Lynchings in Guatemala

Dec. 6, 2009

My Chilean friend Lalo passed us at a fast trot exclaiming, ¨They´re burning people in front of the police station.¨

Two weeks ago the pueblo of Solola, adjacent to Panajachel, demanded of the police the three people who had robbed and killed the bus driver and passengers on a local bus earlier that day. The town gathered in front of the police station until they eventually burned the two women, one of them pregnant, the man and eventually the police station itself. This I saw and heard about through the news, through the grapevine. Today, it happened here in front of my own eyes.

With Lalo, I walked up near the central market of Panajachel to the police station. A mob of people met me. Police in their full swat team armor stood around with their automatic weapons and tear gas guns ready. A mob circled around something on the ground I couldn´t see. I pushed my way closer and got my first glimpse of a man, bound and tied with a thick stained with blood rope, kneeling, praying and swaying in pain. Covered in his own blood. The mob took turns beating the man. Two machete strikes to the head. The people who couldn´t reach him ranted and yelled ¨Quamalo¨....burn him.

He and three more women still inside the jail, robbed a local store of 7,000 Quetzales. About $900. The police arrested all four of them, but the pueblo, knowing one too many years of police corruption, demanded to take vengance with their own hands. ¨Uno por uno,¨ they yelled. Eye for an eye.

A shirtless drunk was the one to finally take the life of the man lying in the street. Fueled by alchohol and mob mentality he stomped out the life of this man. The mob yelled to burn him. ¨Gasolina,¨ they shouted. The police managed what little control they had by saying that before the crowd could burn the man, women, children and cameras had to be put away. The cameras left. Women and children did not. They dragged the man 10 feet. He lay motionless on the hot concrete. A paramedic pushed through the crowd and checked for a pulse. No. He was dead. Almost immediately the energy shifted back to the jail where the three women were still. ¨Protected¨by the police.

As ancient and barbaric a custom as this all seems, it is something new for Guatemala. Since 1996, these public lynchings have been occuring at an increasing rate. I spoke with a grad student from Yale who is in Panajachel doing her graduate research on the reactions and sentiments of the pueblos where these lynchings happen. When the police capture these theives and murderers they are quickly released within a matter of days if they can pay their way out. A local store owner told me, ¨no podemos vivir asi,¨ there must be consequences for the theives or they will just continue taking from the pueblo. So the pueblos, Solola, Panajachel and many others in the surrounding mountains, are taking justice as they know how. Burning the police station, stoning police, fighting the police until they release the prisoners, and killing them in their own streets, in front of their own stores with their babies and children watching.

On the steps of the police station, the people yelled with blood in their eyes to release the women. ¨Matalas¨ Bring the gasoline. There were about 7 men, ¨neighbors, no mas,¨a woman in the crowd told me, standing and negociating with the police. After much yelling and impatience, the men announced that they were not going to release the women. If they did the crowd would engulf them. The crowd was rabid with a killing fever. But still, women were giggling among each other. Children played tag within the crowd. Men made horrible jokes. Twenty men climbed on top of a truck to see the dead man lying in the street. All the metal smashed down under their weight. Two men started to rock and attempt to overturn the truck. People laughed. Joked. Bizzarre. A man lay dead in the street and the people were acting as if it was merely the county fair in town.

The police announced that they needed five indigenous women to enter the jail. We will not release the women, but five indigenous can enter the jail and kill the three women inside. ¨Con tranquilo.¨ Noone volunteered. The police added, noticing that no woman wanted to do this, they could put a blindfold on the five women so they won´t have to see what they were doing. How they would kill three women. The crowd laughed. Insanity. One woman volunteered. A señora of maybe 40 years. I couldn´t watch anymore. I left. Went back to where we were working on the tourist strip 10 blocks away.

About an hour passed until a señora who sells tamales went running by us saying they were bringing the women down this street to the lake to burn them there. Immediatly shop owners started closing. All the metal doors slammed down. Restaurants kicked out their customers. The indigenous women rapidly took down all the clothes hanging up for sale. The gringos wandered around with lost, scared looks on their faces. Panajachel had transformed from a safe touristy haven to Bagdad.

Smoke pillared into the sky. The mob was burning 3 police cars. Flipping them and smashing the windows. The police began shooting tear gas. People came running, their mouths and noses red from the gas. Crying. Scared. Boys and men walked around with their shirts wrapped around their mouths like bandits carrying rocks. Ready for battle. We left.

The people of Panajachel are not proud of what they did. However, I never got a real sense of regret either. Rather, this is something they have to do. The police take bribes and do nothing, so the people have to defend themselves. A man that was recently lynched in a nearby pueblo was 29 years old. He had been in and out of jail 67 times, a local told me. Sixty seven times in a life of 29 years, this man was arrested, released and set free to only get thrown in jail again for another crime he commited. I read in the paper, El Diario, that since 1996 these lynchings have begun. This is not an ancient Mayan custom. This is a new phenomonon. Perhaps a fad, ¨The people of Solola did it, so we will too.¨ But something that has its roots in a very serious problem.

The police are not paid enough. They are young, uneducated boys from poor familes and are eager for bribes. I spoke with a man from Texas who has been living in Guatemala for some 20 years now. His son, last week, was set up and arrested with seven ounces of marijuana. He was taken to the local jail where locals gathered and fought with the police for permission to burn him alive. The police took him to another jail in order to protect him. There, the family had to pay 3,000 Quetzales to the inmates of that prison so the inmates wouldn´t kill their son. After this, garunteered, the family will have to pay the police if they want their son released from jail. It´s all corrupt. Every part about the whole system. So who can blame the people of Guatemala for wanting their own justice on the spot. The question lies in if beating and burning a person to death for stealing money or selling drugs is justice. Where is the line drawn? When is a person liable for death by el pueblo and when is he not?

The three women on Sunday were rescued from the police station after the crowd began to set fire to the police trucks. The police tear gassed the crowd and a hilocopter flew in and took out the women. The body of the man lay in the middle of the street, covered by a black plastic bag until mid-afternoon the next day. A lawyer had to see the body and sign some papers before he could be removed.

To date, this year, there have been 96 public lynchings in Guatemala.