"Community Justice, " Ancestral Rights, and Lynching in Rural Bolivia. (January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Yates, Donna
• Is Part Of: Race and justice. Volume 10:Number 1(2020:Jan.)
• Page Start: 3
• Page End: 19
• Publication Date: 2020-01
• Subjects: Indigenous people -- race/ethnicity -- Latin Americans -- race and policing -- lynching -- race and death penalty -- community corrections -- race and corrections; Crime and race -- United States -- Periodicals; Discrimination in criminal justice administration -- Periodicals; United States -- Race relations -- Periodicals; 364.089
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368717713824
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2153-3687

Abstract

Lynching in Bolivia has been portrayed as a largely routinized and primarily urban occurrence that is a direct response to the state's inability to provide security. Using a recent case of rural lynching as a starting point, I will evaluate the idea of rural Bolivian lynching in Indigenous communities as vigilantism. I contrast what little is known about rural lynching in Bolivia to the known pattern of urban lynching and ask whether these are distinct phenomena. Finally, I discuss the idea of ancestral validation and the punishment rights implied by a western-style state sanctioning aspects of non-western justice. I ask, do our existing models for such extreme cases as fatal vigilantism exclude lynching in rural Indigenous Bolivian communities? At the heart of this discussion is how we define a cultural practice versus how we define deviance in a multicultural society; how we nest authority structures and how we afford them legitimate rights to the use of force and other extreme control measures.