Children sometimes stop and stare, but adults tend to ignore the scruffy kerbside shrine. However fast they walk past the drooping flower arrangements and candle ends, the people of San Juan Ixtayopan admit the consequences of what happened are not so easy to leave behind.
It was here that two police officers were murdered three weeks ago, set upon by an enraged mob who mistook them for child snatchers.
The incident caused a national furore in Mexico and led this week to the sacking of a police chief, widespread concern over corruption, and increasing vigilantism across the country.
In San Juan Ixtayopan, a charming town on the semi-rural southern edge of the capital, Mexico City, the shock is still fresh.
”This has affected us all deeply and I am not sure we will ever recover,” said one middle-aged woman. Like most people there, she refused to give her name.
”San Juan used to be so peaceful and nice. Kids playing football in the street, neighbours chatting to each other, lots of parties. Now everybody shuts themselves up in their houses. It is as if the town has died.”
San Juan attracts poor, though not poverty-stricken, refugees from the capital who want to build their own homes and settle for a less stressful life. And it was, until 6.30pm on November 23, outside the Popul Vuh Primary School in one of the town’s newer barrios stretching up a volcanic hill.
Rumours that child snatchers were stalking the area had circulated for weeks, but appeals to the police for security had fallen on deaf ears.
An unfounded story spread that two girls had been kidnapped. By coincidence, three undercover federal agents who happened to be hanging around taking pictures (police chiefs later said they were on a surveillance mission looking for drug dealers) were accused of being involved.
A crowd converged, and the frenzied beating began. Two of the agents lost consciousness, the mob doused them in gasoline or paint thinner, and set them alight. Police rescued the third victim when they finally arrived, three-and-a-half hours after the attack began. He remains in intensive care.
”It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I got goose bumps all over,” a local shopkeeper said, grimacing as she tried to find the right words, before adding quickly that she ”was only watching”.
Raul Rodriguez, an academic who teaches a course in mob justice, estimates there are about 10 such cases in Mexico each year.
”This was not the most brutal case, nor was it the only one where agents of the state were targeted,” he said.
The phenomenon, says Rodriguez, typically combines a widespread lack of trust in the state’s ability to fight crime with collective moral indignation. Together they open the door for a kind of ”madness” to take over.
However, the lynching in San Juan was also unlike any other because it broke the mould of public and official indifference that used to ensure life soon went back to normal and that nobody was arrested.
This time, the public was outraged, the police carried out unprecedented operations to find suspects, and politicians set about channelling the controversy into an existing feud between the central government and the Mexico City mayor.
This week, President Vicente Fox cancelled a trip to Peru, citing the lynching, and then sacked the top security official in Mexico City. Some observers expect charges of negligence for police over their not getting to the victims quicker.
Meanwhile, federal police have detained 39 people from San Juan, 29 of whom are now facing murder charges. Most were arrested the day after the events when 1 000 federal police descended on the town.
But perhaps the main reason why the San Juan lynching has dominated the news for weeks is that it unfolded before the television cameras. At some points the mob seemed to be performing.
Ricardo Tapia (17) watched his friend get caught up in the excitement and deliberately get in front of a camera: ”He wasn’t participating really, he said he just wanted to be on telly.”
The people of San Juan have had enough of the media.
”It isn’t nice that we are known all around Mexico for this,” one mother said as she waited to collect her children from school. ”It isn’t fair.”
The sense of injustice springs to the surface in most conversations, though not all.
”We don’t feel guilty,” one woman said. ”I don’t agree with what happened, but people were trying to defend their children.”
The rumours of child stealing may have been false, she added, but ”everybody knows that the police never do anything when things like this do happen”. — Guardian Unlimited Â