Violence and Crime in Latin America: Representations and Politics
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Violence and Crime in Latin America: Representations and Politics
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Overview
According to media reports, Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world—a distinction it held throughout the twentieth century. The authors of Violence and Crime in Latin America contend that perceptions and representations of violence and crime directly impact such behaviors, creating profound consequences for the political and social fabric of Latin American nations.
Written by distinguished scholars of Latin American history, sociology, anthropology, and political science, the essays in this volume range from Mexico and Argentina to Colombia and Brazil in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, addressing such issues as extralegal violence in Mexico, the myth of indigenous criminality in Guatemala, and governments’ selective blindness to violent crime in Brazil and Jamaica. The authors in this collection examine not only the social construction and political visibility of violence and crime in Latin America, but the justifications for them as well. Analytically and historically, these essays show how Latin American citizens have sanctioned criminal and violent practices and incorporated them into social relations, everyday practices, and institutional settings. At the same time, the authors explore the power struggles that inform distinctions between illegitimate versus legitimate violence.
Violence and Crime in Latin America makes a substantive contribution to understanding a key problem facing Latin America today. In its historical depth and ethnographic reach, this original and thought-provoking volume enhances our understanding of crime and violence throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806158808 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
David Carey Jr. holds the Doehler Chair in History at Loyola University and is author of several books, including I Ask for Justice: Maya Women, Dictators, and Crime in Guatemala and Engendering Mayan History: Kaqchikel Women as Agents and Conduits of the Past.
Read an Excerpt
Violence and Crime in Latin America Representations and Politics
By Gema Santamaría, David Carey Jr.
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5880-8
CHAPTER 1
Ley Fuga as Justice
The Consensus around Extrajudicial Violence in Twentieth-Century Mexico
Pablo Piccato
In 1933, having been found guilty of murdering China Aznar, a high society lady in Mexico City, Pedro Gallegos was taken by train to the penal colony of Islas Marías in the Pacific Ocean. At some point on the long trip he stood up to retrieve the typewriter he had placed above his seat, and a soldier who was guarding him shot him in the throat. His body was dumped by the tracks, and the official explanation, which few believed, was that he had been shot while trying to escape. A textbook example of the ley fuga (flight law), Gallegos's death was not an unusual occurrence at the time "because," according to a reporter, "guards usually eliminated the most dangerous criminals even though they were sentenced to spend several years in prison." The story even generated a verb: "galleguear," a euphemism for the ley fuga applied to other cases during the 1930s.
The history of the ley fuga helps us understand the interactions between crime, punishment, and politics in modern Mexico. This is a history of public debates over and representations of crime, including a powerful critique of the justice system. The ley fuga was a violent abuse of power that revealed the limitations of the state while recognizing the influence of public opinion. Alan Knight places the ley fuga as part of the "hot, dense, and often dirty undergrowth of local politics" that historians of twentieth-century Mexico tend to overlook. Violence, he suggests, was part of politics at every level, even when the violence was not overtly "political." The ley fuga became a broadly cited reference in public culture, from political struggles to law enforcement. Everard Meade has documented increasing press interest in ley fuga cases in the 1930s, following the abolition of the death penalty.
Another form of critical engagement with justice was lynching, which Gema Santamaría examines in chapter 2. Although lynching should be understood on its own terms — with any analysis starting, as the term indicates, with the emergence of this practice in the United States after the Civil War — the connections with ley fuga are meaningful. The framework David Garland proposed for U.S. lynching is useful here: in Southern towns, lynchings were formalized acts of violence that usually targeted prisoners and often were intended as spectacles, their gruesome results disseminated through postcards. In the case of the Mexican ley fuga, agents of the state, rather than a mob, produced the spectacle, and its results were conveyed through printed images and narratives by journalists. In both cases, these acts reveal political fissures in moments of political transition, at the local and regional levels in the postbellum U.S. South, and in the difficult and uneven consolidation of a national state in 1930s Mexico. Although the following pages might seem to paint a stable picture, this is an artifact of the difficulty of documenting and quantifying ley fuga cases. As I will show, however, its use was probably more significant in moments when, in the eyes of the public, tensions between police and judicial institutions revealed the shortcomings of the state in relation to its obligation to guarantee safety, truth, and justice. Among such moments were the nineteenth-century civil wars, the dictatorial peace of the Porfiriato, and the postrevolutionary decades when the law revealed itself impotent in the face of violence and private appropriation of public resources by the new ruling groups.
Despite their exceptional or disruptive character, it would be erroneous to consider either lynching or ley fuga as examples of the "antipolitical" violence that Hannah Arendt associated with taking justice into one's own hands. Lynching and ley fuga, though illegal, were rarely punished because they expressed tensions between popular moral codes and the written law, and enacted collective sentiments toward transgressors — thus illustrating the distinction between crime and illegality presented in the introduction to this volume. The ley fuga accomplished this through journalistic reporting that justified official extrajudicial violence by referring to the victim's previous crime, just as Southern lynch mobs did while also expressing racism in their selection of victims. Thus the ley fuga was not merely a demonstration of the weakness of the state: by ironically referring to the legality of executions (it was a ley, after all) and giving a central role to state agents, the ley fuga was justified as a complement to state action, increasing the severity of punishment and instilling fear in would-be criminals. The police did reject ley fuga in public statements, but embraced it as a remedy against the legalistic restrictions of procedural codes, which tied their hands in the fight against criminals. The public and civilian authorities tolerated it as a justifiable exercise of power. The ley fuga addressed the limits of the justice system; it demonstrated a deeply rooted contradiction between police institutions and the judiciary that other actors in civil society and government also saw as a weakness of liberal institutions.
The ley fuga, then, was anything but antipolitical. A practice deeply embedded in the rough-and-tumble politics of post-independence Mexico, it provided a key narrative to public debates about crime and violence in Mexico, connecting crime and justice in an ironic and critical way. This is best explained by putting some cases in context. Gallegos was the victim of a long-established practice, but he was also at the center of a case that attracted the attention of the Mexican public for months, with the press characterizing him as a particularly devious criminal who deserved a harsher punishment than was meted out by penal courts. Using this and other examples, I will present a broad outline of the history of the ley fuga and some coordinates for its study in the public sphere. The perception that extrajudicial means are necessary for justice survives today, as Mexican police and armed forces continue to be accused of extrajudicial executions. This chapter, however, will focus on the era up to the middle decades of the twentieth century, when those abuses were not yet framed in terms of human rights violations, but were considered part of regular law enforcement practices.
Since the Porfiriato, journalists, average citizens, and even lawyers had justified the ley fuga as a method to procure justice when official justice was not to be trusted. Although the ley fuga was committed by representatives of the government, most commentators pragmatically recognized the contradiction between it and formal law. They found ways to express favorable views about the ley fuga, usually in conjunction with tacit support for officers who, in dealing with criminals, claimed to be encumbered by the formalities of the law. The ley fuga was simultaneously the object of official condemnation as a violation of the rule of law, and of praise from those who recognized that such rule was impossible to achieve in reality.
These contradictions beg a reconsideration of the relationship between violence and politics inspired by Arendt's observation. As the following pages show, violence was not an irrational byproduct of inequality or culture, but an integral part of politics — if we define politics as a multi-layered realm of life in which shaping policies about public matters of common interest involves a diversity of languages and actors.
The term "ley fuga" seems to have emerged in print during the 1870s, and was probably employed earlier in Spain, as "ley de fugas," in the context of the repression of bandits and later of anarchists and republicans. The first examples of the practice in Mexico for which I could find references date back to the era of civil unrest after independence. They were not called "ley fuga" yet but already consisted of the killing of prisoners on the pretext that they were attempting to flee. The criminologist Julio Guerrero, in La génesis del crimen en México, attributed the term to conservative general Anastasio Bustamante, one of the nation's "multitude of little tyrants and murderers" notable for "the art of killing and destroying entire regions." According to Guerrero, the ley fuga was first applied against two rebels who had surrendered on the condition that their lives be spared. "But in spite of the agreement, they were taken out of the capital on the back of mules, their hands and feet tied, surrounded by twenty dragoons." A firm believer in science and the law, Guerrero condemned the practice as a barbarity even worse than lynching.
Yet the practice, according to Guerrero, "has been used by all national authorities from then until not long ago," an indirect reference to the Porfirian regime. At the time Guerrero was writing, however, the ley fuga and its association with lynching were not things of the past. Guerrero himself cited testimony presented throughout the trial of police officer Antonio Villavicencio, in 1898, describing routine use of the ley fuga: "a person would be taken by order of the authority to an uninhabited place at night, and killed by gunshots or stabbing. Noriega [the witness] stated that he had seen more than four hundred indigenous prisoners killed this way in Sonora." Villavicencio had been a participant in the death of Arnulfo Arroyo, a man who attacked Porfirio Díaz during a parade in 1897. While Arroyo was detained at the police station a crowd, which apparently included members of the police, broke into his cell and killed him in an ostensible expression of popular outrage. Liberal journalist Ireneo Paz characterized the attack on Arroyo as "a lesson, as rigorous as it is patriotic, because it reveals the virility of the Mexican people." The police chief who allowed this to happen, Eduardo Velázquez, was nevertheless arrested because Díaz could not condone the violence against his aggressor. Velázquez wrote a note full of regret for disappointing President Díaz, and killed himself at the police station — or perhaps fell victim to a subtler version of the ley fuga. The episode proved that such messy executions could amount to unofficial yet "patriotic" violence, but also that higher authorities would never openly support them.
Though highly publicized, this case merely presented a complicated instance of a routine practice. Francisco Bulnes, an intellectual close to Díaz, wrote that General Bernardo Reyes was the regime's most famous practitioner of the ley fuga: "during the thirty-four years of the Tuxtepec regime about ten thousand individuals must have been killed in order to cleanse the country of bandits ... the governor who put the greatest effort into this bloody task was undoubtedly General Bernardo Reyes, who for twenty-three years ruled the state of Nuevo León with an iron and bloody hand." Writing in the 1920s, years after the end of the regime and the death of the dictator, Bulnes added that Díaz approved of these methods, describing Reyes and his use of lethal violence as "inspired by Huitzilopochtli." Bulnes was an adversary of Reyes so he might have exaggerated his negative view of extrajudicial murders. In contrast, newspapers during the Porfiriato reported on the execution of suspects at crime scenes without any apparent concern over the illegality of the practice. The unofficial punishment of the killers of a domestic worker in Pachuca in 1897 demonstrated the simple logic of the ley fuga: they were executed in the same place where the body of their victim was found.
President Francisco I. Madero and Vice President José María Pino Suárez were murdered in similar fashion in February 1913, outside the Mexico City penitentiary. Nobody believed that Victoriano Huerta, the general who overthrew Madero, had not ordered the crime, yet the circumstances surrounding it reflected an attempt to justify it. The use of the ley fuga seems to have been less prominent in this period — not for lack of prisoners to execute but because the civil war displaced the established authorities who would have required the ley fuga to skirt legal formalities. In the most famous example from those years, the ley fuga seems to havebeen used for sport rather than political necessity. According to Martín Luis Guzmán, Villista general Rodolfo Fierro killed prisoners, perhaps even hundreds of them, simply for entertainment. On one occasion, prisoners were told to run toward a wall and try to climb it. If they managed to do so, they would be free, but they had to survive the methodical guns of Fierro, shooting at them as they ran away.
After the revolution, lynching and the ley fuga began to be defended in the context of a state that could not be trusted to protect honor and property. Saydi Núñez Cetina examines the case of Isaac Mendicoa Juárez, a recidivist bandit from the southern suburbs of the Federal District. The use of the ley fuga against him, in 1933, expressed the influence of the press, public frustration over the light sentences imposed, and the ineffectiveness of prisons in rehabilitating criminals. Querido Moheno, a famous Mexican defense lawyer in the 1920s, praised U.S. lynchings as a method to protect the honor of white girls. Representing a young woman accused of killing a politician to avenge her father's murder, he told the judge, in his characteristically melodramatic tone: "I proclaim that all of us have not only the right but also the sacred duty to take justice into our own hands when public authorities deny us the justice we deserve by divine right." He added a rationale that could apply equally to the use of ley fuga in subsequent decades: "only those people who can apply justice themselves, when public authority cannot or would not apply it, have a right to justice." In the context of the consolidation of the postrevolutionary regime, Moheno, a former Porfirista and Huertista, framed his defense of extrajudicial violence as a popular reaction against a new tyrannical state.
Yet there was certain ambiguity about the ley fuga, in terms of both morality and semantics. This, I believe, is the reason why the late Paul Vanderwood is wrong in assuming that the 1938 execution of Juan Castillo Morales, in Tijuana, was an example of the ley fuga: in fact the execution was public, conducted according to regulations, and took place after a military trial. Vanderwood claims that the ley fuga was widely condemned, but cites little evidence other than the popular reaction against the (probably legal) execution of Castillo Morales. The opposite seems to have been true. Multiple examples show that extrajudicial violence against suspects in the interests of justice was condoned in the context of broadly shared skepticism toward penal institutions, yet, unlike the Morales case, the executions were conducted more discreetly.
The clearest expression of this reasoning is found in the crime news from the 1930s. As in the cases of Gallegos, Arroyo, and Mendicoa Juárez, the press created the narratives that shaped public interpretations of the use of the ley fuga. The nota roja, as crime news was often called, was the most influential journalistic genre in twentieth-century Mexico. Crime-focused periodicals enjoyed high circulation and financial autonomy, and so were able to engage readers in a critical dialogue with the state, as represented by police officers and judges. Nota roja publications, particularly during the middle decades of the century, appealed to the emotions and critical reasoning of readers, inviting them to become involved in the pursuit and punishment of suspects. Gruesome images were central to this appeal, sometimes including the bodies of ley fuga victims. Editors expected readers to question law enforcement and judicial institutions and seek the truth using the evidence presented in their publication, along with logic, intuition, and experience. In 1934 La Prensa, the most popular nota roja newspaper, offered a reward for readers who contributed information leading to the arrest of the main suspect in a triple murder at a barbershop, and a prize to the reader who could explain the true motive of the gruesome crime in no more than one hundred words. Santiago Rodríguez Silva was suspected of killing three women with razor blades and then fleeing the city. He was indeed killed by police detectives while in custody. Calls for swift punishment of suspects, also repeated in nota roja editorial pages, could only be construed as an extension of that involvement.
For readers and editors seeking truth and punishment there was no clear hierarchy between legal and extralegal justice. The sentence was the least important aspect of the judicial process, since many innocent people were behind bars while true criminals fled or served short sentences. The suspect's arrest was more meaningful because it led to prison. What happened there afterwards was uncertain, but could include the ley fuga. Goyo Cárdenas, the famous 1942 serial killer, for example, was the object of multiple public demands for extrajudicial violence. Yet he was sent to a penitentiary and then to La Castañeda mental asylum, where he had an easy life, including excursions that, when discovered, forced his return to the penitentiary. In prison he became a lawyer, married, and had children; on his release in the 1970s he was cited as an example of rehabilitation. As explored by Enrique Desmond Arias and Kayyonne Marston in chapter 11, justifications of police repression and extrajudicial violence are influenced by the degree of visibility of crimes.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Tables,
Preface Cecilia Menjívar,
Introduction: The Politics and Publics of Violence and Crime in Latin America David Carey Jr. and Gema Santamaría,
Part I. Extralegal Violence and Its Justifications,
1. Ley Fuga as Justice: The Consensus around Extrajudicial Violence in Twentieth-Century Mexico Pablo Piccato,
2. Legitimating Lynching: Public Opinion and Extralegal Violence in Mexico Gema Santamaría,
3. Engendering Violence: Military Leadership through the Moral Crisis of Guatemala's National Family M. Gabriela Torres,
4. Police Use of Force and Social Consensus in Buenos Aires Lila Caimari,
Part II. Constructing Crime,
5. Sodomitic Violence in Chile: Medical Knowledge and the Ambivalent Application of Law Robert F. Alegre,
6. Debunking Indigenous Criminality: Discourse, Statistics, and the Ethnicity of Crime in Guatemala David Carey Jr.,
7. The Invention of Night: Visibility and Violence after Dark in Rio de Janeiro Amy Chazkel,
8. Rebels, Outlaws, and Enemies: The Criminalization of Dissent in Colombia and Mexico Luis Herrán Ávila,
Part III. The Politics of Making Violence Visible,
9. "There Are No Lynchings Here": The Invisibility of Crime and Extralegal Violence in an Eastern Guatemalan Town Daniel Núñez,
10. Silent Traffickers or Brutal Criminals: How State Power Shapes Criminals' Incentives to Expose Violence Angélica Durán-Martínez,
11. Selective Blindness: Criminal Visibility and Violence in Rio de Janeiro and Kingston Enrique Desmond Arias and Kayyonne Marston,
Conclusion: The Politics of Violence Control in Latin America Jenny Pearce,
Epilogue: Apocalypse Now? Diane E. Davis,
Works Cited,
List of Contributors,
Index,