Roadblocks and a New Collective: Guadeloupe's Cost-of-Living Anger Returns to the Streets

A multi-day protest movement led by the new 'Nou Las Pale' collective blocked roads across the island, the latest eruption of a grievance that never fully subsides in the French Antilles.

A multi-day cost-of-living protest movement blocked roads across Guadeloupe this week, led by a newly formed collective calling itself Nou Las Pale, Creole for 'we are tired of talking,' which brings together around 25 representatives from economic, agricultural, union and community groups (RCI Guadeloupe, October 14-17). Roadblocks hit the industrial zone at Jarry and three roundabouts at Sainte-Rose, and clashes at Riviere-des-Peres injured police officers, the familiar escalation from blockade to confrontation that has marked Guadeloupe's social movements before.

The name of the collective is the whole argument. 'We are tired of talking' is a statement about process as much as prices, an accusation that years of commissions, negotiations and promises have failed to close the gap between what Guadeloupeans pay and what people in mainland France pay for the same goods. That gap, the 'vie chere' or expensive life, is the structural grievance of the French Caribbean, rooted in the islands' dependence on imports, the dominance of a handful of distribution companies, and the costs of shipping everything across the Atlantic to a small market. It produced a major uprising in 2009 and has flared repeatedly since.

The economic machinery of the island felt the squeeze on both sides. Local elected officials asked the French state for a one-year moratorium on businesses' tax and social-security debts (RCI Guadeloupe, October 16), an acknowledgment that the same high costs crushing households are also squeezing the small firms that employ them. When a protest movement blocks the industrial zone at Jarry, it blocks the arteries through which the island's imported economy flows, which is precisely the point and precisely the cost.

The week carried a harder security dimension as well. Two gendarmes from the GIGN elite unit were shot in Les Abymes, with four suspects arrested by the following day (RCI Guadeloupe, October 11), and a container collapse in the same commune injured two people. Alongside the protests and the shootings, there was one piece of institutional good news: Pointe-a-Pitre, the island's largest city, exited a decade-long financial recovery plan after the regional audit chamber confirmed a balanced budget, a quiet milestone for a municipality that had been in fiscal distress for years.

Guadeloupe, like Martinique, is a part of France, an overseas department that uses the euro, elects deputies to Paris and lives under French law, and that status shapes the protests in a particular way. The anger is directed not only at local distributors but at the state in Paris, which is seen as responsible for the structural conditions and capable, if it chose, of changing them. The French government's standard response, price-monitoring agreements and targeted subsidies, has never satisfied a population that can see mainland prices and ask why theirs are higher. A new collective with a new name is leading the same old fight, and the roadblocks at Jarry are the sign that, once again, talking has run out. Whether this round produces more than the last is the question Guadeloupe has asked, and had answered unsatisfactorily, many times before.