Mexican Mob Murders

When the police are ineffective or corrupt, and law and order seems to have broken down ....

FAKE CHILD KIDNAP REPORTS

.... then mob justice takes over. Usually with horrific results.

Mexico has been struggling with Narco gangs for decades, and in rural areas the police are few on the ground, and often inept or corrupt. So mob justice has started to erupt in many areas. For instance in the central state of Puebla, two people were killed by mobs in 2022 alone.

The latest was Daniel Picazo, a political advisor who in June 2022 was visiting his grandfather in the town of Papatlazolco, when he and his two companions were cornered by a mob by a crowd of 200 people, before him being dragged into a local field and set on fire.

The mob apparently believed, without any evidence to support it, that he had been involved in the kidnapping of a child, after allegations that a suspected child kidnapper had entered the town had been spread by some malicious troll on a local WhatsApp group.

The police did attempt to intervene and placed him in a patrol car, but they were quickly overwhelmed by the villagers, who dragged Mr Picazo into a sports field, doused him in petrol before setting him alight.

Local officials called the attack an act not of "justice, but barbarism," and the city council said it "strongly disapproves this act and reiterates that criminal behaviour must be judged under the procedures of our rule of law". Authorities hadn't immediately arrested anyone in connection with the attack, local media reported.

Makeshift Memorial In Puebla 2015

• In 2019, BBC News reported that seven men were beaten and burned alive by a mob in the same state.
• In 2018, two men were burned to death in Puebla after rumours spread on WhatsApp that they were child abductors. The rumours turned out to be untrue.
• Also in 2018 residents of the town of San Martin Tilcajete in the southern state of Oaxaca attempted to lynch a group of seven men, a group of housepainters, who were falsely accused of being child kidnappers. Luckily, some police officers were able to rescue the men.
• In October, 2015 a makeshift memorial, in front of the Municipal Palace in Ajalpan, Puebla, Mexico, was created by a woman for two pollsters, mistaken for criminals who were also killed and burned by a mob.

The Mexican National Human Rights Commission said that there had already been 67 attacks with 107 victims across Mexico by mid June 2022. Since the start of 2015, 121 people have been killed in such attacks, with most attacks occurring in the central states of Puebla and Mexico. 

WhatsApp has also been linked to a wave of lynchings across India, and elsewhere also often fuelled by fake stories of child abductors. 

• In June 2015, in the state of Assam  two men Abhijit Nath and Nilotpal Das were beaten to death by a mob of 200 following WhatsApp rumours of child kidnappers.
• In 2018, in Singrauli district in India's Madhya Pradesh, a woman was beaten to death by a lynch mob after false rumours circulated on WhatsApp that she was a child abductor.
  
• In Ecuador, on the 16th October 2018, two men and a woman arrested for allegedly stealing 200 US dollars were killed by a mob after a message circulated on WhatsApp falsely accusing them of being child snatchers.
• Also in October 2018, a mob in Colombia's capital Bogota killed a man who was falsely accused in WhatsApp messages of being linked to the kidnapping of a child.

In case your wondering, WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption, means that the origin of anything shared on the app is impossible to trace, so the trolls who launch these lies that result in murders, can't be caught and prosecuted.