Global Policy Forum

By Reed Lindsay

Corrupt officials face brutal village justice that goes back to Inca times

The blood has been washed away but the blackened concrete below a broken lamppost in this sluggish town's main plaza is an inescapable reminder of the grisly lynching that took place here this summer. The mayor of Ayo Ayo, Benjamí­n Altamirano, was hanged from the lamppost and set ablaze. The post mortem suggested he had been severely beaten. Apart from his family, no one mourns for Altamirano in Ayo Ayo, a poor rural municipality an hour's drive from La Paz on the windswept Altiplano plain, homeland of the Aymara people. In fact, most people in the town approve of the killing. No one has claimed responsibility, but the authorities have arrested at least 10 suspects. 'Altamirano was corrupt, just like the rest of the politicians,' said 59-year-old tailor Emilio Mamani as he walked through the plaza. 'We told him if he did not keep his promises we would take more drastic measures. We told him very clearly. But he would not listen.'

The lynching came less than two months after Aymara people in a village in neighbouring Peru lynched a mayor also accused of corruption. And it won't be the last, warn Aymara leaders. Fed up with corrupt, unresponsive government institutions long controlled by a white and mestizo elite in La Paz, the people of the Altiplano are taking justice into their own hands. Residents of Ayo Ayo defend the killing of Altamirano as the rightful exercise of communal justice, a homegrown legal system practised semi-clandestinely in the region since the time of the Incas. Critics say the killing is little more than savagery.

What is certain is that, less than a year after thousands of Aymara peasants and urban slum dwellers staged massive road-blocking protests that drove Bolivia's President from power, the harsh Altiplano remains a redoubt of fierce anti-government defiance and, some analysts say, the most tangible threat to the precarious administration of interim President Carlos Mesa.

At various times in recent years, Aymara peasants have expelled police, judges and prosecutors from Ayo Ayo and other towns. Some are demanding self-rule. We Aymara carry rebellion in our blood,' said Ramón Coba, who heads the leading Ayo Ayo peasant organisation. 'Bolivia is totally corrupt, not just the mayor. All of them should be finished in the same way, if not burnt then drowned or strangled or pulled apart by four tractors... It's the only way they are going to learn.'

Ayo Ayo is steeped in revolt. The municipality is the birthplace of Tupaj Katari, a legendary warrior who led an uprising of thou sands of Aymara peasants against Spanish colonialists in 1781 before he was captured and executed. The lamppost where Altamirano was hanged stands in the shadow of a towering bronze statue of Katari.

People in Ayo Ayo began demanding Altamirano's resignation after he was accused of embezzlement in 2002. A group of locals held him captive until he promised to resign, and they burnt down his house. But Altamirano, who is also Aymara, then refused to step down. As a two-year legal battle dragged on with no resolution in sight, Ayo Ayo residents opposed to Altamirano lost their patience. 'We would have been satisfied if Benjamí­n had admitted he had made mistakes, or if he had proposed a punishment for himself, or if the authorities had fined him,' said Coba. 'But none of this happened. What else could we do?'

Communal justice is widely practised in rural Aymara communities, where it usually resolves mundane issues such as compensating peasants whose crops have been destroyed by a neighbour's cattle or sheep. Physical punishment is rare, and generally limited to a public lashing. The death penalty is used in extreme cases when the entire community decides there is no alternative. Ayo Ayo typifies a growing disillusionment among Bolivians with their representative democracy, which has brought rising rates of poverty, unemployment and crime. There have been 27 lynchings in Bolivia since 2001, compared to six in the previous five years, according to Juan Ramón Quintana, director of Cordillera University's Democracy and Security Observatory.