On the weekend of Oct. 12, 2003, grieving relatives delivered 16 bodies to Reverend Wilson Soria's church in a neighborhood at the heart of fighting between protesters and government troops.
"We had to sharpen the knives in the parish kitchen" so autopsies could be done by doctors who typed out their reports in the church office, Soria recalled during a reunion marking the bloody protests' third anniversary.
After the fighting had stopped, a mass funeral was held in the park next door to the Roman Catholic church in the Villa Ingenio barrio, with all 16 coffins laid out across a concrete basketball court.
In all, more than 60 people were killed over three days in El Alto, a rapidly expanding wind-swept shadow city on the edge of a precipice high above La Paz.
As others in the room told their stories of what is now known as Black October, painful memories were fortified by fierce pride at having toppled then-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.
A popular young soccer player was gunned down by soldiers, one person remembered. For another, it was a pregnant woman being shot in the back. Soria, for his part, recalls ringing his church bells through the sound of gunfire.
Journalist Julio Mamani lamented the lack of a coherent history of Black October, recalling how he and other reporters set aside their work to tend to the hundreds of wounded.
"Did we get the cameras out? Did we keep the recorders rolling? We couldn't. We had to save lives," Mamani said.
Many mentioned the fatal blast at a shuttered El Alto gas station on Oct. 13.
Gas was scarce after a dayslong blockade had prevented tanker trucks from entering the capital, and a group of local residents trying to siphon gas from an underground storage tank touched off an explosion that killed four people.
But many also recalled the pride El Alto felt during the protests, when residents realized their bare-brick, hard-luck neighborhoods could rise up to demand real change.
Maria Vargas remembers with fondness the fires that burned on street corners every night during the protests.
"During the first days we built the fires out of fear," she said. "But then this understanding of solidarity was born."
On El Alto's chaotic streets today, many believe little has changed in the three years since the protests.
Benita Hilario, 43, grazes her team of burros on the trash-strewn remains of the exploded gas station.
Unheeded graffiti covering the abandoned station demands the site be turned into a memorial park, but dead bodies are periodically dumped there -- just regular street murders, Hilario says.
Could unrest on the scale of Black October happen again?
Hilario nods.
"They'll do it again," she said. "Soon."
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the