Protest

Here's the story of the protest that blocked la redoma on the 27th of December.

My teammate KT and I decided to join the protest. I felt that the authorities were doing as best a job as they could with planning and rebuilding the infrastructure, but they were completely ignoring the issue of crime. There was a rumor that when someone asked the police to come and watch over the stairs, they responded that the community should hire its own delinquents to patrol the stairway.

The protest was my first such event and was an excellent learning space. First, I learned that groups doing something out of the ordinary need strong leaders. Strong leaders are natural leaders. That is to say, they can't help but be leaders regardless of the their own disposition; everyone looks to them for instruction and inspiration. Remove the leaders and the movement dissipates. There were two such natural leaders present at the protest. The second thing I learned is that many times natural leaders are clueless as to their status as natural leaders.

The protest blocked off a major intersection at the base of our hill that feeds the local market place (la redoma) and serves as a major hub for our section of the city. The police showed up immediately, and very naturally ended up being directed towards the leaders. The police briefly chatted with the leaders asking for the demands of the protest and then quietly took a spot in the shade to make sure everything proceeded peacefully. When motorcycles tried breaking the human blockade, one of the leaders asked the police for a caution tape and was quickly rewarded with a full roll. The blockade of the intersection lasted for about three hours. It came to an end when the leaders, obviously unaware that they were the leaders and moral support of the group, went to shore up a road block at a different location and left the main location leaderless. Soon a group of people, who knows who they were, showed up at the scene and began to negotiate with us to unblock the road, and in spite of our verbal protests, completely undid the blockade while the leaderless protesters were left wondering what exactly had happened. A very anti-climatic protest over all. One interesting cultural note, almost all of the protesters were women. Our little group vacillated between 20-40 people, while an equal number of men sat by watching. We later figured that blocking the road as a man can be very dangerous as it leads to many confrontations with other men on motorcycles which can turn deadly in a not so public setting.

The blockade turned out to be actually counter productive in the end, but I chalk it up to the ever present chaos of groups. The blockade first started in a different location much earlier in the morning. A high ranking minister in the government deployed to the scene of the protest immediately and then climbed the hill to survey the damage with two of our neighbors.The arrival of the minister and his action up on the hillside were of course was completely unknown to us. The president of Venezuela, interestingly enough, was immediately informed of the blockade we had made (after the initial protest) and called the minister asking why in the world people were still protesting if he was already on the scene. The poor minister, who to the best of his knowledge thought that the protest had ended, could only respond that all the protesters were part of the opposition against the president. It was a lie to cover himself, but what was to be done? He didn't know we were protesting, and we didn't know he had already showed up. What's more, the people who knew that the minister had arrived were not natural leaders, and even if they had tried to stop the blockade, it would have come to nothing. We only found out these details of the story a week after the protest.

So, like I said, the protest was successful in that it caught the attention of the authorities and they responded, unnecessary in that the protest had already achieved its goal when it started the blockade, and a flop in that it was a unresolved ending with no clear outcome.