By Ken McCormick
The lead story in the November 30, 2002 Nuestro
Diario of Guatemala City is "Ladron a punto de ser linchado en la zona
9" ("Thief at the point of being lynched in Zone 9"). It is accompanied by photos of a hog-tied
man being kicked in the ribs by one of an angry crowd surrounding him, with
another man winding up for a kick to his thigh. To summarize the story, one Julio Cesar Bonilla, 38, was
allegedly caught in the act of attempting to break the ignition lock of a
motorcycle in order to steal it, and was immediately assaulted by a crowd of
dozens of people. "He was tied by
the feet and hands," said the paper, "and later was attacked by blows
and kicks by those who said they were tired of such delinquency." Several other accompanying photos show the
bruised and bloody, and by now no doubt relieved Bonilla being handcuffed by
police to be taken to the hospital before being incarcerated.
Three accompanying man-in-the-street
interviews are revealing as far as explaining the almost weekly reports of mob
violence in the republic. Said Ronald
Monzon, mensajero (messenger): "Really we are unprotected because the
police do not do their job of providing security." According to Luis Nunez, mensajero,
"Already a person can't work; we are not free of the thieves who at any
moment may rob a person." And
finally, according to Celso Tuc, mensajero: "The robberies continue to
increase in the absence of any authority which might hold them in check."
Bonilla seems to have gotten off lightly due
to the fact that the Guatemala City police are more or less on the ball. In the city of Antigua, the police may be
seen from time to time cruising the streets, but they have only one telephone
at the police station, and it is used to receive faxes as well as emergency
calls, so police are said to be relatively unresponsive as far as emergencies
go. This probably explains why so many
establishments have security guards armed with 12-guage shotguns. Even the soda pop distributor's truck has a
guard brandishing a shotgun riding on back to keep people from stealing bottles
of Pepsi.
Being a security guard is an increasingly
dangerous occupation, though, since thieves have taken to waiting until the
guard is looking in another direction, then pulling a gun and shooting the
guard first off before robbing the establishment. A few days ago, the paper carried an article about a bloody
shootout in which the thieves failed to immediately knock out the guard before
he was able to return fire. He died,
but he managed to take one or two of the assailants with him.
Out in the boondocks, things can get
rougher. A week or two ago, the paper
carried a report of a mule thief who was captured by a mob of farmers and tied
up and beaten all night in an effort to get him to implicate other people
involved in the livestock thefts that have plagued the region. The hapless thief was finally disposed of by
being burned at the stake.
A few years ago, there was a man with a couple
of horses who lived in the vicinity of Pastores, near Antigua. It is said that when crops were ready for
harvesting, he would go out with his horses after dark and the next morning,
people living in remote villages would find to their dismay that someone had
harvested their crops during the night, loaded the crops on horses, and
disappeared. In a country with few
social services, people who lost their crops faced the prospect of starvation.
The situation became so predictable that one
village decided to post sentries to keep watch over the crops at night. One night, the man with the horses went out
and never returned. His body was found
in pieces along a roadway.
A national census effort has been launched,
but the census-takers are reportedly concerned about being lynched. As a former survey-taker, I know from
experience that people tend to be quite suspicious of any stranger seen
wandering about their neighborhoods taking notes, but in the states, this
usually only results in the police being called. In Guatemala, this sort of thing has sometimes led to people's
being hanged or beaten to death by lynch mobs.
Once a mob gets underway, it seems that there is no way it will listen
to reason. The census agency has
responded to the problem by only assigning census-takers to their own
neighborhoods.
Another article in the same paper relates to
one of the causes of mob violence against foreigners. "Banda de robaniños" describes the denunciation of a
band of criminals trafficking in stolen children on the South coast of
Guatemala by the Procuraduria de Derechos Humanos, which has managed to recover
some of the children sold illegally.
Now, there are many unwanted children kicking around Guatemala. The very poor, and bear in mind that the
minimum wage in Guatemala is about $4 per day, frequently leave newborns at the
doors of churches or social service agencies, or even place them in the
trash. Perhaps this situation leads to
certain people coming to Guatemala to adopt children. I know one North American lady who has three adopted Guatemalan
children. Actually, I'm not really sure
they are legally adopted - she is very cagey when it comes to that subject.
Guatemalan papers have sometimes reported,
though, that the children are stolen by North Americans to provide body parts
for transplant operations. Whether
there is any truth behind this lurid charge or not, it has led to at least two
incidents in which foreigners, one a lady from the United States and the other
a Japanese man, have been killed or almost killed by lynch mobs. The man was killed when a mob of about five
hundred Guatemalans assaulted a busload of Japanese tourists in Todos Santos
Cuchumatan because for several days a rumor had been circulating there that
Satanists were planning human sacrificial rites in the area, and when the
Japanese tourists began snapping pictures of children, this seemed to indicate
that they were the ones intent on performing the heinous deeds. The Guatemalan bus driver was also killed
with a rock, doused with gasoline and set afire when he attempted to protect
the tourists.
In the case of the lady, because a young girl
had gone off to a friend's house to play without letting her mother know where
she was going, the hapless tourist found herself to be the subject of the
charge of stealing children in order to remove their hearts for shipment to the
United States. She was scooped up by
police for her own safety, and sequestered in the police station at a
picturesque town in Alta Verapaz. Even though the child later turned up, the
angry mob was not to be denied “justice.”
A determined attack on the police station was made, the police were driven
from the building when it was set afire, and the accused woman was captured and
beaten into a comatose state by the mob.
The chief of police saved her life by returning after having been beaten
by the mob himself, examining the woman, and announcing to the satisfaction of
the mob that she was dead. The chief
was placing his own life on the line in this case. A U.S. State Department advisory warns travelers not to attempt
to interfere with a lynch mob, as Guatemalan lynch mobs will quite readily lynch
anyone who tries to frustrate their efforts.
The tide of crime and violence continues to
rise in Guatemala. The civil war of the
1980's led to the formation of death squads and other groups which have
sometimes continued their violent work into the present as extensions of
organized crime. It was probably such a
band that recently assaulted a minibus full of tourists on a secluded road and
killed an Austrian tourist, leading to a new "travel advisory" from
the government of the United States regarding reportedly dangerous conditions
in Guatemala. The tourists would have
probably been safer on one of the "chicken buses" used by the
locals. Although the chicken buses and
city buses are sometimes hijacked, the hijackings usually don't result in any
deaths because the buses are in no position to try to make a run for it, as did
the tourist minibus in question.
Youth gangs, inspired by news reports, by
members returning from bad neighborhoods in the United States, and popular
culture, have made certain zonas of Guatemala City virtually ungovernable. Due to the recent death of a postal carrier
at the hands of criminals in one such neighborhood, pizza delivery boys, postal
workers and other public sector workers refuse to enter many neighborhoods of
the city. The daily death toll due to
crime in Guatemala City is about five to eight on average.