The boy—whose name has not been released by the police—was caught stealing in Villa Candelaria, in the populous southern area of Cochabamba. The neighbors, tired of the increasing crime rate and the lack of police surveillance, decided to take justice into their own hands and after capturing the boy the mob tied him to a pole and burned him.

Archbishop Solari said he was “frozen and horrified” after watching the pictures of the attack in the newspaper. “What is happening with us, brothers and sisters? Have we become beasts? Nothing, absolutely nothing can justify this act of brutality,” the Archbishop said the day after the young man was burned at Villa Candelaria.

On June 26, a source at the Viedma hospital, where the boy remains in critical condition, revealed that Archbishop Solari has been visiting him and has requested two nuns to watch over him permanently.

Kathy Revollo, head of the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, revealed that the archbishop has also provided for the expensive medicines needed to treat the boy’s third-degree burns which cover 80 percent of his body. Archbishop Solari said that authorities also have responsibility in the crime because the police do not respond promptly when crimes occur.