In Latin America, Awash in Crime, Citizens Impose Their Own Brutal Justice
Article CAIRCO note:
Coming soon to a country near you
Article publisher:
Wall Street Journal
Article date:
6 December 2018
Article category:
National News
Medium
Article Body:
... Lynching is Latin America’s dark secret. The region has the world’s highest murder rate, and its highest rate of impunity. Some countries including Brazil solve just 1 in 10 murders. With little faith in the police or the courts to bring criminals to justice, mobs routinely kill suspected lawbreakers in spontaneous attacks.
Lynchings in the U.S. were historically linked to mobs of white Americans mostly killing blacks and other minorities, usually by hanging. Those peaked in 1892 with 230 people killed. It is by now a rare phenomenon and virtually unheard of in Europe....
In Brazil, mobs now kill—or try to kill—more than one suspected lawbreaker a day, according to University of São Paulo sociologist José de Souza Martins, Brazil’s leading expert on lynchings. That figure is both the highest in the world, and more than at any point in Brazil’s history, he said....
While Latin America is known for its hardened drug cartels and street gangs, the region’s lynch mobs are made up of ordinary, otherwise law-abiding citizens, from school students to old ladies. They kill with the same grisly cruelty, sometimes mutilating victims’ sexual organs in cases of suspected rape, or burning them alive in broad daylight....
In about 1 in every 13 lynchings in Brazil, the victim turns out to be innocent of the alleged crime, ...
Law-enforcement officials point to lynchings as the expression of a pathological indifference to death....
A survey conducted by a São Paulo Law School found that Brazilians have little trust in many institutions...
