Response to the Human Rights Foundation:
Don’t mistake lynching and other
forms of vigilante violence for community justice.
January 28, 2008
Daniel M. Goldstein*
The Human Rights Foundation’s report on community justice (justicia
comunitaria) in Bolivia (“Country Report: Bolivia 2007”) criticizes the Evo
Morales administration and the proposed Bolivian Constitution for their
willingness to accord legitimacy to what the HRF terms the “barbaric”
practices of communal self-adjudication. The report accuses the Constituent
Assembly and the Morales government of “enshrining mob rule” by including
support for community justice in the new Constitution, approved by the
Assembly in late 2007.
The report contains a basic error that invalidates its conclusions: The HRF
report mistakes lynching and other forms of vigilante violence for community
justice.
Though the report refers anecdotally to punishments of adulterers and others
accused of violating local norms, the cases which it actually documents are
all instances of lynching, in which an accused thief is apprehended and
violently punished by an angry mob. Such events are not a product of the
MAS’s rise to power, but have been frequent occurrences in Bolivia since at
least 1995, when I began studying them in Cochabamba. Nor are lynchings
examples of community justice. In its traditional form in indigenous Andean
villages, community justice emphasizes reconciliation and rehabilitation.
Rather than violent torture and execution, community justice promotes the
“reeducation” of community members who violate collective norms and rules,
and the reincorporation of these offenders back into the community.
Typically, the last resort for this kind of community justice would be to
exile offenders, prohibiting their return to the community where their
family, lands, and all other signs of their social existence are located.
Such punishment has a powerful deterrent effect on would-be criminals, such
that extreme forms of violent punishment are rarely required. Punishments
under this system are not decided upon in anger, but are the result of a
deliberative process in which elected elders of the community participate
and pronounce judgment.
Unlike community justice, lynching is indeed an example of “mob rule,” as
the HRF report observes. Lynchings like those described in the report – from
Ayo Ayo to El Alto to the Cochabamba valley – obey no form of adjudicative
process, but proceed from the rage and vulnerability that poor, indigenous
people feel in the face of almost continual and uncontrolled crime in their
communities. Unable to rely on the state justice system or the national
police – which are underfunded, understaffed, and inaccessible to the
majority of poor and marginal people – community residents resort to
violence as the only possible means that they can imagine to control crime
and punish the accused. Lynch mobs frequently misidentify the perpetrators
of crimes, and end up punishing the innocent. The human rights violations of
such practices are evident to even the most casual observer.
Lynchings of the kind cited in the HRF report are a far cry from the
justicia comunitaria that has long existed in the Andean countryside, and
which the Constituent Assembly would enshrine in the new national
Constitution. Indeed, to say that lynching is a form of community justice
(as the HRF does) is to side with the lynch mobs themselves, who frequently
try to justify their actions by claiming that lynching is a form of
community justice, when clearly it is not. Lynching has much more in common
with capital punishment and other “barbaric” practices of the Global North –
Bolivia, like most Latin American nations, does not have a death penalty on
its books – than it does with Andean community justice.
The HRF report recommends that the “ordinary justice” system of the state
take precedence over communal justice in Bolivia. This simplistic suggestion
neglects decades of Bolivian history, and the ongoing reality of the
Bolivian legal system, which is corrupt, impoverished, and incapable of
administering justice in the country. Lynching and other forms of human
rights violations have emerged precisely in response to the failures of
ordinary justice, whose inability to regulate the marginal areas of
Bolivia’s cities and rural areas has produced conditions of extreme
insecurity and violence. It should also be noted that the Bolivian justice
system has long been required to devote much of its resources and manpower
to prosecuting the United States’ dubious “War on Drugs” on Bolivian soil,
filling Bolivia’s prisons with peasant coca farmers and limiting the state’s
ability to deal with more quotidian matters of crime in the streets,
domestic violence, and so on. Rather than preaching from afar about the
“barbarism” of poor Bolivians, the Human Rights Foundation might take a more
global view of the situations it critiques, and where it lays the blame.
Rather than advocating an unrealistic, top down ordinary justice to resolve
problems of violence and insecurity in Bolivia, a better recommendation
would be to provide local communities with the resources they need to create
their own security without resorting to violence and violating the rights of
the accused. The Fundación Pro Justicia, a Cochabamba-based organization
dedicated to the study of violence and insecurity and the promotion of human
and civil rights in marginal communities, is taking such steps. Pro Justicia
is attempting to create Centros Integrales de Justicia (Integral Justice
Centers) in marginal neighborhoods of Cochabamba, to reduce lynching
violence while helping Bolivian citizens to realize their own rights to
justice, security, and peace in their lives. Transnational organizations
seeking to defend human rights are encouraged to support such local
initiatives.
*Director, Center for Latin American Studies, Rutgers University
