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09/19/2004:

"Bolivian peasants turn to lynch law"

by Reed Lindsay
The blood has been washed away but the blackened concrete below a broken lamppost in this sluggish town's main plaza is an inescapable reminder of the grisly lynching that took place here this summer.

The mayor of Ayo Ayo, Benjamín Altamirano, was hanged from the lamppost and set ablaze. The post mortem suggested he had been severely beaten.

Apart from his family, no one mourns for Altamirano in Ayo Ayo, a poor rural municipality an hour's drive from La Paz on the windswept Altiplano plain, homeland of the Aymara people. In fact, most people in the town approve of the killing. No one has claimed responsibility, but the authorities have arrested at least 10 suspects.

'Altamirano was corrupt, just like the rest of the politicians,' said 59-year-old tailor Emilio Mamani as he walked through the plaza. 'We told him if he did not keep his promises we would take more drastic measures. We told him very clearly. But he would not listen.'

The lynching came less than two months after Aymara people in a village in neighbouring Peru lynched a mayor also accused of corruption. And it won't be the last, warn Aymara leaders. Fed up with corrupt, unresponsive government institutions long controlled by a white and mestizo elite in La Paz, the people of the Altiplano are taking justice into their own hands.

Residents of Ayo Ayo defend the killing of Altamirano as the rightful exercise of communal justice, a homegrown legal system practised semi-clandestinely in the region since the time of the Incas. Critics say the killing is little more than savagery.

What is certain is that, less than a year after thousands of Aymara peasants and urban slum dwellers staged massive road-blocking protests that drove Bolivia's President from power, the harsh Altiplano remains a redoubt of fierce anti-government defiance and, some analysts say, the most tangible threat to the precarious administration of interim President Carlos Mesa.

At various times in recent years, Aymara peasants have expelled police, judges and prosecutors from Ayo Ayo and other towns. Some are demanding self-rule.

'We Aymara carry rebellion in our blood,' said Ramón Coba, who heads the leading Ayo Ayo peasant organisation. 'Bolivia is totally corrupt, not just the mayor. All of them should be finished in the same way, if not burnt then drowned or strangled or pulled apart by four tractors... It's the only way they are going to learn.'

Ayo Ayo is steeped in revolt. The municipality is the birthplace of Tupaj Katari, a legendary warrior who led an uprising of thou sands of Aymara peasants against Spanish colonialists in 1781 before he was captured and executed. The lamppost where Altamirano was hanged stands in the shadow of a towering bronze statue of Katari.

Full Article: Guardian UK