Ruckus in Puno

I had planned to get the bus to Puno, a Peruvian town on the shores of Lake Titticaca, from Cusco, and then to travel across the border to Bolivia and on to La Paz. But a chance look at the local TV news revealed that the Cusco-Puno road has been closed for a few days due to protests and roadblocks. It's unclear what the protests are about. There have been numerous strikes and protests in Peru over the past couple of years over the expansion of the Free Trade Agreement that Peru has with the US, which forces neo-liberal economic policies on the Peruvian people that many of them, particularly the poorer indigenous peoples who make up the majority of the population, don't want (one example of steps that the government has tried to take is the sale to private investors of communally-held land that has traditionally belonged to campesino communities and formed the backbone of their way of life). There has also been miner's strikes, and I think there is also a heated dispute over a proposed hydroelectric plant in the Puno region. It's hard to get concrete information, but apparently a couple of people have been killed (according to my taxi driver this morning), including a policeman. In a protest in another part of the country recently, the town's mayor was held hostage and the townspeople threatened to lynch him. These people don't mess around.

Anyway, in light of these ructions, I seized the opportunity of an affordable flight from Cusco to the Bolivian capital La Paz, where I arrived this afternoon. I just bought a bus ticket from a wonderfully pleasant and wonderfully deranged Bolivian lady, so tomorrow I'll be hightailing it to Copacabana, a small town on the Bolivian shores of Lake Titticaca. We flew over the lake this morning, it's pretty damn big.

So, that's where I'm at. I'm lining up a final post on Peru, and one on the spicy sausage that is the current political situation in Bolivia. Que caliente!