DANIEL M.

GOLDSTEIN
College of the Holy Cross

"In our own hands":

Lynching, justice, and the law in Bolivia

A B S T R A C T
Vigilantes in the marginal communities of a Bolivian city take the law into their own hands both to
police their communities against crime and as a
way of expressing their dissatisfaction with the
state and its official policing and justice systems.
In this article, I examine an incident of vigilante
violence (lynching) in one such Bolivian barrio to
explore the ways in which vigilantism acts as a
moral complaint against state inadequacy, challenging state legitimacy and redefining ideas about justice, citizenship, and law in the process. I also analyze the range of discourses that surrounds
lynching in contemporary Bolivian society, exploring the interpretive conflict that results as barrio
residents attempt to counter official representations of the meaning of vigilantism in their
community,

[violence, vigilantism, legal anthropol-

ogy, citizenship, Bolivia, the Andes]

On Friday, March 10 of this year, at approximately 10:30 a.m., the senora

Sonia D., 48 years old, with her two children Sandro, 18 years old, and
Monica, 17 years of age, left their home in Cruce Taquina and traveled to
Villa Sebastian Pagador, so that the daughter Monica could collect money
from her former live-in lover Nelson H., arriving at the location at 11.00 in
the morning, they went up to Nelson's house, and were told that he was not
in, so they opted to wait and moved one block away from the house, during
which time the senora Sonia D., with her son Sandro, went into a thicket of
bushes to attend to their biological necessities, leaving Monica alone, and
she, taking advantage of the solitude of the place and seeing a house
completely unprotected, opted to enter the dwelling of senor Jose C, breaking the glass in the window, and succeeded in entering, removing a radiotape recorder, a gas tank, a small stove, blankets and clothing, then her
mother and brother returned from the bathroom and were surprised to find
Monica with these bundles, in that interim a resident of the place, Ana de
V., realized that a robbery was taking place, and gave shouts of alarm and
in an instant almost immediately the residents of the place gathered, armed
with shovels, wires and stones, trapping the thieves and beating them with
the aforementioned objects, withfistsand kicks, after which they tied them
to a high-tension tower, where they cut off their hair, blindfolded them,
insulted them with coarse words, attacking them they tried to get them to
confess to other robberies that had been committed in the area, after which
they doused them with gasoline, first they set fire to Sandro who screamed
in pain, this happened at 1:00 p. m., at which time police officers arrived and
disrupted the lynching of the three, rescuing them from the mob of enraged
people, who then threw stones at the police breaking the windshields and
glass of the vehicles of Radio Patrol "110" and destroying the cars' metal
plating, after which the rescued people were taken to Hospital Viedma,
Emergency Section, where they were given a meticulous examination, two
of them remained in the hospital, Sonia with injuries, lesions and severe
burns and Sandro with injuries, lesions and severe burns, the latter remains
hospitalized, in the men's surgical ward.
In addition... in the place where the incident occurred nobody wants to
furnish any information about the events, to the contrary threats have been
received to the effect that if any authority were to go to the area he would
receive the same punishment as the thieves.
Report of the investigating officer, Policia T^cnica Judicial, Case no.
2700451, Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 5,1995 (my translation, [sic] throughout)
Ameriam l-thnologist 30(1 l ^ ^ M . Copyright 2()(>:i, American Anthropological Association.

Lynching, justice, and law American Ethnologist

Hatred and truculence: it was as though the labourers had

at last realised that they were not Englishmen with rights,
but slaves; that their demand for the modest and subaltern
life in a stable hierarchical but not in principle unjust
society had been a mistake, because the rest of society did
not accept that there was justice and that they had rights.
Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude, 1968
ynchingslinchamientos or ajusticiamientos, the
murder or attempted murder of suspected thieves
by an angry mobare occurring with increasing
frequency in the peripheral settlements ringing
the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia (Action Andina
n.d.). In 2001, groups of enraged community residents carried out more than 30 such lynchings, typically citing police
corruption and lack of access to formal institutions of justice
administration as the primary factors motivating their violence. Six years earlier, one of the first lynchings occurred in
the urban settlement of Villa Sebastian Pagador, on
Cochabamba's far southeastern fringe. As recounted in the
police report above, this incident involved not only the attempted execution of three accused thieves but also a violent assault by neighborhood residents on police officers
who responded to the incident. Attempting to account for
this violence after the fact, community residents explained
that, if they were to have any hope of seeing justice done,
they had no choice but to take the law into their own hands.
In this article, I explore the significance of this claimwhat
it says about the relationship between state law and local
people's ideas about justice, rights, and citizenship and
about the kinds of expectations that poor and marginalized
peoples have of the "newly emerging democracies" (Caldeira and Holston 1999) in which they now find themselves.
Anthropologist John Comaroff (1994) has argued that
law, as a source of power for the ordering and symbolic construction of social life, is, not surprisingly, an important
arena of contestation between social groups. This is a critical observation, reflecting the changing view of law within
sociolegal studies.1 Rather than regarding law merely as a
body of codes, a means to settle disputes, or a system for
controlling behavior (law as "the will of the State," in Radcliffe-Brown's [1940:xxiii] terms), analysts now emphasize
what Merry (2000) has identified as "the cultural power of
Jaw", its ability to produce meanings, shape identities, and
define relationships in the context of state power, violence,
and terror (in both colonial and postcolonial situations; see,
e.g., Isbell 1994; Poole 1994; Rappaport 1994; Warren 1993).
Law in this sense is historically constituted, its practice and
discourse infused with the power to create or change social
reality, while it remains subject to discursive challenge
(Conley and O'Barr 1998; Hirsch 1998; Philips 1994; Starr
and Collier 1989; Yngvesson 1993). This perspective has led
to an anthropological understanding of law as an important
site of political struggle, as differentially empowered groups

contest the ways in which society is ordered and represented (Coutin 2000; Lazarus-Black and Hirsch 1994; Merry
1995). As the socially disadvantaged begin to criticize and
advocate for change in the prevailing order, they frequently
turn to the discourses and practices of the legal realm for
ammunition in their struggle: "The crucial challenge we
face," Comaroff suggests, "is to establish when and why
some seek legal remedies for their sense of dispossession
and disempowerment; when and why others resort to illegalities, to techniques of silent subversion or to carnivals of
violence" (1994:xii).
Responding to this challenge, I detail the panoply of
competing interpretations offered by observers of and participants in one such "carnival"the attempted lynching of
suspected thieves, described in the police report above, that
occurred in the urban barrio (settlement, neighborhood) on
the outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia, in which I was doing
fieldwork in March of 1995. Acknowledging the horrific violence of the lynching itself, I analyze the prevailing discourses about lynchings in Bolivian media and official legal
circles as well as those deployed by the vigilante actors
themselves, examining the ways in which these discourses
intersect, overlap, and blend to produce compelling narratives about justice, power, and law in a context of urban migration and marginality. What emerges from this analysis is
a picture of vigilantism as more than simple "mob violence,"
the spasmodic reflex of enraged sociopaths bent on retribution (cf. Thompson 1971). Rather, I suggest that we regard
such acts as a form of political expression for people without
access to formal legal venues, a critique of the democratic
state and its claim to a rule of law. Through such violent
practices, the politically marginalized find an avenue for the
communication of grievances against the inadequacies of
the state's official legal order, while at the same time deploying the rhetoric of justice and law to police their communities against crime. As was the case with the 19th-century
English peasants described by Hobsbawm and Rude, violence emerges as the socially subordinate and politically
and economically powerless attempt to communicateto
themselves as well as to those power holders whom they regard as having failed themtheir grievances, their anger,
and their political potential.2
In Bolivia, the absence of what is generally referred to as
seguridad ciudadana (citizen security) is an important component of what people call "la Crisis" (the Crisis) facing Bolivian society today. As the Bolivian state has wholeheartedly pursued a neoliberal democratic model emphasizing
free market reforms, privatization or "capitalization" of
state-owned industries, and the withdrawal of the state
from social service provision, escalating levels of crime and
violence, particularly in the marginal zones of the nation's
cities, have produced heightened fear, anxiety, and social
tension among the populace. The Bolivian national police
force is widely viewed as corrupt, and the judicial system,

23

American Ethnologist Volume 30 Number 1 February 2003

never a model of efficiency, is almost entirely unavailable to

the many people in need of its services. Globalization of the
U.S.-sponsored "war on drugs" has placed additional burdens on an already beleaguered Bolivian justice system, filling the nation's prisons with petty drug offenders and creating an enormous case backlog in the court system (Laserna
1995). Prosecuting the drug war has also led to worsening
police corruption, as the heavy sentences associated with
conviction under the draconian Law 1008 intensify the levels of bribery and extortion to which the accused are willing
to submit in order to secure their liberty (Andean Information Network 1993). Violations of human rights by state
authorities and violent clashes between police and coca
producers have also intensified in recent years (Farthing 1997).
In Cochabamba city, levels of violent crime, police corruption, and the exasperation of people confronting these
conditions have likewise mounted. The promises of political
candidates to enhance "citizen security" ("Our government
will give security to the people," boasts Ronald MacLean of
Accion Democratica Nacionalista, "and will make the delinquents nervous, very nervous" [Marinkovic Uzqueda2002])
are regarded with scorn in the marginal barrios of
Cochabamba, whose residents are quite familiar with the
daily consequences of the neoliberal model. In Villa Pagador, for example, a total of three police officers are stationed full time in the barrio, and rather than patrolling the
streets, they stay close to their station house on the corner
by the school, responding laconically to complaints brought
to them by residents. Meanwhile, gangs of youths roam the
unlit barrio streets, making travel after dark hazardous for
the average barrio resident. Murders, rapes, and other violent crimes are common in the barrio, as are alcoholism, domestic abuse, and abandonment. Because most people
work in the city center, they must leave their homes unattended during the day and so are vulnerable to the predations of thieves, who often steal the most basic of household
items: clothing, food stores, canisters of cooking gas. For
people who can count themselves among the poorest in a
country ranked among the poorest in the Western hemisphere, such losses are devastating. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that people in these communities are increasingly looking for alternatives to the state's own system of law
enforcement: "When the institutions of order fail to provide
proper arbitration of conflict, legitimate forms of revenge,
and security, private citizens are likely to act on their own"
(Caldeira 2000:209). In neoliberal Bolivia, where the ethic of
privatization has been elevated to something akin to a national religion, taking the law into one's own handsthe socalled privatization of justiceis an ironic response to the
lack of official state law enforcement (Caldeira 1996).
In what follows, I emphasize two distinct yet interwoven themes. I first consider the relationship of vigilantism to the law, looking to what it can tell us about local conceptions of justice, crime, and punishment and how these

24

conceptions come into conflict with formal, institutionally

derived understandings of these same issues. The second
strand of analysis examines the rich semantic field in which
vigilante violence occurs and is rendered meaningful, looking at the ways in which different interpretive frameworks
connect and conflict as people try to make sense of and publicly represent vigilante justice. Indeed, as an ethnographic
analysis shows, the struggle to define publicly what a particular act of violence "means" may be as contested as the
act itself, as different forces debate and attempt to act on the
messages implicit in violent practice. Reflecting as they do
the relative power of the parties articulating them, constructions of events "that become officially or broadly accepted
are usually far removed from the actual precipitating incidents and from local interpretations of them" (Brass
1997:5). That is to say, whereas government or media interpretations of vigilante violence readily become accepted as
definitive accounts by the general public, the vigilantes
themselves, already acting from a position of disadvantage
vis-a-vis the formal realms of economic and political power,
must invest extraordinary effort to have their interpretation
of an eventwhat it meant, why they acted as they did, what
they hope to get out of itheard and acknowledged. The introduction of alternative readings of events into the discursive arena can "hold profound political implications for any
state, but especially for fragile democratic states, where this
discourse often reveals deep cultural cleavages in the meaning of citizenship, civil rights, and legitimate state action"
(Nagel 1999:150). Examining the process by which this interpretive struggle unfolds is one of my intents in this article;
revealing the discursive complexity that exists within the
most seemingly (but never actually) homogeneous social
arena is another.

Locating vigilantes
Although characterized as occurring "outside the law" (Harris 1996), vigilantism"taking the law into one's own
hands" in order to achieve some political end (Brown 1975;
Rosenbaum and Sederberg 1976)is not necessarily antagonistic to the power of the state but, rather, presupposes
its existence. Vigilantes are "autonomous citizens"
(Johnston 1996) whose actions seek to compel the state to
live up to its own claims of legitimacy by providing security
and order for its citizens (Huggins 1991). In other words,
vigilantes in contemporary urban Bolivia are not simply "resisting" the state in order to create an autonomous polity
unto themselves. Rather, what they reject is their marginalization from the benefits promised by the modern democratic state, including security for persons and property
(Caldeira and Holston 1999); it is precisely because the state
has failed to protect its citizens from crime that local people
justify collective violence in their communities. Vigilantism
in this context may be understood as a political or moral

Lynching, justice, and law American Ethnologist

statement that challenges state legitimacy and the official

claim to a "rule of law" (Dworkin 1986; Pinheiro 1999; Sunstein 1996), not to overturn the state but, in classic Hobbesian fashion, to recall it to its legal obligations, its social contract with its citizens (Abrahams 1998; Souza Martins 1991).
In Latin America, where the discourse of democratization is
belied by the reality of the neoliberal state's apparent refusal
to provide services such as an effective judiciary and honest
police protection, vigilantism is a powerfully visible expression of the reality of indigenous people's exclusion from the
so-called democratic transitions that have been so widely
celebrated in media and government circles (cf. Linz 1996;
Mainwaring et al. 1992; O'Donnell 1999). It also stands as a
refusal to accept such exclusion, as people threaten to construct alternative systems for the exaction of justice, based,
they claim, on their rights as citizens to protect their communities, their property, and their families from predators
(Benevides and Fischer Ferreira 1991; Weisberg 1992).3
Taking the law "into one's own hands" is a communicative act for those rendered voiceless by the state precisely
because of vigilantism's mimetic potential, its ability to reproduce official rhetoric about law and justice while refracting back to participants and observers the inherent violence
of the state system itself.4 As sociolegal scholars have
pointed out, "law and order" as delivered by the state is typically represented in official discourse as the only defense
against the chaos and violence that would exist in its absence (Sarat and Kearns 1996:2). But the modern state and
its rule of law are in fact predicated on violence, the establishment and ongoing maintenance of state order requiring
violence or its implicit threat (Coutin 1995; Sarat 2001a,
2001b; Starr and Collier 1989). The very existence of the
state, as Weber (1947:156) famously argued, its ability to
designate a territory and subject the inhabitants thereof to
its "compulsory jurisdiction," depends on the state's ability
to identify itself as the only source of legitimate violence in
society, to define its law and the enforcement thereof as legitimate while consigning all other forms of violence to the
realm of irrationality, of savagery, of chaos (Sarat and
Kearns 1992:5; Wolff 1971). In Bolivia, for example, where a
nominally democratic state only recently emerged after
decades of authoritarian rule (following the "incomplete"
national revolution of 1952 [Klein 1992]), state law and order
have long been underwritten by violence, both in the domestic and international political arenas.5 Often, this has
taken the form of state-sponsored violence as a means to repress other, unsanctioned or subaltern efforts to challenge
or pluralize the political order. In a context in which violence so clearly is foundational to and inseparable from the
practice of official state law, it remains a legitimate recourse
for other social forces that would exercise it for their own
purposes (cf. Cover 1986; Derrida 1990; Greenhouse 1992).
As an effort to claim the democratic rights of citizens by
violating the basic human rights of its victims, vigilante

violence is inherently contradictory. On the one hand, vigilantism in contemporary Bolivia represents, to use LazarusBlack's phrase, a kind of "pragmatics of inclusion," a practice by which political actors attempt to "claim new rights
and negotiate structural transformations that enable them
to enact those rights" (2001:389). By decrying the state's neglect of their rights as citizens to security and safety in their
homes and communities, vigilantes in Cochabamba, Bolivia, are attempting to call attention to their predicament,
to insert themselves forcibly into the official justice system
of the state by their insistence on citizenship, a rhetorical
cornerstone of the state's inclusive politics (part of what
Trouillot [2001:132] calls its "identification effect"). At the
same time, however, vigilantism marks a challenge to and
rejection of the state and its official justice system (Foucault
1980) by proclaiming for people themselves the right and
the capability of making justice "by their own hands" (including the right to administer capital punishment).6 If a
monopoly on the "legitimate use of physical force" (Weber
1958:78) is the defining characteristic of the modern state,
then efforts to "privatize" the administration of justice and
the exaction of punishment pose direct challenges to state
authority and legitimacy (Caldeira 2000).7 Vigilante violence
thus represents a simultaneous embrace and rejection of
the official order; it reaffirms the power of the state to enforce the law, while at the same time suggesting that justice
may be attained apart from the law, that the two are, perhaps, separable (contrary to what official state ideology insists) and indeed may at times be in opposition.8 Vigilantes,
in their role as autonomous citizens, are thus also "insurgent" (to use Holston's [1999] term), for their actions raise
the possibility that legitimate citizenship itself may be derived outside of or apart from the state, which has forfeited
the moral authority to bestow it (Pardo 2001) .9
In what follows, I offer a historical and ethnographic
framework within which competing interpretations of vigilante violence in Bolivia can be understood and evaluated. I
examine the recent history of the southern zone of Cochabamba city (the zona sur), its growth and development over
the last 30 years, and the formation of "illegal" or "marginal"
barrios within this sector. The discourses of illegality and
danger posed by migrants to Cochabamba that were established during this period of the city's history have had important and lasting consequences, providing an interpretive
context for later acts of vigilantism in the zona sur. I then examine these discourses, reflecting on the ways in which the
media have perceived the violence and the ways in which local interpretations of the attempted lynching in Villa Pagador respond to and attempt to counter these dominant
representations.10 What emerges is a picture of intense social conflict, a landscape in which physical, structural, and
ideological violence are intimately conjoined.

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American Ethnologist

Volume 30 Number 1 February 2003

On the margins of urban life

The problem that most troubles the inhabitants of "Sebastian Pagador" is the insecurity in which they live....
The residents of the more distant areas report that in the
early morning hours a group of low lifes marauds through
their neighborhood.
Los Tiempos, June 25, 2001
The attempted lynching that took place in Villa Pagador on
March 10, 1995, was not an isolated incident. Rather, it is an
example of a rapidly emerging practice of vigilantism by the
residents of poor barrios in response to rising crime levels in
the southern zone of Cochabamba and the apparent inability or unwillingness of the state to police their communities
effectively. According to reports collected by the daily newspaper Los Tiempos between January and July of 2001, some
thirty incidents of lynching or attempted lynching occurred
in Cochabamba, most of them in the marginal communities
of the city's southern sector.11 Within that sector, as a recent
Los Tiempos article reports, Villa Pagador is one of the two
"most dangerous zones and where the most delinquents
have been detained" (20011). What is unclear from this statement is whether Villa Pagador should be considered dangerous because of the many "delinquents" found there or because of the violent nature of the pagadorefws themselves,
who are prone to lynch thieves without waiting for the
authorities to enforce justice.
This conception of the zona sur as a place of danger,
disorder, and violence is widespread in public discourse
throughout Cochabamba, and lynchings are taken as an indicator of the inherent viciousness of the people who live
there. This discourse has historical roots, having emerged
over the course of the last 30 or 40 years, as the barrios of the
zona sur have formed and begun to experience exponential
growth on the margins of Cochabamba city. Prior to 1950,
the area to the south of Cochabamba's old colonial center
was sparsely populated and largely rural in character, the
population of the entire city numbering only about 80 thousand people (Centro de Estudios de Poblacidn n.d.). This
changed, however, following the national revolution of
1952. With the agrarian reform of 1953 breaking up the estates and putting an end to feudal relations of production in
the Cochabamba valley, Cochabamba city and its enormous
Cane ha (outdoor market) took on greater importance, as
the new class of peasant smallholders sought markets for
their agricultural produce (Solares Serrano 1986). Throughout Bolivia, the urban centers began to experience unprecedented growth. Between 1950 and 1976, the population of
the city of Cochabamba more than doubled, numbering
204,684 by the end of that period (Centro de Estudios de
Poblacion 1993). The nature of this population growth had
changed along with the rate of that growth: Whereas prior to
1950 the greater part of the small migrant population had

26

been drawn from the rural areas of Cochabamba department itself, by 1976 the majority of migrants arriving in
Cochabamba originated from Bolivia's high, cold altiplano
departments of Potosi, Oruro, and La Paz (Aguilo 1985).12
This trend continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and
by 1992 the urban population of Cochabamba had reached
407,825 (Instituto Nacionalde Estadistica 1992).13
The municipal government of Cochabamba (the alcaldia) responded to this rapid expansion and change in
composition of its urban population with a series of measures intended to control and regulate the new arrivals. During the 1950s and 1960s, the municipality drew up and attempted to implement a Piano Regulador (Regulatory Plan),
which identified areas of the city that could be settled by incoming migrants and designated other areas to be used as
parks, farmland, roadways, or sites for public buildings (Urquidi Zambrana 1967). To the urban planners, such "green"
or public areas were essential to the "rational" growth of the
city. They anticipated that leaving such spaces unpopulated
would serve to limit the number of people who could set up
residence in a given area, thus controlling population
growth. At the same time, such open areas would enable
Cochabamba to retain its long-standing civic identity as the
Ciudad Jardin (Garden City) of Bolivia, with parks and green
spaces to serve as recreation areas where citizens could enjoy nature within the confines of the city (Urquidi Zambrana
1986). To the migrants, facing a grave housing shortage and
uncommitted to the maintenance of Cochabamba's urban
identity, such green areas were nothing more than vacant
lots that the city unfairly kept them from settling. Invasion of
land and (what Holston [1991] calls) the "autoconstruction"
of housing soon commenced, and incoming migrants, organized into sindicatos de migrantes (unions), began to
transform the cityscape by constructing sprawling, unregulated communities.
The formation of barrios by the migrant unions met
with a great outcry from the native Cochabamba population. The invasion of the green areas was characterized in
the press as an attack on the body of Cochabamba by an
alien force, threatening the very life of the city.14 Like bacteria invading a vulnerable host, the migrant groups were portrayed as precipitating the destruction of Cochabamba with
their dirty, dangerous out-of-placeness (cf. ColloredoMansfeld 1998; Weismantel 2001).15 The migrant settlers
were painted as "bad citizens" and selfish violators of the
public trust, thieves of public spaces and transgressors of
urban rationality, turning parks and farmland into settlements for their own interests (Urquidi Zambrana 1986). The
process of urban expansion and settlement, governed by its
own laws of availability and obliging need rather than the
bureaucratic rationality contained in the Regulatory Plan,
was characterized by government officials, media commentators, and native cochabambinos as "irrational," "anarchic," and "absurd" as well as deeply threatening to the city

Lynching, justice, and law American Ethnologist

and its inhabitants (cf. Lobo 1982; Orlove 1994). The response of the alcaldia was to declare all of the southern zone
of the city "illegal" and thus to exclude it from membership
in the city proper, denying to its residents those city services
(including such basics as water, sewers, and police protection) ordinarily provided by the municipality.16
It was within this context that Villa Sebastian Pagador
came into existence. Located on the far southeastern periphery of the city of Cochabamba, the barrio was founded
in 1977 by a group of Aymara and Quechua migrants from
the altiplano department of Oruro, seeking a better life in
the mild climate of the Cochabamba valley (Goldstein 1998).
After a period of temporary residence in rental properties
throughout Cochabamba city, these migrants (most of them
expeasants displaced from rural livelihoods or urban
tradespeople relocated from Oruro city) got together and
bought a parcel of land on the outskirts of town, naming
their new settlement in honor of Oruro's prerevolutionary
hero, Sebastian Pagador.17 Ignorant of the municipal government's Regulatory Plan, however, the migrants had unwittingly founded their new community on agricultural land
that the city had not intended to be used for urban habitation. Thus, Villa Pagador was designated an "illegal" or
"clandestine" settlement by city authorities.18 However,
spurred on by a strong cadre of leaders in charge of the local
junta vecinal, or neighborhood council, the barrio became
politically organized, and early on in its history was active in
securing, through informal channels, local improvements
that could not be formally acquired. By establishing ties of
patronage with individuals within the municipal government and by seeking assistance through contacts with nongovernmental organizations, barrio leaders were able to secure for Villa Pagador development aid and services that the
municipality was unwilling to provide (CERES/FORHUM
1993).
For example, one of the most conflictual issues in the
southern sector of Cochabamba is access to water.19 In addition to its natural dryness (scarcity of surface water is compounded by frequent droughts in the Cochabamba valley),
the zona sur suffers from a lack of potable-water delivery
systems, construction of which requires a large public investment that has long been lacking because of the "illegal"
designation of the communities of this sector.20 Nevertheless, in the early 1980s a group of men in Villa Pagador got
together to strategize ways of bringing a water system into
the community. One of the men, it turned out, had a compadre de bautizo (a ritual kin relationship formed through
sponsorship of a child's baptism) who was fairly highly
placed in the city's water department (later called SEMAPA).
And so barrio leaders began a campaign of persuasion
aimed at this individual, attempting to impress on him Villa
Pagador's need for water. After about a year of regularly visiting the offices of the water department to make their pitch,
the men of Pagador were rewarded: It seems that the World

Bank had come to Bolivia, looking for a marginal barrio in

which to install a water system, and had contacted the
Cochabamba water department seeking site recommendations for this pilot project. The compadre in the water office
immediately put forth the name of Villa Pagador. People in
the barrio insist that Pagador was chosen because of its
reputation for organization and internal cohesion, qualities
that the World Bank supposedly looks for in a "collaborator"
community. But they also joke that the compadre had gotten so fed up with frequent visits from the Pagador delegation that he put their name forward to get them off his
back.21 Whatever the actual motives of the parties involved,
the fact remains that today Villa Pagador is one of the only
barrios in the zona sur to have its own water system, independent of the city.22
It is through actions such as this that Villa Pagador has
come to possess a reputation in Cochabamba as an organized and highly effective community, politically progressive
and active in its own development. This reputation coexists
uneasily (and somewhat contradictorily) with Villa Pagador's other reputation as a marginal barrioimplying poverty, backwardness, and criminalityimputed characteristics that it shares with other illegal barrios of the zona
sur.23 It is by maintaining the positive side of its reputation
while working to counter the effects of the negative side that
barrio leaders have been able to secure such benefits as the
water project described above. However, Villa Pagador (reflecting the larger growth patterns of the city of which it is a
part) has itself grown tremendously over the last 25 years
and today is the home of some twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. The consequent socioeconomic, cultural, and religious diversity that has emerged in the community has
produced internal tensions over a variety of issues, with
conflicts erupting especially between those living in the barrio's center (many of them families of the original founders
and leaders of the community) and more recent arrivals
from the countryside or from other Bolivian cities, who live
on the least-developed fringes of the original community/4
Despite its progress in a number of areas, Villa Pagador
still suffers from a lack of many important public services,
particularly police protection. Many barrio residents regard
the lack of attention they receive from the national police
force as a significant indicator of their marginal status vis-avis the city and the Bolivian nation. As mentioned above,
only three full-time police officers are stationed in the barrio, and Villa Pagador frequently suffers from robberies and
other crimes against property as well as incidents of personal violence such as rapes and murders. These are particularly recurrent in the newer, more peripheral sectors of
the community, where homes are frequently left unattended during the day while their owners are at work in the
city center. Lack of public illumination in these sectors contributes to the incidence of violent crimes committed at
night, when the dark barrio streets are virtually deserted.

American Ethnologist Volume 30 Number 1 February 2003

People's complaints to the authorities generally fail to produce results, underscoring the widely held belief that the
police themselves are in league with the criminals, looking
the other way when they commit crimes or releasing them
in exchange for a small bribe. Crimes that are reported to the
police typically go uninvestigated or unsolved and rarely
find their way to court. Barrio residents cite this lack of attention and honest service to explain the police department's inability to identify a suspect in the murder of a
young barrio resident in February of 1995, a few weeks prior
to the attempted lynching described in this article. Their
sense of their own insignificance in the eyes of the state,
measured by their vulnerability to crime, conditions local
people's responses to the lack of police protection in their
community and sets the stage for the reaction in Villa Pagador to the capture of the thieves and the attempted lynching.

Interpreting lynchings
Apparently, Bolivian sociology has a new object of study:
the lynching. It reveals the level of social degradation to
which Bolivian society is descending.
Yuri Torres, 2001
Most residents of Villa Pagador accept the police report's
version of the sequence of events relating to the attempted
lynching of March 10, 1995. Three individuals were apprehended in broad daylight, stolen goods in hand, on a street
in one of the poorest sectors of Villa Pagador. An alert neigh
bor, noticing something strange going on in the house next
door, began shouting the alarm. Others, hearing her cries,
began to blow whistles and, in seconds, a crowd gathered,
seizing the astonished thieves and tying their hands behind
their backs with plastic strips. (One of the thieves recounted
in her statement to the police that she had been captured by
a "mob" of people, appearing out of nowhere "like ants.")
The prisoners were marched up a hill to a high-tension electrical tower, where they were tied up, insulted, beaten and
stoned, their hair was cut off, and, finally, they were doused
in gasoline. One of them was set on fire by the angry crowd,
his skin falling from him, in the words of one woman, "like a
potato peel." He reported to the police that, had his plastic
bindings not melted in the fire, allowing him to roll on the
ground and extinguish the flames, he surely would have
been incinerated.25
Shortly thereafter, the police arrived to disrupt the
lynching. First on the scene were the three local police officers, who ran the length of the barrio from their station near
the plaza, only to be showered with stones and abuse by the
barrio residents. These officers retreated and called in reinforcements, who arrived in patrol cars, dressed in full riot
gear. These policemen, too, were attacked by stone-throwing people in the crowd, and stones shattered the windows
of three of the police cars parked at the bottom of the hill

28

where the attempted lynching was taking place.26 At some

point, a van from a local TV news station arrived, and, according to one report, this vehicle also was stoned by the
crowd (Opinidn 1995:3B). The police responded more
forcefully following this attack and dispersed the crowd with
tear gas and police dogs.
Although presented in official police language, the
breathless style of the investigating officer's report (presented above) captures the texture of the event: the outrage
of the barrio residents, the terror of the victims, the bewilderment of the police. The protagonists of this particular,
official narrative are the police officers, who arrive on the
scene in the nick of time and rescue the victims from the
people's rage. Although the three thieves are the official suspects named in the police report, the real criminals, the report implies, are the people of Villa Pagador, inflamed with
passion and bent on revenge, who take the law into their
own hands and interfere with the authorities' attempts to
restore order. The barrio residents' disrespect for the law
and the people who enforce it appears to be demonstrated
in the last paragraph of the report, which describes the residents' lack of cooperation during investigation of the case
and the threats received by the police warning them to stay
out of Villa Pagador. These themes were picked up by the
news media, which characterized the lynching as an act of
savagery, committed by people with no decency or respect
for the laws of civilized society.
As mentioned in the previous section, Villa Pagador and
other barrios of the zona sur are widely regarded in the better parts of Cochabamba as "dangerous," with the source of
this danger being both the people who live there (themselves criminalized in public discourse) and those who commit crimes of person and property against them. The conception of the marginal barrio as a "dangerous place" was
presented to me on several occasions during my original
field work in Cochabamba (1994-96). Friends in the city center would often caution me against working in Villa Pagador
and were aghast at the thought that I lived there with my
wife and infant son.27 "They'll set you onfire!"I was warned,
with only a hint of ironic humor implied in the suggestion.
Others more intimately involved in the criminal justice system shared this perception. The district attorney in charge
of prosecuting the near-lynching in Villa Pagador was extremely cooperative in my attempts to learn more about the
case, sharing with me the official police records cited in this
article; she also shared with me her personal opinion that
the root of the problem was that esa gente (those people)
have no respect for justice, by which she meant the police
and the judiciary. A secretary in the DA's office told me that
she had heard Villa Pagador mentioned on the nightly news
and would be too terrified to go there herself. It would appear that even in the halls of justice itself, people harbor
fears of the lawlessness of the margins.

Lynching, justice, and law American Ethnologist

Perceptions and prejudices such as these, historically

constituted, color and condition the ways in which vigilante
violence, subsequently dehistoricized, is perceived by people in the government, the media, and the better parts of the
city. This is evident in newspaper interpretations of vigilantism in the barrios of the zona sur, many of which employ a
discourse similar to that used to characterize migrant settlers in an earlier period of the city's history. The same people once accused of bringing "chaos" and disorder to
Cochabamba, violating the norms of urbanization, threatening the very life of the city with their reckless settlement
patterns, now are accused of disordering the justice system,
whose fabric of laws and regulations is seen as binding together the human community. Described as an "attack on
social institutions" {Los Tiempos 2001c), the violence of
lynching seems to threaten to undermine social order entirely and so is perceived as an assault on the democratic nation. For example, sociologist and editorial writer Torres observes that the phenomenon of the lynching "is an example
of democratic retrocession," which "should serve as a red
light causing us to stop and reflect on this problem, unless
we want to end up with a society devoid of any juridical
regulation" (2001). Justice and law are the province of the
state, according to this discourse, not of a mob. "We cannot
punish crimes with crimes," remarks one commentator:
Society cannot sanction acts which by their commission
violate what is called in law Due Process because constitutionally speaking, only the jurisdictional body can and
should try someone accused of committing a crime and
determine a discontinuance (by declaring his innocence) or even his eventual condemnation. [Gutierrez
Sanz2001]
"Nobody can take justice into their own hands," chief of police Col. Hernan Miranda more prosaically reminds us. "We
have judges and prosecutors for that" {Los Tiempos 200If).
Criminal behavior, including lynchings, is portrayed in
the media as moving Cochabamba even further from what it
formerly was, a peaceful city with a quiet, harmonious public face, the garden city of Bolivia.
The tranquil and secure city, chosen by so many as a
place to relax, which Cochabamba once was, seems to
be a thing of the past owing to the amount of delinquency and the macabre crimes that have occurred in
the last few months, which not only trouble the population but provoke a reaction, in various cases leading to
justice by one's own hands (justicia con sus propias
manos). [Los Tiempos 200 le]

The romanticizing of the city's past, it must be remembered, recalls an era prior to the migration boom of the last
three decades, before the arrival of rural migrants who expanded and diversified the city. Now vigilantism is described

as a reflection of the migrants' disrespect for the laws and

institutions of civilized society, a "sign of barbarism," a
practice "typical of the intolerant mentality of the Middle
Ages" {Los Tiempos 20016). Another commentator remarks,
"In the movies of the Savage American West the sheriff appears, just in time, and gun in hand confronts the mob that
wanted to hang the presumed bandido. 'We'll hang him after a trial'he warns them . . . Here (in Bolivia) things are
more savage, and the police arrive late" (Pena Cazas 2001).
Imagining a conversation with his "fat aunt," a lady who "divides her time between the club, the beauty parlor, and her
commentaries on virtually everything and nothing at all," a
media analyst gives us some insight into how these images
of primitive savagery find their way into the discourse of upper-class cochabambinos. Reflecting on one particular
event in the recent spate of lynchings, this writer envisions
this fine lady telling him: "The incident seems to me atrocious, an embarrassment, hijo, something out of a truly underdeveloped country, full of savages, what would the Chileans say, ;ay hijo!" (Gonzales Quintanilla 2001).28
Similar things were being said about the attempted
lynching in Villa Pagador in 1995, provoking strong reactions among the barrio populace. People in Villa Pagador
expressed incredulity and outrage at the journalists' reports
and news commentaries that described the barrio residents
as "savages," decrying those who were using the episode to
destroy the barrio's good name. Criticism of the press coverage of the lynching was extended in people's conversation
to a more general critique of the media as an institution and
of its failure to speak on behalf of the poor people of the
marginal barrios. The leaders of the barrio were particularly
vocal in their denunciations. Don Lucho, head of the parents' group at one of the local schools, complained to me of
la prensa amarilla (the yellow press) that reports on the
marginal barrios when something bad happensa murder,
a robbery, or some violent eventbut otherwise only reports on issues of concern to the q'aras (Quechua: whites;
rich people). At a leaders' meeting called to discuss the
event and its consequences, my compadre Nestor, his normally placid demeanor evaporating, described bitterly a report on the national radio network Metro-Policial that had
characterized the barrio residents as crazed savages, completely out of control, and Villa Pagador as a dangerous
place no sane person should visit. This report also made the
criminals out to be victims, he said, describing the people
who were burned as chicos (kids) and painting the barrio
residents as the real criminals. Another television news report had featured a call-in program, in which residents of
Cochabamba (i.e., those with both TVs and telephones,
which most barrio residents lack) had phoned in to denounce the residents of Pagador as heinous savages.
The barrio's good reputation for community organization
and collaboration was threatened by this media criticism. In
the days following the attempted lynching, Villa Pagador

29

American Ethnologist Volume 30 Number 1 February 2003

was abuzz with discussion and analysis of the event, in particular, the effect that the incident would have on the barrio's reputation in greater Cochabamba. As discussed
above, although widely viewed in the city as a "marginal
barrio," illegally settled by thieves of public space, Villa Pagador also has a reputation in Cochabamba as a highly organized and progressive community, politically active in
making demands of the local authorities and in trying to
bring needed services and development initiatives into the
community. To this end, individual male barrio leaders rely
on the public perception of Villa Pagador as a community of
good citizens and willing collaborators, people who are capable of participating in self-help development schemes.29
Many of these leaders were thus fearful that the negative
reputation Villa Pagador seemed to have acquired after the
attempted-lynching incident might imperil these other efforts and that NGOs and government officials would begin
to regard the community as an enemy of the state rather
than a good collaborator in development enterprises.
Thus began a local effort to counter images of the barrio
being produced and disseminated through channels outside of local control. Barrio leaders and residents offered
their own narratives and interpretations of what took place
during the attempted lynching and what its larger political
significance was, whenever possible seeking avenues to present this interpretation to a wider audience. These efforts
mostly targeted the media (see below), but in my role as ethnographer and author, I, too, was offered "insiders' " interpretations of events.30

The view from the barrio

If you as the authority do not make justice, then we are
going to make it with our hands.
Celestino Loayza, resident of Villa Pagador
Although admitting that he did not witness the lynching
firsthand, Celestino Loayza, a local leader, recounts the
event in the following manner, offering an account that differs in many respects from the one contained in the official
police report cited at the beginning of this article:
These little thieves have always tried to harm humble
people, no? Because they have no feelings. And besides,
this is their work. They never want to work, to make
sacrifices. So, they look for the easiest thing to do
But also the people, all the residents of Villa Pagador,
how many times have we caught [thieves], and delivered
them to the police, to the National Police, no? To the
National Guard. But this National Guard doesn't respond like it should. They hold him in prison, the thief,
then, he pays a few pesos.... So from that perspective
they [the police] are also participants in the crime. And
that's why Villa Sebastian Pagador reacted.... And the
police, truly, instead of defending the pueblo they go and

30

defend the wrongdoers, against the pueblo, no? And

suspecting that the police were opposed to the pueblo,
the pueblo reacted.
Then, the police called in reinforcements from the central station, so that they'd have more officers there, no?
And they called them in from the central station, and
there came a large number of soldiers, and they released
tear gas, and after that those rockets that they have, and
they released those. And seeing these abuses, the pueblo
rose up, see? Then they rose up. And they reacted with
the only weapon that they had to use, in their hands: the
stone. So the police began first, releasing tear gas, and
after that the people began to react. And they rose up,
with stones. Then, after that, they brought in police dogs
to pacify all those people. But the pueblo joined together
tremendously then, and there was a confrontation between the groups. Even the dogs, even the dogs were
stoned. But in that way they decided, when they [the
police] went to defend the wrongdoers, then they [the
pueblo] decided to set fire to that wrongdoer. In that
way, they came to be burned.... Because the people
themselves said . . . "Where is the justice? What justice
are you going to make?" Then, "If you as the authority
do not make justice, then we are going to make it with
our hands." Now," If you want to take us in,fine,take all
the people." That was the key.
So that was the reaction of the people. We defended the
pueblo itself.31
A rhetorical element deployed in this account is the
trope of community, glossed here by the narrator's frequent
use of the term pueblo. Although generically translatable in
locational terms, meaning simply "town" or "village,"
pueblo also refers to people, the inhabitants of the space so
identified, as well as to the "community" that joins individuals to each other and to the place they inhabit (Nugent 1993:
34). The term also has a much broader range of meaning, in
some contexts used to refer to larger sociopolitical collectivities, including the city (the pueblo of Cochabamba) and
the nation (the pueblo boliviano, or Bolivian people), although in these cases, too, it conveys the sense of unified
community implied in reference to smaller groups (cf. Anderson 1983; Peattie 1968). Even more poignantly, the term
pueblo resonates with a long-standing collectivist ideology
in Bolivian politics, in which el pueblo is consonant with
"the people," the bedrock of the national social formation.
By invoking this term, Celestino suggests that it is "the people" themselves who are the ultimate arbiters of justice, unified and mobilized against the injustices they confront at
the hands of the police. This gives the residents of the barrio
the moral high ground, for it is as "the people" that they are
justified in taking matters into their own hands. At the same
time, use of the term pueblo enables the narrator to be deliberately vague, making reference to "the people" in a general

Lynching, justice, and law American Ethnologist

collective sense without having to identify which specific

people he is actually talking about (and thus guarding their
identities against retribution, as I discuss below). In describing the violence as a community action, the narrator shifts
voices to speak authoritatively from the position of the community as a whole: the pueblo, a single entity with a single,
unitary voice. In juxtaposition stand the thieves, described
as malhechores (wrongdoers) or antisociales (antisocial elements) people without commitment to the pueblo and so
indefensible and deserving of any punishment the community sees fit to give them.32 So, too, are the police deserving
of just retribution, for their failure to protect the pueblo is a
failure in both the local and national senses of this term: the
police, as an arm of the state, are charged with defending
"the people," from whom they ultimately derive their legitimacy. The pueblo speaks to the police, chastising them for
their failure to meet their responsibilities to the community
and warning them of the potential consequences: "If you as
the authority do not make justice, then we are going to make
it with our hands."
One thing that distinguishes the attempted lynching in
Villa Pagador from most other instances of this kind is that,
in addition to exacting justice on the bodies of suspected
criminals, the residents of the community also launched a
violent assault against the police who came to disrupt the
lynching. As newspaper accounts indicate, mistrust of the
police and suspicions about their allegiances are endemic in
the marginal barrios of Cochabamba, and people in Villa Pagador share this mistrust.33 In Villa Pagador it is widely accepted that the police are in league with the criminals, taking money to look the other way in the event of a crime.
Many people told me that, on the day of the attempted
lynching, the crowd was certain that, once back at the station, the thieves would have bribed the police into freeing
them, allowing them to prey once again on the residents of
Pagador: "They are accomplices of the delinquents," says a
lynching participant, "the police are accomplices." In Villa
Pagador, some people assert that the burning never would
have taken place had the police not shown up and attempted to defend and rescue the criminals. People thus regard the police as another threat to their security: Although
officially an arm of the law, the police themselves are seen
by barrio residents as lawbreakers, incapable of providing
justice because they, too, are unjust.
Accusations of corruption are made against perceived
violations of social norms and appropriate standards of conduct; corruption is not inherent in an action itself but depends on the social position and group identification of the
person making the accusation (Herzfeld 1992:77). Designations of corruption also may be applied to behaviors that appear to violate local standards of accountability, when public officials are viewed as working against the interests of the
people they are supposed to serve:

Expectations of "right" behavior, standards of accountability, and norms of conduct for state officials, in other
words, come from social groups as well as "the state."
Sometimes these standards and norms converge; more
often, they do not. Thus, there are always divergent and
conflicting assessments of whether a particular course
of action is "corrupt." [Gupta 1995:388]
From the perspective of state law, a police officer intervening to stop an illegal lynching is acting in accordance with
his assigned duties, but a barrio resident perceives this same
action as a violation of the moral precepts of the community, a defense of the thieves against the people, and thus as
a corrupt action. The resident's perception also is informed
by the bribe taking generally imputed to corrupt individual
officers. This set of perspectives creates an impossible situation for the police, who disrupt the lynching in the name of
law and order but, in doing so, appear to the people in the
crowd to be rescuing their accomplices, the thieves whom
the crowd is attempting to punish (cf. Brass 1997). In trying
to impose the state's law (including right to a trial, i.e., due
process, instead of summary judgment) by rescuing the
thieves, the police's actions put them in opposition to the
pueblo. From a police perspective, the subsequent attack
demonstrates the lawlessness of the crowd; seen differently,
police corruption has delegitimized the law as a means of
securing justice, requiring the crowd to pursue it through
other means.
This idea is expressed in Don Celestino's narrative, in
which the sequence of events is critical to accomplishing
one of the narrator's rhetorical objectives: establishing responsibility. Contradicting the official narrative contained
in the police report, the burning in Don Celestino's account
did not occur until after the police came to defend the
wrongdoers, thus transferring responsibility for the event to
the police authorities. Such a rhetorical move is important
as a way of protecting individuals and the community itself
from possible retribution, both from "delinquents" returning to seek revenge on the people of the barrio and from the
police seeking to do the same. By transferring responsibility
for the burning from the people of the community to the police, Don Celestino intends to stave off the possibly violent
retribution by the state against the people who challenged
its authority. He asserts that only after the police had demonstrated their complicity with the thieves, thereby opposing themselves to the interests of justice, did the people respond by assaulting the police.
Afinalpoint to make about this narrative is what it reveals about the political effectiveness of unanimity in acts of
vigilante violence.i4 Don Celestino's narrative closes with
the pueblo defiantly reminding the authorities of their inability to prosecute the community for the attack and of the
"safety in numbers" that the group action provides. ("Now,
'If you want to take us in, fine, take all the people.' That was
the key.") This is complemented by the refusal on the part of

31

American Ethnologist Volume 30 Number 1 February 2003

those involved to identify individual perpetrators: The lament that one hears in the final lines of the official police report ("in the place where the incident occurred nobody
wants to furnish any information about the events") attests
to the effectiveness of this tactic (cf. Scott 1985). In his analysis of the "arts" of political resistance, Scott (1990:140-152)
has identified anonymity as one of the "elementary forms of
disguise," whose strength lies in protecting the powerless
from possible retribution by the powerful whose authority
they have challenged. Unanimity seems a parallel to this
technique, likewise functioning by disguising the identities
of individual perpetrators of violent or resistant acts: If the
police cannot single out individual actors to punish, they
have no recourse but to abandon prosecution of the entire
incident. Owing to their effectiveness as a form of protection
in a context of state-sponsored violations of human rights,
techniques of unanimity appear quite frequently in accounts of lynchings in the Cochabamba valley.35 The failure
of authorities to prosecute or punish vigilantes has itself
been interpreted as an indictment of the police and the formal justice system; as one federal prosecutor puts it: "If the
State were more efficient in the investigation of these acts, it
would jail all those who instigate and carry them out, but
since the legal entities charged by law with guaranteeing
personal security have failed to do so, they lack the moral
authority to try the lynch mob, and so these cases fizzle out
and are forgotten" {Los Tiempos 2001 i).
Despite their patent illegality, lynchings remain impervious to the efforts of the Bolivian legal system to prosecute
via formal legal channels both the people doing the lynching
(los linchadores) and those whom they lynch (los linchados).
This is because of features of the law itself. According to the
New Penal Procedural Code (Nuevo Cddigo de Procedimiento Penal) of the Bolivian state, intended to limit arbitrariness in police procedures, to investigate a crime the police
need proof that a crime has been committed and someone
to make a formal accusation (Los Tiempos 2001m). This requirement means that the linchadores are rarely if ever arrested, because the police are unable to establish proof of
the culpability of any single individual. Similarly, because
they lack faith in the honesty of the police and the efficacy of
the justice system, the linchadores rarely make formal denunciations of suspected thieves to the authorities, preferring to send a warning to thieves by means of the lynching
and hoping to recover the items that were stolen from them.
Also, were an individual to step forward to make a formal
denunciation, he or she would in effect surrender the cloak
of anonymity conferred by membership in the crowd and
thereby would risk prosecution as a linchador. Thus, despite
the obvious violence and other illegalities that have occurred, in the absence of a perpetrator and an accusation,
the police and the district attorney find themselves unable
to gather sufficient evidence to establish the existence of any
crime at all. This situation is especially galling to the legal

32

authorities, because it essentially confirms the critique of

the justice system as ineffective and inadequate. The police
are forced to concur with the vigilantes' own reading of their
behaviorthat is, that no crime has been committedbecause the formal requirements of the system prevent an investigation, thus compelling the police to participate publicly
in their own discrediting.36
"So that was the reaction of the people," Don Celestino
confirms, "We defended the pueblo itself." Throughout his
testimony, one is struck by the speaker's effort to construct
through narrative a coherent, unified community that is
both actor and object in the lynching/self-defense action of
March 10. I have suggested that this is in part a strategy to
protect individuals from retribution through the posture of
unanimity. But equally important is Don Celestino's effort
to represent the community to outside audiences as unified
and indivisible, capable of securing its own defense in much
the same way as it once secured its own water supply. Don
Celestino's narrative may be read as an effort to put forth an
interpretation of the attempted lynching that counters the
prevailing discourses of violence and savagery circulating in
the media and other public interpretations of the meaning
of the incident, by representing the attempted lynching as a
community effort to secure justice in the face of another
kind of violence coming from the representatives of the
state and the law. But his narrative energies are not being
exerted just to resist the authority of the state in some simple, reflexive manner. Such representations are better understood in the context of ongoing efforts by barrio leaders
like Don Celestino to foster inclusion within the city and the
state; they are part of a larger effort to restore the barrio's
damaged reputation in the aftermath of the attempted
lynching by bringing the positive aspects of local reputation
once again to the fore.

Producing and problematizing the local

The residents of Villa "Sebastian Pagador" meeting in
grand Extraordinary Assembly and confronting the events
that occurred on Friday March 10 of this year in which
unfortunately . . . enraged residents . . . decided to take
justice into their own hands
Resolve: Not to permit the
repetition of other similar acts [of thievery], as the population of this barrio is in a constant state of emergency and
therefore we cannot be responsible for the measures taken
by the residents against the delinquents . . . We want the
people of Cochabamba to know, that the residents of "Sebastian Pagador" are peaceful people, of limited economic
resources, in a place where robberies of our homes frequently occur and the authorities named by Law haven't
been able to stop these abuses that have caused us so
much sorrow and therefore we are organized and ready to
act in case of a repetition of similar acts
Should the
residents of "Sebastian Pagador" again suffer the aggressions of antisocial elements, we willriseup as one man and

Lynching, justice, and law American Ethnologist

punish this act, knowing as we do that the security forces

lack the personnel and the means necessary to do it.
"Resolution," Los Tiempos, March 22,1995
In the testimony of local leaders like Don Celestino, the
pueblo is represented as a community of unified, likeminded people acting on a shared perspective vis-a-vis
crime, justice, and the state. But this rhetorical move, politically motivated, masks a variety of interpretive perspectives
within the community itself, attention to which problematizes our understanding of the "local community" and
brings to light the various ways in which differentially positioned subjects respond to crime and acts of vigilante justice
in their midst. Attention to the ways in which this coherent
community is produced in discourse and the kinds of diversity (including gender diversity; see below) that it obscures
helps us to better understand how vigilantism is experienced by different parties to the event.
In addition to many personal accounts like Don Celestino's, the lynching met with several "official" barrio responses (i.e., statements issued by male barrio leaders in the
name of the community as a whole). The incident occurred
on a Friday, Saturday was market day, and the barrio was
absolutely still because most residents went into town to sell
or to buy. By Sunday, however, the leaders had begun to coordinate a response. By that time, much negative publicity
had come out in the press, and the leaders had realized how
much potential damage to the barrio's reputation could result. The barrio leaders met and decided that a rally should
be called for the following day (Monday) and that the commandant of the Cochabamba section of the national police
should be invited to the barrio to hear the demands of the
residents for improved police protection in the zone.
On Monday morning it was raining, and the unpaved
streets of the barrio had turned to mud. The commandant
had been scheduled to arrive at 8:00 a.m., but when he had
not shown up by 10:00 a.m., a delegation was organized to
go downtown to the prefecture, seat of departmental government in Cochabamba, to demand an explanation. The
timing of the delegation's visit to the prefecture was provident, for it happened to be covered by both the radio and
the print news media. An article in Los Tiempos (1995b) reported that the residents of Villa Pagador wanted to replace
the corrupt national police, quoting one barrio resident as
saying, "We want our own police force for our pueblo."
Meanwhile, in the barrio, the leaders' group organized an
effort to catalog everything that had been stolen from people's homes during the last few months. A partial list was
compiled for presentation to the police.37
The news coverage that the barrio residents received on
their visit to the prefecture was remarkable in that it was the
first positive coverage they had gotten from the media,
stressing the ineffectiveness of the police in meeting the
needs of barrio residents. The Los Tiempos article also

picked up on one of the key themes that the leaders were attempting to put forth to the authorities: the barrio's potential for self-reliance and collective action. Viewed positively,
this image connects with the barrio's reputation for collaboration and self-help; viewed negatively, it suggests the barrio's threatening disrespect for the authorities and the law.
The repetition of these elements of local reputation in the
news report suggests the presence of an active leader, taking
the opportunity to transmit the theme of barrio unity to a
suddenly receptive audience.38 This theme was reiterated
during the visit of the commandant, which took place later
that same day. The commandant, a colonel of the national
police, spoke to a group of several hundred barrio residents
gathered on the football field, promising to augment police
protection in the barrio and to provide a patrol car to the
area one night a week. Following his address, Juan Mamani,
a leader speaking on behalf of the community, offered this
response:
Sr. Colonel, on a previous occasion there occurred
something similar to what is happening to us now. At
that time you promised to grant us the personnel necessary for the tranquility of the barrio. Again we were
promised 24-hour protection, and shortly thereafter it
was forgotten. And these are the consequences, when
we can't count on the support of the authorities. We
understand, Colonel, that there are very few police personnel. But also it is necessary that you give them to the
areas where their protection is most required for the
well-being of the citizenry itself. The promise that you
just made, we would like to ask you very respectfully that
you fulfill it, and that here, we don't want to go to extremes, Colonel! . . . We are beseeching you that you
grant us this security. And if there is not going to be the
security that we are asking you for, Colonel, I think that
this place that now welcomes you will have to take matters in a direct form. And we don't want to do that. We
are very respectful of the authorities. We are citizens
that, we are battling here in order to be able to live. But
also we need the cooperation of you all. That is what I ask
for, as a citizen, and as a resident of Sebastian Pagador.
This speech reflects the dual themes that appear
throughout local discourse on the lynching: a desire for inclusion within the official justice system of the state, against
a willingness to take the enforcement of justice under local
authority when the legal apparatus of the state is unwilling
or unable to provide it. Don Juan, as a spokesman for the
community, invokes the inclusive discourse of citizenship
to call for improved police protection for the barrio. He follows this with the community's threat to take matters into
its own hands, directly referencing the violence of the lynching as a warning to the state to meet the needs of its citizenry
("We don't want to go to extremes, Colonel!"). Don Juan presents the residents of the barrio as loyal subjects of the state
("We are very respectful of the authorities"), an amusing

American Ethnologist Volume 30 Number 1 February 2003

irony given the steady criticism of the police and suspicion

of their legitimacy by barrio residents, but a statement that
reiterates the positive side of the barrio's reputation as a
good and cooperative collaborator. He then invokes the violence of March 10 as the predictable and coordinated response of an organized community demonstrating its dissatisfaction with the current authorities.
After the colonel's departure, an impromptu gathering
was called on the football field. Several leaders addressed
the crowd, among them Don Lucho of the parents' group
from the local school. He denounced the negative characterization of barrio residents by the news media, calling on
the pueblo to take charge of its own reputation. A hat was
passed around, and the crowd responded enthusiastically
with a flood of coins. The money was publicly counted and
displayed, its intended purpose being to pay for publication
of a statement by the pueblo itself in defense of its actions
during the near-lynching. The leaders adjourned to Dona
Lidia's pharmacy, where a small core of the local leadership
gathered to draft the statement that would be sent to the
newspaper. A number of people sat on the floor, wrestling
with the language to find just the right words to express their
intent. The result was the "Voto Resolutivo" (statement of
"Resolution") dated March 13, 1995, and published in Los
Tiempos (1995a) on March 22 of that year.
Curiously, the published resolution points out that the
great majority of the participants in the burning were
women ("los vecinos enardecidos con este hecho y que en
su gran mayoria eran mujeres"). Despite this, in the resolution the pueblo itself is conceptualized in the masculine: In
defense of itself, the pueblo will rise up as one man ("nos
levantaremos como un solo hombre") to punish those who
prey on the community. As the leaders sat around in the
pharmacy, composing the text of the resolution, the gendering of the pueblo became a point of some small contention.
Don Lucho, an agronomist and college graduate, had taken
charge of the writing, and it was he who suggested the
phrase "como un solo hombre." Seated nearby on the floor
of the pharmacy, Dona Felipa, head of the local club de madres (mothers' organization) and one of only two women in
attendance, suddenly piped up, "jComo una sola mujer!"
[As one woman.]}. All eyes fastened on her. Well, she said, not
backing down under the steady gaze of the men, everyone
knows that the women in this community participated more
actively in the lynching than the men. The men acknowledged this point, nodding their heads in agreement, but the
text of the resolution retained its masculine emphasis.
It is useful to reflect briefly on the role of women in the
attempted lynching, as it directs our attention once again
toward the struggle to construct and publicly represent particular interpretations of violence and to the heterogeneity
of perspectives that exists even within one pueblo, one "local community." Much more could be and has been said
about Andean women and the political sphere (e.g., Babb

34

1989; Paulson and Calla 2000; Rivera Cusicanqui 1996), but

here I want to refer to women's involvement in the attempted lynching in Villa Pagador as a way of pointing to the
diversityin this case, gender diversitythat exists in interpreting the violence in that one locality. It was widely acknowledged in the barrio that women were responsible for
the greater part of the violence against the thieves and that it
was a woman who threw the match that set the young man
on fire.39 Women spoke openly in approval of the violence,
saying that the thieves deserved the punishment they got
and worse. Far from expressing remorse about the burning,
many women in Villa Pagador endorsed it, fearing only that
the thieves might return to take their revenge on the community.
Although in some ways an extension of their role as defenders of the domestic unit (Navarro 1989; Scott 1994),
women's participation in the attempted lynching should
not be downplayed as merely spontaneous and uncoordinated, as though it lacked any political content. Indeed, in
their participation in and subsequent interpretations of the
lynching, women had distinct political goals that differed
markedly from those of the male leaders. Men, concerned
with the political ramifications of the act and its effect on local reputation, sought to moderate the negative impact by
suggesting that the violence, committed by women, was a
justified act of self-defense. In their public speech, men emphasized the collective nature of the violence as an expression of community solidarity, while reiterating the barrio's
continued loyalty to and acknowledgment of state authority, thereby leaving open the possibility of state support for
future projects in the barrio. Women, on the other hand, are
not involved in ongoing, formal political activities and so are
less concerned with the "good" reputation of the barrio. Still
enraged and now living in fear of retaliation, women preferred to maintain the image of the barrio as hostile to all
outsiders. Whereas the characterization of the people of Pagador as savages was, for many male leaders, a cause for
grave anger (with some even suggesting a march on the prefecture just to protest this representation of the community
in the media), women were not nearly so adamant. Many
women, in fact, confessed to me that they were not at all unhappy with their characterization as savages or the barrio as
a "dangerous place." Such an image, they felt, could only
serve to frighten off future delinquents and criminals, who
might recognize the barrio's reputation and so choose to
commit their crimes somewhere else. Some men also recognized this advantage of a negative barrio image, although
they sought to moderate it with public statements insisting
that barrio residents were gente pacifica (peaceful people)
and good citizens as opposed to savages.
Finally, it is interesting to note that this gendered difference in interpretive aims is paralleled by socioeconomic divisions within the community. The interpretive goals of
women in the barrio are shared by many women and men in

Lynching, justice, and law American Ethnologist

the poorer sections of Villa Pagador, those who are most vulnerable to crime and who participated most actively in the
attempted lynching. For these people, too, political office is
less attainable than it is for men living in the older, more established sections of the community, and their recent arrival in the city means that they are less likely to have ongoing
ties of clientage with politicians and bureaucrats in the city
center. For the poorest people, then, as for women of all social classes within the barrio, the negative side of the barrio's reputation (i.e., as a place of savagery and danger) is
more efficacious (i.e., as a tool to ward off delinquents) than
is the positive side emphasized by the male barrio leaders.

Conclusion
In an article entitled "Democracy and Violence in Brazil,"
Teresa Caldeira and James Holston (1999) observe that, despite a constitutional commitment to democratic politics
and values, newly emerging democracies in Latin America
have largely failed to institute and abide by a rule of law that
guarantees justice and protects the rights of citizens. Although by political measures (and especially in contrast to
the authoritarian regimes of the recent past), these societies
might be defined as democratic, when considered in terms
of the basic rights of citizens to justice, security, and freedom to live without fear of violence, they come up far short
of the democratic ideal. This "disjuncture" between a
democratic politics and the lived reality of fear, violence,
and insecurity for many within these democracies is characterized by Caldeira and Holston as an overall failure of "civil
citizenship," the consequences of which include
the delegitimation of many institutions of law and justice, an escalation of both violent crime and police
abuse, the criminalization of the poor, a significant increase in support for illegal measures of control, the
pervasive obstruction of the principle of legality, and an
unequal and uneven distribution of citizen rights.
[1999:692]
A critical point these authors make is that analysts of newly
democratic societies must look beyond the political to the
realm of law, not just as it is produced through executive
and legislative initiatives but as it is practiced and enforcedadequately or inadequatelyin the protection of
civil rights by the apparatus of the judicial system, namely
the police and the courts: "Such a rule of law is necessary for
full democratic citizenship, on which the legitimacy of democracy as both a political and a social project ultimately
depends... .A democracy must secure the legitimacy of law
on its own terms of citizenship. If not, it becomes discredited" (Caldeira and Holston 1999:724).
In this article, I have attempted to explore ethnographically the ways in which this failure of legitimacy is experienced
in a context of urban marginality and political discontent in

one city in Bolivia. It is worth noting that one of the key insights to emerge from a study of law and law enforcement in
a space legally defined as "marginal" is that such places
might not be marginal at all. Villa Pagador is an example.
Since the barrio's founding, it has been defined by city
authorities as "illegal," owing to the fact that its lots were
purchased and its homes constructed in violation of the
codes set forth by the city to regulate such settlements. As a
result, the people themselves came to be identified as illegal
and, as such, marginalized, effectively ignored by the state,
their petitions for legal services such as police protection left
unanswered by the legal authorities. This process coincided
with the institution of national, neoliberal programs of political and economic reorganization, which heightened inclusive democratic rhetoric although in practice reduced
state capacity for promoting legal reform and citizen security. The result is a grave crisis of confidence in the state
among this urban population, which views the municipal
and national governments as actively antagonistic to their
needs. The violence that is being perpetrated by these people, sometimes directed against state authorities themselves, is a visible expression of their dissatisfaction with the
democratic transition as it is unfolding in Bolivia today. And
so this community, like other so-called marginal barrios, is
in many ways at the forefront of the struggle for the future of
Bolivian democracy. If the state cannot secure its legitimacy
in a place like Villa Pagador through a democratic rule of
law, then it is quite likely that a democratic politics will give
way to more authoritarian measures to guarantee "law and
order" on the urban periphery. From the perspective of the
Bolivian state, resolving the difficulties posed by the people
on the margins may be central to the nation's political future.
From the perspective of these marginal citizens themselves, things are not so clear cut. The discussion presented
in this article reveals the complexity of interests and interpretive frames that surround issues of justice and law enforcement, which are operative at even the most seemingly
unproblematic level, that of the face-to-face community,
what Don Celestino calls "the pueblo." In analyzing the
struggles over meaning that follow events like the attempted
lynching, it is perhaps not surprising that there should be
differences of opinion between forces that exist at what we
might call the national and the local levels, that is, between
agents of the state and its associated apparatuses (including
the media) and members of the group that initiated and participated in the violent action, often glossed anthropologically as "the local community." What is not as immediately
evident, however, is the extent to which members of the local community may themselves disagree about the meaning
of a particular violent incident or which of several possible
meanings people in the community want to put forth as the
singular local interpretation (what I have referred to as the
"official" local response). Consensus, in other words, even at
the level of "the community," cannot be assumed by the

35

American Ethnologist

Volume 30 Number 1 February 2003

analyst, especially where questions of violence and justice

are at issue (a point that resonates with Nader's work on
"harmony ideology" [1990]). As the preceding discussion
has attempted to show, in the conflict that emerges between
rival interpretations of violence, even at the most local of
levels, particular interpretive frames may be suppressed
and others elevated, as groups and individuals within and
without the locality struggle to establish the paramountcy of
one particular narrative interpretation.
In Villa Pagador, the publication of the resolution
turned out to be the final word on the lynching episode of
1995. The sensation in the news media died out, the authorities made promises of a very limited extent that they did not
keep, and the anger of the barrio residents moderated with
time and a return to the exhausting routine of daily life. But
the representations of the barrio and its residents produced
by the news media endured, impacting the ideas that urban
cochabambinos continued to hold about the people inhabiting the city's margins. These representations returned to
the fore in early 2001, as Cochabamba once again attempted
to grapple with the issues raised by vigilante violence in the
city's zona sur. As before, this new round of lynchings seems
to confirm the fears of native urban cochabambinos that
their city is under siege by altiplano migrants, people culturally and linguistically different from themselves, who are
bringing disorder and lawlessness to the city.40
In 2001, however, a new kind of interpretive frame was
brought to bear in media analyses of lynchings, one that
resonated surprisingly with the goals of vigilantes themselves (although sometimes mixed with a dose of pop psychology, as well). For example, in an article in Los Tiempos, a
psychologist suggests that "mass hysteria" is the cause of
the lynchings, the result of living conditions that create
"grave psychosocial stress, both acute and chronic" {Los
Tiempos 2001b). Significantly, the psychologist quoted in
the article indicates that social factors may be the direct
cause of violent behavior among people of the marginal barrios where lynchings occur. This sentiment is echoed in the
same article by Daniel Moreno, a Bolivian sociologist, who
observes that one of the sources of chronic stress for poor
barrio residents is the absence of effective policing and the
failure of state institutions such as the justice system to control and punish criminals. People do not respect the law,
Moreno comments, nor do they feel like citizens or have an
attachment to state institutions: "That's why these people
take justice into their own hands" {Los Tiempos 2001b).
Some articles cite legal authorities who are themselves critical of the failures of the state justice system. One such
authority, described as an "ex-judge," comments that poverty, compounded by anxiety in the face of mounting crime,
is the real cause of the lynchings, remarking: "The problem
is that in this country justice does not exist, and the Police
have abandoned citizen security" {Los Tiempos 20{)\g).

36

This critical discourse increasingly appears in periodicals and public commentaries such as those quoted
here, as Bolivian intellectuals, politicians, and journalists,
weary of the problems brought on by the national economic
crisis of the last few years, begin to interject a new theme
into the discussion, one that reflects the inclusive political
goals of the vigilantes themselves. This shift makes the discursive picture more complex as efforts to present a more
critical sociological perspective on the lynchings sit uneasily
beside condemnations of barrio vigilantes as criminals and
savages. Criticism of state inadequacy, including attacks on
corruption, frequently appear in commentaries on national
politics and political leaders, as mainstream Bolivians increasingly express their dissatisfaction with the deep flaws
within the nation's political and judiciary systemsa point
expressed by writers advocating for a "new kind of political
leader," whose greatest challenge will be to "restore public
confidence in the political system" (Parada Mendez 2001).
This new leader will be less beholden to the old alliances and
more attentive to the needs of the "popular majority," a sociopolitical space whose parameters in Bolivia are currently
being negotiated (see Himpele and Albro n.d.). Discursive
intersections between this media commentary and the
rhetoric of vigilantism suggest that lynching itself may represent an intervention into the national political arena, an
attempt by marginalized groups to insert their voice into the
national conversation about the future of Bolivian politics. It
also suggests that as "la Crisis" continues to worsen in Bolivia, accompanied by mounting violence and decreasing
confidence in the ability of the state to control crime and
provide security, the Bolivian middle class is increasingly
coming to sympathize with the aims of the lynch mobs patrolling the barrios of the urban periphery.
Reflection on this congeries of discourse returns us to a
consideration of vigilantism as moral complaint, an expression of political dissatisfaction with the ruling regime of law
that purports to offer justice but instead brings greater injustice and suffering into the lives of those already vulnerable to criminal predations. Despite its patent disregard for
the human rights of its victims, the visceral outrage expressed
in the lynching serves as a clarion call to state officials, reminding them of their public responsibilities. It also poses a
challenge to state legitimacy, accusing the legal authorities
of neglecting the needs of the people, deploying the inclusive discourse of citizenship to forge a new kind of political
relationship between the marginal communities and the
state. Given the powerful political potential of vigilante violence and the immunity to formal legal prosecution that it
confers on its practitioners, it is not surprising that street
justice of the kind described here is increasingly emerging
as a response to state failures and inadequacies, from Indonesia (Siegel 1998) to 1-ast Africa (Fleisher 2000) to Mexico
(Fuentes Diaz and Binford 2001; Quinones 2001; Vilas
2001a, 2001b) to Fxuador (Castillo Claudett 2000; Colloredo-

Lynching, justice, and law American Ethnologist

Mansfeld 2002; Guerrero 2001). This points to new avenues

of research that should attract the attention of legal anthropologists and sociolegal scholars concerned with justice and
law in popular perspective.

Notes
Acknowledgments. The research on which this article is based
has been ongoing since 1994. Recent work has been supported by a
Grant for Research and Writing from the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation, a Richard Carley Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and a Summer Faculty
Fellowship from the College of the Holy Cross. Earlier research was
funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, FulbrightllE, the University of Arizona, andSigmaXi. During
my research in Cochabamba, I was affiliated with the Centro de
Estudios de la Realidad Econdmicay Social (CERES); I thank Roberto
Laserna, Alberto Rivera, and Humberto Vargas for their support.
Research assistance was provided by Lee Cridland, Kathy Ledebur,
Ruben Perez, and Laura Peynado; Tom Kruse and LaDona MartinFrost kept me current on events in Cochabamba. Thanks also to Rose
Marie Acha and her colleagues at Accidn Andina and to Dra. Sara
Fuentes, Agente Fiscal of the Ministry of Justice. Portions of this
article were presented at the 100th annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C., in December,
2001; thank you to Sally Engle Merry, Elizabeth Mertz, and Susan
Philips for their helpful commentary. I would also like to thank
Robert Albro, Andrew Brown, Philip Coyle, Jane Hill, Billie Jean
Isbell, Aldo Lauria-Santiago, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Susan Rodgers,
Ralph Saunders, and the anonymous AE reviewers for their comments and feedback on different versions of this material. Responsibility for omissions or errors is mine alone.
1. I am referring here to the theoretical framework of critical legal
anthropology, which analyzes issues of law within broader sociopolitical, discursive, and economic contexts, viewing the law as a
process within which both domination and resistance are possible
(Greenhouse et al. 1994; Hirsch and Lazarus-Black 1994; Maurer
1997; Philips 1998).
2. The comparison of the Bolivian case with the agricultural uprising of 1830 described by Hobsbawm and Rude" (1968) raises the
question of typology. I find it exceedingly difficult and, for my purposes, fruitless to attempt to classify lynchings like the one described
in this article as one type of public manifestation or another, a
problem of "framing" collective action (Tarrow 1994). Are they "uprisings," to use the terminology of Hobsbawm and Rude (for Latin
America, see Chasteen 1993)? Following Brass (1997), we might call
lynchings "riotous behavior" or (if we focus on the second part of the
incident described here) "police-people confrontations." More
broadly, if we consider the political significance of these events, they
might be better characterized as components of a social movement,
of the sort described by the contributors to Escobar and Alvarez 1992
or Alvarez et al. 1998. But such efforts to typologize obscure more
than they clarify. What is more relevant here is an understanding of
the violence of the lynching, looking to what Coronil and Skurski call
its "specific manifestations, to the way its effects are inseparably
related to the means through which it is exerted, and to the meanings
that inform its deployment and interpretation" (1991:289).
3. The argument I am making here is not intended to have universal application, so as to account for any violent response by a group
that feels itself to have been wronged by the powers that be. My
attempts to illuminate the events of the lynching described in this
article should not be read as efforts to rationalize it, norwould I wish

my analysis to be seen as justifying other forms of violence such as

international terrorism.
4. Tolnay and Beck (1995:90) remark on the "expressive potential"
of the lynch mob for reinforcing racial hierarchy and social norms.
5. For example, in the last several years the Bolivian state has been
engaged in frequent violent confrontations with organized groups of
peasant farmers from the country's lowland Chapare region, who
defend their right to cultivate the coca plant (the raw material from
which cocaine is elaborated for consumption in the United States)
by appealing to national sovereignty and the traditional and medicinal uses of that plant in rural Bolivian communities (see Sanabria
1997). Between November 2001 and February 2002, these conflicts
resulted in the deaths of a number of cocaleros and police officers in
the Cochabamba region.
6. In its rejection of the state, vigilantism of the sort I describe here
has certain commonalities with what Merry has called "anarchic
popular justice" (1993:47) and Cain "wildcat popular justice" (1985).
Foucault (1980:30) defines popular justice as an attack by the masses
on an enemy in reaction to a specific event or injury.
7. Options for the privatization of security like those adopted by
Brazilian elites (the "cities of walls" described so compellingly by
Caldeira [1996, 20001) are simply not available for the urban poor
(although the typical barrio residence in marginal Cochabamba is
surrounded by a high mud wall topped with the jagged edges of
broken bottles to keep out intruders). In Cochabamba today, middle-class neighborhoods, markets, and other places of public interaction are increasingly patrolled by uniformed security guards in the
employ of private firms, hired to provide order and control crime in
the absence of an effective state-run police force. For the underclasses, lynching might be seen as another type of privatizing justice
(see Benevides and Fischer Ferreira 1991).
8. In other places at other times, and in contradiction to the
above, vigilantes have been used by states to advance their own
official agendas. Abrahams's (1998:24-52) discussion of Sungusungu in Tanzania provides one example of this.
9. Another possible reading of vigilantism here suggests that people in marginal barrios are asserting a particular understanding of
citizenship, one that suggests that a good citizen is a dynamic citizen,
one who deliberately (and sometimes violently) acts to defend him
or herself and to keep the peace in his or her community. In Bolivia,
this reflects the strong-arm tactics of leaders at the national level,
who often seized power during the era of military dictatorships,
always in the name of the good of the nation. In this case, the violence
of an active citizenry or an active leader is itself opposed to chaos
rather than an indication of it.
10. As the "site and the stake" (Hall 1982) of struggles for cultural
meaning, the media are an important source of anthropological
images of both dominant and subaltern groups; "the analysis of
reports in local and national newspapers tells us a great deal about
the manner in which 'the state' comes to be imagined" (Gupta
1995:385). On the lynching as media spectacle in Ecuador, see Guerrero 2001.
11. Violence of the kind described in this article is widely referred
to as lynching or attempted lynching (casi-linchamiento), the former
distinguished from the latter by the fact that someone actually was
killed in the event. A lynching need not involve hanging to merit the
appellation; lynchings in the southern United States often involved
other means of dispensing with victims, including burning, as in the
case described here (see Dray 2002; White 2002).
One also hears reports of similar incidents occurring in the
nearby towns of Sacaba, Capinota, and Quillacollo {Los Tiempos
2000), in the countryside of the Valle Alto near Cliza and Punata, and
in the cities of Potosf and Santa Cruz {Los Tiempos 200l\).
12. People from the altiplano are often conceptualized in Bolivian
racial ideology as being of Aymara descent, although the association

American Ethnologist

Volume 30 Number 1 February 2003

of particular ethnic or linguistic groups with specific geographical

zones in Bolivia is a historical stereotype more than a contemporary
reality. For example, the altiplano department of Oruro (from which
a large number of migrants to Villa Pagador originated) lies between
the predominantly Quechua-speaking valleys of Cochabamba and
the Aymara-speaking highland communities of La Paz and Potosi
and is, as a result, a multilingual, pluricultural region. Oruro migrants, nevertheless, tend to be regarded in Cochabamba as uniformly Aymara, even to the imputation of certain "defining" racial
characteristics to individual orurenos (dark skin, e.g., or a protuberant "Aymara nose").
13. This explosive growth stemmed from a number of factors
motivating migration out of the altiplano and toward Cochabamba,
including ecological disasters (drought, animal disease) and the
national economic crisis that lasted from the late 1970s through
most of the 1980s, a crisis characterized by declining agricultural
prices, skyrocketing inflation, closing of the nation's tin mines, and
mounting international debt (Klein 1992:271-272). Many of the expeasants and ex-miners impacted by these events turned their sights
on Cochabamba (Penaloza Chej 1991). With its thriving informal
economy centered on the small-scale commercial opportunities in
the Cancha and easy access to the coca fields of the lowland Chapare
region, Cochabamba offered the promise of economic opportunity
in a pleasing climate (Escobar de Pabbn and Ledo Garcia 1988).
14. That the native cochabambinos viewed the altiplano migrants
as culturally and linguistically different from themselves intensified
the urbanires' sense of the migrants' threatening out-of-placeness.
As discussed above, migration to Cochabamba prior to the 1960s had
originated primarily from the Cochabamba valley itself, whose
Quechua-speaking vallnno population had much in common with
the urban residents of Cochabamba (including ties of kinship, clientage, and fictive kinship \compadrazgo\). With the advent of altiplano migration, however, much of it from Aymara-speaking communities, the cultural identity of the city seemed to be under assault.
15. The discourse here resonates with themes identified by Mary
Douglas (1966) as intrinsic to the definition of dirt as matter (or in
this case, people) out of place. Much newspaper commentary at the
time represented migrants as a dirty and polluting influence, their
unregulated settlement as an attack on the physical body of the city,
leaving disease and destruction in its wake.
16. In some cases, delivery of these services is becoming the work
of domestic and international nongovernmental organizations, owing in part to the constraints of neoliberal structural adjustment (Gill
2000).
17. Although many migrants to Cochabamba during this era were
ex-miners (many of them having relocated following the closure of
the national tin mines in 1985), very few former miners participated
in the settlement or subsequent occupation of Villa Pagador.
18. In addition to denial of city services, being classified as illegal
renders an individual incapable of establishing a legal claim to his
or her landholding, making that person, effectively, a squatter.
19. This situation recently reached a crisis point with the so-called
Water War of 2000, which involved massive protests against the
government's attempts to privatize the city's water supply system, a
move that would have raised water prices astronomically. Following
a scries of violent marches and demonstrations, the government
backed away from this plan, although the issue remains unresolved.
20. The inability of the state to provide services to the expanding
population on its periphery was another motivation behind the
alcaldia's decision to exclude these people from membership in the
city proper.
21. It also seems likely that, pursuant to norms of compadrazgo
relations in the Andes (typically ordered in a hierarchical patron-client fashion), the more socially prestigious and institutionally powerful compadre was rewarding his supporters and poorer relations

3B

in the barrio with a favor that only a politically influential sponsor

could provide.
22. The water system of Villa Pagador is itself one of the factors
that distinguishes established residents of the barrio from newcomers living in even worse conditions on the barrio's periphery. The
water system services only those homes that were part of the barrio
at the time of the projects implementation in the late 1980s, so that
the more recent arrivals to the community do not have water in their
homes.
23. Because Villa Pagador was originally founded by a group of
mostly Aymara-speaking people from Oruro, it is still regarded by
cochabambinos living in other parts of the city as homogeneously
Aymara, despite the great diversity of its more recent settlers. The
negative side (as I call it here) of the barrio's reputation reflects the
generally negative attitude of Bolivians toward Aymara people, who
are often seen as inward looking and reserved, tradition bound and
antimodern, tough and historically indomitable.
24. Many residents of the barrio, both men and women, work as
small-scale ambulant vendors in the city's enormous open-air market; others, mostly men, work as laborers or construction workers in
temporary, low-paying positions. A small but sizable percentage of
the population is involved in home-based clothing manufacture,
sewing pants and T-shirts with fake North American labels that are
sold throughout the city. Income levels of barrio residents range
from very poor to almost middle class, with the poorest tending to
be the newest arrivals from the countryside, who live on the least
developed land at the far southern edge of the barrio (Direccidn de
Interaccidn Social Universitaria [DISU1 1996). Spanish is spoken
almost universally in the barrio, and most adults are bi- or trilingual
in Quechua and Aymara. Church membership among the barrio
populace is similarly diverse: Although the majority of the population is nominally Catholic, evangelical churches have been present
since the founding of the community, and today the Catholic church
must compete for adherents with seven other congregations (Pentecostal, Baptist, Adventist, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, Unidn
Cristiana Evangeiica, and Assemblies of God).
25. A prominent theme in the interpretation of lynchings in the
southern United States has been to view them as a form of ritualized
human sacrifice (Patterson 1998, following ideas put forth by
Douglas 1966 and Hubert and Mauss 1964). Although I do not take
this approach here, there are some compelling parallels that would
warrant comparative analysis (e.g., Castillo Claudett 2000:222). The
ritual/symbolic aspects of lynching that find expression in other
forms of political protest in Cochabamba include the burning of a
figure in effigy at political rallies, another way in which immolation
serves as a form of symbolic communication, there again conceptualized in terms of a debate over citizenship/noncitizenship or the
unfair denial of rights to the poor and disenfranchised in national
politics.
26. Stoning has a long history as a form of collective punishment
in rural Andean society. Community members accused of violations
of local norms could be banished from the village after being stoned
by angry neighbors. The ritualized performance of the t'inku also
may be accompanied by stoning of one's opponents (cf. Platt 1987).
In urban Cochabamba, stones were the most common weapons
deployed by rioting crowds in that city's Water War of 2000, mentioned above. All of these examples suggest a broaderfieldof practice
within which the actions of the lynching can be understood.
27. The warmth with which my family was received in Villa Pagador is ample testimony to the humanity of the people there, who
are so often stigmatized as "dangerous."
28. The frequent appearance of the terms savage and savagery in
these commentaries reflects established Andean "racialized geographies" (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996), which locate "Indians" in the
countryside and "whites" in urban areas (see Weismantel 2001). The

Lynching, justice, and law American Ethnologist

depiction of rural-to-urban migrants as posing a threat to modern

urban order and rationality is linked to this characterization of migrants as savages, while also reflecting the image of the Bolivian
countryside as "backward" and "traditional," in opposition to the
modern urban center. In the history of Cochabamba, efforts to
"clean up" the city center have typically been characterized by policies promoting the removal of distinctly Indian "vices" (such as the
drinking of chicha, a locally brewed corn beer) and other unhygenic
practices to the urban periphery (Rodriguez and Solares 1990).
29. Albro (1997, 2001) describes the process by which political
identity is imagined and manipulated (to produce similar sorts of
collusive relationships as those described here) in a contemporary
Bolivian context marked by hybridity and neopopulism; see also
Healey and Paulson 2000.
30. Fortunately, I was spared the kind of soul searching that Starn
(1999) experienced following his witnessing of a lynch mob in Peru.
Although I have obtained data about the events described in this
article from a variety of sources (including a videotape of the attempted lynching shot by the TV crew that was on the scene), I was
not physically present at the time of the event. Nevertheless, I often
find myself wrestling with the moral and ethical issues raised by
studying such horrendous violence, enacted by people to whom I
feel a deep personal and professional commitment. This is a conflict
I have yet to resolve. I hope that the discussion that follows can be
read as an attempt at explanation, rather than justification, of the
lynching in Villa Pagador.
31. Although Villa Pagador is a real place, all personal names used
in this article are pseudonyms.
32. Every account of a lynching that I have read has described the
accused as outsiders to the local community. It is unclear to me what
the community's response would be to a crime committed by one of
its own members. In a way, such a thing would be a logical impossibility, in that, by committing a crime against the community, one
necessarily defines oneself in opposition to it and hence becomes an
outsider (Simmel 1971). On the question of insiders and outsiders in
a very different context, see Greenhouse et al. 1994.
33. For example, the director of the Small Merchants Federation,
Asteria Chamani, complains, "Not only do the police protect the
delinquents, but they set them free and attack us with tear gas" (Los
Tiempos 2001a). Recent exposes of massive corruption in the Bolivian national police force (including the Bias Valencia scandal; see,
e.g., La Prensa 2002) seem to confirm these suspicions.
34. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.
35. For example, in December of 1994, in the barrio Villa Exaltacidn, not far from Villa Pagador in Cochabamba's southern zone,
a group of residents apprehended a man they believed to be a thief
and, after beating him almost unconscious, strung him up in a tree.
When the police arrived to rescue the man, they were met with
insults and threats to puncture the tires of their vehicles. The commanding officer noted in his official report that when he attempted
to determine who exactly was responsible for the lynching, the
people shouted at him, "jSomos todos los responsables!" [We are all
responsible.'], making it impossible for him to identify the perpetratorsofthedeed (Policia Tecnica Judicial, Case no. 311758).
36. Other people with whom I've spoken argue that the police are
actively antagonistic to the new penal code, because it limits their
ability to use force indiscriminately by imposing legal requirements
on their investigative and coercive capacity. The police may in fact
discourage complainants from lodging formal denunciations, blaming the law itself for their failure to prosecute.
37. I helped to compile this list, using a manual typewriter to
record the testimony of losses by robbery victims. The quotidian
nature of the items stolenpropane gas tanks, items of clothing,
packages of foodattests to the direct impact of these thefts on
people's attempts to preserve basic domestic economy. The absence

of any luxury items on the list (apart from an occasional boom box)
also is telling.
38. Inviting the press to witness a lynching may be becoming part
of the routine for such events. Following an incident in a barrio on
Cochabamba's south side, where a young man was caught in the act
of burglarizing a home and verbally abused by angry barrio residents, an unidentified individual is quoted in the paper in defense
of his community: "The residents here behaved with restraint, we
didn't try to lynch him, we called the Police and the press" {Los
Tiempos 2001h).
39. This contradicts Abrahams, who comments:
I am confident that the large majority of those who are
currently and historically identifiable as vigilantes are and
have been men, and few women have apparently been
keen to stake their claim to an active share in the proceedings. It is less clear, however, that this pattern will continue
in the future. [1998:1371
40. Whether such practices as lynching may be considered part of
indigenous legal custom is the subject of future research. As Mayer
(1991) points out for Peru, whereas collective violence is often
viewed as morally justifiable as a last recourse in defense of the
indigenous community, it is not necessarily a sanctioned aspect of
indigenous law. Indeed, armed groups in rural Andean communities
have at times appealed to the "right" of self-defense to justify violence that augments their own local power at the expense of the
legally protected rights of others (Orlove 1980; Poole 1988). The
extent to which community self-policing and punishment in the
urban barrio is a direct extension of rural "tradition" is another topic
of debate by Bolivian intellectuals and the media (e.g., Los Tiempos
2001i).

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accepted December 14,2001
final version submitted March 8, 2002
Daniel M. Goldstein
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
College of the Holy Cross
1 College Street
Worcester, MA 01610
dgoldste@holycross.edu

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