PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Contra-CAFTA en Costa Rica
by Isaac Ludwig Wednesday, Sep. 21, 2005 at 3:55 AM

A day of anti-CAFTA protesting in San Jose, Costa Rica

So I haven't posted anything on here since I was PR chair for the Westminster College Green Party. I hope you still see some of our faces in the streets though. I've mostly been traveling and growing as a person since then.

Today I woke up and went to an anti-TLC (CAFTA) march and rally at UCR (University of Costa Rica, in San Pedro, (about 5 mins outside of San Jose) Costa Rica) at 10 AM. We started out just marching around the university. I thought that we may only do this but after we were done with that we met up with another march from another college and marched out into the streets on San Pedro. From there we marched past the mall and down a little way more, then met up with another group and marched back. A lot of people were hanging out around the roundabout by the mall while this happened. From here some people stayed there and most people went to the Casa de Presidencial (Presidential Palace). We were there for awhile and then kind of dispursed and most of the older (union members) went home.

I wanted to see if there was anyone around the mall still, and to my surprise they had the entire area blocked off. That meant that there had been no traffic flowing in the main area of town since 11 AM (these are the two main roads in Costa Rica) we shut down this whole area of town from then until around 4:30. It started raining and people were getting bored (even though the organizers had let in a truck with food in to give to people and then brought in another truck with a sound system playing music and hooked up to a mic... this surprised me because it was only college kids at this time) around this time so the organizers decided to disperse and form a march. We did this and marched on the main road towards Guadilupe when we got to the University the organizers asked if we should turn into the University or go on... the cheer was to go on. We went from here to the main roundabout in Guadilupe and shut that down (it was smaller and the amount of people we had at this time made this much easier). This was a different situation because the police didn't already have the traffic routed correctly for this area so we were confronted with a lot of angry motorists... most was just yelling and people turning around. Stuff came to a head when one guy ran into a bunch of people and hurt a girl pretty bad... emotions where high and the people around the car flipped out and smashed all the windows in the car (I think... I could only see the rear windows). Prior to this there was a couple of American flags burnt (this usually happens sooner in the US). After the car thing happened an ambulance came and I made sure everything was alright it was also starting to get dark at this time so I decided to go home in time to eat something and go to church( I had been home two other times in the day when I was in the area to grab something to eat and see how my girlfriend Elizabeth was). Good day of protesting... I'll be interested to see the media reaction... I ran into some people who had heard there were riots... not true (they were Mormons though).

www.isaacludwig.com