LA ASUNTA: The police car lights flashed in the dark and dusty streets of the Bolivian mountain village of La Asunta. The officers approached two boys and told them: "Go home, there's a curfew."
But it's not the authorities who decided to order minors to stay home at night and prohibit alcohol consumption in La Asunta, a coca-growing community of 2,000 people beset by a spasm of crime.
It was the villagers themselves.
They demanded the strict measures following the rape of an 11-year-old girl in May by a drunken man.
An 18-year-old suspect from a neighboring region has been detained.
The townspeople were already tired of the drug trafficking and car-running going through the area, but the girl's rape was the last straw.
"I found my daughter bleeding," the girl's father, construction worker Edmundo Luna, told AFP. "We demand justice, because the police asked us for money" to continue the investigation.
Villagers say the suspect was paraded in the street and whipped by residents as punishment.
The village decided to prohibit children under 18 years old from going out from 10:00 pm until sunrise. And nobody is allowed to drink booze.
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