By IPS Correspondents
MONTEVIDEO, Apr 30 2004 (IPS)

Local residents of an Andean highland village in Peru were holding the members of their town council hostage Friday, threatening to kill them, just a few days after the mayor of a nearby town was publicly lynched.

But Monday’s murder of the mayor of the town of Ilave by local residents who are mainly Aymara Indians can be interpreted as an outburst by a poor, marginalised community demanding a voice in local decision-making and fed up with being governed by corrupt local elites, said indigenous leaders and analysts.

It can also be read as an expression of traditional Aymara justice.

In Ilave, a town of 90,000 near Lake Titicaca, some 900 km southeast of Lima, the capital, Mayor Cirilo Robles was pulled out of a town council meeting, dragged several blocks and beaten to death in the town square by an enraged mob on Monday, the 25th day of a strike demanding that he resign.

The local Aymara residents accused Robles and his administration of embezzlement and misappropriation of funds.

On Thursday, the people of Tilali, a village of 5,000 near the Bolivian border on the north shore of Lake Titicaca, took four town councillors hostage after the mayor, Melesio Larisco Quispe, who is also accused of corruption, fled.

Nearly half of Peru’s 26 million people are Quechua or Aymara Indians.

The country’s newspapers reported the news of Robles’ murder with headlines like ”Barbarity” to describe the explosion of a long-contained rage that had become visible in Ilave.

Indignant lawmakers decided to call Interior Minister Fernando Rospigliosi for formal questioning, accusing him of failing to intervene earlier in Ilave to prevent the violence.

But in the midst of the loud condemnation of what had occurred, some Aymara Indians justified the murder and predicted further violence if the government of Alejandro Toledo continues to ignore the community’s grievances and demands.

A public lynching ”is a common, ordinary event,” Bolivian Aymara leader and legislator Felipe Quispe told IPS Friday. ”We at any moment kill thieves, wrongdoers and traitors. The laws of our country are no good, we do not use them.”

The lawmaker urged his ”brothers and sisters in Peru” to keep on fighting the ‘qaras’ (whites) in order to ”stop being enchained,” and warned that there will be lynchings ”everywhere.”

”We only have to be patient. They will see,” Quispe, the founder of Bolivia’s Pachakuti Indigenous Movement, told IPS.

”The taking of hostages in Tilali seems to indicate that the crisis in Ilave is expanding” in southern Peru, where the country’s Aymara Indians live, journalist Feliciano Gutiérrez, a correspondent with the Peruvian daily La República in the southern city of Puno, commented to IPS.

”The situation in Ilave is improving, but not in the rest of the region,” he said. ”Some highways leading to Bolivia are still blocked, while indigenous people in Tilali have threatened to carry out more lynchings if the government does not send a high-level commission there as well.”

Gutiérrez explained that for years, the Aymaras have felt ignored and neglected by Peru’s governments and abandoned to the whims of corrupt local authorities.

Quispe said the Aymara Indians in Ilave ”are happy” because they will have their own government, and because they took one more step towards rebuilding the Collasuyo, one of the four regions of the ancient Inca empire of Tahuantinsuyo, which covered the modern-day territories of Bolivia and Peru, and parts of Argentina, Ecuador and Chile.

The Inca empire emerged in the 13th century and extended its influence over a number of indigenous groups, including the Aymaras. It was defeated in the 15th century by the invasion of Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Since then, indigenous people in the region have been marginalised, discriminated against and mistreated.

The Aymaras currently number nearly two million, 80 percent of whom live in Bolivia, nearly 15 percent in Peru and the rest in Chile. The overwhelming majority are poor campesinos or peasant farmers.

The Aymara community ”has its own laws, its own culture, its own way of being, which is why it does not accept the ‘white people’s’ government,” said Quispe, who pledged ”solidarity” with their ”brothers and sisters” in Peru from Bolivia’s Aymara Indians.

Quispe was a member of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army in Bolivia, for which he served time in prison from 1992 to 1997. In October 2003, he was one of the leaders of the popular uprising against the natural gas export plans of the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who was forced to resign by the nationwide protests.

Bolivia’s indigenous majority has gained political influence in recent years.

On Friday, Bienvenido Sacu, the president of the Coordinator of Ethnic Peoples of the eastern department of Santa Cruz, said a series of protests were planned against the government of Carlos Mesa, who replaced Sánchez de Lozada, and who is accused of failing to address their social grievances.

On Monday, workers and campesinos in Bolivia will hold demonstrations and mount roadblocks which could end in new clashes with the police. In October, at least 70 people were killed when the security forces cracked down on the protests that toppled the government.

The reaction by the Aymaras in Ilave ”should not surprise anyone,” Bolivian Aymara historian, sociologist and activist Waskar Ari Chachaki remarked to IPS.

”The Aymara have a long tradition of collective government. For them democracy must be direct. It is not enough for them to go and vote every four or five years. They demand constant participation in decision-making,” he said.

”They are very poor, and they react with rage to local governments that enrich themselves through corruption. That is why these violent incidents occur,” he added.

But Chachaki, the author of several books on Andean indigenous peoples and the creator of the indigenous Kechuaymara Foundation, said the ethnic group is pursuing different objectives in Bolivia and Peru.

In Peru, where the Aymara are a relatively small group, the aim is to participate in local governments, from which they have historically been excluded.

In Bolivia, the Aymara have more ambitious goals. Several Aymara Indians have made it to the legislature and to posts in municipal governments. Their aim is to make it to the central government one day.

But the majority in both countries are opposed to their governments, and dream of the creation of a great Aymara republic, which would be governed by its own laws, language and culture.

”In the rest of Latin America, it might seem unusual for Peru’s Aymara Indians to want to separate from Lima and join Bolivia. But for us it is normal,” said Chachaki.

He noted that the history of the Aymara community in Peru has been marked by many uprisings, but that in the past few years the movement has grown in strength.

The indigenous question is present in many countries of Latin America. This month it was catapulted into the headlines in Brazil when members of the Cinta Larga (‘wide belt’) indigenous community in the Amazon jungle in northern Brazil killed 29 garimpeiros or informal miners who were illegally extracting diamonds in their territory.

With respect to the murder of Robles, Chachaki underlined that it should be analysed within the context of a social conflict.

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