Faith in the Law Lost, Mobs in Mexico Reach for the Rope

It wasn’t much of a theft: Two men appeared to be stealing a Dodge Dart in the village of La Purificacion on Mexico City’s outskirts early Monday when several local residents spotted them.

It’s what happened after the residents caught Eduardo Mojica, 52, and Fidel Marco Patino, 49, that startled so many here in the nation’s capital Tuesday. With the two alleged thieves in their grasp, the residents called state authorities, warning that if police and prosecutors didn’t come soon--as they often don’t--the villagers would lynch their captives.

Hours passed. Finally, prosecutors said Tuesday, the frustration of soaring crime and a criminal-justice system gone awry combined to drive dozens of La Purificacion’s villagers into a frenzy.

They dragged the two men into the town square. They slipped nooses around their necks, tied them to a tree, blindfolded them with rags and beat them for seven hours--with photographers from the national media snapping away--until state authorities finally arrived and negotiated the battered suspects’ release.

On Tuesday, grisly pictures of Mojica and Patino appeared at street-corner news kiosks showing them dangling by the neck, bloodied and near death in the village square. It was the latest incident in a growing phenomenon known as the “law of talion”: eye-for-an-eye justice that many say has been on the rise in rural Mexico.

The main reason, experts say: a lack of faith in the country’s police, prosecutors and judicial system.

At a time when Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar has acknowledged that corruption, inefficiency and poor training have left the nation’s criminal-justice system “in its worst crisis in modern Mexican history,” prosecutors and analysts say more and more Mexicans have taken the law into their own hands.

In response, President Ernesto Zedillo has ordered a sweeping reform of the attorney general’s office and judiciary. But Zedillo and Madrazo concede that “profound transformation” of those institutions will take time.

And although no government agencies officially record incidents of lynchings, “popular justice” is rising--especially in rural areas, where such acts tend to go unreported--according to human rights groups, independent analysts and state prosecutors.

“People feel so irate and upset by violence and crime that they go to these means to try to solve the situation,” concluded Arturo Aguilar Basurto, attorney general in the state of Mexico, where Monday’s near-lynching took place. “They have lost faith in the authorities.”

The two car theft suspects were charged with robbery and hospitalized in Mexico City with skull fractures, broken bones and missing teeth.

Lynchings have drawn increasing public attention here since August, when two dozen villagers in the southern state of Veracruz strung up a 28-year-old man they accused of raping and killing a local woman. With 300 cheering townspeople--and video cameramen--looking on, the suspect was burned to death, a horrifying scene that was replayed on national television.

The Veracruz case spawned dozens of commentaries from analysts, politicians, religious leaders and human rights activists, who almost universally blamed police incompetence and corruption as the root of such crimes.

Commentator and Roman Catholic priest Miguel Concha said at the time: “The incompetence, negligence, absence and corruption of those in authority mean they do not do their job properly.” And that, he said, invites gruesome popular justice.

Clearly, even the horror of the Veracruz lynching--25 townspeople were charged with murder and are facing trial there--failed to deter villagers elsewhere.

On Tuesday, after the near-lynching in La Purificacion, Concha said: “It is a very worrisome phenomenon. . . . It is in no way justifiable, but it should be a cry for help that is taken very seriously.”

Human rights workers in the state of Morelos said there have been several lynchings of suspected criminals there in recent months. Others were reported in the states of Chiapas and Puebla. And similar cases were recorded by rights workers in the state of Mexico.

The state negotiator who ultimately freed the robbery suspects from the villagers Monday said that he was surprised at the anger and suspicion the residents harbored for state authorities.

“I remember them saying that we were corrupt,” Deputy Atty. Gen. Sebastian Cruz Vargas said of the villagers who gathered around La Purificacion’s makeshift gallows.

“They said that no one cares about their problems and no one gives them good service. But all that is false. . . . Ninety percent of these people are ignorant. They think we’re still living in those times when they need to show force to protect their village.”

Cruz conceded that it took him several hours to arrive in the village, saying, “This is a very big state.” But he insisted that his very presence--as the chief state criminal investigator--should have sent strong signals that the villagers can trust his department in the future.

Criminologist Emma Mendoza of the National Autonomous University of Mexico agreed that part of the lynching problem lies in ignorance. “For example, a lot of people are freed on bail,” she said. “For common people, it seems as if a criminal was taken in by the authorities and then simply let go. This makes them irate.

“This is especially common in small villages where the people are interrelated or very well integrated. These villages are rather primitive, and their reaction to crime also is primitive. It goes back to the [biblical] notion of the first kind of death penalty: the stoning of a criminal to death in which each villager had the right to cast a stone.”

But Mendoza stressed that the main cause of the increase in lynchings is “the inability of law enforcement authorities to enforce the law: If they enforced the law as they should, people simply wouldn’t take justice into their own hands.”