Three half-naked men are tied to the thick palm trees in the main square of Ivirgarzama, a town of 30,000 inhabitants located in Chapare, one of the coca plantation areas of Bolivia. A crowd of men and women beat and insult them. They are blamed for being responsible for the kidnappings of children that have affected this region for a long time. Dozens of people watch from the balconies of the houses that surround the square.
The police do not appear in the place, reduced hours before in their own offices by the mob that took the suspects from the jail and beat them to the square, forcing them to walk a distance on their knees. After hours of torture, the outcome will come: one of the men is doused with gasoline and burned alive. The other two are taken to the outskirts of the town and beaten to death. The crowd disperses. A new lynching had taken place in Bolivia.
The dead had police records. On May 8, they tried to steal the truck that a couple was offering for sale on one of the town’s streets. They tied up the owners, apparently posing as police officers, and left them lying on the ground. Since they could not escape with the truck, they tried to seize another vehicle. They were discovered by neighbors, who managed to arrest them and take them to the Ivirgarzama “police module,” where they were locked up. A police officer, surrounded by civilians, began to search the trunk of the car in which the alleged thieves had arrived in town. He found a white apron: apparently one of the murdered was studying medicine. He also found school notebooks. At that moment, the people around him assumed that the detainees were the perpetrators of the child abductions that have disrupted Chapare in recent months.
Thanks to the coca leaf, Chapare, where former president Evo Morales became a union leader, is one of the richest rural areas in the country, but also the one with the fewest police officers, only about 25 officers live there, although the population It amounts to 393,000 people. The reasons for this absence are, in part, political. The governments of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) have withdrawn the police from this region that produces raw materials for drug trafficking to allow its community self-regulation. Although it does not include other crimes besides drug trafficking, this expansion occurs in practice illegally.
In the video of the inspection of the suspicious car that circulated in the media, a woman exclaims: “We have to kill them, they can’t come here.” This is how the lynching began. Other videos, recorded by the participants themselves, show dozens of men inside the police module, kicking and punching the detainees out, before the passive gaze of the few police officers who work there. They would then take the victims, stripped of their shirts, to their end in the square.
The incident was condemned by the Government, which sent a commission of prosecutors to investigate it. After their visit to the place, the prosecutors spoke of a “pact of silence” that until now has prevented them from even having any accused, although the videos and photographs could allow them to identify many of those who claimed the right to execute the alleged criminals.
Almost 200 cases in seven years
Lynching is a frequent practice in Bolivia, both due to the weakness of security institutions and the collectivist culture of the population. A study counted 193 cases and 373 victims between 2005 and 2011. The custom is maintained even on the outskirts of large cities such as La Paz or Potosí, where immigrants from the countryside have settled. In these neighborhoods, rag dolls hanging from light poles warn outsiders that the death penalty applies. Most of the victims of vigilante explosions are outsiders. Added to the purifying exaltation is distrust of strangers.
The movie is about to be released these days. Tribes, by director Gory Patiño. The film brings to the screen journalist Roberto Navia’s chronicle of a lynching that occurred on July 2, 2013, also in Ivirgarzama. He then burned a robbery suspect alive and beat other members of his family, who narrowly survived. So far there have been no sanctions against the perpetrators. Navia remembers other cases in which there were detainees and this caused political problems, because the communities involved protested against the authorities and demanded the freedom of their countrymen.
On May 13, just five days after the Ivirgarzama tragedy, another lynching took place not far from there, in Tolata, also in the Cochabamba region, in the center of the country. A crowd caught two thieves, killed one and left another seriously injured. Authorities also promised that they would investigate what happened.
Follow all the international information on Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
.
.
_
