The article sets lynching of presumed criminals in the city of El Alto, Bolivia, in relation to both everyday experiences of insecurity about crime and violence and the enactment of neighborliness as a grounded notion of citizenship. Focusing on the experience and management of insecurity and its paradoxical entanglement with the enactments of citizenship and state-citizen relations, the article argues that people's attempts to remain safe constitute a permanent process of making visible and defacing (following Michael Taussig's notion of defacement) dangerousness and criminal subjects vis-à-vis the construction of community and local expressions of citizenship.