The mayor of a small town in Peru managed to make international headlines after police caught him lying in a wooden casket in an attempt to fool them into thinking he was dead, after breaking curfew to go drinking long into the night.

Jaime Rolando Urbina Torres, the mayor of Tantará, a rural district in Castrovirreyna, had long been criticized by his constituents for not taking the threat of the ongoing SARS-Cov2 pandemic seriously and not taking the necessary measures to protect them, but last week the elected official really went above and beyond to show his contempt for the lockdown enforced by the Peruvian government. Last Monday Torres and several of his friends broke curfew, going out to drink late into the night. Around midnight, residents alerted by the ruckus the inebriated mayor and his friends were making called the police and the troublemakers came up with an ingenious way of avoiding arrest…

Alerted by the sirens of the approaching police car, Jaime Rolando Urbina Torres and his friends – probably too intoxicated to make a run for it – decided to lay in a bunch of wooden coffins made for potential victims of Covid-19. They were hoping that police would mistake them for actual victims of the novel coronavirus and just let them be, but they underestimated the lawmen. It’s not everyday that you bump into dead bodies lying in open caskets lined up in the open, let alone ones that are obviously still breathing.

Police managed to coerce the drunk men “back to life”, but not before taking a picture of the mayor as he was trying his absolute best to play dead. It went viral immediately after being posted on social media, and has since been doing the rounds online. Both Torres and his drinking buddies were taken into custody, but it’s unclear if any or what charges were pressed against them.

Earlier this month Jaime Rolando Urbina Torres was hauled to an emergency town meeting where locals accused him of failing to open any emergency coronavirus quarantine shelters or creating safety checkpoints to ensure people from outside the town couldn’t enter. His own officials reportedly shot him down when he tried coming up with excuses.

Torres, who has allegedly been present in Tantará for just 9 of the last 73 days of national lockdown, clearly doesn’t care too much what his constituents think of him, as made obvious by his latest stunt…

 

via El Commercio