Interview with Elizabeth Kayonari

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Interview (in English): Elizabeth Kayonari

Relevance: University project with ADAEOL (2003-2008) in the town of Calamarca, supporter of community justice

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Me: “Thank you for meeting with me. Please, tell me your thoughts on community justice given your experience with the topic.”

E: “Well, I will get straight to the point. You’ve been to the Altiplano, right?”

Me: “Yes.”

E: “You’ve seen how there are little villages in the middle of nowhere? Calamarca is where I lived and worked for 4 years. It’s got 12,000 inhabitants and they are kind of dived into 27 communities. These communities are not like cities, there are farm people who live in scattered houses, which are called “area dispersa”. They are in the middle of nowhere and you can walk for miles without finding anything. And so that is how they live. In every community there are conflicts and problems, you know, just like any other community. We have places that in the city, but they don’t in the countryside and they never have. For ages, they have been solving their problems for themselves. For plenty of things, it was ok, but they kept their organization.”

Me: “Indigenous traditional organization?”

E: “Oh yeah, because you see in every community, they have a system, it’s like the military, where you have to serve the community. It is an unpaid job service that you have to fulfill as soon as you have a family. They consider that someone becomes a person as soon as they have a family, ok? It is called “jaqe” in Aymara. You have to become a “jaqe”. So, you start like soldiers do. Every year you kind of go up one step and everybody ends up being the head of the community at some point in their life. So, they have different jobs. And it is a scale (I have a paper document with the descriptions and if I find it I will send it to you), a year thing, after you finish one post, you rotate the next year.”

Me: “Are they usually men?”

E: “Men and the wives; it is not exactly “igualidad” but it is complimentary. The man is the “mallku” and the mujer is “mama taya” and she organizes the women. Ok, there is this post called “justicia”. In all the positions they try to do their best because there is “prestigio”, honor. You don’t want to lose the respect of your community, no one does. It is important that they do a good job for their honor. So, that is one thing that they worry about. If you do something that is not honorable, you get kicked out of the community, and that is what the “justicia” does. They decide who gets kicked out and when. You want to watch this movie, I forgot the name of it, this man gets kicked out of the community and all his life he works to make a coffin and goes back to die. It is a very powerful movie, I don’t remember the name of it.”

Me: “Do you know what country it is from?”

E: “Aquí, in Bolivia. Anyway, lets go back.”

Me: “So the justicia is the one who decides...”

E: “Yes, but he doesn’t work alone, he has like a committee. Everybody works because, ok, there is maybe 12 people in what you would call, its not a “gobierno” but what you would call the “organización interna”. And they have a boss, a chief, a “mallku”.

Me: “Did you say organización de gobierna?”

E: “Es un gobierno de la comunidad. Evo has it easy to get to the people because of this organization. Because every community has one chief, the mallku, and they all go to big meetings in the province. La comunidad, la sección de provincia, and then el nacional. So he always goes to the national meeting where all the malcus from the community go.”

Me: “So he is connected through the mallkus?”

E: “Through the mallkus, the chiefs that have the title for a year. So, a ver: comunidad, sección; this is how it is divided. La Paz has 20 provinces, every province is divided into sections. Every section has a mayor, and that is the civil authority, ok? And that is how the state is organized. But parallel to that, every community has a chief, like a board of directors. And they are more powerful than the mayors, they can remove mayors and they get together and discuss things. And the decisions are made only when everybody agrees. Sometimes, they come up with the craziest ideas just because everybody in the community wants that.”

Me: “So everybody has to agree for the decision to pass?”

E: “When everybody agrees, then that is democracy. They talk for hours. The men meet on one side and the women meet on the other side. Then what happens is that men and women meet at home and they kind of discuss things before they meet in public, and they just talk for hours until the point is agreed upon by everybody. Ok, and when they have called them, they call themselves to this person called the “justicia”. And he tries people like he is the judge. And this has been this way forever. You have to remember that they were not able to vote before the 1950s.”

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E: “Yeah, and whenever they had problems they solved them amongst themselves. Going back to the communities in the middle of nowhere: You will wake up one morning and you will see that your cow is gone and you will only find the insides. Somebody killed it and left the intestines or whatever. What do you do? There is no police in el campo. You have to go to “la capital de la provincia” to file a “denuncia”, when you press charges. But you have to go all the way to the capital of the province to press charges. Now with the cell phones it’s easy because they have guards at night. You know, if they see a stranger they just call everybody. It happened once in Calamarca, people were stealing gas containers…They are valuable, like 300 Bolivianos (about 42 US dollars)
or something but for them that is a lot. They live off of the crops. So they were losing things. Calamarca is different from the scattered communities in the middle of nowhere, i’ll send you pictures. So the neighbors got together and decided to have watch posts at night. They divided up the town and took turns. Everything is done by turn in el campo, you have to do these things. So one night, the patrol found a young guy walking by and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’ And he says, ‘I am going to visit my Aunt’. ‘Who is your Aunt’ ‘Mrs. So and so’. And then Mrs. So and so actually lived there and she happened to be the aunt of the patrolman. So they took him there and the lady said ‘I don’t know this guy’. And so they grabbed him and kicked him, it was bad. The next day, we went to work at the university and we saw this guy tied to a tree and all the people in Calamarca were gathered. They have a language with bells, so they called them with this special way of ringing the church bell. And so we had to go on with the school day as normal, we just couldn’t let the little kids out. We were working with the summer school session and we were very nervous because we didn’t know what was going on.”

Me: “And you were outsiders too?”

E: “ Of course. We had a priest working with us, and he said ‘if they try to kill him I’m going to have to say something.”

Me: “When did this happen?”

E: “I can look it up its in the working diary. We were there for four years, we started in 2003 and ended in 2008, it was probably in 2008. We were very well known by then, we were part of the town. We didn’t do the rounds but we paid somebody to do them for us. They told us we had to. Now, they held this man in the chapel on top of the hill and hung him upside down for a while, while they were discussing what to do to him. It’s not true that if they catch someone they lynch him right away, like some people think. Maybe they would do that in some wicked communities, like the one in Potosí. I don’t think that is a straight community, I think it’s a narcotrafficking area. What they did was not justicia comunitaria, they took it much further… Ok so the people in the community we’re mad and they kicked him, and they tied him upside down. El corregidor, something that is in every community, is a representative of the prefect. At that time, the country had a president and prefect for every department. Now the prefects are called “gobernadores”. In happened to be that Calamarca was the capital of the province, so the corregidor had to call the police. They don’t have a corregidor in every town in the countryside, only in the capital. So he called the police and the community came again and everybody went down to the main plaza and they wouldn’t let the police pass. They said, ‘This is our problem.” Then the mallku came and said, ‘When ever we turn our thieves over to the police, they are let go and they come back and steal from us again. So, we are not turning him over to you.’ Then, the channel 9 news station showed up.”

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E: “What happens is that justicia comunitaria should not interfere with the laws of the republic, so they can’t keep somebody, they have to turn him in. So the investigators come and the townspeople tell him the whole story. The police conducted an investigation and they were sure that the man was guilty. When they searched his pockets he had many ID’s, he was probably a pick pocket. Anyway, by this time he was sitting down, and the community wanted to turn him into his malcu, to the chief of his community. But they couldn’t figure out who that would be or which community he actually belonged to because he had so many IDs. They usually tell the mallku to take care of the son of his own community. But in this case they didn’t know so they turned him over to the police. And as they expected, the police let him go and he came back again to taunt the townspeople. That is how I got my notion of justicia comunitaria: all the problems of the community should be solved within the community by the people, according to however they see fit.”

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E: “Have you heard about Felix Patsi? He was the candidate for governor.”

Me: “Oh yes, he was caught drunk driving.”

E: “He was sentenced by community justice to make 1,000 adobes.”

Me: “Oh really? And he couldn’t return to MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo; Evo Morales’s political party), right?”

E: “No, but because it was so clear that they didn’t want him.”

Me “Didn’t he publicly denounce Evo?”

E: “Not Evo, he and Lorenzi and Alvaro don’t get along. So it was bad.”

Me: “So do you think that justicia comuntiaria is necessary?”

E: “This is what happened, they turned the robber into the police and the police turned him loose and he came back to rob again. And he was like, ‘Try to catch me now.’ It was horrible.”

Me: “Do you think there is a difference now, after it has been legally recognized by the new constitution?”

E: “It was always recognized, it was always there. Justicia comunitaria is recognized as long as it doesn’t interfere with federal law.”

Me: “So if they lynch people, that interferes with the law doesn’t it?

E: “But lynching is not something that happens all the time. But if it does happen, we don’t always know. That is not something that country people always do. Achacachi, that’s a different story. There, the are a militia. You might want to look up this guy, Toribio Salas who was a “wella saco”, a red coat.”

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E: “So justicia comunitaria, as I understand it, is something necessary and something that has been there all the time.”

Me: “For the safety of the community?”

E: “If people are fighting, who do they go to? Justicia comunitaria takes care of it. It is a very primitive way of solving problems. I think this lynching thing is something we are learning about nowadays. Fernando Toja was talking the other day about justicia comuntiaria and how people get kicked out of the community for raping and taking somebody’s property. I have a friend, Don Juan Chani, who was the justice authority in the town and he told me all about it. It is closely related to how they view life, and their relationship to the cosmos…it’s not superstition, it is their way of life.”

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E: “So I believe that justicia comunitaria should not be looked down upon, it has been going on for 400 or 500 years. And now this one wicked community is getting so much attention. You know there is corruption with the judges here too.”

Me: “Here, in La Paz?”

E: “All over the country, in the world, it is human.”

Me: “Do you think I can find coverage of this story in old newspapers?”

E: “No, maybe in the file from the television, channel 9.”

Me: “Oh, ok.”

E: “Now, Calamarca is next to the town where they burnt the mayor.”

Me: “What is the name of the town?”

E: “Ayo Ayo. You will find a lot about that case… Through the law of popular participation, which started in the 1990s, the towns in rural areas were given a certain amount of money by the government. They also started to have “alcaldias” or town halls, which they were not used to. Some community leaders did crazy things with their money, like buying cars, because they didn’t understand that the money was supposed to be used for the whole community, to build bridges and streets. So they began to understand later, but, as they realized that this was a good source of money, people got interested in becoming involved with the councils. And, you know, politicians are not always the best people. So this is what happened in Ayo Ayo: They mayor did not want to spend a penny because he wanted to do good. So the councilmen tried to kick him out of office and he went to the judge and said ‘look what they are doing to me.’ And while he was in La Paz, they caught him and burned him. Everyone involved was scared to death to talk. Later, they found out who it was and he went to jail.”

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E: “Now, Ayo Ayo was where Tupac Katari was from. Evo refers to him so much, like he wants to be the next Tupac Katari. In 1888, he was tied to four horses that were sent in different directions (dismemberment) for his political views. They even made dolls of him with his four limbs on strings.”

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Me: “Wow, thank you so much you gave me a lot of valuable information.”

E: “If you need anything else, just call me.”

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