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Peru mayor flees lynch mob
30/04/2004 11:55 - (SA)
Tilali, Peru - Just days after highland Indians in an Andean town beat their mayor to death, accusing him of corruption, some 800 Indians in this village held five councillors hostage after their mayor fled, fearing he also would be lynched.
Hundreds of residents from Ilave - a town near Lake Titicaca, about 910km southeast of the capital, Lima - killed Mayor Cirilo Fernando Robles on Monday after accusing him of corruption. Rioters then rampaged through the town, attacking a police station with fire bombs.
More than 200 riot police established control the following day. Meanwhile, mayoral duties were handed to Robles's deputy, who is under investigation for allegedly inciting the mob that killed him.
But the killing frightened Melecio Larico Quispe, the mayor of Tilali, a village of five thousand people bordering Bolivia on Lake Titicaca's northern shore, police Captain Abner Bardales said from the regional capital city of Puno.
He said Larico Quispe fled his village on Tuesday and took refuge in the city of Juliaca after he too was accused of corruption.
Bardales said village councillors had taken charge of the municipal office, but a gathering crowd in Tilali's main square claimed they were holding the five officials hostage.
"We have been protesting for 18 days, demanding the resignation and removal of the mayor," said Ruben Coasaca, who identified himself as president of the village council.
Hear grievances
Coasaca and other villagers accused Larico Quispe of embezzling public funds and threatened to harm the five councillors if a government delegation did not arrive by Friday to hear their grievances.
Although police were nowhere to be seen on the main square Thursday, Bardales said 15 officers were sent on Wednesday night to back up eight border police. He said there were no plans to send more reinforcements because police believed the stand-off was a ruse to draw attention to the villagers' complaints.
It is not uncommon in isolated Indian communities for residents to mete out vigilante justice against local officials accused of corruption, beating them or parading them naked through the community.
Peru has a centuries-old history of a dominant white political elite based in Lima failing to address the needs of a desperately poor Indian population in the rural highlands, anthropologist Rodrigo Montoya noted in a recent interview.
President Alejandro Toledo's government has tried in the last two years to create local government control in rural provinces, but his critics charge the political makeover has been haphazardly planned and inadequately funded.
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