Lynchings in Mexico, a setback in the rule of law | Camila Gómez Case

“Girls don’t touch each other,” shouted a crowd of people as they beat Ana Rosa Díaz Aguilar to death in the city of Taxco, northern Guerrero state, in Mexico. The woman was one of those accused of kidnapping and killing Camila Gómez Ortega, an eight-year-old girl who had been invited by her daughter to play at her residence last Wednesday to play in a pool. The case brings back to the table the growing trend of taking “justice into one’s own hands” in the region, before any investigation is carried out.

The evidence that directly linked Díaz Aguilar as a suspect in the murder of Gómez’s disappearance were two video camera recordings from the houses surrounding her residence in the La Florida neighborhood. In these images you can see that the girl did arrive at Díaz Aguilar’s home to meet her friend, even though the woman told the Díaz Ortega family that the minor never arrived at the home.

In the videos you can also see Díaz Aguilar taking out a large bag of garbage and a basket of clothes that he climbs into the trunk of a taxi. Gómez Ortega’s family would have been extorted to recover the minor, as they commented later. At this moment the alerts began. The girl’s body was found hours later on the Taxco-Cuernavaca highway, around the early hours of Holy Thursday.

As soon as the videos came to light, the residents of the La Florida neighborhood demanded that the authorities prosecute Ana Rosa Díaz, her partner and her son, who also participated in the alleged plan to kidnap and murder the minor. A crowd warned that if they were not arrested, they would seek “justice into their own hands.” Around noon on Thursday, the residents of the sector became fed up with the lack of response from the authorities. According to local media, Gómez’s relatives took the murder suspects out of his residence and exposed them to neighbors, who began to attack them.

Ana Rosa Díaz received several blows and, although she was taken to the hospital for treatment, they were so accurate that they caused her death. Her son, Alfredo, was also declared brain dead on Friday after the beating received by his neighbors. Even the defendants’ dog, a pit bull, according to accounts reported in X, was attacked by neighbors after trying to defend its owner while she was brutally beaten. The animal was caged and taken to a group of animal rights groups.

Although the Attorney General’s Office of the State of Guerrero promised an investigation into the case, the image that was already captured in this episode is, once again, that of the inaction of the local authorities, who remained static when the mob broke out violently against the suspects in Gómez’s death.

Lynchings, like the one that occurred in Guerrero this week, are a violent phenomenon that is increasingly worrying in Latin America, but particularly in Mexico, where the numbers grow every year. Only between 2016 and 2022, the country recorded 423 cases of lynching and another 196 attempted lynchings, according to a report by researchers from the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), Raúl Rodríguez Guillén and Norma Ilsa Veloz Ávila.

“These executions (…) manifest a high degree of moral indignation (…) and express the crisis of authority or loss of confidence in the procurement and administration apparatuses,” the researchers state in their article.

Mexican sociologist Julián Flores also told La Razón that these actions multiplied by up to five between 2020 and 2023, given the problems of the judicial branch, the increase in crime and the exhaustion of society. According to the expert, at the beginning of the decade, between 20 and 35 cases were documented annually, but by 2023 the figures rose to almost 100 cases, which include the death or disappearance of the accused.

“What the population is doing is reaching a solution, in this case it is lynching, but without a bureaucratizing argument; That is to say, they have realized that the authorities are cumbersomely bureaucratic and do not lead to a real response and, in less than a rooster’s crow, these people who are committing crimes come out safe; So, people generate social resentment,” the sociologist told La Razón.

The situation is so alarming that even the National Human Rights Commission of Mexico warned in a 2019 report that this phenomenon was becoming increasingly complex, so it was necessary to work on the feeling of abandonment by the State. Special emphasis must also be placed on the most marginalized areas, since, according to reports, the municipalities where the most lynchings occur also tend to be very poor.

That this phenomenon is so immersed in the social ecosystem is worrying, because for René Alejandro Jiménez Ornelas, an expert in the sociodemography of violence from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), this can become an uncontrollable situation. There are even cases in which the people lynched and murdered have not been responsible for what they are accused of, but rather victims of rumors and hasty actions without investigation. Here there is a two-way work: citizens and authorities.

“What we have to do as citizens is demand legal compliance with the law, avoiding corruption processes as a system. All efforts must be directed towards the search for and respect for the rule of law,” the UNAM expert told Univision. As for governments, they must understand that what citizens are telling them is that it is not that there are no mechanisms to report, but rather that they do not provide the results or the confidence necessary to respond to the needs of the population, according to the analysts.