Lynch mob attacks appear to be on the rise throughout the poor country as President Evo Morales plans to give the country's indigenous majority greater powers to decide how to punish criminals within their communities.

Officials say this will complement conventional justice, which is slow and overloaded with cases, and alleviate the frustration they say causes mob violence like lynchings.

In the bleak streets of El Alto, residents say some people take the law into their own hands because they are sick of crime and the justice system fails to prosecute minor offenses like theft.

"People hand over criminals to the police, but then they don't do anything. They let them go," barber Danny Montano said.

Occasionally anger erupts into violence. Local newspapers have reported a number of mob attacks in recent weeks, over incidents as minor as stealing gas canisters.

There have been 63 lynch mob attacks -- nine of them deadly -- in Bolivia this year, the same as the whole of 2006, according to La Paz-based social analyst Daniel Atahuichi.

"Nowadays more and more, people are choosing to take the law into their own hands," he said.
Last week in El Alto, residents beat and threw buckets of water over a suspected thief, leaving him tied to a post to die in the freezing temperatures, local media reported.

Similar scenes have played out in the cities of Santa Cruz and Cochabamba, where two teenagers died this month after being beaten and thrown in a ditch by residents who accused them of burglary.

JUSTICE SYSTEM
Officials in the leftist government condemn such attacks, saying the violence demonstrates the need for better policing and a more effective criminal justice system that promotes traditional methods of indigenous, or communal, justice.

"There's a lot of corruption and delay, so the people get fed up," said Deputy Minister for Communal Justice Valentin Ticona, describing lynching as a distortion of communal justice, which has no death penalty but can involve public lashings and paying compensation to victims.

"Residents catch a criminal or a murderer or rapist, take him to the authorities ... and the next day he's back on the streets," he said, adding the officials were concerned about the wave of lynching attacks.

Police in Bolivia, South America's poorest country, defend their work and say the biggest problem is a law that means judges free petty criminals soon after they are arrested.

In El Alto, which adjoins the capital of La Paz, they say they have made significant progress to fight crime, even with limited resources and manpower.

"This lynching phenomenon is nothing more than an expression of society's frustration (and) lack of trust (in the law)," said El Alto's regional police chief, Oscar Nina.

"People misunderstand the concept, and, in the name of communal justice, commit crimes like lynching that sometimes end in murder."