Lynched, stoned and buried alive; these are just some of the ways that people have been punished in recent years by indigenous, communal judges in the South American country of Bolivia. The newly proposed constitution by the government under President Evo Morales allows indigenous communities to engage in these practices without due process or a check on authority.
Communal justice, or justicia comunitaria, as it is called, is an ancient Inca custom which, according to a recent study by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), allows local leaders to bypass the official legal system and directly carry out punishments for crimes committed by members of the community.
Human Rights Foundation President Thor Halvorssen recently spoke out against this justice system.
“Communal justice does not always follow a rigorous or standard process,” Halvorssen wrote. “In practice, communal justice allows self-appointed communal judges to issue instant verdicts and sentences—sometimes with fatal consequences for the accused.”
While the proposed constitution states that indigenous judges must respect the people’s right to life, and other rights included in the Constitution including the right not to suffer physical or psychological violence, it also maintains that no decisions made by indigenous judges can be overturned by the ordinary justice system or the executive. In other words, indigenous judges have absolute authority in their jurisdictions whether they follow the Constitution laws or not.
Allowing indigenous jurisdiction is part of an effort by President Morales to give greater autonomy and control to Bolivia’s indigenous people, who make up nearly 62 percent of the population. Morales promised to do so when he became the first president elected into office by a majority vote in 2005.
Since Morales’ election, there has been a drastic rise in lynchings, lashings, and other forms of corporal punishment. The HRF found 28 such cases reported between November 2005 and September 2007. Cases include women buried alive for adultery, vigilante mobs raiding town halls and police headquarters, and young men being thrown off of a cliff. In one instance a group intercepted the arrest of 16-year-old Marcelino Rojas Parra just outside of Santa Cruz. Parra, who had been accused of stealing a motorcycle, was clubbed and stoned while forced to carry a heavy cross back to San Julian by the crowd that had taken him from the police. The mob eventually left his dead body at the entrance to the police station.
The HRF has made several recommendations for the Bolivian government to amend such practices. They include regulating the administration of communal justice, limiting its scope, allowing basic rights and guarantees to the accused, and ensuring that communal justice does not have equal standing with ordinary justice.
Restraining communal justice may not solve the problem, however, as reports from the World Bank show that the recent rise in violence may not have come from communal jurisdictions, but from larger problems in the legal system as a whole.
The World Bank details that as much as three-quarters of the prison population in Bolivia may be detained without sentence under “preventative imprisonment” which subverts habeus corpus and presumption of innocence. The report also shows that long delays in the legal process have resulted in overcrowded jails, and inadequate finances have made the system weak and vulnerable to pressures by both the executive and legislative branches of government and elites. Bias and corruption are rampant.
“The inadequate justice and security services provided by the state have led to many instances of Bolivians taking justice into their own hands,” the report states. “It is worth emphasizing that the lynchings do not reflect community justice, but rather, quite the contrary, they reflect an absence of justice in general.”
Amanda Busse is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
