Live Working or Die Fighting by Mason Paul

Author:Mason, Paul [Mason, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446444160
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2011-06-29T23:00:00+00:00

Philipp Scheidemann, 1929

Huanuni, Bolivia, 2006

The line of trucks and tankers runs like a white scar across the altiplano; the blockade lies two miles ahead along a road spattered by rain, strewn with plastic bottles, corn husks and a couple of hundred stranded vehicles. Even from here you can feel the thud of the dynamite.

The tin miners of Huanuni have set up a road block. It’s not any old road; at 4,000 metres above sea level it’s the main north–south artery across the Andes. The miners have commandeered a police station and a toll booth, dumping a tipper-load of earth onto the road. The approaches are strewn with hundreds of small boulders, arranged into neat, impassable V shapes. Although there are only about 200 pickets huddled in the lee of adobe huts, there are plenty more camped out in the village up the hill. Given the miners’ reputation, they don’t really need physical force. The truckers bow to moral force and sit around resignedly. Just to make sure though, every ten minutes a lighted stick of dynamite is lobbed into the road.

Their demands are simple and have nothing to do with mining. They want 55 extra teaching posts to be created in Huanuni’s schools. They want more money for secondary education and vocational training. ‘Education is all we’ve got,’ says Marisol Huaylla, a member of the miners ‘civic committee’. She’s a grey-haired community leader and explains patiently: ‘Our children need education, otherwise they will end up like us.’ She’s wearing the baseball cap of the main trade union federation, COB. The B is formed by the face of Che Guevara.

I find Roberto Chavez, general secretary of the Miners Federation of Bolivia, huddled with his lieutenants in the middle of the road, keeping an eye on the dynamite throwers. The government will give in, he thinks, but it’s not the end.

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