Four police officers died, and they were accused of smuggling and extortion.
That's the result of the recent most talked-about case of mob lynching in Bolivia,
committed by the indigenous people of the Altiplano region in Oruro, in the western part of the country.
As they've done in the past, they took matters into their own hands through "community justice."
Well, it's like a strategy, like a form of prevention.
If we are going to try to capture them, then we have to hang them as well.
Now, if he's capable of killing a girl or a person, he can't be allowed to remain free or, for that matter, alive.
The one who kills has to be killed as well.
That's the criteria in this area at the moment.
There are eight mob lynchings every week in Bolivia, according to journalistic sources.
But as several analysts and even indigenous leaders explain,
community justice has nothing to do with lynching.
After a lynching act or attempt,
people usually tend to disguise the act and argue that it is community justice.
Almost 100 percent of the people admit that lynching is a criminal act, a murder,
but in such a situation, how do you justify yourself?
What are you defending?
You also have a son, man!
But he's not a drunk!
The actual act of lynching looks for other factors to give it legitimacy.
No ... don't do it!
In Bolivia, lynching is a very complex phenomenon
with different connotations: juridical, cultural, and those that relate to the safety of citizens.
The neighbors don't have trust in the police anymore.
The police don't do anything.
The police catch the gangs, take them to jail and what do you think?
You can't follow the trial on your own, so they let them go.
People tend to take justice into their own hands
because of the inefficiency of the authorities and the state, meaning the judicial system and the police.
This is one of the possible explanations
considering the increased number of lynchings that have been occurring in Bolivia
since 2004, when citizens of Ayo Ayo, in Bolivia's Altiplano region,
burned alive their own mayor, who had been accused of corruption.
Since then, community justice has served as an excuse to cover up many lynchings,
which affects the validity of community justice itself.
Indigenous community justice follows the manners and customs passed down from our ancestors.
That is what we follow.
There is no lynching in our system. You can't kill another human being.
Community justice is restorative.
When an indigenous person commits a crime, he or she is tried in person.
If found to be guilty, he or she receives a sanction.
It can be in kind or can include community work.
Or, if the crime is very serious, the person is expelled from the community.
Let her come, comrades.
Let's see what she has to say. Talk louder.
There are social, moral and physical sanctions
and, in very few instances, whipping.
The moral sanction, however, affects not only the person who committed the crime,
but also the person's entire family.
Where, how and up to what point indigenous community justice will be applied
is what the law project of jurisdictional demarcation
that the government of Evo Morales has just presented
seeks to regulate, in order to set limits between the so-called ordinary justice and indigenous justice.
It also recognizes 36 different methods of justice
corresponding to each indigenous group.
And that's where the problem starts.
Although it represents a significant advance in terms of recognition of the rights
of different sectors of the Bolivian population, especially the indigenous one,
the relationship between the state and indigenous justice is not yet very well-defined.
And for a simple reason:
The constitution itself says that indigenous rural justice
has autonomy, independence, etc.,
but only if it doesn't violate the fundamental rights defined in that same constitution,
that is to say, the right to life, to begin.
Gentlemen, community justice is not murder.
It is clear that lynching is basically an urban phenomenon,
which has created a crisis for the indigenous groups
that can't control the rapid growth of small settlements,
where authority and community justice ruled society.
Bolivia is no longer the rural country it used to be.
Beginning in the 1980s, poverty has resulted in big migrations to cities,
where the customs and hopes of migrants
and the hard reality of a city in the making come together and sometimes clash brutally.