2015 Rio Bravo lynching

On 10 May 2015, in the village of Río Bravo, Suchitepéquez, Guatemala, a 14-year-old girl named Bedelyn Esther Orozco Gómez was killed by a vigilante mob. According to local media reporting summarized in the Wikipedia article on the case, Orozco Gómez had been accused of involvement in the killing of Carlos Enrique González Noriega, a 68-year-old moto taxi driver. Residents claimed that Orozco Gómez, along with two other men, shot González Noriega after he refused to pay protection money. The two male accomplices reportedly escaped, but Orozco Gómez was captured by a mob and dragged to the town center.

A crowd of at least one hundred people, including women and children, is reported to have watched as Orozco Gómez was repeatedly punched and kicked. Police attempted to intervene but were blocked from the area by the mob and left the scene. After the beating, a member of the crowd doused her in gasoline and set her on fire, killing her.

Seven days after the killing, a video of the attack surfaced online. It was uploaded to YouTube, where it reportedly received thousands of views before being taken down, and it was also widely shared on Guatemalan social media, prompting public debate over vigilante justice in the country.

The video later became the subject of repeated false-context claims on social media. In 2018, it was falsely described as showing a Hindu girl from Madhya Pradesh, India, who was said to have been burned alive for attending a Christian church service. Following the 2021 Fall of Kabul, the footage was recirculated with false claims that it depicted an Afghan girl. In October 2023, it resurfaced again with false claims that it showed the killing of an Israeli girl by a "Palestinian lynch mob."

Two contemporaneous news sources — CNN and The Sydney Morning Herald — are cited by that article as references but their text was not independently reviewed here beyond confirming their citation; no additional facts have been drawn from them.