Following a spectacularly tragic incident in Mexico, Newsweek examines the growing phenomenon of vigilantism in Latin America. Our 21st century world is not so far removed from primitivism as we would like to think.
Vigilantism has taken root in Latin America over the past decade, lending credence to the notion that the region is in the throes of a democratic crisis. From Venezuela and Guatemala to Bolivia and Peru, angry crowds are increasingly taking the law into their own hands, meting out physical punishment for crimes real and imagined. Vigilantes often "lynch" common criminals who, in their view, have escaped justice. More recently they've started attacking public officials suspected of malfeasance. Last May a mob in the Peruvian town of Ilave beat their mayor after accusing him of embezzlement, then dragged him into a public square and left him to die. "Lynching has grown totally out of control," says Mark Ungar, an expert on Latin American police reform at the Woodrow Wilson International School for Scholars in Washington. "It's spreading in the sense that vigilantes are going after criminals, officials, even governments—and once it starts it's hard to stop."Posted by Alan at December 14, 2004 12:13 PMExperts generally agree that vigilantes are not merely filling a law-and-order gap created by poor or nonexistent police work. The phenomenon is more complex. The western highlands of Guatemala, where many incidents of lynching occur, is not an area with an otherwise high rate of official crime. Rather, vigilantism is most prevalent in places where people have lost faith in their civic institutions. They no longer trust the police or judicial officials to care about their duties or the people they've been entrusted to protect. Indeed, corrupt police are part and parcel of the problem. A neighborhood protection group in Honduras recently told Ungar that they pulled people out of their houses frequently "and beat the hell out of them"—often while the local police were watching. Says Ungar: "The local officers allowed it to happen."
Analysts say that many cases of vigilantism are desperate attempts by disenfranchised groups to assert a nascent political will. In one case, closely documented by University of Washington sociologist Angelina Godoy Snodgrass, thousands of people gathered on a farm in rural Guatemala in October 2001 to witness the hanging and burning of three men suspected of stealing some fertilizer and candy. In a recent article, Snodgrass notes ominously that the process was "clearly premeditated... [community] security committees had been constituted to handle crime." If vigilantism is left unchecked, say experts, the problem could develop into something even more sinister—swaths of Latin American territory where mobs and mafia types rule.