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Lack Of Judges Leads To Lynching
By Gemma Candela for Infosurhoy.com – 18/10/2012
In the Bolivian capital of La Paz, residents hang dolls as a threat to thieves. In neighboring El Alto, the light poles also feature signs reading “Thieves who are caught will be lynched.” (Gemma Candela for Infosurhoy.com)
LA PAZ, Bolivia – In nearly half of the territory of Bolivia, justice is carried out at the community level.
Forty-five percent of Bolivian municipalities do not have a local judge, according to the Ombudsman’s Office of Bolivia. Only 23% of the country’s 337 municipalities have a public prosecutor.
Conciliation and mediation centers only exist in the country’s urban areas.
Solutions for conflicts in rural areas that do not have a judicial framework are rendered by indigenous community representatives who evoke laws and traditions that have been used in their territories for decades.
The justice system for indigenous, traditional and rural communities is officially recognized as a system on par with the Bolivian government’s judicial system, according to the Bolivian Constitution.
The Constitution, which came into effect in 2009, placed community justice on equal footing with the mainstream judicial system and the agro-environmental system, which handles disputes related to ownership, property rights and farming, as well as forestry and water use.
Taking matters into their own hands
When lynchings started occurring a little more than a decade ago, the concept of community justice began to be criminalized.
The town of Ayo Ayo, in the department of La Paz, is one of the more well-known cases of a misinterpretation of the concept of community justice. READMOREHERE
