Angry Villagers Bury Suspected Rapist And Murderer Alive With Victim

Mourners in a Bolivian village seized a 17-year-old boy who was named by police as a suspect in the rape and murder of a 35-year-old woman and buried him alive alongside her at the woman’s funeral.

About 200 inhabitants of the small town near the Colquechaca municipality in the Potosi district of Bolivia’s southern highlands became enraged as they mourned the death of Leandra Arias Janco on Wednesday evening and threw Santos Ramos into the grave, which was then filled with earth.

Prosecutor Jose Luis Barrios said Thursday that police had identified 17-year-old Santos Ramos as the possible culprit in the attack on 35-year-old Leandra Arias Janco.

Inhabitants of the Potosi district of Bolivia are often poor, scraping a living from the remains of the once-prosperous silver mine that was all but emptied by the Spanish, and lynchings are not uncommon

A local reporter for an indigenous radio station, who would only speak on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said that Ramos was tied up at the woman’s funeral before mourners threw him into the grave. Lynchings are not uncommon in Bolivia, where the justice system is often corrupt and communities are known to police themselves.

Also on Wednesday in Potosi, residents of the Quechua indigenous community of Tres Cruces stoned to death a suspected thief and burned his accomplice alive, Barrios said. The two had earlier robbed a car and killed its driver.

Mob justice: The state has sanctioned indigenous justice in Bolivia, where there is an indigenous majority, but the line is blurred when it comes to defining jurisdictional boundaries

Earlier this year, a Bolivian police officer was lynched by an angry mob after he was confused with a thief in the city of El Alto. Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous President, signed into law in 2009 a measure extending institutional recognition of ‘indigenous justice,’ but it’s difficult to define the boundaries between the indigenous and Western systems of justice.