The ronda and the rope: parallel justice systems and the dangers of legal abandonment in rural Latin America

Peruvian President Ollanta Humala delivers a speech in rural Puno.
Humala ran on a campaign with ethnonationalist tones. He is currently serving a 15 year sentence for his involvement in the Odebrecht scandal, the largest corruption scandal in Latin American history.
© Presidency of Peru, 2015 

Much has been written about the lack of access to legal services in rural areas of America. Savvy writers usually stay clear of making worst case scenario predictions. This is understandable, as nobody wants to be the person who says the sky will fall down. I shall not make such calamitous predictions either. What this article contains is instead a view into a place in which legal systems have failed and given way to other forms of justice.

This article is a small survey of parallel systems of justice in rural and remote areas of Peru, a country with which I am intimately familiar. Over the course of this piece I will go through the circumstances that led to the formation of such systems, their current status, and some of their worst excesses. Peru is not the United States. Its geography, history, and demographics are radically different. The underlying conditions that produced these parallel systems are not, however, unique to Peru. It is worth asking what fills a vacuum when the courts do not play a role. In Peru, we have some answers. Whether the same questions in rural America would ever be answered in like manner to Peru is for the reader to imagine.

The geographical roots of legal absence

A lone truck challenges the curves of the Pasamayo Serpentine.
The trip is usually made harder by fog and wet asphalt. Hundreds of people have fallen 300 feet to their deaths in this road over the last couple decades.
© Santiago Stucchi, 2008.

Peru's geography represents a major obstacle to the nation's political integration and by extension, to its legal system. Peru is vertically split in half by the Andes mountain region, it is flanked on its east by the Amazon rainforest and on its west by the Pacific Ocean. Peru's capital of Lima holds 1/3 of the nation's population. The result of this is an extremely centralized nation, dominated by its political and economic coastal elites. Its mountainous terrain makes transportation quite difficult as well, with some highways like the infamous Serpentine of Pasamayo (an extremely narrow 14 mile stretch of highway which has mountain on one side and abyss on the other) being the only way to make way through the country.

In many remote areas, especially in the Andes, there is very little formal policing. The courts are a distant, nonoperative institution. Language barriers do not help either, as about 15% of Peru's population speaks Quechua as their main language, but much of the population, and especially those working in government, do not speak it at all. Historically, communities in such areas have governed themselves with little involvement from the central or even regional government. Often, they handled disputes through informal assemblies or through respected community leaders. The first rondas campesinas (meaning "peasant patrols") were established in the northern Andean region of Cajamarca, in the late 1970s. These early rondas were primarily created to deal with property crimes (the main one being cattle theft).

Sendero Luminoso and the militarization of the rondas

A painting displayed on the First Military School of Sendero Luminoso.
On the left, the students. On the right, Sendero's leader, Abimael Guzman. Above him the figures of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

In May 1980, the Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (literally "Shining Path"), a primarily rural Andean movement, declared war on the Peruvian government. It was led by Abimael Guzman, a professor of philosophy at a university in Ayacucho (a region in the south Andes). Part of Sendero's strategy was what they called "batir el campo" (meaning "scouring the countryside", destroying all non-Sendero authority in such regions). Initially, many rural communities sided with Sendero, agreeing with their message of discontent against the neglect the government had for the people of the Andes. When confronted with the violent revolts happening in the Andes, President Fernando Belaunde dismissed them, assessing the threat as nothing more than small issues with cattle rustlers. Sendero held "people's trials" against those it considered "antirevolutionary elements". The subject of these trials were often community leaders, and the price of resistance was massacre. The most notorious of these was the Lucanamarca massacre of 1983, in which over 60 people (ranging from ages of 6 months to 70 years of age) were killed with machetes and axes, in retaliation for the killing of one of Sendero's commanders. What followed were years of massacres in the Andes, with much of the human cost falling on the rural communities that lived there.

Eventually, in the early 1990s, the Peruvian government found its footing in the fight against Sendero, and the war started to turn. Under the leadership of President Alberto Fujimori, the rondas started being armed and supported by the government. This cooperation proved instrumental in defeating Sendero in rural regions, and displacing them into other areas where the government had an easier time fighting them. On September 12, 1992, Sendero's leader Abimael Guzman was captured in a safehouse in an upper class neighborhood in Lima, where he was being hosted by a wealthy classical dancer. That was game over.

Constitutional recognition

After the inflection point of Guzman's capture, Fujimori moved forward with a series of reforms. Chief among them was the Peruvian Constitution of 1993. In its Article 149, the constitution recognizes the authority of the rondas campesinas within their jurisdictions, as long as they "respect the fundamental rights of people". The same article calls for the cooperation of the "traditional" judicial power and these parallel systems of justice in the future.

How the project of cooperation and respect for the fundamental rights of people is going is difficult to assess with precision. But, where statistics are scarce, it is always good to tell a story.

A Canadian in Ucayali

The village of Nuevo Jerusalen in the Ucayali Region of Peru.
A village such as this was where the events described below took place.
© Vratislav S, 2012

Imagine you are a young (ish) Canadian man. Like many of your peers, you seek enlightenment. You doubt Western medicine and respect indigenous cultures. So, you decide to look into the real stuff. You travel south, to Peru, perhaps further south, to the Ucayali Region (in the Amazon rainforest). You do ayahuasca, it changes your life, you seek to go further down the rabbit hole. You seek a teacher, Olivia Arevalo Lomas, a well known elder, healer and community leader. You dedicate ten years of your life to this. Then one day, a bang, and your teacher is dead, three gunshot wounds. The police eventually show up (it takes them some time), and everyone is really angry. Even worse, they think it is your fault. Oh no. Facebook posts start to be circulated. "WANTED" they say, then a picture of you, then a plea for clues on your whereabouts. People in the comments express their wishes that you are brought to justice, others propose rewards for hunting you down. Things are looking really bad for you. But actually, these latest developments are not that bad, since you are already dead. Police soon find a phone which contains a video recording of your last moments. A mob got to you (quickly, well before the police ever got there, since you are conspicuously foreign). There was no trial, no evidence, no attorneys. You have been lynched, and your manner of death was strangulation. Your family says you were really nice, hated guns, and just loved ayahuasca. The locals will remain convinced it was you. The rest of the world will never know. This story is not a thought experiment. These events happened to Sebastian Woodruffe, a Canadian tourist. His death drew international attention before disappearing from the news cycle within days.

Gerardo's choice

If you are in any way like me, you may have heard the story and said to yourself, "only one way to avoid a similar fate, stay as far away as possible from that region if you are not a local." However, this is not a solution. In 2007, in the village of Patascachi (near the border with Bolivia, population around 1000), a mob descended upon the house of Gerardo Parisuana, a farmer. Nearly the entire town was there. The occasion? Gerardo's son Gary was accused of being a cattle rustler, and the mob had had enough of him. The evidence against him? A gang of cattle rustlers, upon capture, had accused Gary of being their leader. The police arrested Gary, but found insufficient evidence to hold him and released him shortly after. For the rondas, however, the "trial" had already happened, the verdict was in, and there was no room for appeals. Gerardo now had a choice: to lynch his own son, or to have the rest of his family share his son's fate. Gerardo made his choice. According to witnesses, the crowd tortured Gary before Gerardo hanged him.

The mayor on trial

A sign near the city of Ilave, in the Puno Region.
The city of Ilave is at an elevation of over 12 thousand feet above sea level.
© TeshTesh, 2015

Not even money and power are enough to protect yourself from such a fate. In 2004, in the city of Ilave (in the Puno Region, near Lake Titicaca in the heart of the Andes), the mayor of the city, Cirilo Robles, was lynched by a mob. It all started with a protest sparked by allegations of corruption and embezzlement. Aymara-speaking peasants made camp in front of the municipality's doors, protesting that the mayor had promised to pave the Ilave-Mazocruz highway, and the promise was yet to be fulfilled. The mayor left the city as soon as the protests started, and only came back weeks later. When he finally came back, he held a meeting with his council at his private residence, in which he resolved to resign. The mob found out about the mayor's return, and soon thereafter they descended upon his home. They breached the house and dragged the mayor after giving him a beating. He was tortured for hours before being hanged in the city's square. His lifeless body was found under a bridge. Later that year, Peru's Government Accountability Office investigated the allegations against him. They found no evidence of embezzlement, and they exonerated him. The Supreme Court of Peru sentenced two members of the mob to 30 years in prison. The mayor's successor, Miguel Flores, closed this somber chapter with a phrase that could be considered the most Peruvian aphorism, "Everything remains the same for us."

Conclusion

The rondas campesinas are not just a series of horror stories. They emerged from genuine necessity. They fulfilled a role that no one else could. They even have constitutional recognition. But the results they tend to generate speak for themselves. Formal policing and legal institutions are not perfect, but they tend to produce something different. 

Peru is not the United States. The Andes are not Appalachia. The Amazon is not the Ozarks. But legal vacuums do not know borders, and the dynamics that fill them may follow recognizable patterns. Whether those patterns may ever extend to America is, as said in the introduction, for the reader to imagine.