The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Lynching in the heart of Chiapas: a Tzotzil community burns a man accused of robbery

2022-12-30T21:27:07.766Z


The Prosecutor's Office goes to Santiago de El Pinar and is met with the silence of the neighbors. The relatives prevented the experts from carrying out the autopsy on the body of the 26-year-old


Inhabitants of Santiago del Pinar, in the State of Chiapas, observe the charred body of the man who was accused of robbery. RR.SS.

Silence has been imposed like a heavy stone among the residents of the municipality of Santiago El Pinar, in the heart of the southern state of Chiapas.

One day after residents of the town, inhabited by Tzotzil indigenous people, arrested, tied up with wire, lynched and burned a 26-year-old man at the stake, the authorities who have arrived in the area to investigate the crime have come across an absolute muteness.

No one speaks, no one saw or heard anything.

The charred corpse was also buried in silence and the relatives did not even allow the legal autopsy.

What led the inhabitants of these lands to commit such a horrifying act?

The robbery, suppose the authorities.

The boy was accused, they say, of being part of a gang that stole cars.

And so, without proof or certainty of having caught a thief,

they took justice on their own.

The state authorities also seem to have their hands tied and are limited to accompanying the investigation that, due to "uses and customs," falls to the indigenous justice prosecutor's office.

Early Thursday morning, a group of residents of Santiago de El Pinar, located in the Chiapas Highlands, left their homes amid the thick mist that covers the area, a thick damp and cold curtain, attracted by the capture of Lucas N. The authorities have managed to gather very little about what happened with impunity on that icy night.

It has been learned that the 26-year-old was accused of robbery, his hands and legs were tied with wire, they sadistically unleashed communal fury against him and in their orgy of punishment they built a bonfire and set the bloody body on fire.

Images of the remains of the corpse circulated on social networks on Thursday morning, when smoke was still emanating.

office of darkness

, the Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos would call it, who documented in her work the brutality of the violence that can be unleashed in indigenous communities of Chiapas with a single assumption that alters the order of the area.

The news reached the halls of the state prosecutor's office in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital, which mobilized officers from the Preventive Police, the Investigative Police and experts to try to clarify the atrocious event.

But when the law is imposed by its own hand in these communities, little margin is left for the authority in its effort to clarify what happened, establish responsibilities and bring the guilty to justice.

The press release from the Prosecutor's Office shows the fiasco suffered by those responsible for order: when they began to inquire among the neighbors what they saw or heard, they found a heavy silence, as resounding as it was eloquent.

The officials said that the residents "were unaware of the reasons for his death."

Faced with the silence of the group, the police –always accompanied by traditional authorities, according to the same note– arrived at the municipal cemetery, where the family of the murdered young man was burying the body.

The experts requested authorization to carry out the legal necropsy, but there is no court order that prevails in the area: they refused.

"However, when carrying out a recognition of the body, the elements of the Investigative Police and experts verified that it presented third-degree burn injuries throughout its anatomy," they explain from the prosecutor's office.

The authorities have had no choice but to report that they will continue with their investigations "in accordance with the murder protocol with the purpose of establishing responsibilities and that this act will not go unpunished."

Juan Manuel Zardain, who works as a human rights defender in Chiapas, resorts to a play on words to explain the daily life of these communities: “In those towns, authority has little authority and they rely on their traditions.

Their local authorities have more power than the civil ones, those of the State, ”he says in a telephone conversation.

Those who watch over human rights, like Zardain, also have little room to work.

He says that they visit the area, try to gather information and little else.

It only remains for them to make a report and present recommendations to the local leadership.

"These are towns where things happen outside the law," he says.

With resignation, Zardain says that it is possible that what happened will go unpunished.

“Investigations become slow and confusing,

The incident in Santiago El Pinar is reminiscent of a similar one that occurred last summer in the community of Papatlazolco, in the state of Puebla, where Daniel Picazo, 31, a political adviser, was lynched and burned.

The family said that the young man, originally from the area, had to get lost among the indigenous communities, where he was intercepted by a mob that ended his life.

The neighbors accused him of wanting to take a minor, although the authorities did not take that story for granted and no one could prove something similar.

Lynchings are common in Mexico, where in many rural communities the neighbors take the law into their own hands.

A study by the Universidad Iberoamericana in Puebla shows that in that State between 2015 and 2019, 78 people were lynched.

The lynchings, explain the researchers in that study,

They are related to poverty and inequality, but also to the abandonment that causes many communities to impose a law that, without trials or formal investigations, punishes for what are supposed to be serious offenses.

And once that justice is imposed, all that remains is to remain silent.

An eloquent, ghostly, corrective silence, like the one that prevails in Santiago El Pinar.

subscribe here

to the EL PAÍS México

newsletter

and receive all the key information on current affairs in this country

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-12-30

You may like

Life/Entertain 2024-03-12T19:23:08.408Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.