Last Friday (27 July), Bogotá woke up with its main avenues blocked. The powerful taxi drivers’ group did it in protest because 8 of them have been murdered this year, the latest one, Mario Orlando Velásquez, 39, on Thursday night. The above 17-minutes Caracol TV report, broadcast at Friday noon (and co-presented by lovely Silvia Corzo), summarizes the chaos and everything most Bogotans had to go through in order to arrive to their workplaces or their schools or colleges.
It was too late when Bogotá mayor, leftist Luis Eduardo Garzón, himself elected mostly because of the votes of groups as the taxi and bus drivers’, ordered police to dissolve the protest and unblock the streets by force, after the local government and the taxi drivers’ representatives concerted a meeting for talks toward the resolution of their concerns around 10:00. The following video, posted by a left-wing group magazine, shows the police abuses in some points of the city. One taxi driver says they’re fighting for their own lives:
Since the Transmilenio system was blocked (their drivers were caught playing parqués), and some bus drivers joined the protest, people had to walk, ride a bicycle or trucks (even TV crew vans) in order to get to their destinations. Despite most people agree the drivers’ reasons to protest are fair and right, a lot of them don’t endorse the way they chose. The latest location unblocked was Quirigua, a neighbourhood northwest of the city, where the traffic started to flow again after 12:30.
