A scary reminder

I got a terrifying taste this morning of how close Bolivia teeters toward anarchy.
I was meeting with an official from the municipal independent budget office at a long table that he shares with a few other functionaries in a tight loft. Imagine a room the size of a Manhattan living room reached by climbing a narrow spiral staircase.
About five minutes into the meeting we heard the pops of about a dozen large explosions that shook the windows. No one inside the office reacted so I assumed the booms were construction noise or firecrackers.
Then we heard a human commotion outside. Like a flash flood, several hundred demonstrators had converged outside the office building in the five minutes I was inside. To announce their arrival, the demonstrators had thrown the dynamite – I am told it is an Ayamara custom. Everyone in the loft stood when they heard the stomping of protestors on the wood floor downstairs. The mob had pushed past the security guard and through a metal gate.
“They’re inside!” someone in the loft shouted. We all rushed to the spiral staircase, but several dozen demonstrators were already climbing up and wouldn’t let us pass.
The demonstrators were from a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of town and demanded a meeting with the director of the budget office. They said he had ignored earlier, more civil requests. They wanted to tell him that they were angry about the amount of trash in their neighborhood.
A leader of the group, spitting with rage, rushed to the director of the office and cornered him at his desk. The crowd around him squeezed in blocking all means of escape. The crowd pushed a female secretary and I against a wall and, fortunately, largely ignored us.
Some of the female protestors then began to open file cabinets and dump and tear documents. The secretary and I tried to escape down the staircase but were forced back upstairs.
As the director of the office listened to the leader of the mob, wiping sweat from his forehead with a rag every few seconds, the crowd grew more and more animated. Then, several of the demonstrators began to beat the director on the head, face, in the neck and back. As he crouched to protect himself, a few women spit their chaws of chewed coca leaves in his face.
A few of the director’s deputies managed to push the director through the crowd toward the spiral staircase toward the exit. But the mob pushed him down the staircase and he must have fallen about 12 feet. I couldn’t see whether he was injured.
The crowd then turned on my friend and began hitting him and spitting on him. He managed to squirm to the staircase and descended uninjured.
The mob had effectively taken over a government building with me and the secretary inside and no police were visible.
No one seemed to notice us there until leader of the mob turned to me and asked if I worked there too. I explained that I was a professor and journalist and that we wanted to leave. He waved me and the secretary out and we had to push hard to climb down the stairs and outside the building.
On the street were close to a thousand demonstrators from the neighborhood and a few National Police officers, holding shotguns, who -- I swear -- shrugged when I looked their way. It took more than 20 minutes after I LEFT THE BUILDING before riot police were standing in front of the adjacent mayor’s office.
A leader of the demonstrators held a press conference outside.
“We demand a meeting with the mayor and with the (independent budget office),” he told reporters. “This was a pacifistic march. If this doesn’t work, we will have to look at our other options.”