I Got Caught Up in a Riot On the Streets of Bogota

Last Thursday, students and union members took part in protest marches across Colombia to show support for the country's embattled agricultural workers. In the build-up, organisers had called for calm and insisted that the marches remain peaceful. But the aftermath was four dead, millions of dollars in property damage, clouds of tear gas drifting past the presidential palace and soldiers patrolling the capital city, Bogota, to "assure normality".

Across the countryside, small farmers are facing economic ruin. In part, this is due to the high cost of necessities like insecticides and gasoline, but they also blame their impending bankruptcy on free trade agreements put in place by the Colombian government. These, the farmers argue, are allowing the Colombian food market to be flooded with cheap products from the US, Europe and other South American countries. Simply put, the Colombian farmers are being undercut.

As a result, farmers have been setting up roadblocks on key routes to cities and towns, as well as destroying their own produce in an attempt to disrupt food supplies. Since the protests started two weeks ago, there has been talk of a "Colombian Spring" from government opponents. While it's perhaps not quite there yet, people are definitely very angry.

However, like most protests here, Thursday started off happily enough. Smiling students played drums and people marched in costume, carrying placards covered in playfully derisive pictures of President Juan Manuel Santos as Chucky from the Child’s Play movies. Some chanted, “No violence! No violence!” seemingly as much a call to their fellow protesters as to the police.

Tens of thousands of those marchers passed along Bogota’s Seventh Avenue on their way to the Plaza Bolivar, the location of the Colombian Supreme Court, Congress and the Bogota mayoral office.

"We’re not here protesting, we're supporting all the small farmers, who – for years now – have been lacking government support," a student called Brandon told me. "The marches are always meant to be peaceful, but the government provoke us because that’s the best way they can disperse us.”

As if on cue, there were a quick succession of explosions from one side of the plaza – most likely papa-bombas, rocks and gunpowder wrapped in tinfoil that, when thrown, cause cracks of noise so powerful that they’ll set off car alarms blocks away. The DIY devices are a favourite of the black-outfitted encapuchados, or "hoodies" – radical students always up for a clash with police.

The author's footage of the day's events.

Tear gas canisters started to rain down on the protesters and panic ensued as people surged out of the plaza, aware that the fight was now on. Clashes moved to the surrounding streets, with protesters and police battling throughout the white-walled Candelaria, Bogota’s oldest colonial neighbourhood.

A well-dressed, middle-aged woman in high-heels sprinted along the street desperate for any escape; others banged on closed shutters, begging shopkeepers to let them in. Like an idiot, I'd come along without a gas mask, and soon breathed in a lungful of gas. My eyes burned, my throat constricted and I couldn’t breath. My brain shut down and I sat down in a daze on the curb for a couple of minutes until I could stand again.

Throughout the protests, there were multiple reports of police attacking journalists. The incidents in the below video occurred in the second city, Medellin:

I was one of the lucky ones and only had my camera punched by a protester. When I shouted at him, he replied, “Report the truth!” and sulked off. Luckily, his punch was weak, so the camera came out unscathed.

Rubbing toothpaste on your face helps null some of the effects of the tear gas.

After I was caught in a second cloud of gas, a young girl approached me and offered me toothpaste. “Rub it under your eyes – it stops the burning,” she told me. Hundreds of us moved through the streets with daubs of white smeared across our cheeks (which, as a side note, does actually remove some of the sting from the tear gas).

The Jimenez Avenue usually hosts emerald dealers hawking their stones (real and slightly less so). That day, it was occupied by dozens of civilians, coughing and dousing their eyes with water. A young man leaned against the wall barely able to stand, mopping the blood from a gash in his head. The police had scored a direct hit with a gas grenade, his friend said, holding up the offending projectile.

A protester holds a police gas grenade.

On Sixth Avenue, a crowd regrouped. The protesters let what little traffic there was pass by. Then a silver SUV with tinted windows pulled around the corner. The crowd couldn't resist – in their eyes, the passenger in the car was almost certainly a congressman, the root of so many of Colombia’s ills here in their midst.

Shouts of "Son of a bitch!" began cascading towards the car. One guy then ran up to the SUV and kicked the side. Soon after, a huge man stepped out of the vehicle holding a gun, his arms outstretched as he calmly approached the protester, asking him how far he wanted to take his assault on the SUV.

The answer, unsurprisingly, was not that much further at all. The protester backed off pretty quickly and though the crowd roared a little, the would-be bodyguard didn't appear at all put out as he returned to the waiting car.

The man with the gun.

Along Seventh Avenue, riot police used their shields to deflect a hailstorm of bricks, pieces of wood and chairs. Further down the street, rioters smashed shop windows.

By the end of the day, Bogota’s centre was a mess of broken glass and street fires. Graffiti had been daubed across any shop window that hadn't been smashed and gangs of motorbike cops were riding around waving their truncheons at anything that moved.

The day after the protests, the vandals were the undesirables; no one wanted anything to do with them. Students talked of agent provocateurs, one leftist politician said that drug dealers had paid the vandals and the army blamed students linked to guerrilla rebel group FARC.

According to the magazine Semana, the riots’ toll was four dead, 200 injured and more than 500 arrested. President Juan Manuel Santos ordered troops to patrol Bogota and offered bounties of $2,500 (£1,611) for a selection of 50 vandals who had been photographed.

Santos has said, "I'm the first to recognise that we are in a structural crisis in Colombia's agricultural sector." Since Thursday's riots, his government has offered concessions to different protesting groups – in some cases, the government purchase of milk and loans to small farmers. However, farmers in the province of Boyaca – the scene of some of the most organised protests – have yet to answer the government's offer, and I for one would wager that we haven't seen the end of Colombia's protests quite yet.

Follow Toby on Twitter: @tobymuse

More stories from Colombia:

Less Coca in Colombia Means Nothing for Your Supply

The Colombian Government Is Killing Its Peasant Farmers for Their Land

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