In Mexico’s marginalised communities, mob justice is replacing rule of law
- Residents of such areas often find themselves preyed on by criminals and ignored by the state, with little recourse to justice
- This sense of abandonment, coupled with a recent wave of kidnappings, robberies and murders, has driven locals to take the law into their own hands
“I didn’t want to see,” the 62-year-old storekeeper explained as she relived the moment a tide of lynchings swept into Tepexco’s picturesque Plaza de la Constitución, leaving seven alleged kidnappers dead.
Witnesses say many in this farming community felt differently and had packed the square to watch a massacre they call simply los hechos or “the events”.
The dead included three suspected gang members – one a teenager – who were dragged from a local police station, interrogated and strung up from a rusty yellow basketball hoop as the crowd bayed for justice, and for blood.
“My goodness, the 16-year-old kid, they hanged him and then brought him down – but he was still breathing. He was still alive,” Munoz recounted in horror. “And when the people saw, they started shouting: ‘Put him up again! Put him up again!’ And so they put him up again. It was terrible. We’ve never seen anything like this.”