Tag Archives: road blocks

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

For more than a year now (since 20 July 2016), the road between Santa Barbara and Caranavi (on the primary road between La Paz and Rurrenabaque) has been closed from 7 am to 5 pm, Monday to Saturday, due to road construction activities. We didn’t know that, though, when we left La Paz at 5 am last Tuesday morning in order to drive to Rurrenabaque. When leaving La Paz, well before dawn, we paid the road toll of Bs. 9.50, and the guy in the toll booth didn’t think to warn us that we would soon have to wait for 9.5 hours because the road is closed all day.

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Freedom of speech has become an important prerequisite of democracy and is to an equal extent prized by the population of any democratic country. Many modern generations quite rightly feel that they have a “right” to speak their mind about political policies and that when many minds converge in their opinion these minds have a “right” to group together and express their discontent, be it in the form of strikes, blockades, marches or sit-ins. This relatively modern trend can be seen in the almost daily protests, of one kind of another, that afflict America, England and a number of other developed democratic (or even non-democratic) countries. It can also be noted in the international outcry that rained down over the presidents of the Arab Spring over a year ago, or more recently, but to a lesser extent, the international discontent over the arrest of the Russian protest punk group “Pussy Riot”.

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