“Are you determined to die?” a man asks a young man with a bloody face and tied with ropes from the neck. Minutes later, he would be doused with gasoline along with another young man and both would die this Saturday, burned alive by an angry mob in a village in Guatemala.
It all started with the crime of a woman who sold clothes, identified as María Marcela Lux, 47, who was attacked in the morning with bullets inside her store, located in a shopping center in Sacapulas, in the department of Quiché. , almost 200 kilometers from the capital. Despite being transferred by the Volunteer Firefighters in a delicate condition to the Quiché regional hospital, she died as a result of multiple injuries upon her arrival at the healthcare center.
The two attackers fled on a motorcycle, but shortly after they were intercepted in the San Jorge hamlet by a patrol of the National Civil Police who arrested them and took them back to the center of Sacapulas to bring them to justice, after both were identified after viewing security cameras.
However, hundreds of people prevented them from doing so, as they pulled the two young men out of the patrol car, stretched them by their legs, and threw them to the ground where they beat them without the police officers doing anything to prevent it.
Subsequently, as is usual in indigenous justice, they tied them with ropes all over their bodies and paraded them through the town. A child even went so far as to rebuke them, asking one of them “Who sent you?”, to which the young man, with a lost look and a scared face, did not respond.
“And if not, we are going to burn you,” warned the boy, infected by the angry mob that was dragging the two young people with the rope, one of them with a naked torso, while they tried in vain to avoid the pushes and blows that came. from everywhere.
All of this was evidenced in different videos recorded by the residents who lynched Víctor Manuel López Cifuentes, 25 years old, and José Alberto Gutiérrez Copen, 23, both originally from Guatemala.
Some of those who participated in the mob tried to get information from them about where they came from and who their relatives were. One man even said to one of them while they were tying him up: “Repent. Ask God for forgiveness.” While they were being dragged with ropes tied around their necks, another man warned the mob: “They are going to report them, take them quickly.”
Next, they put them on a pickup truck and, from there, there were no more videos published until the local media reported on their social networks a video in which the body of one of the alleged victims can still be seen burning. woman killers. Shortly after and when the mob had already withdrawn, the Police arrived at night to the place where the alleged hitmen were burned and murdered, located in the village of Pacuch, in Sacapulas.
The Guatemalan Prosecutor’s Office has already begun investigations to find out the reason why they committed the crime against the merchant, a sector hit by extortion under threat of death from gangs in the Central American country. Now it remains to be seen if the Public Ministry is also going to investigate the neighbors who participated in the crime against the two young people in the purest style of Fuenteovejuna in 1476.
This type of ‘justice’ by one’s own hands is common in Guatemala due to the distrust of a part of the population in justice agencies due to the impunity of many crimes and the weariness of the endemic violence that takes more than 3,000 lives each year without that no government has managed to reverse this situation.
In August of last year, a similar event occurred between the Canich village and the center of the Colotenango municipality, 300 kilometers from the country’s capital. The police had captured three men after several residents handed them over after accusing them of the kidnapping and murder of an 11-year-old boy.
The agents only had to transfer them to the corresponding court, so that it could decide whether to order their entry into preventive detention, as established by ordinary law. However, at night a mob of 6,000 people decided that the three captured were not going to face justice, but their ‘justice’, so, after beating them, they doused them with gasoline and burned them alive until they were burned to death. remaining unrecognizable, just as happened this Saturday with the two young people.
The last lynching in Guatemala that had worldwide repercussions was that of Domingo Choc Che, in the village of Chimay in the municipality of San Luis, 400 kilometers from the capital.
A mob accused this naturopathic doctor and indigenous spiritual guide of witchcraft, for which they doused him with gasoline and set him on fire until he died charred to death in June 2020. For these events, two women and a man were sentenced a year later to 20 years of incommutable prison for the crime of homicide.
The most relevant case occurred in 2015 when a 15-year-old teenager was murdered in the middle of the street in Río Bravo, in Suchitepéquez, at the hands of 1,000 people who participated in the fatal attack. On that occasion, they took her to the center of her town holding her hair and there they threw stones at her, beat her and ended up burning her alive in front of everyone and without any police officer coming to her aid.
To commit this crime, they accused her of having participated, along with two other young people, in the murder of a motorcycle taxi driver, although, as happened with the crime of the three alleged kidnappers, no one presented evidence against her, not even one. report to the police. This crime was recorded on video and posted on the Internet, where the moment in which she was doused with gasoline and burned to death could be seen without any type of censorship. “Pour more gas,” one person shouted.
