Every country has a national sport: cricket in India, rugby in New Zealand, the gangs of El Salvador (it had it and got through it), football in Brazil and the blockade of Bolivia.
The sport of blockades is all about preventing vehicles of all sizes from crossing a road, allowing only pedestrians with their belongings to pass.
The blockade has very special characteristics, which I will describe in detail.
It is not an individualistic sport, but a mass sport. It mobilizes hundreds and sometimes thousands of players who travel, eat, stop working on behalf of a patron who covers these expenses or sponsors who contribute, freely obliged, to the sustainability of the sport. Tariffs/contributions are circulating on social networks depending on the means of transport authorized to violate the rules of the blockade. In fact, although it is a mass sport, it is an expensive sport, like Elon Musk’s space travel, which cannot extend too long in time.
The bloc is a democratic sport: no one is discriminated against or excluded from participation; On the contrary, every new member is welcomed and encouraged to position themselves in the front rows of the block, while the organizers usually humbly put themselves in the rear.
It is a sport that can be practiced in any corner of the national geography, although national and departmental highways, intersections, bridges and viaducts and places where there are hills, an abundance of large stones, trees for felling and coca for the agrochemical industry are privileged.
Blockade is a sedentary sport: after an intense and enthusiastic start, athletes dedicate themselves to manning the “checkpoints”, sitting, eating and drinking, even alcohol. However, this sedentary lifestyle ends when the opposing team appears, well-equipped and in uniform. It is the police who try, most of the time in vain, to disperse the blockers. Then, the game enters its dynamic phase, with tear gas being fired on one side and screaming, insults, stones, felling of trees and burning tires on the other. Although it cannot be called an ecological sport, it still meets Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic maxim: “the important thing is not to win, it is to participate”.
In fact, another characteristic of this national sport is that no one wins and everyone loses, those who play and those who watch helplessly in the face of this form of “right to protest” that violates the rights of an entire country. In fact, it is self-rewarding for athletes in the sport to harm others, especially the poorest and most defenseless in such situations, and even their teammates who refuse to play.
The motivations of the players, varied and witty, range from simple claims to cosmic requests.
The blockades pretend to protest. Some MAS lawyers, famous for making money by losing all international lawsuits against the state, have positioned the idea that the blockade is a legitimate form of protest. A curious theory, according to which the rights of the majority are subject to the whims and abuses of “effective minorities”. It is not for nothing that a neighboring country has banned this criminal sport (it is, in essence, a form of extortion) practiced by the “piqueteros”.
If we look at the targets, they range from the demand for the construction of a road, which will later be damaged and blocked, the repair of a schoolyard or the request for the acceptance of a fraudulent candidate, to the demand for impunity for crimes against children, women and morals. Although there is no shortage of nobler causes, such as the miraculous appearance of dollars and fuel or the resignation of the president of the state.