Blog Post – Michael Hitchcock – 7/16/09

Yesterday a few of us decided to take the truck into the nearby town of Cayambe to go to the store, use the internet and eat some amazing pizza. The trip started out like most of the other trips, we went to the Santa Maria and purchased some necessities. After leaving the store we headed up the main street to get a cake for another student whose birthday we were celebrating that night, on our way up the street we saw a mob of people running our direction and shop windows locking up. This of course sparked our interest immediately so we continued up the street to see what was going on. There was a group of riot police standing in the middle of the street along with numerous onlookers like ourselves. Some people started throwing rocks at the police in front of the mayors building and the police responded with tear gas, the group of us decided that was about the time to get out of there.

We headed back down the street to meet up with a couple staff members who were down eating pizza. Our next course of action was to attempt to circumvent the growing riot by going a block over and then up the street to the internet café where we knew a group of more students was hanging out. When we arrived we talked with the other students for a bit but then noticed just outside of the internet café the line of police gathered on ones side of the street and a line of rioters on the other. It was just our luck that we had wound up in the middle of this riot. A couple of us decided to go out into the middle of the street to see what was going on, a bunch of young and angry Ecuadorians were throwing large rocks and sticks at the riot police, you could feel the emotion in the air. After the cops had enough they launched tear gas again into the mob, the mob that a couple of were now standing in, we were able to run back to the café in time to not get gassed too badly but we could certainly feel it. The restaurant next to the café was nice enough to let us silly gringos out the back door and out of the fray. We finished our day eating pizza up the street then driving out of town around the riot. It wasn’t until we got back that we found out the whole story about the riot and it being a modern day lynch mob out to get a few Columbians who had car jacked and murdered a local.

Looking back at the day it was certainly intense but an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything, seeing people rise up against the police is something one usually only sees on the news.

-Mike Hitchcock