CRASSH

This paper is based on a three day period in my fieldwork spanning a festival in Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Guatemala, in 2003.  At the end of the first day martial law was instigated after the police fled town. One of their number had fatally shot a local youth and their was concern regarding reprisals.  Over the next two days the alcohol fuelled revelry led to several deaths and an accompanying atmosphere of heightened gossip and rumour.  In a town that had already experienced two lynchings in which innocent victims had been wrongly targetted this atmosphere of hearsay and the inadequacy of the military's policing led to the generation of several potential targets for vigilante justice. These included a bus driver who accidentally ran over a drunk sleeping under his bus and a Guatemalan tourist who was repeatedly groping gringas. Oddly it did not include a man who murdered his wife.  Drawing upon these experiences the paper will illustrate the problematic role played by gossip in the attribution and assessment of guilt in vigilante justice and the broader context of uncodified non-state law.  It will explore the way in which these events highlighted the awkward evidentiary nature of gossip in vigilantism and the gossamer-like impediments which lie between proposed violence and actual attacks.  Against a backdrop of an increasingly subjective legal landscape in Guatemala and throughout Latin America these are issues which demand further attention.