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Now, in these last strikes too, I went to La Paz. I was there in La Paz for the 27 days. And how the government treated us, that’s what hurts us. What we were doing in La Paz was serious. We went to the university; we had our tea. Our breakfast was in those cups: we drank in the morning, and straight to the blockade. On the blockade, we had nothing. The blockade was until six in the afternoon. They came into the full Murillo Square. They made us fly the whole avenue with the force of the water, right? The first few times, one or another was screaming: it was not pure water. It was with pepper; it was with gas. Oh, our eyes, our bodies were burning. Wow, the despair was serious. And so we held the posts – ladies, everyone, all crying. Imagine.

What were we going to do? We were going to save the others, the young. In the end, they fenced it so that we could not enter the square. They gassed us; they sent us the dogs. They were nasty to us. How they gassed us, the pain they caused us, how they treated us, how they looked at us in their buildings as if we were thieves because we entered their stores. We were thrown out. We knew to run. Of course, the way we were gassed from one place to another – it was from there, it was from there, it was from there – they came out of the buildings everywhere, as if we had gone to take something away from them. That’s what they did to us. – Doña Carmen