Tea Time in La Paz

It was around 6 00pm, I was reading a book when I thought I heard gun shots. I recognise them now because in my room on the 7th floor bordering El Prado, the street of protest, they are a common occurrence. The first time pistols were fired by the leaders of protest at the front of a demonstration the noise woke me up. I lay in a jet lagged stupor and registered the thought that someone was firing a gun. It is an incredible thing that a real gun does not sound like a gun fired in the movies or a starting pistol. There is menace in the noise, an incongruity with day to day living that shakes the senses. I told my Bolivian friend I had heard gunfire and she said, ' oh yes, it happens all the time, every time they are having one of their marches'.

This evening when the ricocheting shots resounded in the containment of the street I leapt to the window and saw the march coming. I saw the orange flash of the bullets fired and the plume of smoke left behind.

The racket was incongruous with the steady pace of the protestors. The rank and file of the march curved around the end of the central reservation. Indigenous men and women, the new indigenous elite advanced by Evo Morales, wanting something.

To understand what was happening something must be said about Bolivian society. It is headed by Evo Morales the first head of state drawn from the indigenous peasant class to be democratically elected. He is fast becoming one of the most influential players in Latin American politics. He has near hero status in latino lands for standing up to the United States, reducing their influence in Bolivian commerce, preventing their exploitation of gas revenues and telling them where to go when they endeavour to interfere in the production of the Coca plant. Not only has he reduced US influence he has also freed Bolivia from the shackles of the IMF. Put all that together with his programme of promotion of peasant rights, anti poverty campaigns, health and literacy campaigns to improve life in the most deprived rural areas and we should be dealing with some modern day political hero. A good man, a man of the people. So why the need for protest, what did the protestors want?

I left my hotel room and went to the street. I stood on a raised traffic island to get a better view and asked an indigenous peasant woman at my side what the protestors wanted. ' No lo se', she told me. I went back to the hotel and ask the educated 'white' Bolivians on the reception desk what was going on. ' I do not know what they are protesting about this time; who can ever say'', the receptionists said, massively disinterested.

I include this final image of an indigenous woman near the head of the protest march because it contains within it everything I am coming to love about Bolivia

It demonstrates the complexity of the character of the people,the passion that brings them to the street and the down to earth every dayness that I find in them when I approach them as a stranger and ask for directions or ask about their life.. They are a warm people, helpful. They do not exude anger or revolution,they exude kindness and a tenderness for each other, they may be social activists and powerfully effective over the last twenty years in changing society through that role, but at heart,just like the rest of us, they prefer simply to be social.