Unrest

Earlier in the year I made a brief post talking about having a day off from school as a precautionary measure due to political protests. Well, they're back again. As someone who lives in this country but still considers himself a guest of the country, I will refrain from making or expressing my own political opinion on the issues taking place but you get the gist of what's happening here, here, or here.

One thing I do know is this, things got real last night. We were told by a few friends that the President would be returning from Europe last night and protests were planned at the airport to meet him, and all along the roads to his home. According to this person, the President was passing an unfair tax and while he was in Europe, he was purchasing a 3 million dollar home in Belgium with tax money. People were very upset. I don't know about the purchase of the house, but I do know he was there are an international meeting among leaders of various nations.

I've mentioned that we live close to the President, and we also live close to the highway that links the President's house to the airport. We took the extra precaution of walking the dog early so we were inside before anything went down...just in case. Well at around 7:30 we heard a lot of this:

The audio isn't great but you can tell that there were people in the street banging on pots and pans, whistling, chanting "Down with Correa", beeping horns, wearing black and other demonstrations of general unrest.

This went on for about a half hour and Shannon and I speculated that the President would be coming through shortly. So we did what anyone in our position would do, we pulled up some chairs to the window, got a drink, and sat own to see the show.

Riot Police Setting Up Shop

Next came the riot police. Yes, riot police. Outside of our apartment there were about 20-30 armed riot police complete with shields and what appeared to be guns, although it was hard to see since it was dark out. They stationed a handful of them down the street which was the entrance of the gated community the President lives in, another handful of them across the street from us, and the rest at the end of the street where the majority of the protest noise was coming from. The result of their presence was instant silence. People stopped banging on pots and went inside. It turned to a ghost town.

Army Truck Number 1

When the riot police set up in their formations, we started seeing two army trucks driving up and down our street with armed soldiers in the back of the truck. The soldiers never got out of the truck but the mere presence of an army regiment was enough to deter any violence.

After about 20 minutes we stopped watching due to the inactivity but for a while it felt like we were on the edge of some bad stuff going down.

Either way, we're safe and it luckily diffused before anything bad went down outside of our apartment.