Mob Justice

Before I left on the Dream of Dreams trip (see here), I had quite the adventure with one of my friends from church. It all started when she asked me to make spaghetti for her family. So we set out to get the ingredients for spaghetti a la Davielle :)

It was already a weird afternoon, being election day, which made the streets eerily quiet and abandoned. You need a permit to drive on election day so most folks just opt to stay home. You're also not allowed to drink the whole weekend proceeding an election, so all the bars are closed.

Anyway, election day caused problems for us because: Every. Single. Store. Was. Closed. Now there aren't a lot of supermarkets in Montero anyway but usually you can get what you need at the huge outdoor market . However, the market too was mainly closed but we managed to find a few stands and got everything except for hamburger (or "ground meat" as it is called here -if you ask for "hamburger" you're gonna get something with a bun).

Just as we were leaving, I see two men running straight at me. There is a look of complete and total terror on the face of the guy in the lead. Then I notice that there's a huge crowd following them. Scratch that, we're going to call them a mob. I'm starting to get a little frightened at this point because the whole gang is headed straight for me and I have nowhere to go.

They end up catching the guy right in front of me. I get a little jostled by the crowd and realized that they are all shouting "thief, thief!!" Turns out that the guy -who just lost what may have been the most important race of his life- stole a woman's purse. By this time, there's a very large man making his way through the crowd, holding a whip. I'm starting to see where this whole thing is headed and believe me, this was not something for which I wanted to be a spectator but the crowd has boxed me in. I was stuck watching.

You can guess what happened next. They didn't whip him within an inch of his life or anything but it wasn't pretty and I wish I wasn't there. It reminded me of a Bible story, where everyone gathers around while they stone a prostitute. I don't think I'll ever forget the look on the guy's face and if he happened to see the look on mine, it was absolute pity.

After a good whipping, the mob dragged him over to a policeman. I'm not sure what happened after that because I was whisked away on my friend's moto. While we were driving away, I asked her if this type of punishment was common and she told me yes. Once, she said a man did something (I didn't know the verb that she used in Spanish, but you can imagine) to a three year old girl and a mob burned him to death. I'm not sure what the crime rate is here in Montero but with punishment like that I would hope it'd be next to nothing.