Law, Honor, and Impunity in Spanish America: The Debate over Dueling, 1870–1920

Law and History Review

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 311-341

  Parker, David S ^a  

^a QUEEN S UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85011436470     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: 19399022     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/744132     Document Type: Article

References (103)

1. Archivo General de la Nation, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tribunal Criminal Serie 1, B4 1871-1874, “Benites, Julio y Jacobo Varela por desafio.”
2. Archivo General de la Nation, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
3. Archivo General de la Nation, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
4. Archivo General de la Nation, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
5. Thomas Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a 19th-century City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), provides an unflattering but convincing picture of police behavior in nineteenth-century Rio, where the arbitrary abuse of the poor was habitual. Other Latin American cities may have been different in degree, but not in kind.
6. Some sources in English: Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1995), chap. 1; Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin de Siecle Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 23-34; Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 173-82; Steven Hughes, “Men of Steel: Dueling, Honor, and Politics in Liberal Italy,” in Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, ed. Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 64-81. Nor were these debates new ones; see also Robert A. Schneider, “Swordplay and Statemaking: Aspects of the Campaign against the Duel in Early Modern France,” in Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory, ed. Charles Bright and Susan Harding (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 265-96; Francois Billacois, The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early Modern France, ed. and trans. Trista Selous (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990); James Kelly, That Damn ‘d Thing Called Honour: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), chaps. 4-6, esp. 158-67.
7. Mark Burkholder, “Honor and Honors in Colonial Spanish America,” in The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America, eds. Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 34.
8. On Cuba, see Agusti'n Cervantes, Los duelos en Cuba (Havana: A. Miranda and Cia. Imprenta La Moderna, 1894), 6-9. On Mexico, see Angel Escudero, El duelo en Mexico (Mexico City: Imprenta Mundial, 1936), 56-59. On the fatal 1866 duel in Uruguay, see Jose Maria Fernandez Saldana, La violencia en el Uruguay del siglo XIX (Cronicas de muertes, duelos, atentados y ejecuciones) (Montevideo: Cal y Canto, 1996), 26-30; [Jose Pedro Ramirez], La muerte de Servando F. Martinez (Montevideo: Imprenta Tipografica a Vapor, 1866). A few deadly duels took place in the early nineteenth century, but they appear to have been fought with much less formality. See, for example, Armando Braun Menendez, “Un duelo historico: Mackenna-Carrera,” Mapocho (Santiago, Chile) 28 (1980): 29-35. A fatal Mexican duel in 1852 had seconds and a formal challenge, but the weapons were unorthodox, to say the least: shotguns at five paces. Escudero, El duelo en Mexico, 55-56.
9. Cervantes, Los duelos en Cuba, esp. 118.
10. Killed in 1880 were Enrique Romero Gimenez by Jose Paul y Angulo and Pantaleon Gomez by Lucio V. Mansilla. In 1894 Colonel Carlos Sarmiento killed Lucio Vicente Lopez, and only the last-minute intervention of Argentina's most influential men averted a duel between the leader of the ruling party, former President Carlos Pellegrini, and Leandro Alem, leader of the opposition Union Civica Radical. Coming but a year after the failed revolution of 1893, a Pellegrini-Alem duel might well have returned Argentina to the brink of civil war.
11. Cesar Viale, Jurisprudencia caballeresca argentina, 2d ed. (Buenos Aires, 1928).
12. “Actualidad: estadi'stica del duelo,” El Plata (Montevideo), 14 April 1920, p. 1.
13. Cesar Viale, Jurisprudencia caballeresca argentina, 3d ed. (Buenos Aires, 1937), 500.
14. On Italy, see Hughes, “Men of Steel,” 68.
15. Normally duelists did not shun the press; however, a desire for secrecy might arise if the original offense was of an especially sensitive personal nature, or if the authorities at that particular moment were taking a hard repressive line against the duel. Just as often, duels went unreported simply because the participants were not important enough or well-enough connected to make the papers, or because the duels took place in the provinces rather than in the capital. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 184-86, assumes for France that statistics based on official sources and the press undercount by a factor of three or more, but that figure appears to be only an educated guess.
16. For examples, see the debates sparked by incidents involving Uruguayan presidents Jose Batlle y Ordonez and Baltasar Brum. La Democracia (Montevideo), 27 April 1906, p. 1; 28 April 1906, pp. 1-2; La Tribuna Popular (Montevideo), 16 April 1913, p. 1; The Montevideo Times, 14 December 1922, p. 3; 19 December 1922, p. 3; La Tribuna Popular, 13 December 1922, p. 1.
17. Pablo Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor: Dueling in Turn-of-the-Century Mexico,” Journal of Social History 33.2 (Winter 1999): 331-54. On the resurgence of dueling in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Robert Nye, “Fencing, the Duel and Republican Manhood in the Third Republic,” Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990): 366; McAleer, Dueling, 3; and especially Hughes, “Men of Steel,” 66.
18. For Mexico City, see Escudero, El duelo en Mexico, 39-50; Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 333. For Buenos Aires, see Roberto J. Cristiani, Resena historica del cuerpo de gimnasia y esgrima del ejercito y su proyeccion en la vida nacional: Algunos aspectos de su evolution entre 1897-1960 (Buenos Aires: Servicio de Informaciones del Ejercito, 1968), esp. 11-15.
19. See some of the biographies of immigrant journalists in La Nacion, numero especial para el centenario de 1916 (Buenos Aires, 1916), 251-60, 338-43.
20. On dueling and the press in Italy, see Hughes, “Men of Steel,” esp. 68-70. On France, see William M. Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814-1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), chap. 5; Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 187-90. On the political press in Latin America, see Charles F. Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), chap. 6; Tim Duncan, “La prensa politica: Sud-America, 1884-1892,” in La Argentina del ochenta al centenario, ed. Gustavo Ferrari and Ezequiel Gallo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1980), 761-83; Benjamin Fernandez y Medina, La imprenta y la prensa en el Uruguay (Montevideo: Dornaleche y Reyes, 1900), 42, 66-83.
21. For one of many examples, see the complaints of bias in the 1883 defamation case between Jose Pesce and El Bien Publico of Montevideo. El Hilo Electrico (Montevideo), 9 October 1883, p. 2; 12 October 1883, p. 2; La Tribuna Popular (Montevideo), 12 October 1883, p. 1.
22. On the legitimacy crisis and the long struggle to forge a new legal order, see Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), chaps. 4, 7, 8. See also Francois-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispdnicas (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992); and in English, Francois-Xavier Guerra, “The Spanish-American Tradition of Representation and its European Roots,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26.1 (1994): esp. 4-6, 9-12, 24-29.
23. Hughes, “Men of Steel,” 77.
24. Joanne Freeman, “Dueling as Politics: Reinterpreting the Burr-Hamilton Duel,” William and Mary Quarterly 53.2 (1996): 289-318; Bertam Wyatt-Brown, “Andrew Jackson's Honor,” Journal of the Early Republic (1997): 1-36; Reddy, The Invisible Code, chap. 5.
25. “Private” duels are inevitably underrepresented in the available historical sources, precisely because they were private, sensitive, and hence concealed, unlike political duels, which almost required publicity. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 185-86, makes this point for France. Nevertheless, when Spanish Americans discussed the duel, most noted the predominance of public over private motives, and the magnitude of the disparity seems to negate the possibility that underrepresentation in the sources is a sufficient explanation. That is not to say that duels among competing suitors, for example, did not occur. See, for one, Francisco Varona Murias, Mis duelos, 3d ed. (Havana: Imprenta de Ricardo Ripes, 1906), 107-12. But Varona's eight or so other duels all arose from politics, journalism, or both.
26. Repiiblica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 271, 21 May 1919, p. 55.
27. In 1880, for example, supporters of the editor of a satirical paper in Montevideo repeatedly charged that government cronies provoked duels in order to muzzle the free press. See El Negro Timoteo (Montevideo), 20 June 1880, pp. 212-13; 11 July 1880, pp. 217-27.
28. Years after his famous 1897 encounter with Hipolito Yrigoyen (leader of Argentina's Union Civica Radical), ex-partisan Lisandro de la Torre lamented having fought the duel, precisely because the rules of honor forced him to keep to himself the accusations that had occasioned their falling out. B. Gonzalez Arrili, Vida de Lisandro de la Torre (Buenos Aires, 1940), 79-80.
29. “Personal,” Diario del Plata (Montevideo), 6 November 1915, p. 3. See also “Para ella,” El Dia (Montevideo), 28 May 1913, p. 6, and “Escorpion en la Camara,” El Dia, 20 May 1914, p. 5, a cartoon depicting archrival Juan Andres Ramirez in a dress. The ideas of honor and responsibility that underpinned the culture of dueling were, not surprisingly, heavily gendered. Those who refused to duel or who found excuses not to duel were often accused of acting like women, because women also (allegedly) lacked the ability to guarantee their words on the field of honor. Women's a priori exclusion from the world of the duel in turn reinforced their exclusion from the world of public discourse, political journalism, and politics itself, a point made in Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 343-46.
30. At present, far more work needs to be done on image making and the representation of leadership during the long and uncertain transition from military to civilian rule in nineteenth-century Latin America. At stake are complex and important issues of political legit imacy and the discursive invention of “public opinion.” For vaguely analogous debates in United States history, see Freeman, “Dueling as Politics”; Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. chaps. 1 and 3; Wyatt-Brown, “Andrew Jackson's Honor,” 1-36.
31. Wyatt-Brown, “Andrew Jackson's Honor,” 14-27, makes precisely this point for dueling in the antebellum United States. Interestingly, he draws heavily on studies of patronage in Latin America and Spain. See also Eric R. Wolf, “Kinship, Friendship and Patron-Client Relations in Complex Societies,” in The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies, ed. Michael Banton (London: Tavistock Publications, 1966), 1-22; and Glen Caudill Dealy, The Latin Americans: Spirit and Ethos (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), chaps. 4-6.
32. Juan M. Rodriguez, El duelo: Estudio filosofico-moral (Mexico City: Tipografi'a Mexicana, 1869), 5. The Church's formal denunciation of the duel had been unwavering for more than half a millennium, going back at least to the Council of Valencia in 1229 and strongly confirmed by the Council of Trent, which ordered the excommunication of duelists and seconds and denied ecclesiastical sepulture to those killed in duels. Jose Borras, El duelo: Estudio historico-critico (Madrid: A de S. Martin, 1888), 23; Billacois, The Duel, chap. 9.
33. M. A. Fuentes and M. A. de la Lama, Diccionario de juhsprudencia y de legislation peruana (Lima: Imprenta del Estado, 1877), 226-27. On Dupin, see Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, esp. 134-35.
34. Alejandro Groizard y Gomez de la Serna, El codigo penal de 1870, concordado y comentado, vol. 4, 2d ed. (Madrid: Establecimiento Tipografico de los Sucesores de J. A. Garcia, 1912), 681.
35. On informal dueling and masculine honor codes among the lower classes, see John Charles Chasteen, “Violence for Show: Knife Dueling on a Nineteenth-Century Cattle Frontier, “ in The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and Uruguay, 1750-1940, ed. Lyman L. Johnson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 47-64.
36. “Dictamen de la section 2a. del Gran Jurado Nacional,” Revista de Legislacion y Jurisprudencia (Mexico City), vol. 7 (1894), 86-388.
37. See, for instance, Senator Emilio Frugoni in Repiiblica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Senadores, vol. 120, 5 August 1920, pp. 201-2; Representative Antonio de Tomaso in Argentina, Congreso Nacional, Diario de sesiones de la Cdmara de Diputados, 1917 vol. 4, 21 August 1917, pp. 120-21; Rodriguez, El duelo, 23.
38. Senator Joaquin Secco Ilia in Repiiblica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Senadores, vol. 120, 5 August 1920, p. 193. See also Senator Frugoni, Representative Antonio de Tomaso in Argentina, Congreso Nacional, Diario de sesiones de la Cdmara de Diputados., 191-92.
39. Senator Frugoni, Senator Joaquin Secco Ilia in Repiiblica Oriental del Uruguay., 191. See also Rep. Juan B. Justo in Argentina, Congreso Nacional, Diario de sesiones de la Cdmara de Diputados, 1917 vol. 4, 21 August 1917, p. 126. On British dueling and its abolition by the mid-1800s, see Donna T. Andrew, “The Code of Honour and its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700-1850,” Social History 5 (1981): 409-34; and Anthony E. Simpson, “Dandelions on the Field of Honor: Dueling, the Middle Classes, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England,” Criminal Justice History 9 (1988): 99-155.
40. Argued Argentine Socialist Senator Enrique del Valle Iberlucea: “A civilization based on law and justice cannot allow blood to cleanse.” Codigo penal de la nacion argentina, ley no. 11.179: Edicion oficial (Buenos Aires: Talleres Graficos Argentinos de L. J. Rosso y Cia, 1922), 273.
41. Rep. Jose Salgado in Republica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 270, 9 May 1919, p. 403; Emilio Pedemonte, Comentarios del codigo penal (parte especial), 2d ed. (Montevideo, 1953), 313.
42. Rep. Duvimioso Terra in Republica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 270, 9 May 1919, p. 410.
43. Rep. Argerich in Argentina, Congreso Nacional, Diario de sesiones de la Cdmara de Diputados, 1900 vol. 1, 13 July 1900, p. 285. See also Codigo penal de la nacion argentina, ley no. 11.179, 184-85; Samuel F. Sanchez and Jose Panella, Codigo argentino sobre el duelo (Buenos Aires: Imp. Moreno, 1878), 12-14; Rep. Juan Andres Ramirez in Republica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 271, 28 May 1919, p. 132; Antonio Tovar, Codigo nacional mexicano del duelo (Mexico City: Imp. Lit. y Enc. de Ireneo Paz, 1891), 13-15.
44. Sostenes Rocha, in prologue to Tovar, Codigo nacional mexicano del duelo, iv.
45. Rep. Terra in Republica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 270, 9 May 1919, p. 410. Similar sentiments appear in Tovar, Codigo nacional mexicano del duelo, 9.
46. There are several Spanish translations of Chateauvillard, which was translated into other languages as well. See Ensayo sobre la jurisprudencia de los duelos por el Conde de Chateauvillard, traducido del frances y seguido por comentarios y preceptos adicionales a dicha obra por D. Andres Borrego (Madrid: Juan Iglesia Sanchez, Impresor, 1890); Luis Ricardo Fors, Arte del testigo en duelo (Buenos Aires, 1913), 57-93.
47. Julio Urbino y Ceballos-Escalera, Marques de Cabrinana, Lances entre caballeros ([Barcelona?], 1900), 346, 375-76; Ventura Oreiro, Reglas del duelo: Precedidas de un prefacio sobre el duelo en general y un bosquejo historico del mismo (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Mendia y Martinez, 1890), esp. 85-89.
48. Sanchez and Panella, Codigo argentino sobre el duelo, 56. Tovar, Codigo national mexicano del duelo, 31, considered smooth-barreled pistols preferable, “if available.”
49. One such example was the “florete sin boton” (foil without safety tip), prohibited in Luis Ramos Yzquierdo, Codigo del duelo extractado y traducido de varios autores nacionales y extrangeros (Cienfuegos, Cuba: El Comercio, 1889), 60-61. 50. Escipion A. Ferretto, Codigo de honor: Compendio de las leyes de honor destinadas a resolver las vertencias caballerescas, 6th ed. (1st ed. 1905; Buenos Aires, 1930), 65.
50. One such example was the “florete sin boton”., 74,79.
51. Tovar, Codigo national mexicano del duelo, 34.
52. Cabrinana, Lances entre caballeros, 13.
53. Tovar, Codigo national mexicano del duelo, iii-xii, 3-5.
54. Sanchez and Panella, Codigo argentino sobre el duelo, 91-107; Tovar, Codigo national mexicano del duelo, 65-69.
55. Dr. Pedro Federico Coral Luzzi, Codigo de honor con las leyes relativas al duelo: Ajustado a la codification penal de las Republicas O. del Uruguay, Argentina e ibero-americanas (Montevideo: Editorial A. Monteverde, 1950), esp. 11-18, 46-57. See also Horacio Levene, Duelo: Manual de procedimiento, 3d ed. (Buenos Aires: Revista Militar, 1924), 17-22.
56. Ferretto, Codigo de honor, 88-90, 130; Levene, Duelo, 44-5.
57. Viale, Jurisprudencia caballeresca argentina, 2d ed., 422-24.
58. Carlos Escribano, “El duelo en la legislation penal,” La Ley (Buenos Aires) 7 (1937): 18-19.
59. Fors, Arte del testigo en duelo, 50-55; Levene, Duelo, 54-61.
60. Mario Ramirez Boisson, Estudio sobre el duelo: Parte jun'dico penal (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1960), 90-91. Pedemonte, Comentarios del codigo penal, 322.
61. On the treatment of these issues in Argentine penal codes, see Sebastian Soler, Derecho penal argentino, vol. 3 (Buenos Aires: Tipografica Editora Argentina, 1951), 182-83; on the Mexican codes of 1871 and 1931, see Celestino Porte-Petit, Delitos contra la vida y la integridad corporal (Jalapa: Editorial Veracruzana, 1944), esp. 202-3; on the 1863 Peruvian code, see Jose Viterbo Arias, Exposition concordada y cotnparada del codigo penal del Peru de 1863, vol. 3 (Lima: Imp. Torres Aguirre, 1902), 117-20.
62. “Dictamen de la seccion 2a del gran jurado nacional,” Revista de Legislation y Jurisprudencia 1 (1894): 351-52.
63. On the treatment of these issues in Argentine penal codes., 355-56.
64. El General Sostenes Rocha ante el jurado popular con motivo del duelo verificado antre los senores Verastegui y Romero (Mexico City: Hospicio de Pobres, 1895), 8-34, 44-46. See also Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 335-37.
65. El General Sostenes Rocha ante el jurado, 39-40, 51.
66. Latin America was by no means unique in this regard. See Kelly, That Damn ‘d Thing Called Honour, 193-94.
67. Rep. Terra in Republica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 271, 21 May 1919, p. 44; Rep. Ramirez, Latin America was by no means unique in this regard., 28 May 1919, pp. 126-29.
68. Rep. Demarfa in Argentina, Diario de sesiones de la Cdmara de Diputados, 1917 vol. 4, 21 August 1917, pp. 124-25.
69. Rep. Terra in Repiiblica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 271, 21 May 1919, pp. 44-45.
70. Rodolfo Rivarola, Exposition y critica del Codigo Penal de la Republic Argentina, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Lajoune, 1890), 76, cited in Sandra Gayol, “Duelos, honores, leyes y derechos: Argentina, 1887-1923,” Anuario IEHS (Tandil, Argentina) 14 (1999): 324. See also Rodolfo Moreno (hijo), El Codigo Penal y sus antecedentes, vol. 4 (Buenos Aires: H. A. Tommasi, 1923), 76-81.
71. For a detailed study of the decriminalization debate in Uruguay, see David S. Parker, “La ley penal y las ‘leyes caballerescas’: Hacia el duelo legal en el Uruguay, 1880-1920,” Anuario IEHS 14 (1999): 295-311. Some of the material that follows appears in that article.
72. Republica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 194, 16 May 1908, pp. 168-69. The quotation marks denote a pasage cited from the authors of Uruguay's 1888 penal code.
73. Rep. Ramirez, Republica Oriental del Uruguay., 23 May 1919, pp. 82-83.
74. El Siglo (Montevideo), 12 Feb. 1908, p. 1.
75. El Siglo.
76. El Siglo., 5 June 1908, p. 1; 12 June 1908, p. 1.
77. Luis Jimenez de Asua and Jose Anton Oneca, Derecho penal conforme al codigo de 1928, vol. 2, Parte especial (Madrid: Editorial Reus, 1929), 173.
78. Rep. Ismael Cortinas in Repiiblica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 271, 9 May 1919, pp. 57-58.
79. Similar arguments had been employed in Argentina, during debate on a revised version of the 1891 Rivarola-Pinero-Matienzo penal code. See Gayol, “Duelos, honores, leyes y derechos,” 324-26; and Mariano Molla Villanueva, El duelo: Tests (La Plata, Argentina: Sese, Larrafiaga y Cfa., 1906), 74-77. On the broader issue of Romanticism in Latin American legal philosophy, see Adelman, Republic of Capital, chap. 7 (esp. 167-72).
80. On the question of the criminalization/decriminalization of abortion in Uruguay, see Graciela Sapriza, “Mentiras y silencios: El aborto en el Uruguay del novecientos,” in Historias de la vida privada en el Uruguay, vol. 2, El nacimiento de la intimidad 1870-1920, ed. Jose Pedro Barran, Gerardo Caetano, and Teresa Porzecanski (Montevideo: Ediciones Santillana, 1996): 1155.
81. Piccato goes so far as to argue (following Habermas) that the duel in Mexico was a key factor in the creation and legitimation of a “public sphere” restricted to the community of “men of honor.” Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 343-45. See also Gayol, “Duelos, honores, leyes y derechos,” 327-30.
82. Boisson, Estudio sobre el duelo, 94-115; Alfredo J. Molinario, Derechopenal, segundo curso: El libro II del codigo penal argentino (ti'tulos I a VI) (La Plata: Talleres Graficos de Emilio Bustos, 1943), 138-40; Eusebio Gomez, Tratado de derecho penal, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Compama Argentina de Editores, 1939), 223-26; Armando M. Raggi y Ageo, Derecho penal cubano: El Codigo de Defensa Social, estudio teorico-prdctico (Havana: Cultural, S.A., 1939), 367-68; Evelio Tabio, Comentarios al Codigo de Defensa Social, vol. 8 (Havana: Jesiis Montero, 1950), 297-99. Those who looked to European models noted that the Italian penal code chose to treat the duel as a crime against the administration of justice.
83. Molinario, Derecho penal, 138.
84. Gomez, Tratado de derecho penal, vol. 2, 225.
85. Jimenez de Asua and Oneca, Derecho penal, 174.
86. Derecho penal., 173-74.
87. Rep. Salgado in Republica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 270, 9 May 1919, pp. 398-400.
88. El Pueblo (Paysandu, Uruguay), 3 June 1908, p. 8; La Tribuna Popular (Montevideo), 27 June 1908, p. 2; El Paysandu, 15 June 1908, p. 2; 19 June 1908, p. 2. The 19 June editorial, reprinted from L'ltalia al Plata (Montevideo), explicitly contrasts the dilatory prosecution of the Gomeza duel with the unfair detention of one of the seconds in yet another first-blood saber duel in Montevideo that very same month.
89. La Tribuna Popular (Montevideo), 18 May 1908, p. 6.
90. El Siglo (Montevideo), 21 May 1908, p. 1.
91. Repiiblica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 271, 21 May 1919, p. 55.
92. On honor courts in the Prussian and later German armies, see MacAleer, Dueling, 86-107; Frevert, Men of Honour, 53-68.
93. Jose Maria Barnuevo, “El duelo ante la razon y la ley,” Revista General de Legislation y Jurisprudencia (Madrid) 110 (1907): 772-73.
94. El Siglo (Montevideo), 25 June 1908, p. 1.
95. Compare the 1908 and 1919 versions of the bill with the final text of the law passed in 1920. Repiiblica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 194, 16 May 1908, p. 167; El Siglo., vol. 270, 9 May 1919, p. 390; Republica Oriental del Uruguay, 1920 Registro national de leyes, decretos y otros documentos: publication oficial (Montevideo: Imprenta Nacional, 1921), 597-98.
96. See, for example, Rep. Ghioldi in Republica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cdmara de Representantes, vol. 283, 4-5 August 1920, pp. 196-97. In the short run, the result of the reform does appear to have been a decrease in the percentage of “gentlemanly conflicts” that made it to “field of honor,” but the benefit was offset by an increase in the overall number of such conflicts.
97. Mexico (Federal District), Laws, Statutes, etc. Codigo penal para el distrito y territorios federates (Mexico City: Talleres Graficos de la Nation, 1929), 231-37.
98. Moreno, Codigo penal y sus antecedentes, vol. 2, 76-101, covers the legislative history and debate in great detail. Also Gayol, “Duelos, honores, leyes y derechos,” 324-30.
99. Porte-Petit, Delitos contra la vida y la integridad corporal, 204. More precisely, the 1931 Penal Code ceased to name dueling as a specific crime, so homicide in a duel became actual homicide, with attenuating circumstances.
100. In Uruguay, for example, the contrast is startling. One or two pages were devoted to sports in the 1910s or early 1920s, while four, six, or even more were standard by the early 1930s.
101. Pablo O'Brien, “Los duelos en el Peru: Cuestion de honor,” Somos [Saturday supplement to El Comercio], December 1996; Carlos Jorge Varangot, Virtudes caballerescas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones P.S. Carra, 1972), 176-77; Roger Rodriguez, “Cuestion de honor,” Posdata (Montevideo), 19 September 1997, pp. 24-25. The repeal of legalized dueling in Uruguay had to overcome serious opposition, even in 1992. See Republica Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la Cdmara de Senadores, vol. 349, 16 June 1992, pp. 199-222; 1 July 1992, pp. 272-80. As recently as 1999, former President Julio Maria Sanguinetti lamented the repeal, arguing that it had removed an effective deterrent against irresponsible political discourse. See El Pah (Montevideo), 28 Feb. 1999, p. 19.
102. See the uproarious parody of Cabrinana's dueling code, published in Peru: Sofocleto [pseud.], El codigo de honor del Marques de Cabrihana: Edition corregida, aumentada y deformada (Lima: Editorial Arica, 1970).
103. For example: “Que tiempos aquellos…, ” El Sol (Lima), 16 July 1996.