Thursday, December 2 in the morning, in Ponte-à-Pitre, local elected officials met for nearly four hours a “collective organizations in struggle”.
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At 6 pm, while the night has just fallen, we shoot the curtains of shops and restaurants close kitchens. There are still a few cars circulating, families who come home and even half a dozen prostitutes sitting on their plastic chairs, on the fairing road, this “hot” district near the Marina de Pointe-to-At. -Pest, but the city seems soon engulfed in the dim light. The moist heat can then give up step.
It is a funny atmosphere offered by this city of 17,000 inhabitants dive into the night. There is still a week, looting and fires had illuminated in the evening, ravaging five stores and living on two floors, in the city center. The calm ended up coming back and the shops by reopening but the day traders turn around while waiting for customers who do not come back.
Cars calcined
Up to Thursday night, they hoped for a return to normal. But the curfew set up on November 19th and seems to extinguish at 18 hours the beating heart of the city as one would reduce the source of a lamp, was further extended until December 7 in Pointe-à-Pitre and Twenty other communes of Guadeloupe. The prefect Alexandre Rochattte ensures that “public order disorders in certain municipalities of Guadeloupe, including the arrest of armed individuals, gatherings intended to block the traffic axes, fires of dams”.
As soon as we leave the city, there are indeed the traces of these dams built by protesters against the immunization obligation for caregivers and firefighters and, more generally, against the expensive life, the water cuts untimely, endemic unemployment of young people. At the crossroads of Montebello, construction machines have cleared from Wednesday, under the supervision of gendarmes, impressive in their anti-pearl protections, a pile of burnt cars that now burn the side of the road.
Throughout the island, the operations of dismantling these wild dams, sometimes reassembled in the night, continue. A school bus was stolen and burned in the middle of the RN1, clusters of young people continue to gather, waiting from time to time the gendarmes before giving the ground. There is hardly only the boucan, at the entrance of Sainte-Rose, a tourist town of the north of Basse-Terre, that the dam still holds upright, hood protesters controlling the cars and leaving that medical transport and market gardeners providing refueling.
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