Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

BOLIVIA: Lynching of Mayor – a Distortion of Indigenous Justice

Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Jun 18 2004 (IPS) - In Aymara indigenous communities in Bolivia, punishments like public whippings or humiliating donkey-rides are commonly meted out to local authorities considered inept or corrupt.

But the kidnapping and lynching of a mayor on Tuesday was a distortion of the indigenous group’s philosophy of community justice, several sources told IPS.

Mayor Benjamín Altamirano issued a call for help in the media on Apr. 21 and complained that the government was failing in its responsibility to protect him as the mayor of the highlands community of Ayo Ayo, 81 km from La Paz.

After nearly two months of vainly seeking help from the courts, the police and Congress, he was seized on a street in downtown La Paz. His burnt corpse, showing signs of torture, appeared Tuesday in the central square of the town he had governed amidst a hostile climate since January 2001.

Corruption charges had been brought against Altamirano, but the case was dismissed.

Some local residents, standing by and watching in a challenging attitude as the police took away the body Tuesday, said the lynching was a product of community justice.

But the atrocity committed in Ayo Ayo, whose 7,000 indigenous inhabitants are scattered in 11 hamlets, triggered an outcry from Bolivia’s political leaders and government officials.

Some people ”want to pass this off as community justice,” Susana Mejillones, a researcher with the non-governmental Centre for Research and Promotion of Campesinos (peasant farmers), CIPCA, told IPS.

But the aim of punishment is to modify a person’s behaviour and achieve their reinsertion in the community, she argued.

CIPCA has taken part in efforts to improve the administration of the municipality of Ayo Ayo for the past 12 years. In Mejillones’ view, the murder was the result of a hunger for power and the dispute between political parties with an eye to the municipal elections coming up in December.

The ‘mallku’ or native leader of Ayo Ayo, Roberto Chino, lamented Altamirano’s death and said execution is not one of the punishments included in the indigenous justice system. He also denied that he had called a city council meeting to ”try” the mayor.

On Apr. 26, a mob of local Aymara residents in the Peruvian town of Ilave, on the border with Bolivia, around 250 km from Ayo Ayo, took justice into their own hands and killed Mayor Cirilo Robles, who they accused of embezzling public funds.

‘Mallku’ Felipe Quispe, a lawmaker with the Pachakuti Indigenist Movement of Bolivia (MIP), told IPS on that occasion that there would be more and more ”lynchings” because ”the laws of our countries are no good, we don’t use them.”

The Aymara, one of the most numerous indigenous groups in South America’s Andes mountains, live in the central-western Bolivian departments of La Paz, Oruro and Potosí, in much of Peru, and in northern Chile.

Altamirano’s death also highlighted the administrative problems plaguing local governments in the highlands region.

Municipal governments have received cash transfers from the central government since 1994. But a lack of experience in fiscal administration has led to the mismanagement of funds in many cases, and has generated tension and disputes over municipal government posts and the discretional use of state financial resources.

To date, 40 municipalities have had their accounts frozen because those in charge of them have failed to account for the use of the funds allocated by the state. As a result, city government activities have been virtually brought to a halt in those areas, spawning discontent among local residents.

Altamirano was accused of embezzling some 631,000 dollars, but the courts and the constitutional court dismissed the charges and ordered that he be reinstated as mayor, after being suspended from his post during the legal proceedings.

The mayor was bound to a stake and burnt. At the foot of the post a sign read ”This death is due to the negligence of the Public Ministry (the Public Prosecutor’s Office) and the Finance Ministry.”

Under the ‘Law on Municipalities’, when a lawsuit is brought against municipal officials, they are automatically suspended from their duties until the case is clarified.

But that law has been used for personal ends and specific interests, to the point that a state of ungovernability has been generated, with often unpredictable results, like this week’s grisly murder, said Mejillones.

To that is added the slow pace at which the General-Comptroller’s Office works, in terms of oversight and audits. In the case of Ayo Ayo, for example, the Office announced that it would take two years before a special audit of the municipal government could be scheduled, she pointed out.

Accusations of embezzlement that are not clarified due to a lack of timely oversight efforts by the courts and the Comptroller-General’s Office have created a climate of instability in a number of municipal governments, said Mejillones, who argued for the creation of specific municipal bodies that would carry out audits in a timely manner.

Criminal lawyer Eduardo Olivares said the appalling murder poses a challenge for the application of a form of justice that is appropriate to each of the indigenous nationalities, that form a majority of the population of this impoverished country of 8.8 million.

”People feel impotent because those who are guilty of corruption aren’t sent to jail, which is why they apply ‘rural justice’,” he told IPS.

Olivares noted that the Soviet Union (which collapsed in 1991) adapted its legislation to 23 different nationalities, and that in the United States, each state has its own laws, and only questions like national security fall under federal jurisdiction.

Bolivia, which has a varied geography of Andean highlands and valleys, tropical jungles, and the Chaco, a flat area marked by scrub woodlands, is home to a number of different indigenous groups, each of which has its own culture.

After Altamirano’s killing, Ayo Ayo’s four police officers and the government health workers fled, out of fear of the fury of the mob, and the municipality is even more isolated now.

The government said legal action would be taken against those responsible for the murder. But so far only town councillor Saturnino Aspaza has been put under preventive detention in the Chonchocoro maximum security prison, accused of participating in the kidnapping.

In a meeting of the town council, local residents demanded Thursday an end to what they called the ”police persecution” of their leaders, and Aspaza’s release.

They want the judicial authorities who dismissed the charges against the mayor to be removed and tried, and threatened to kidnap government officials and journalists, and to blow up electricity pylons unless their demands are met.

The government has asked the Roman Catholic Church and human rights organisations to help broker talks with the local residents in Ayo Ayo, where tension still runs high.

Next to the mayor’s coffin, at the funeral in La Paz, his children demanded that his killers be tried, and said they would take vengeance if the courts failed to bring them to justice.

 
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