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.

*Daniel M. Goldstein is Director of the Center for Latin American Studies, Rutgers University

Read the HRF report here:Enshrining Mob Rule in Bolivia: Communal Justice and the New Constitution