Huelgas

Plaza de Armas

The Plaza de Armas in Cusco is a place where people often gather in Cusco in order to do demonstrations and marches to support their cause. In the past 3 weeks I have seen several of these kinds of incidents, but the past few days have been different. Basically the entire city of Cusco has been shut down for the past 36 hours and will continue to be shut down until tomorrow.

What does this mean? It means no buses, no taxis, no collectivos, no private buses and many shops and restaurants and are also closed. A lot of locals and tourists alike are stuck walking far distances and many tourists find themselves without any transport to tours, including trains to Machu Picchu. 

The city was informed the afternoon before that there would be demonstrations over the government deciding to cut water off to many of the pueblos near Cusco and that there would be a strike of public transport. I was also informed Tuesday morning via email from the USA embassy to steer clear of these demonstrations in case they become violent. 

Tuesday morning I woke up as usual at 6:30am to go to the gym, only the gym was closed and there were riot police in the Plaza de Armas. It seemed like to today was definitely going to mean more than just a strike of public transport. It has been pretty noisy the past few days with people yelling, blocking roads with rocks, parading down streets with drums at 6:30am and various demonstrations throughout the city. 

Luckily, it has up until now been peaceful and hopefully the government pays attention to the protests without them turning violent. I am glad that for me it has only been the inconvenience of walking 1.5 hours to the bus station instead of taking a cab, like 100s of others, and nothing more serious. Actually it has been quite nice not to have cars running you over and breathing gasoline fumes all day. 

This is the first time that I have ever experienced strikes in a city of this scale, I can't imagine what it would be like if all of a USA city decided to strike and go protest in the streets. It would take a pretty big cause for that to happen and I can't imagine people of every party joining together. It's interesting to see how much bigger local elections are and how people are much more informed in Peru than at least in my home town in the USA. 

Hopefully the rest of today ends with streets empty of cars, lots of noise, the government listening and no deaths.