Introduction

Following a brief overview of the book as a whole this first chapter quickly gets to the two detailed accounts of vigilante violence in Todos Santos, Guatemala, at the heart of this book. Starting with the lynching of Jorge Mario – a local youth suspected of thefts following his return to the traditional Maya community from the United States with long hair, tattoos, and piercings. We then move on to the fatal attack on the Japanese tourist Tetsuo Yamahiro and his bus driver Edgar Castellanos, which followed regional rumours of Satanic violence against children. The victims were innocent of the accusation in both cases. To contextualise these acts – and to begin the process of unpicking how these innocent victims came to be singled out – the chapter moves on to look at the wider wave of lynchings that swept across Guatemala, how they relate to other forms of collective violence, wider regional practices of vigilantism (Mendoza 2003; Pratten & Sen 2007), and how they came to be described by the UN as a “new form of human rights abuse”.