day, remaining locals are slightly perturbed by the numbers of dark tourists who still cruise the town’s main street, gliding by the bank building and taking selfies, much as I did twenty years ago. The question they now ask themselves is not so much how to stop them coming, but rather, whether to cash in on their presence.
A Tragedy in Posorja: When “People’s Justice” Goes Horribly Wrong
Three innocent people were burned and beaten to death by a lynch mob in a collision between a centuries-old method of meting out justice and the lightning speed of social media mass hysteria. This crime has left a quiet town and a largely peaceful country reeling with questions over what it means to live in the twenty-first century.
The brutal tragedy that befell two men and a woman in the sleepy fishing village of Posorja on October 16, 2018, began with the three victims robbing two local women and ended just hours later after a mob of two thousand enraged citizens broke into the police station, dragged them out, and lynched them in the street.
Social media had sentenced the three to death by wrongly convincing people that they were pedophiles who had drugged and abused a local child. It triggered a traditional “people’s justice” that overwhelmed armed police and sowed death and destruction before the army brought the mob under control.
This chillingly complicated story began a few months earlier, but the events of that fateful day began to unfold when two women went to the local school to drop off their children, just like any other day. Outside the school, they were approached by a woman trying to sell them a cheap ring. The two friends declined, whereupon they were drugged, using scopolamine, a tasteless, odorless powder made from the flowers of the borrachero tree. The drug is popular with criminals throughout Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru because it temporarily “zombifies” the victims, putting them at the mercy of the perpetrator. It is not unusual for a victim to wake up hours later to find they have been raped, their bank account drained, or, in extreme cases, that they are lacking one or more vital organs. The drug can be slipped into food or drink or, as in this case, blown into the victim’s face.
Two men appeared and forced the dazed women into a taxi. They were driven to a local park, where they were robbed of two hundred dollars (the US dollar is Ecuador’s official currency) and two cell phones.
One of the women, however, suffered only minor effects from the drug and was able to escape. She called the police, who captured the three perpetrators, identified as Tonny Mauricio Pareja Valladares, forty-four; Jackeline Cecibel Mero Figueroa, thirty-five; and Ronald Gustavo Bravo Rosado, twenty-five; as they tried to leave town. The trio was taken to the local UPC (Unidades de Policía Comunitaria) station where they were to be housed until they could be transferred to the Playas judicial unit, which handles crimes of this nature. Within hours, they were dead.
The village of Posorja lies 120 kilometers (seventy-five miles) south of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, where the wide, slow-moving Guayas River empties into the Gulf of Guayaquil. Posorja has a population of only eleven thousand, but that afternoon the sleepy fishing port was rocked by a horrendous crime that rivalled anything that might occur in any major city around the world.
A horde of local citizens, inflamed by social media accounts that children had been drugged (or according to some rumors, killed), stormed the UPC building. The mob dragged the two men and the woman from the station and beat them to death using iron bars and stones, some of which had been ripped up from the sidewalks. As a result of the melee, five police officers and two soldiers were injured; a taxi, a police car, and five motorcycles were set on fire; and the police station was damaged to such a degree that it was no longer usable.
As bizarre as this incident might appear at first glance—a twenty-first century lynch mob taking justice into its own hands—there is more to the story. Although all three victims possessed criminal records, they were in no way associated with the heinous crime for which they were executed on that warm, cloudy afternoon.
A spokesperson for the police department stated: “There was much confusion about the robbery and the result turned into tragedy. The robbery suspects were being detained at the police station awaiting transfer to Guayaquil when a crowd gathered outside, shouting, ‘Kill them, burn them.’ ”
The crowd grew through the afternoon, eventually breaking down doors and windows of the station and dragging the suspects outside. According to witnesses, the suspects were stripped, beaten, and set on fire by men and women wearing masks or shirts covering their faces.
Meanwhile, looters tore holes in the roof and walls of the police station in order to gain entry. Police uniforms and equipment, radios, ammunition, even air conditioners, disappeared right beneath the noses of the overwhelmed forces.
Soldiers from a nearby army base who had been called in to assist police arrived minutes after the suspects had been killed.
How did it happen? First of all, there is a popular concept in Ecuadorian society known as justicia indígena, or indigenous justice. In 1998, indigenous justice was recognized and legalized in the Ecuadorian constitution, but the practice dates from centuries ago. When the Spanish conquered the country in the sixteenth century, they treated the indigenous people as less than human, more like animals to be subjugated and used for the benefit of the conquistadores. Understandably, the people fought back. Unfortunately, the Spaniards’ weaponry was far superior to the crude armaments of the natives, and those who weren’t slaughtered were quickly subdued and enslaved. A few groups, mostly in the remote stretches of the Andes Mountains or the Amazon Jungle, proved to be too fierce and too stubborn to be conquered. The Spanish largely ignored them and went about the business of colonizing the rest of the country with a brutal efficiency.
The latest update of the constitution, ratified in 2008 upon the election of populist president Rafael Correa, further entrenched the idea of the autonomy and rights of the indigenous peoples. Members of the indigenous population were given explicit permission to mete out indigenous justice, but with limitations. Murder, rape, kidnapping, and armed robbery are to be prosecuted by the local authorities. Punishment for less serious crimes usually takes the form of public shaming, perhaps a bit of whipping with nettles and tree branches, and, in extreme cases, expulsion from the community.
In Ecuador, only 7 to 10 percent of the population is truly a member of one of the twenty-eight groups that make up the indigenous population. It is doubtful that any of the two thousand rioters that afternoon was indigenous. Even if they had been, they were clearly acting outside the law. Yet if you talk to local citizens today, more than a year later, you will hear very little in the way of condemnation of the perpetrators of this monstrous act.
“Posorja is a peaceful town,” says resident Julio Parrales, though he adds, “People reacted violently because they are tired of justice not fulfilling its role. That is why the people take these matters into their own hands.”
Many articles and research studies have been published on this controversial subject, but Señor Parrales, in that simple statement, has clearly defined the core of the problem. Ecuadorians have little faith in the police or the judiciary system. They see and experience indifference, incompetence, and outright corruption on a daily basis.
Ex-president Correa, mentioned above, is currently living in Belgium, and a warrant has been issued for his arrest on corruption charges if he should ever return. Jorge Glas, his vice president, is currently in jail, having received millions of dollars in bribes to help Odebrecht, a huge Brazilian conglomerate, obtain lucrative public-works contracts.
Corruption is viewed as nothing more than an unfortunate
