Colombians take to the streets with a plethora of grievances
By S.B. | BOGOTÁ
PROTESTS and strikes often go hand in hand with roadblocks. If you disrupt the lives of lots of people for a prolonged period of time, the reasoning goes, the government cannot ignore you—and your demands. Understandably, the government is less keen on the tactic. So when tens of thousands of Colombian miners, truckers, coffee growers, milk producers, public health-care workers, students and others—each group with its own gripes—announced they would take to the streets on August 19th, President Juan Manuel Santos warned that he would brook no blocked highways (or violence). He ordered the police to tear down barricades wherever they cropped up.
Predictably, protesters did not heed Mr Santos's warning. By the end of the second day the nationwide protests had blocked off 15 main roads in the provinces of Boyacá, Arauca, Putumayo and Nariño. At least 61 people have been arrested for obstructing roadways, violence against the police and destruction of property; 62 policemen have been injured in clashes with protesters. The disruption overshadowed the government's success, just earlier, to persuade the aggrieved in Catatumbo, in the country's north-east, to stand down from roadblocks they had manned for more than 50 days.
For all the disruption they caused, Mr Santos has downplayed the strikes. They were indeed smaller than expected. But two days into the unrest, El Tiempo, a newspaper, reported that the government does in fact intend to negotiate, separately with each group.
Coffee growers, who had been promised subsidies after earlier protests, were demanding more support from the government in the face of shrinking coffee prices and a strong peso. Small-scale miners, some lacking official licences, complain that in its efforts to combat illegal mining the government has confiscated and destroyed their equipment, confusing it for that belonging to criminal gangs. Truckers want lower fuel prices and more investment in infrastructure. Many of these gripes are legitimate: more of Colombia's roads are closed on any given day because of landslides and poor maintenance than protesters could ever hope to block.
The country's far-right politicians loyal to the tough former president, Alvaro Uribe, threw their support behind the protests. So did leftist FARC rebels, who are in talks with the government to end a half-century of war—and who, perhaps in order further to bolster their credibility with Colombians, accepted responsibility for "cruelty and pain" wrought by its forces. None of this surprised Joseph Tulchin, a Latin-America expert at Harvard University. The politician who learns how to channel this anger, he says, can count of plenty of votes in next year's congressional and presidential elections.
