9.5.8 There's a riot going on - during the footie!

Innocently watching Euro2008 in an open fronted café, I was distracted by a noisy demonstration. Hundreds of cholitas in bowler hats and men in baseball caps streamed past carrying banners, chanting and firing dynamite fuses into the air. The official advice is stay away these “manifestacions” but that doesn’t take into account viewing live sport. Instead, I watched as they concertinaed to a stop outside, a man stared at me and began a chant of “Death to the Yankees!”

I smiled sweetly, packed my laptop in my bag and observed the café’s security guard take out his truncheon. They moved on again and it all calmed down. 0-0 at half time. Twenty minutes into the second half (still 0-0), a crowd of cholitas ran past, the noise picked up and suddenly the road was packed. A roar went up, missiles were thrown, shops boarded up as glass smashed, something hit me on the leg–not a dynamite fuse, thank God.

The excitement passed, and I returned to the game (no excitement here: 0-0). Another distraction when tear gas was let off, as someone in the first flush of a highly productive cold, this could have been spectacularly unpleasant. Fortunately, I suffered no exacerbation to my existing symptoms.

At the final whistle it had been a soul-sappingly tedious 90 minutes of football for everyone who wasn’t Romanian or sitting next to a minor riot.

The demonstration was instigated by a story that the US was giving amnesty to former Defense Minister Carlos Sanchez Berzain. An iron-fisted fellow, he’s held responsible for the killing of 60 residents of El Alto when the country went into meltdown in 2003. The marchers had descended from the Altipano and were en route for the fortress-like US embassy, where fireworks and tear gas were exchanged.