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 University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5574-6

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,

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...