Blockade Ends on Day 19

At 6:30 a.m. last Thursday we heard rallying chants from the military police gathering in Copa’s main plaza. Soon afterward, the roar of truck and bus engines broke the morning quiet. As they’d done since last Monday morning, the troops headed back up into the mountains to guard the road from La Paz.

About two hours later loads of residents gathered in the plaza to salute a select delegation headed out to the lake – neutral territory where protesters couldn’t reach them – to try to hammer out a solution to the problem. The delegation included representatives from Copacabana, the peninsula’s four sectors, and Tiquina and Tito Yupanqui, the two villages vying for a bridge over Lake Titicaca connecting to La Paz, Copa, and millions of tourist dollars. The delegation was 100% male.

There were actually two different blockades. The first one, from March 25 to April 7, was mandated by the provincial government in protest over the rogue piracy of boat pilots who ferry people and vehicles across the Strait of Tiquina. By crossing at Tiquina, the 70-mile trip from La Paz takes about 3.5 hours. The pilots randomly raise rates, spontaneously strike, and take dangerous risks. One can avoid the strait by crossing into Perú, curving around the southern tip of the lake and re-entering Bolivia, for a 9-hour trip. So the other point of the first blockade was to demand a bridge be built over the Strait of Tiquina.

The second blockade, from April 8 to 12, was a counter-protest staged by the people of Tito Yupanqui. Someone might have foolishly promised them a triple-span bridge would land in their village, linking La Paz and Copa. That route would have lopped off a third of the time and distance between La Paz and Copa, and of course, it would have sky-rocketed tiny Tito Yupanqui’s economy. More likely the people of Tito Yupanqui saw foreign engineers conducting months-long feasibility studies, and concluded, wrongly, that the bridge would be theirs. Alas, the studies showed a triple bridge there would seriously harm the sacred lake, and would cost $600 million USD. When the first blockade was resolved with the decision to build a $200 million bridge at Tiquina, the people of Tito Yupanqui blamed Copacabana.

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