Month: October 2003

We arrived in Cuenca this morning. It’s nice to be back. Classes start on Monday.

Bolivia’s still a mess: today protesters unsuccessfully tried to block the road linking La Paz to its airport. And for an excellent re-cap of what all the fuss is about, see “Bolivia’s Gas War,” which ran recently in CounterPunch. Benjamin Dangl writes:

A new cycle of conflict has developed in Bolivia as worker unions, coca farmers and ordinary citizens unite to prevent the sale of the nation’s gas reserves to the United States through a Chilean port. In a country whose economic identity has been strongly shaped by U.S. pressure in the war on drugs and IMF structural adjustments, The Gas War is the most recent case where the Bolivian public has vehemently protested against foreign interests taking priority over the country’s economic well being.

We’re in Lima now. And we’ve almost made it back to Cuenca.

We had to leave Puno a day early–our airline changed our Lima to Guayaquil departure time from 10:45 a.m. tomorrow to just after midnight tomorrow. So we bussed 7 hours from Puno to Cuzco yesterday and–get this–were held up by roadblocks (yes, more roadblocks!) outside Juliaca, on the way to Cuzco.

The reason for the trouble: a disputed soccer championship, astoundingly. Apparently the team from Juliaca lost to Puno’s squad in a controversial match, and Juliaca’s fans blocked all highways in an attempt to be awarded the crown. These protesters, though, unlike Bolivia’s, lacked logistical organization–our bus driver simply diverged from Juliaca’s main drag, where some rocks were strewn haphazardly about, and took an alternate route through town.

We flew from Cuzco to Lima today; we’ll arrive in Guayaquil early tomorrow morning and then we’ll be in Cuenca by tomorrow afternoon.