Bolivia's Crisis Deepens: Blockades Strangle La Paz as Food and Medicine Shortages Mount

La Paz is running out of oxygen. In the pediatric hospital at the center of the city, there are fifty-seven children admitted and enough oxygen to keep them alive for thirty-six hours. The director, Alfredo Mendoza, knows this number the way a captain knows how much fuel remains in the tank. Other hospitals face the same arithmetic. This is what three weeks of roadblocks do to a city: they strangle it slowly, then all at once.

Bolivia is in its worst economic crisis in four decades. The blockades—organized by farmers, miners, and labor unions demanding the resignation of center-right President Rodrigo Paz—have sealed off La Paz from the rest of the country. No fuel reaches the gas stations. No food reaches the markets. No medicine reaches the hospitals. The protests began in early May and have only hardened since Monday, when police and thousands of demonstrators clashed near the presidential palace in what witnesses describe as a pitched battle. More than one hundred twenty people were arrested. Dozens were wounded.

Magaly Quispe, thirty-eight years old, lives in the neighboring city of El Alto. Her infant son, Arón, had open-heart surgery as a newborn and now depends on a portable oxygen tank that lasts eight hours before it needs to be refilled. On Tuesday morning, she navigated through multiple blockades in the dark to reach a medical appointment in La Paz, her baby in one arm and the oxygen tube in the other. "My son just left the hospital," she told the Associated Press. "He fought for his life for five months. That's why I have to be here. I'm going to fight." The blockades make that fight harder every day.

The Red Cross announced it would attempt to open a humanitarian corridor for an oxygen tanker truck stranded for days at Guaqui, on the border with Peru. If successful, the delivery would sustain the city's hospitals for roughly ten days. It is a temporary measure for a deepening crisis.

In the Villa Fátima market on the north side of La Paz, the meat stalls were mostly shuttered on Tuesday. The vegetable vendors had little to sell. Rosario Yujra, a seventy-three-year-old homemaker, managed to buy a quarter kilogram of the cheapest meat—bone-in, suitable for broth—for twenty-three bolivianos, about three dollars. Before the conflict, the same purchase cost one dollar. The government deployed military transport planes, including two Hercules aircraft sent by Argentina, to fly meat into the city. Long lines formed at state-run food stores, where people waited for chicken, a staple of the Bolivian diet.

The government blames former president Evo Morales for orchestrating the unrest. Marco Antonio Oviedo, the interior minister, claimed that people sent by Morales from the Chapare region were committing violence in La Paz, and suggested they were being paid to do so. "There is evidence of money circulating," he said. But political analyst Verónica Rocha sees a more complex picture. "Things accumulated and exploded," she explained. "Salary issues, permanent economic crisis, bad gasoline that's ruining people's cars, diesel shortages." In her view, Morales is only one piece of a larger failure. "The government will emerge weakened if it doesn't make drastic changes."

On Tuesday, Christopher Landau, the U.S. State Department's undersecretary, posted on social media that he had spoken with President Paz to express concern and firm support for his "legitimate constitutional government." Landau, who visited Bolivia after Paz's election victory last year, characterized the blockades as an attempt by those who "lost overwhelmingly at the ballot box" to overthrow the president through "riots and roadblocks." The international backing offers Paz diplomatic cover but does nothing to refill the oxygen tanks or restock the markets. The city remains encircled, and the clock is running.