7 March 2014
Driving Matt and Abby into Oaxaca Monday morning, we took
the usual route down through Viguera to the intersection with the Carretera
Nacional at the mammoth statue of favorite son Benito Juárez. The Carretera
Nacional, the central artery of the Etla Valley, is also the Pan American
Highway. It is also the only route from Oaxaca City out to the cuota, which is the toll super-ish
highway that runs north to Mexico City. The Carretera Nacional is six-ish
lanes, three on either side of a median divider. It is decidedly not of limited
access, for side roads—paved and unpaved—, alleys, paths, and steps on both
sides connect with the warren of residences and businesses that cling to the
Fortín mountain and sprawl out across the flats toward the Atoyac River in the
center of the Etla Valley. Even though the Carretera Nacional is the biggest
arterial road in these parts, there are frequent stoplights, speed bumps, and
intruding construction projects. Traffic is always heavy. Busses and taxis stop
anywhere to load or disgorge. Motorcycles, each carrying from one to four
people, weave in and out amid the trucks and passenger vehicles. A few moto
riders wear helmets. A few carry live chickens. Sometimes it is the same few.
All this information is relevant-ish.
About a kilometer along the road toward Oaxaca, on the
inbound side of the median strip we notice cars emerging from side streets and
coming toward us along the shoulder. Hmm. Must be some construction up ahead we
say to ourselves. A little farther along there are cars coming toward us in our
lane and sometimes the passing lane, while at the same time the inbound traffic
dodges slowly = toward the city. Maybe a bloqueo
we think: a blockade.
Sometimes one of the local trade unions, protesting a
specific grievance against a specific government agency, will block a street
for a while to inconvenience everyone in hopes that the offending bureaucrats
will pay attention and change policy. They never do, so it this a political
tactic that over the eons has been proven over and over not to work. I saw some
bloqueos here in the 1960s by the
teachers union, and the grandchildren of those sitters-in are still camped on
the Zócalo in front of the Palacio Municipal, even though the bureaucrats that
deal with education are way at the other end of town, and the decision makers
are in Mexico City. Still, bloqueos
are a tradition, and traditions in
this culture, like so many others, are often held to be sacred, long after
their initial purpose has faded from memory and relevance. [Note: I am not
talking here about any of our own cherished 2nd Amendment folderols.]
Now Linda and Abby and Matt and I are watching cars weaving
in both directions on the outbound side of the median like a basketball warm-up
drill. And several cars/busses/taxis are trying to cross the 8-inch high median
curbs and thread their way between the bougainvillea bushes to switch from one
side of the highway to the other. Oh dear, a serious bloqueo, we say to ourselves. If we had started an hour
earlier, we’d have made it, though then we might not have got home. Once a
couple of years ago, Mary Stitcher had to take a hotel room in the city when
she couldn’t get out to return to San Pablo. On the other hand, if we had
waited another hour to start, word of the bloqueo
would have spread, and we’d be home and the highway would be empty.
We have a 10:00 appointment in the city and it doesn’t look
like we are going to make it. Now traffic is inching along at
old-lady-with-walker pace in all six lanes, with cars, busses, and the
occasional double-semi facing off in each direction in each lane, Other
vehicles are stuck on the median curb, their butts sticking out perpendicular
to the highway. Linda, who is driving, suggests turning back, that is if we can
find an open couple of inches in which to turn the car around. I suggest we creep
forward another hundred meters to where a side road cuts over to the River
Highway. Maybe, I dream, it has not been blocked.
Fifteen minutes later we have traveled, if not the whole
hundred meters, about as far as a middle-school goalie can kick a soccer ball.
We can see now to the River Road cutoff. It is blocked by a couple of parked
busses covered with political posters. A line of bored policemen carrying light
weapons and drinking coffee or atole
from Styrofoam cups stands to one side, paying no attention to the protestors
or the Gordian knot of traffic.
Plan B. An embankment, not quite too steep for a car to
traverse, falls to a dirt road leading back toward Viguera parallel to the
Carretera Nacional. Linda jounces the CRV down the bank, and we follow the dirt
road for nearly a kilometer until it dead ends. We are about where we’d like to
be, but ten cliff-like meters below the Carretera Internacional. We do an about
face. Three quarters of an hour have passed and now we are back at the first
place we got stuck. I telephone and postpone our appointment to –with luck--
tomorrow.
Linda suggests Plan C: the taxi option. Plan C is not that
we take a taxi and abandon our car at the side of the road, which—if we ever
want to see it again--is unthinkable. It is that we find a really aggressive
taxi and glue ourselves to its back bumper. Inch by inch Linda seesaws the car
around until we are again facing outbound. Then we wait, our four pairs of eyes
peeled, like cheetahs perched in a tree waiting for a springbok to graze by.
Then, there it is! A red taxi whose painted logo says it is
from Sitio Santiago Suchiquiltongo, 25 kilometers up the road. A long-distance
taxi, eager to get home. Taxis in Oaxaca can only pick up passengers in their
home area, though they can take them anywhere. This one rides empty, which
means it won’t make another peso until it fights its way back to
Suchiquiltongo. It squeezes between us and a truck carrying propane gas
cylinders, with maybe 2 centimeters to spare on each side, and then swerves
subtly to the right to cut off a white Ford pickup with six passengers baking
in back. As the taxi maneuvers, Linda follows, leaving not quite enough space
between the two cars for a opportunistic motor-scooter to slip in. Then on we
go, we and the taxi, kindred spirits. Our CRV is like a running back glued to a
tight end blocker, dodging and sprinting, braking, turning, and starting again,
at a breathtaking average 2 kilometers per hour.
Eventually the traffic thins, and becomes entirely one-way:
outbound. Enough people have heard about the bloqueo that no more people are venturing inward toward Oaxaca City.
Coda: next morning’s La
Jornada newspaper, in a four paragraph story below the fold on page six,
says that the perpetrators were students and staff of the Union of Normal
School Students: the Teachers College. Their pie in the sky of the week:
automatic job guarantees when they receive their Licenciatura degrees.
If I make it to the year 2060, which would be the 100th
anniversary of my first trip to Mexico, I am one hundred percent confident that
one of the teachers or student unions, or the truckers, or the guild of public
market vendors (if there are still public markets), will be blocking the roads
into the city in hope that the Powers-That-Be will be more responsive to
Quixotic pressure than their Powers-That-Were grandparents.
Note from Linda: You will have noticed the lack of pictures. I guess we were all so involved in the process that we didn't think to document it.