Lynchings and Political Conflict in the Andes

Abstract

In 2004 the mayors of two municipalities in the Aymará region of the Andes were lynched—the apparent culmination of bitter conflicts within their communities and between those communities and the central government. These two cases illustrate the recent transformation of the organization and internal dynamics of Andean communities and the conflictive articulation of local politics with wider processes and institutions. They point to the importance of recent political-institutional processes, as opposed to traditional cultural factors of alleged indigenous nationalism, for understanding the cultural and political transformation of communities and the ways in which they process their internal conflicts as well as those with the wider state.

Multicultural Institutions, Distributional Politics, and Postelectoral Mobilization in Indigenous Mexico

“…In Ecuador, an indigenous citizen from Cotopaxi was lynched in 2010 in accordance with improvised laws of indigenous justice. Authorities report such atrocities on occasion, and accounts exist of recent lynchings in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Peru (see Vilas 2008;Godoy 2004;Fernández García 2004).…”

The Ship of Theseus and the Problem of “Postwar” Answers to Contemporary Guatemalan Problems

“…Political scientist Carlos Mendoza (2003) demonstrates that the greater the ratio of courts per 100,000 inhabitants, the less likely lynchings are to occur. Yet the obvious critique to these latter explanations that imply lynchings should be grouped under a postwar banner (as all these authors do) lies in the fact that inadequate justice is the sine qua non of vigilantism (Abrahams 1998) and as one might expect, one sees lynchings in all those Latin American countries which have equally dubious criminal justice systems including Ecuador (Guerrero 2000), Bolivia (Goldstein 2004) and the Andes more generally (Vilas 2008), Honduras (El Heraldo 2009 and Mexico (Vilas 2001) among others.…”