Argentinians Love Road Blocks

Last weekend I went to Argentina to visit Facundo's family, which involved 16 hours on a bus (thank you, sleeping pills, for getting me through that eternal bus ride). And, just as I was only half an hour away from Zapala (Facundo's home town), the bus was held up by a road block made up of car tires. My first thought, as is often my first thought in many situations, was "WTF?". A group of Argentinians with makeshift tents on the side of the road had rolled out a bunch of tires in two straight lines across the road, making it so that no vehicles could pass through. Now, that really pissed me off. First of all, I had been on a bus for the last 15.5 hours, and I was damn ready to get off that bus. Second of all, the Argentinians in charge of that little bitch of a road block were sitting around on their tires, chatting, enjoying themselves as traffic started to build on both sides of their tire blockade. Third, nobody seemed the least bit offended by the road block. In fact, everybody got out of the bus and started to smoke, and chat, and hang out. I appeared to be the only pissed off passenger on that bus.

Once people started deboarding the bus, I heatedly paced back and forth for a few minutes, wondering what I should do. I'd be damned if I was going to sit there and take it while those assholes prevented me from arriving in Zapala on time for Facundo's parents to pick me up. So I approached the bus driver and asked him what the road block was for and when it would be over. He told me that the road block had been going on all week and that the protesters were unemployed people who wanted the government to increase unemployment handouts. The road block would open up at 7:00 PM and we would be able to pass through after that. Well, that's fine and dandy, but at that point it was only 3:30 in the afternoon and I was not going to wait another 3.5 hours. So I asked the bus driver if it would be possible for me to walk around the road block and continue to Zapala on my own. He said yes and allowed me to get my luggage out of the bus. At that point I was seriously considering walking the rest of the way. The only problem was that Zapala was still 20 kilometers away. Lugging my bags for 20 kilometers would have been a bitch, but I figured maybe I could hitch hike the rest of the way there.

I got lucky. A bus coming in the opposite direction stopped at the road block, let off a group of people, and those people crossed the road block to my side so that they could board another bus and continue on their way. The drivers of the bus on the other side allowed me to cross over and get on their bus, because they were turning around to go back to Zapala. So while all the rest of the suckers on my original bus waited around for another 3.5 hours, I hopped on another bus and arrived in Zapala soon after. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

After that episode I kept asking myself why Argentinians are so complacent about all the protesting. Apparently protesters set up road blocks all the time demanding various concessions from the government, like salary increases. Last year the entire farming community got pissed off at the government and blocked all access into the cities, leaving people without dairy products and meat. The day I left Zapala to come back to Chile, there was another road block, making my bus a few hours late. Why doesn't anybody get fed up with it?

Apparently there are a number of explanations, one of them being that the road blocks are effective. Protesters almost always get what they want from the government, in exchange for votes of course. Populism at its finest. Another reason is that there is really not much that can be done to stop the protesters. A few years ago the police were sent to quell an uprising in a city in Neuquen, and a police officer accidentally shot and killed a teacher. So after that the police force stopped intervening. Now people just sit around patiently while protesters disrupt traffic and make the entire population suffer for their demands. I don't know, it just doesn't make much sense to me. Of course, I don't support police intervention either, because it always turns violent. But I feel like Argentina is in some embryonic stage of development, because obviously something is wrong with the government if people have to take to creating road blocks all the time to get what they want. One could argue that it is healthy for people to fight for their rights, but it seems to me that more diplomatic means could be used to solve these issues, or at least means that don't involve making the entire population suffer.

It makes me wonder why I don't see demonstrations like that in the US, or even in Chile for that matter. If I decided to set up a road block in Kansas, what would people do? I know they would definitely not be complacent about it. They would raise hell. But what would the police do? And what is different about our government that makes it so that people don't need to take to the streets? It seems like there is always some public manifestation going on in Argentina. Last summer when I was staying with Facundo in Cordoba, I was awoken every morning by loud protesting outside of the window. People burned stuff, honked horns, and chanted every morning without fail. And of course, that time they were also protesting about wages. It's as if Argentinians just discovered the concept of the protest and are milking it for all it's worth. In my opinion, it's bizarre. But in the opinion of Argentinians I know, it's just everyday stuff, and they don't pay it any attention.

But then again, this is also a country that had almost constant military coups from the 1930s on. What a weird country.