Peruvian Protesters - photo credit - Flickr user Distra
Bolivia was the site of a truly gruesome episode yesterday, as an angry crowd took three police officers hostage, beat and tortured them for hours, and then hung them. There are dozens of lynchings in Bolivia each year, which largely reflects the absence of a functioning state-run legal system in many areas (the constant use of street protests to push specific goals is another manifestation of Bolivia’s lack of legitimate mediation mechanisms). However, this episode will undoubtedly fuel the fires of the communal/indigenous justice debate. As described several weeks ago in the Washington Post, the question is how the concept of communal justice will be melded with “ordinary justice” under Bolivia’s preliminarily-approved-but-not-yet ratified constitution, which formally incorporates elements of communal justice. The problem is that, for many, definitions of what are permissible punishments under communal justice remain ambiguous. Simply compare the phrase in the above-linked Reuters story (“in no way does [communal justice] mean physical punishment, much less an assassination”) with the characterization in the Post article (“This much everyone agrees on: The decisions are made swiftly, and they mostly involve corporal punishment, such as whipping.”). The government needs to work hard to make sure this is clarified. One the one hand, the ambiguity can be used by the mobs that now engage in acts of lynching to justify their behavior, which is clearly unacceptable from a rights perspective. On the other, the lynchings also sully the image of communal justice as a whole, which is unfortunate for Bolivia and also a political problem for the government. This is an issue that encapsulates the massive differences in perspective of the two main sides in Bolivia’s polarized body politic: one (pro-government side) looks to indigenous traditions for inspiration, while the other (the opposition side) has adopted a more “standard” Western conception of the state. This gives the communal justice symbolic weight – and means it could be difficult to resolve the issue in a rational manner.
While most attention in Colombia has been locked in on the negotiations to release hostages held by FARC rebels, a significant controversy has arisen related to land distribution among the country’s several-million strong displaced population. As Adam Isacson describes well at the Center for International Policy blog, the Agriculture Ministry announced that a large tract of land known as Carimagua that had previously been set aside for the displaced would be offered instead to private bidders. The story, broken by Colombia’s mainstream El Tiempo newspaper, set off a fierce debate about not only the specific case but the government’s general attitude toward land rights for the displaced. For background and details regarding Colombia’s displaced, click here. The CIP post has several examples of responses to the Carimagua case; yet another comes from an editorial in El Tiempo itself, which serves as a summary of how the land question has long been so vexed in Colombia (our translation):
The concept, historically established among the elites, that land is for the rich and not for the poor, is at the root of many of the country’s problems, among them the armed conflict. The concentration of property and rural inequality in Colombia are among the world’s highest. This is the fundamental question underlying Carimagua. Displacement is a complex phenomenon that demands complex solutions. But if in part it is accepted that it has been a process of plundering lands, it is decisive that that the solution lies in restitution for those who lost them.
In Peru, at least four people were killed and several hundred wounded during agriculture-related protests last week. The government’s response was to blame the leaders of the strikes, whom it characterized as terrorists. President Alan Garcia went so far as to state “I congratulate the police, it’s excellent that they defend Peru, now what we want to see is how that is translated into justice for the guilty.” As with Bolivia, Peru is utterly lacking in effective institutional channels through which to resolve disputes. And there is little doubt that demagogues, agitators, and other species of social deviants were present among the protesting crowds. Nonetheless, the president’s response leaves much to be desired, both politically and in terms of basic empathy. Aside from the questionable legality of the police actions, which warrants investigation, Garcia seems at times to think he can govern without regard to his support in rural Peru, where poverty remains massive and state presence all too rare. This attitude largely accounts for why his approval ratings have declined from initially high levels (the linked poll was urban only – the picture would be even worse if it included the hinterlands). To some degree he may even be right – ex-President Alejandro Toledo made it through the last three years of his term rarely surpassing 10 percent in approval polls. But his legacy, and Peru’s future as a relatively stable, economically growing state, is dependent on the president adopting a wider view of what is necessary to keep the country moving forward.
Regarding Venezuela, two articles by occasional intellectual adversaries reach starkly different conclusions about that country’s economic situation. The first, from the Center for Economic Policy and Research, gives a fairly detailed overview of Venezuela’s macroeconomic picture, along with selected social indicators, which the report generally portrays positively. The second, by Wesleyan professor Francisco Rodriguez, who formerly worked with the Venezuelan National Assembly, appears in Foreign Affairs and casts a heaping helping of doubt on the value of President Hugo Chavez’s anti-poverty programs. These two reports, as well as the discussion they are sure to stimulate (not least among the two authors, who have previously shared forums), will be discussed further in a later post. For now, readers are invited to weigh in regarding the relative merits of the two pieces.
