“We’ll keep going. It doesn’t matter if people die,” said Elizabeth Patzi Choque. “We’ll keep going until the end.”
Choque is 17 years old. She was on a hunger strike, along with 100 high school classmates. They began the strike to demand a computer class. Their demands quickly grew to include more computers, greater municipal funding and a new school building.
The strike began on a Tuesday morning when the students installed themselves in the gazebo in the plaza of Oruro, in western Bolivia. They wrapped an enormous Bolivian flag around the gazebo columns enclosing its platform from view. Each day whispering parents and a curious crowd surrounded the site in a kind of vigil.
Inside all of the students lay on the tile floor on sheets of cardboard. At 13,000 feet above sea level, Oruro is a cold city. Since the hunger strike started, the students, ages 13-18, had been sleeping pressed side-by-side in the open-air gazebo, beneath fleece blankets. They had decided to allow themselves tea. Big plastic jugs of it stood in a corner.
“It’s been very bad,” said Alex Gabriel, 18. “Lots of our classmates have gotten sick.” Three have been forced to go home. This danger made the students take their hunger strike seriously; they were not just playing.
The conflict began two years ago over classroom space. Genovese Jimenez High School shares a building with a middle school. The several-story brick building is far too small to accommodate the combined 1,170 students who learn in it. In 2006, a delegation of Jimenez students, supported by their teachers, began asking the municipal government in Oruro to build a computer class, open study-space, and sciences laboratories. They received no response.
“We initiated this on diplomatic terms,” said Gabriel. “We sent letters to the mayor’s office and to the education department and nothing happened. They’ve forced us to take this measure.”
The student hunger strike is out of the ordinary even here, in Bolivia, a democratically active country known for protests and political demonstrations. “The strike is extreme,” said Jaime Periera, an education official in the Mayor’s office. “It’s bad for everybody.”
Periera said the city education office has tried to resolve the conflict. It offered to build new classrooms for Jimenez in the section of the building used by the middle school but the middle school director refused to give up the space. “The solution is for them to share their space,” said Periera. So far, however, the two school communities have been unable to reach an agreement, and have even clashed violently in public.
This happened when Jimenez students began protesting outside of the building two weeks before going on strike. They were physically attacked by parents of middle-schoolers and then beaten by the police who arrived to control the riot. Gabriel said they decided to strike following the confrontation.
“We want the authorities to respect us,” said Grecia Rea, a shy 16-year-old. Like several other students, Rea said her decision to strike was supported and even encouraged by her parents. “My parents told me to do what I want and I’ll keep going until the end,” said 15-year-old Emilio Gonzeles, who has participated in strikes before with his father, who is a miner.
Going to the end was a popular refrain amongst the students. They laughed nervously whenever it was spoken. The gazebo was filled with the tension of teenage boys and girls forced to coexist in close proximity. It was a bizarre public sleepover – a cocoon of blankets and pillows in the secretive, sealed-off gazebo interior.
“Its horrible!” said Ruben Frias, 13, one of the youngest strikers. “My ribs are starting to show.” He laughed. “No, its not that bad. The girls at night sleep right on top of us.” Frias and others said it was a learning experience.
Nora Alfaro said she allowed her daughter to strike with mixed emotions. “My heart hurts. I thought of my child all day and I couldn’t eat. If my daughter isn’t eating, I couldn’t either,” said Alfaro. “They’re fighting for a good cause,” Alfaro said, “but its not a good experience. It’s a crime.”
While she spoke, a team of three Red Cross doctors entered the gazebo. The doctors took out their stethoscopes and listened to a few hearts, wrote a few prescriptions and then made their way back outside. Doctor Otto Cuevas Villanueva said the three students evacuated from the strike suffered from pneumonia-like symptoms contracted during the cold nights. “If they don’t stop the strike soon,” said Villanueva, “they’ll develop serious problems.”