GUATEMALA: Lynching, Another Face of Impunity

• by Danilo Valladares (guatemala city)
• Wednesday, December 23, 2009
• Inter Press Service

The police, who had initially rescued the three suspects from the crowd and taken them to the police station, from which they were later dragged, also became the target of the public fury: the station and two police cars were set on fire as well.

Several other lynchings have occurred since that late November incident: a 34-year-old man suspected of killing an elderly local resident was beaten and burnt to death in the central square in San Pedro Jocopilas, a small town to the north of Guatemala City, and three men suspected of kidnapping and killing a woman in the northern province of Huehuetenango were murdered by enraged villagers.

The cases are merely the latest demonstration of mob justice in this impoverished Central American nation, where lynchings have become common since the end of the 1960-1996 armed conflict.

According to the United Nations-sponsored International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), set up to strengthen and purge the country's notoriously weak and corrupt justice system, 98 percent of all crimes go unsolved and unpunished.

The number of lynchings and attempted lynchings went up this year, with 42 people killed and 211 injured, compared to 22 people killed and 96 injured last year. The incidents involve beatings, stonings, hangings and dousing with gasoline.

Experts blame the phenomenon on the public's lack of confidence in the justice system and the large number of murder and robbery suspects who are never brought to justice for their crimes. They also point to the legacy of violence left by a 36-year civil war in which some 200,000 people - mainly rural Indians - were killed, primarily by the security forces and allied paramilitary 'civil defence' militias.

'The public have seen that when the police catch a criminal, he pays bail and two or three days later he is back on the streets committing crimes again,' José María Julajuj, mayor of Sololá, a city of 307,000 people located 140 km west of the capital, told IPS.

In the view of Julajuj, who belongs to the Cakchiquel indigenous community, the lynchings represent 'an act of desperation' by a population that is fed up with the state's inability to deliver justice in the face of soaring crime rates.

The Mutual Support Group, a local human rights organisation, put the number of murders this year at 3,615 by late November, up from a total of 3,305 last year.

This country of 13 million has one of the highest murder rates in the world: 47 per 100,000 population in 2007, according to the 2008 U.N. Development Programme Statistical Report on Violence.

Rudy Marroquín, the mayor of San Martín Jilotepeque, a city west of the capital which is known for its record number of lynchings, told IPS that fear of violence and lack of justice has prompted people to take the law into their own hands.

But sometimes the angry mobs take out their wrath on innocent victims.

One such case was that of Miguel Angel Curruchiche, a policeman who was accused of extorting a bus driver - a frequent practice, involving demands for 'protection payments.'

On Nov. 13, Curruchiche was seized by a group of residents who belong to the local security council in San Martín Jilotepeque, tied to a post and beaten until he was soaked with gasoline and set on fire.

After his death, police investigations showed that he was not involved in the extortion racket.

'People act like this not because they're brave or because they're bad people; it's an instinct of self-preservation. They're sick and tired of seeing so much failure' by the police and judiciary, said Marroquín, who clarified that he is staunchly opposed to the practice of lynching.

The mayor also said mob justice was one of the lingering effects of the armed conflict, as lynchings first appeared in 1996, when a peace agreement put an end to the war.

But not everyone agrees that there is a direct correlation between impunity and lynchings.

Gustavo Palma, a sociologist with the non-governmental Association for the Advance of Social Sciences in Guatemala, told IPS that the lynchings reflect the extent to which people are fed up with poverty, marginalisation, lack of basic services like power and clean water, and lack of access to land - deep-rooted, structural problems that especially affect the poor indigenous population.

(Officially, 40 percent of the population is indigenous, although foreign NGOs working in Guatemala like Refugees International say they are a majority.)

Palma said a case-by-case study would be needed to understand why local residents decide to take justice into their own hands. 'These aren't situations that occur as a result of the spontaneous gathering of mobs, as the press depicts them,' he said.

Carmen Rosa De León, director of the Training Institute for Sustainable Development (IEPADES), said the phenomenon was also due to the fact that no one is punished for taking part in lynchings.

'This is happening because there is no response from the state against people who initiate or are accomplices in lynchings,' she commented to IPS. 'Society itself is not rejecting these barbaric acts. On the contrary, there is implicit, and even sometimes explicit, social tolerance of this, even on the part of media outlets that justify these incidents.'

De León says the theory that lynchings are a result of large numbers of crimes going unpunished doesn't hold water, because crime rates are low in some of the provinces where many of the incidents have taken place, as in the case of Sololá - the province that gives its name to the city where the three people suspected of shooting the bus driver were burned alive.

A study carried out last year by her institute, IEPADES, found that Sololá has the second lowest levels of violence out of the 22 provinces (or departments) into which the country is divided, with a murder rate of just seven per 100,000 people, compared to 178 per 100,000 in Jutiapa, the most violent province, which borders El Salvador to the east.

'That means the (judicial) system is not overwhelmed in Sololá, because it does not have high crime rates, so impunity is not a justification for lynchings there,' she said.

Actually, she said, there is a kind of 'backwards' impunity there, because the failure to bring to justice those who take part, either directly or indirectly, in these vigilante justice incidents fuels the phenomenon.

De León also underlined another aspect of many lynchings: the destruction of police stations and cars.

'There are organised crime groups establishing areas where they can operate without the presence of the state. Why burn police stations and equipment? Because they don't want the presence of state institutions in the area,' she said with conviction.

The government of Álvaro Colom, the country's first left-leaning president in half a century, also blames a number of recent lynchings on organised crime.

Deputy Minister of the Interior Francisco Cuevas said the criminal groups want to put society at loggerheads with the security forces and force the police out of towns or neighbourhoods, in order to freely engage in their criminal activities without fear of law enforcement.

A National Commission for the Prevention of Lynchings, made up of 20 government agencies and civil society bodies, including the public prosecutor's office and the police, was created in 1999. But so far its efforts have failed to bear fruit.

'This work has not been very effective,' Supreme Court spokesman Guillermo Melgar acknowledged earlier this month, referring to efforts to combat the phenomenon.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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