When "justice" is criminal: Lynchings in contemporary Latin America

Theory and Society

Volumn 33, Issue 6, 2004, Pages 621-651

  Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 23944446014     PISSN: 03042421     EISSN: 15737853     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/B:RYSO.0000049192.62380.29     Document Type: Review

References (135)

1. Angel Martín Tax, "Baja Verapaz: Intentan Linchar a Tres Delincuentes," Prensa Libre 22 October 2001 ;
2. Teresa López, Teresa. "Turba Lincha a Tres," Prensa Libre 23 October 2001.
3. "Por radio incitaron a sacarlos de la cárcel; desoyeron al gobernador," La Jornada 27 March 1998;
4. for a more detailed account of this lynching, see Sam Quiñones, True Tales From Another Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001).
5. "Comunidad de Mariara se rebela contra el alto íindicendice de inseguridad," El Universal, 18 April 2001;
6. "Apresado el violador y homicida de Mariara," El Universal 14 May 2001;
7. "Mariara de todos los monstruos," El Universal 13 May 2001.
8. Although the term "lynchings" often connotes a particular practice in the U.S. context - readers may have in mind the racially-motivated killings, by hanging, in the post-bellum U.S. south - in the Latin American context the methods of execution are many and there does not appear to be any consistent link to racial domination. For purposes of this article, lynchings are defined as incidents of physical violence committed by large numbers of private citizens against one or more individuals accused of having committed a "criminal" offense, whether or not this violence resulted in the death of the victim(s). Therefore, confrontations between armed groups, military actions, disputes over land that may result in murders, individual settling-of-accounts or vengeance killings, and other types of violence are not considered "lynchings." The numbers of lynchings cited here reflect the number of incidents, not the number of victims; in fact, many lynchings involve multiple victims.
9. This figure includes incidents occurring from the beginning of 1996 to the end of 2002. See Misión de Verificación de las Naciones Unidas en Guatemala (MINUGUA), "Los Linchamientos: Un Flagelo Contra la Dignidad Humana" (Guatemala: MINUGUA, 2000);
10. and MINUGUA, "Los Linchamientos: Un Flagelo que Persiste" (Guatemala: MINUGUA, 2002).
11. Programa Venezolano de Educatión y Acción en Derechos Humanos (PROVEA), Informe Anual 2001. http://www.derechos.org.ve/.
12. Daniel M. Goldstein, '"In our own hands': Lynching, Justice, and the Law in Bolivia," American Ethnologist 30/1 (February 2003): 22-43.
13. Carlos M. Vilas, "(In)justicia por Mano Propia: Linchamientos en el México Contemporáneo," Revista Mexicana de Sociología 63/1 (2001): 131-160.
14. Eduardo Castillo Claudett, "La Justicia en Tiempos de la Ira: Linchamientos Populares Urbanos en América Latina," Ecuador Debate 51 (2000): 207-226;
15. D. Goldstein, "In our own hands," concurs with the view that these incidents are on the rise.
16. See Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 189-192.
17. John L. Comaroff, Foreword in Contested States: Law, Hegemony and Resistance, M. Lazarus-Black and S.F. Hirsch, editors (New York: Routledge), xii.
18. The term polyarchy was first coined by Robert Dahl 9 (see Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971]) to refer to a system of government whereby popular participation is confined to the expression of preferences in elite-controlled electoral contests; citizens vote, but a small group of powerful elites rules. Many theorists, similarly, have accepted variations on a "Schumpterian" definition for democracy whereby the establishment of free elections signals the point at which democracy is considered to have been achieved; yet in my view, the mere establishment of political institutions in which elites vie for leadership is not synonymous with the creation of a system truly "for the people," See Robert Dahl, for an excellent discussion of the relationship of polyarchy to democracy,
19. see William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
20. By locating these democracies in the developing world, I do not mean to imply that advanced industrial countries' democracies are somehow above reproach; quite the contrary, I believe examining the cases of extreme democratic dysfunction in the periphery may shed light on related, yet perhaps less apparent, deficiencies in "core" democracies as well.
21. There are problems, no doubt, in letting research conducted in a single country serve as our window on this broader phenomenon; I am not unaware of these shortcomings. But without some initial attempts to illuminate these phenomena, based as they admittedly are on incomplete, partial information gleaned from glimpses of a very complex and contentious reality, we will never begin to understand this very important pattern of "justice" that is, itself, criminal. Here, I have focused on elements of the Guatemalan case that are generalizable to other contexts. For a more detailed treatment of the particularities of the Guatemalan case, see Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, "Lynchings and the Democratization of Terror in Postwar Guatemala."
22. This is particularly a problem in Guatemala, where a number of lynchings have been instigated by former members of the paramilitary civil patrols, many of whom rely on their de facto authority to continue to impose fear among the residents of their communities. For more on paramilitary involvement in lynchings, see Godoy, "Lynchings."
23. Carlos M. Vilas, "(In)justicia por Mano Propia."
24. 1 have chosen not to identify this group because of the political sensitivity of this topic in the volatile and often violent settings in which they work.
25. I have chosen not to identify this group by name because of security concerns arising from the political sensitivity of this topic in the volatile and often violent settings in which they work.
26. See Robert L. Ayres, Crime and Violence as Development Issues in Latin America and the Caribbean (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1998);
27. Mayra Buvinic, Andrew Morrison, and Michael Shifter, "Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Framework for Action," Inter-American Development Bank, March 1999.
28. Hugo Fruhling and Joseph S. Tulchin, editors, Crime and Violence in Latin America: Citizen Security, Democracy, and the State (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003).
29. See, for example, Guillermo O'Donnell, "On the state, democratization and some conceptual problems: A Latin American view with glances at some post-communist countries." World Development 21/8 (1993);
30. Guillermo O'Donnell, "Polyarchies and the (Un)Rule of Law in Latin America: A Partial Conclusion," 303-337
31. in The (Un)Rule of Law & the Underprivileged in Latin America, Juan E. Méndez, Guillermo O'Donnell, and Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, editors (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999);
32. Guillermo O'Donnell, "Democracy, Law, and Comparative Politics." Studies in Comparative International Development 36/1 (2001): 7-36;
33. William C. Prillaman, The Judiciary and Democratic Decay in Latin America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000);
34. Juan Méndez,"Problems of Lawless Violence," chapter 1 in The (Un)Rule of Law & the Underprivileged in Latin America, Juan E. Méndez, Guillermo O'Donnell, and Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, editors (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).
35. See Edmundo Jarquín and Fernando Carrillo, editors, Justice Delayed: Judicial Reform in Latin America (Washington: Inter-American Development Bank, 1998);
36. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "Law and Democracy: (Mis)trusting the Global Reform of Courts," 253-281,
37. in Globalizing Institutions: Case studies in Regulation and Innovation, Jane Jenson and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, editors (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002).
38. Prillaman, The Judiciary, 172.
39. See G. O'Donnell, "On the State, Democratization and Some Conceptual Problems."
40. Regarding Guatemala, both of these statements are indisputably true. On the crime rate: in 1997 the World Bank estimated Guatemala's homicide rate at 150 per 100,000 population, more than fifteen times the comparable rate in the United States (See Buvinic, "Violence in Latin America," 3). On the justice system: a recent USAID study of the justice system found its inefficiency in prosecuting criminal cases "catastrophic"; of an estimated 90,000 cases brought to the attention of the Public Ministry per year, virtually none is tried by the courts.
41. (See Steven Hendrix, "Lessons from Guatemala: Renewing US Foreign Policy on the Rule of Law," Harvard International Review (Winter 2002): 14-18.
42. http://www.rnw.nl/informarn/html/act001010_laviolencia.html
43. Personal interview with Mayan man from Chimaltenango, 6/25/99.
44. Personal interview with Ricardo Ardón, Executive Director of CACIF, 6/17/99.
45. Catherine Elton, "Guatemala's Lynch-Mob Justice," in The Christian Science Monitor, December 1, 2000;
46. "Las amargas realidades de la 'justicia' popular," Prensa Libre Sept 19, 1997.
47. "López Obrador Justifica Linchamiento," El Diario de México July 28, 2001. http://www.diariodemexico.com.mx/2001/ju101/280701/ fotos/primera.pdf
48. See Sigh Veintiuno (no byline), "Flores Asturias: Más Policias para Reducir Linchamientos," 24 December 1998;
49. Guatemala Flash (no byline), "Falta de Juzgados Motiva a Pobladores a Tomar Justicia por Mano Propia," 24 March 1998.
50. Roberto Montoya, "Linchamientos, un flagelo que sacude Guatemala. Más de 500 personas fueron víctimas de esta alarmante práctica en las comunidades indígenas desde 1996," El Mundo del Siglo Veintiuno, December 18, 2002: 28.
51. On this point, see Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
52. See especially David Trubek and Marc Galanter. "Scholars in Self-Estrangement: Some reflections on the crisis in law and development studies in the United States," Wisconsin Law Review (1974): 1062-1102.
53. Centro de Investigaciones Económicas Nacionales (CIEN), "Paz urbana: percepciones de la violencia en Guatemala." Sondeo Urbano Participativo.
54. Colonia Santa Marta, Esquipulas, Chiquimula, and Cantón El Mosquito, San Pedro Sacatepéquez, San Marcos, unpublished ms, June 1999;
55. CIEN, "Diagnóstico de la Violencia en Guatemala: Aproximación Cuantitativa y Cualitativa," unpublished ms. n/d, on file with author.
56. In Guatemala, this may be partly because those carrying out the more sensational crimes belong to more sophisticated criminal organizations, many of them composed of demobilized former combatants with lingering ties to the state and thus a measure of guaranteed impunity, beyond the reach of a ragtag band of peasants armed with gasoline; in part it may be because such crimes, while atrocious, are more frequently talked about than they are actually experienced, and thus the stories outpace the action opportunities in terms of lynchings.
57. C. Vilas, "(In)justicia por Mano Propia."
58. Castillo Claudett, "La justicia."
59. Richard Sparks, Evi Girling, and Ian Loader, "Fear and Everyday Urban Lives." Urban Studies 38/5-6 (2001): 888.
60. Kai T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966).
61. Furthermore, if we consider contemporary Latin American lynchings in comparative and historical perspective, the naivete of equating their eruption to "self-help criminal justice" is yet clearer. For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, lynchings in the U.S. South were often justified by participants and in the local press as necessary to ensure swift, certain justice for black criminals in light of a slow, ineffective, and lenient criminal justice system; yet a wealth of recent scholarship has conclusively shown that these acts corresponded to boundary management of quite a different sort. While there are many important differences between the U.S. case and contemporary Latin American ones, and a thorough comparison of the two falls outside the scope of my project here, a passing familiarity with the literature on lynchings elsewhere should lead observers of Latin America to be cautious about uncritically accepting presumed connections between crime and contemporary vigilantism. (For more on lynchings in the United States, see, for example, Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, "Racial Violence and Black Migration in the American South, 1910 to 1930," American Sociological Review 57 (1992): 103-116;
62. S. Tolnay and E. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995);
63. S. Tolnay, G. Deane, and E.M. Beck, "Vicarious Violence: Spatial Effects on Southern Lynchings, 1890-1919," American Journal of Sociology 102 (1996): 788-815;
64. Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984);
65. H. Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988);
66. W. Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 1993).
67. José de Souza Martins, "Lynchings - Life by a Thread: Street Justice in Brazil, 1979-1988,"21-32, in Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America: Essays on Extralegal Violence, Martha K. Huggins, editor (New York: Praeger, 1991), 22.
68. Some commentaries on the Guatemalan phenomenon, including the frequently-cited United Nations Mission to Guatemala's 2000 report on the topic, use province-by-province breakdowns, which show that almost as many lynchings have occurred in the capital city as in rural El Quiché, as a way to dispel the myth that lynchings are somehow a "Mayan" phenomenon. Such arguments are misleading, however, because the numbers are not weighted for population; it is not surprising that in an area with a much larger population, more lynchings would occur. Per capita statistics show a more pronounced concentration of lynchings in the Western highlands.
69. Of course, these "traditional," "Mayan" justice practices are themselves shaped by the legacies of colonialism, an outcome of the intersection of multiple forms of legal ordering called interlegality by Boaventura de Souza Santos (and legal pluralism by others). By saying such practices unfold outside the formal legal system, I do not mean to suggest they are ever fully autonomous from it.
70. See Defensoría Maya, Suk'B 'Anik. Administration de Justicia Maya. Experiencias de Defensoría Maya (Guatemala: Defensoría Maya, 1999);
71. Coordinación de Organizaciones del Pueblo Maya de Guatemala, (SAQB'ICHIL-COPMAGUA). Más Allá de la Costumbre: Cosmos, Orden, y Equilibrio (Guatemala: COPMAGUA, 2000);
72. Rachel Sieder, "Recognising Indigenous Law and the Politics of State Formation in Mesoamerica," 184-207, in Multiculturalism in Latin America: Indigenous Rights, Diversity and Democracy, Rachel Sieder, editor (Hampshire, England: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002);
73. Raquel Yrigoyen Fajardo, Pautas de Coordinación entre el Derecho Indigena y el Derecho Estatal (Guatemala: Fundación Myrna Mack, 1999).
74. In recent years, however, several Mayan organizations have undertaken significant (and in many cases, very successful) efforts to recover such practices and encourage communities to resume their use. See Defensoría Maya, Suk'B'Anik.
75. Teresa López. "Turba lincha a tres," Prensa Libre 23 October 2001.
76. Personal interview, 10/26/00.
77. My intention here is not to downplay the importance of the war in this process; quite the contrary, I consider it to be fundamental. But because I have explored it elsewhere (see Godoy, "Lynchings"), I devote primary attention here to other aspects that are more generalizable to other countries of Latin America.
78. George W. Lovell, "Surviving Conquest: the Maya of Guatemala in Historical Perspective," Latin American Research Review 23/2 (1998): 25-37.
79. Edward F. Fischer, "Induced Culture Change as a Strategy for Socioeconomic Development: The Pan-Maya Movement in Guatemala," 51-73, in Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala, Edward F. Fischer and R. McKenna Brown, editors (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1996).
80. Furthermore, while the economic transformation of the highlands continued throughout the armed conflict, in some communities its effects are being felt most keenly now that the war is over, simply because the pressures of military occupation have receded.
81. See William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy;
82. and W. Robinson, "Neoliberalism, the Global Élite, and the Guatemalan Transition: A Critical Macrosocial Analysis," 189-206, in Globalization on the Ground: Postbellum Guatemalan Democracy and Development, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Susanne Jonas, and Nelson Amaro, editors (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
83. See Linda Green, "The Localization of the Global: Contemporary Production Practices in a Mayan Community in Guatemala," 51-65, in The Third Wave of Modernization in Latin America: Cultural Perspectives on Neoliberalism, Lynne Phillips, editor (Wilmington, Del.: Jaguar Books, 1998);
84. and Carol A. Smith, "The Militarization of Civil Society in Guatemala: Economic Reorganization as a Continuation of War," Latin American Perspectives 17/4 (Fall 1990): 8-41.
85. William M. Loker, "Grit in the Prosperity Machine: Globalization and the Rural Poor in Latin America," 9-39, in Globalization and the Rural Poor in Latin America, William M. Loker, editor (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 1999).
86. Alain de Janvry, Elisabeth Sadoulet, and Linda Wilcox Young, "Land and Labour in Latin American Agriculture from the 1950s to the 1980s," Journal of Peasant Studies 16/3 (1989): 396-424.
87. For example, in the 1960s landless peasants were given tracts of land in a previously unsettled region of the rain forest in El Ixcán, El Quiché, as part of an attempt to ameliorate the agrarian crisis. As a result of this resettlement, many communities in El Ixcán are today composed of residents from various ethnolin-guistic groups, each of which has its own language, dress, and set of traditions; it is relatively unsurprising, then, that such communities face challenges knitting a new, pluralistic social fabric in the wake of the war.
88. See L. Green, "The Localization of the Global."
89. Liliana R. Goldin, "Rural Guatemala in Economic and Social Transition," 93-110, in Globalization and the Rural Poor in Latin America, William M. Loker, editor (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 1999).
90. See, for example, Eric Popkin, "Guatemalan Mayan Migration to Los Angeles: Constructing Transnational linkages in the Context of the Settlement Process," Ethnic & Racial Studies 22/2 (March 1999): 267-300;
91. Alejandro Portes, "Theories of Development and their Application to Small Countries," 189-206, in Globalization on the Ground: Postbellum Guatemalan Democracy and Development, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Susanne Jonas, and Nelson Amaro, editors (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
92. It also creates a population highly vulnerable to assault: many of my interviewees expressed particularly deep outrage at activities of criminal bands who lie in wait for peasants returning from the coast, knowing that these men (and occasionally women and children too) will be returning with an entire season's wages, usually in cash.
93. See especially L. Green, "Localization."
94. See ibid.;
95. L. Goldin, "Rural Guatemala."
96. See, for example, Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
97. Kay B.Warren, Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
98. See especially Carol Hendrickson, "Women, Weaving, and Education in Maya Revitalization," 156-164, in Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala, Edward F. Fischer and R. McKenna Brown, editors (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1996);
99. see also E. Fischer, "Induced Cultural Change";
100. and K. Warren, Indigenous Movements.
101. Personal interview with Mayan activist from Huehuetenango, 6/25/99.
102. Focus group interview, 10/24/2000; speaker is a K'iché woman from a village near Chichicastenango.
103. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, George Simpson, translator (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1947), 76.
104. Ibid., 99.
105. Durkheim writes, "We can thus explain a character of this reaction that has often seemed irrational.... When we desire the repression of crime, it is not that we desire to avenge personally, but to avenge something sacred which we feel more or less confusedly outside and above us.... That is why penal law is not alone essentially religious in origin, but indeed always retains a certain religious stamp. It is because the acts that it punishes appear to be attacks upon something transcendent,"
106. (iIbid., 100).
107. MINUGUA, 2000.
108. This holds more for rural than for urban lynchings. In urban areas, lynch mobs are generally unable to hold their victims for long stretches of time without some intervention by the authorities. In rural areas, however, the relative isolation of these communities often permits lynchers more time to organize complex rituals and summon large crowds.
109. C. Vilas, "(In)justicia por Mano Propia."
110. Castillo Claudett, "La justicia."
111. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Patrick Gregory, translator (Baltimore, MD.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 8.
112. As Andrew Buckser has noted in a similar discussion of lynchings in the post-bellum U.S. south, "a lynching which succeeded was not only a victory of the community against the supposed criminal, but also a victory of the community against the government. Justice had been done not by the law but by the communal will; the unofficial realm had triumphed over the official. In a lynching the unofficial white community symbolically regained its authority over the social order." Andrew S. Bucker, "Lynching as Ritual in the American South," Berkeley Journal of Sociology 37 (1992), 25.
113. Castillo Claudett, "Lajusticia."
114. C. Vilas, "(In)justicia por Mano Propia."
115. RadioNederland, http://www.rnw.nl/informarn/html/act001010_laviolencia. html.
116. El Universal, 18 April 2001.
117. Personal interview, 6/25/99.
118. On this point, see also A. Godoy, "Lynchings."
119. Felipe Agüero, "Conflicting Assessments of Democratization: Exploring the Fault Lines," 1-20, in Fault Lines of Democracy in Post-Transition Latin America, Felipe Agüero and Jeffrey Stark, editors (Miami: North-South Center Press, 1998).
120. G. O'Donnell et al., The (Un)Rule of Law.
121. Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
122. See G. O'Donnell, "On the State."
123. See, for example, the work of Richard Sparks et al, "Fear and Everyday Urban Lives"; also that of Katherine Beckett, Jonathan Simon, Michael Tonry, and others.
124. See, for example, the various contributions to Justice Delayed: Judicial Reform in Latin America, edited by Edmundo Jarquín and Fernando Carrillo (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 1998).
125. A noteworthy and highly recommended exception to this is Caroline Moser and Cathy Mcllwaine, Violence in a Post-Conflict Context: Urban Poor Perceptions from Guatemala (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2001), a World Bank study of perceptions of violence in urban Guatemala that offers a richly detailed account of how communities regard violence, based on an unusual participatory research design.
126. Y. Dezalay and B. Garth, The Internationalization of Palace Wars, 5.
127. See also Bryant G. Garth, "Law and Society as Law and Development," Law and Society Review 37/2 (June 2003): 305-314.
128. Stuart A. Scheingold, The Politics of Rights: Lawyers, Public Policy, and Political Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974);
129. Charles Epp, "Do Bills of Rights Matter? The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms," American Political Science Review 90/4 (December 1996): 765-779.
130. Jorge Correa Sutil, "Modernization, Democratization and Judicial Systems," 97-107, in Justice Delayed: Judicial Reform in Latin America, Edmundo Jarquín and Fernando Carrillo, editors (Washington: Inter-American Development Bank, 1998), 98.
131. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "Law and Democracy," 268-269.
132. R. Sparks et al., "Fear and Everyday Urban Lives," 896.
133. See Javier Auyero, "Glocal Riots," International Sociology 16/1 (January 2001).
134. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. "Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony," American Ethnologist 26/2 (1999): 279-303.
135. Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).