Neighborhood Justice: When Patience Runs Out and the Ropes Appear
It seems that in Putla de Guerrero, Oaxaca, the civics manual was rewritten with a special chapter titled “How to Do Justice on Your Own (Includes Practical Knots)”. The residents, tired of seeing how the judicial system played cat and mouse with the same individual, decided that the next performance would be a street show. The protagonist: Hermino Cholula, a man who, apparently, loved to rehearse his role as a neighborhood villain over and over again.
The final act of his last performance was attacking a high school student. What he did not calculate was that the public, in this case the residents of the Airfield, were fed up with their repertoire. When trying to flee the scene, he was chased, caught up and… well, conveniently restrained. The result? A public display that would have made medieval criers blush.
The Parade of the “Honorable” Citizen and the Farce of Authority
With his hands tied and an elegant rope around his neck as a bowtie of shame, Hermino was paraded through the streets. It wasn’t a parade sponsored by the tourist office, of course. The neighbors, turned into judges, jury and something that looked suspiciously like improvised executioners, pointed out that this character was not a novice in the art of aggression. His resume included harassment of Cobao students and women in the area. An exemplary citizen.
And here comes the climax of the satire: the municipal police appeared, as they usually do, when the problem was already “tied and well tied”. The agents, with their impeccable timing, requested to take the detainee. The community’s response was unanimous and deliciously ironic: “No thanks, we already know how that movie ends.” And on a previous occasion, they themselves had handed him over to the authorities, who, in a predictable plot twist, released him so he could repeat his performance. Who said the system doesn’t work? It works perfectly… for those who commit crimes.
Faced with such a demonstration of state efficiency, the neighbors chose to skip the middleman and take Hermino Cholula themselves to the Public Ministry of the State Prosecutor’s Office in Putla. They did not trust that the official transport would reach its destination without suffering a mysterious “breakdown” that would allow the accused to escape. Thus, the citizen delegation was in charge of the delivery, ensuring that, this time, the episode did not end in “and he lived happily to commit a crime again.”
This absurd and tragicomic incident raises an uncomfortable question: to what extent is community justice justified when the State repeatedly fails? The inhabitants of Putla de Guerrero do not seem to believe in happy endings written by institutions. They prefer to write their own, although to do so they need a bit of rope and a dose of street theater. A radical solution to a problem that the authorities insist on covering up with warm cloths and incomprehensible releases.
The message? Perhaps when the law does not protect, patience runs out and neighborhood creativity flourishes in the most picturesque and forceful ways.
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