wage is still very low.”
When I suggested to a different friend, from the CMR, that the slashing of the tires of the M13 buses was a bit over the top, he argued that strategically it was useful, to prevent them taking those buses out again and causing havoc and destruction like they did yesterday.
Another friend, from the Fuerzas Socialists argued that, “the opposition have done this under the inefficiency of the authorities, which has opposition members among them.”
Most of the people at this mobilisation were also young men. It was a ‘student battle’ so on one level it makes sense, but I’m also starting to sense a sort of age delineation, with the communal councils and the more theoretical and debate type meetings mostly attended by middle aged people and up, and protests like the anti-Uribe one- which didn’t have Chavez’s support, is mostly youth.
The M13 left their mark though, literally, all over the bridge from the centre and down Avenue Las Americas (one of the main roads on Merida), with painted outlines of bodies meant to represent bodies- deaths by crime.
Posted on http://gringadiary.blogspot.com/
For background and an indepth explanation of events, see James Suggets article at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3640
For more of my photos, check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/16992000@N03/?saved=1
No comments:
Post a Comment