MEXICO: Lynching

Brutal story here from Milenio newspaper coming out of a small town near Mexico City: townspeople lynched three guys, apparently construction workers from a nearby town.

Townspeople apparently believed they’d tried to kidnap two youths. A mob burned two of them inside their car. Another died at a hospital.

In this story, 23 people — including six women and three minors — were arrested for the lynching.

Lynchings have occurred for years in Mexico; I wrote about one in my first book, True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx. I have a file in my archives 3 inches thick of clippings of lynchings.

Unlike the lynchings in the US South, they are usually the bellow of working people who perceive, rightly or wrongly, that a crime against them is going unpunished and possibly that the criminals have protection from above. This may be the case. But sometimes, as in the case I wrote about in the state of Hidalgo, people misunderstand some remark, the word spreads, a match is held to the inflamed passions of already aggrieved people and they get together and take justice into their own hands, victimizing innocent folks.

Lynchings happened frequently in Indian communities where people are accustomed to coming together for self-protection.

Don’t know what the case is here.