WHEN JUSTICE IS MORE ABSENT THAN BLIND

The 16-year-old girl, her face already bloodied, tries to escape

but is surrounded by the mob. Minutes later her body would lie

ablaze on the ground, as the perpetrators watched her burn.

A recent series of lynchings in Guatemala has once again drawn attention to that Central American country’s reputation for violence.

News reports point to at least a score of lynchings in Guatemala so far this year, in which mobs attack, beat and often then burn to death individuals suspected of crimes.

The latest Guatemala lynching went viral in the social media, in a video that showed how a mob of at least 25 people in the village of Río Bravo first savagely beat and then burned alive a 16-year-old girl. The girl, said to be the daughter of a convicted gang member, was suspected of taking part in the gang murder of a taxi driver, allegedly for not paying a “protection fee” to the gang. She was reportedly accompanied in that crime by two males, both of whom managed to escape from angry local residents.

Observers blame a long history of civil war and subsequent deterioration of institutions for Guatemala’s increasingly violent vigilantism. According to the renowned Carter Center, founded by former US President Jimmy Carter, “The people of Guatemala endured a brutal civil war between 1960 and 1996 that resulted in the deaths of approximately 200,000 people...The trauma to the nation has been profound, and...the social fabric remains fragile due to the continued presence of armed groups operating with impunity.

“Guatemala is plagued by a culture of impunity, from individual murders to the mass killings of the civil war. According to the United Nations, 98 percent of cases never make it to a court. Since 2001, more than 2,000 women were murdered, but most of these cases were never investigated. Mass graves have been discovered since the civil war, where almost entire villages were buried; still, no one has been held responsible for these murders.”

Increasing vigilante violence would appear to be a response to such impunity. An Associated Press report from several years ago pointed to “a string of violent and mysterious killings targeting gang members and criminals in Guatemala,” which had prompted rumors of a "social cleansing," aimed at weeding out undesirable members of society.

The latest string of street lynching, like the one in which the 16-year-old girl was beaten and burned to death last week would appear to be a more open manifestation of “vigilante justice” at the hands of mobs of common citizens tired of the impunity of gang law, but who, for lack of proper institutions, have chosen the same violent course as their erstwhile victimizers.

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