In remote Peru, weak rule renders town's laws tenuous

ILAVE, Peru -- Mayor Cirilo Fernando Robles was fated to die the cold April morning he returned to this town that rises on a small plateau above Lake Titicaca, 12,621 feet up in the thin air of the Andes.

He arrived before dawn to preside over a City Council meeting. Before the sun set, he was kicked and pummeled by his fellow Aymara Indians, beaten with his own belt and paraded through town in a pedal-powered tricycle taxi, bleeding and slowly dying.

In life, he passed out candies from his office to the town's children and took pride in seeing his name on city plaques. In Robles' final minutes, the lynch mob forced him to climb the four steps of City Hall, where he uttered his last words and then fell, his head striking the concrete with a sickening crack.

Depending on your point of view, the mayor's killing last year was the work of a rancher who had been a rival since the two men were in college. Or the 42 men and women formally charged with his slaying. Or all 20,000 Aymara Indians who had marched on Ilave from surrounding villages to demand that Robles resign in the face of corruption charges.

''These things have always happened when the Aymara people are cheated, when they are betrayed," said Edgar Larijo, a community leader and one of those charged in the killing.

If he were alive today, Robles might ask the question that his widow, family, and friends ask: Why are nearly all the people who had a hand in my death walking around the plazas, the streets and even my City Hall as if nothing had happened?

Only one person charged remains in custody. Several others have returned to their city jobs.

Despite an outstanding warrant for his arrest, Larijo spoke about the killing from inside City Hall, within sight of a small group of the mayor's supporters and an employee of the National Police.

Larijo's eyes were all defiance, as if his dead foe were still alive and standing before him.

''The mayor was warned by a colonel of the National Police not to come back here," he said.

Explaining why he hadn't turned himself in, the militant Aymara nationalist said, ''We all know that in Peru there is no true justice, that there is justice only for the big people."

The story of the mayor's death is, in many ways, an allegory of modern Peru. Both the country and this town of 55,000 people near its southern border are unsettled places where weak government makes the rule of law a tenuous thing. A year later, it remains unclear whether the corruption allegations were true. A preliminary report by Peru's Office of the Controller General last month found that at least two of the eight charges against him had no merit, but the final report is still pending.

''This would be homicide if there were just one or two or five people involved," said Albino Zapana Cueva, another community leader charged in the lynching. ''Here, there were some 25,000 souls involved. You would have to prosecute all of Ilave."

The mayor's small band of allies says that none of those indicted will be convicted.

An official autopsy listed the cause of death as shock brought on by internal bleeding and multiple blunt-force trauma. But the countless people seen on video inflicting those injuries with their feet and fists apparently fear no retribution, legal or otherwise.

The radio DJs and community leaders who rallied the angry crowd, and the council listed as defendants in the case, all go about their business.

Valentin Ramirez, a community leader and a defendant, campaigned openly for a candidate in the election to replace Robles, despite an outstanding warrant. His man, Miguel Angel Flores Chumbi, won.

''We nominated Miguel Angel, and he is the mayor now," Ramirez said from his home. ''We gave the authority for the elections to go forward. Our democratic force prevailed."

Ramirez remains conflicted about the mayor's death. He says he believes Robles was responsible for his own lynching. But he began to weep as he remembered witnessing those brutal events in Ilave's main plaza, underneath the statue of a 19th-century hero of the War of the Pacific.

''It was terrible, terrible," Ramirez said. He cast his sunburned face downward, overcome by the memory of so much cruelty. ''I asked the people, 'Why are you doing this?' "

Sister Maria Julia Ardito, an Argentine nun assigned to Ilave's Catholic parish, was at the plaza, too. She corroborates what Ramirez and other leaders say: At the end, the mob was beyond control.

''There is still a deep sense of trauma here," she said. ''People don't know whom to trust. No one talks about what happened, but that fear touches everything."

It is very unsettling, she said, to go to the plaza and walk among people who helped murder another human being.

And yet, for Sister Ardito, as for many Ilave residents, the mayor's death seemed entirely preventable. If provincial and national authorities had listened to the pleas for help coming from all sides, the mayor would be alive today.

''It was the whim of the mayor to come here when so many people were against him," said Teofilo Contreras, another defendant.