Strategic waiting: Experiencing, producing and interpreting court delay during investigative processes in El Alto, Bolivia.

This paper explores how and why state and non-state actors who participate in pretrial investigations in the Bolivian city of El Alto, produce, negotiate, and experience waiting. Specifically, it considers the protracted aftermath of a linchamiento, an act of collective violence in which residents take justice into their own hands, in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. Residents of Villa de Ramos neighborhood physically attacked an off-duty police sub-officer whom they mistook for a burglar. Because the police sub-officer died on his way to the hospital due to the injuries he had sustained in his body, a homicide prosecutor opened investigations against the perpetrators of the act. During a three-year process, the sub-officer's family sought, unsuccessfully, to take the case to trial. Two of the alleged perpetrators avoided becoming the target of judicial investigations altogether, while another seven were indicted and spent different times intervals of time in prison. Based on participant observation and interviews with some of these actors, their lawyers, and state officials, this paper argues that waiting is multifaceted. It is not only a tool of state domination (Auyero 2012; Bourdieu 1998) nor it only benefits those better positioned to endure long-term judicial processes (Galanter 1974; Schwartz 1975). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]