Nightmares of The Lettered City Banditry PDF
Nightmares of The Lettered City Banditry PDF
Nightmares of The Lettered City Banditry PDF
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction | Nightmares of the Lettered City 1
Notes 295
References 333
Index 371
Acknowledgments
is book would not have been possible without my wife and col-
league, Susan R. Hallstead. It owes its existence to her support and encour-
agement, as well as to her intelligent reading of the manuscript and innate
sense of style. e book is therefore dedicated to her. I hope that the prod-
uct is worth the time and love she devoted to it (and to me).
Nightmares of the Lettered City was conceived in Pittsburgh. Later, I sub-
stantially developed the project in Boulder during my first four years there
as an assistant professor. Now it returns to Pittsburgh to start another trip.
Many people in both cities are to be thanked for making its journey possible.
I would like to thank the professors and mentors who transformed me into
a Latinoamericanist and a scholar: Mabel Moraña (who gave me the initial
opportunity to pursue a graduate career in the United States, and showed
me the intellectual and personal challenges of being a Latinoamericanist),
Reid Andrews, Gerald Martin, John Beverley, and Alejandro de la Fuente, all
at the University of Pittsburgh. It has been an enormous privilege to learn
from them, and their legacy will be with me for the rest of my academic ca-
reer. Also, I would like to thank the friends and colleagues who shared those
years with me, in particular Carlos Jáuregui, Federico Veiravé, Susana Ro-
sano, and Ignacio Sánchez-Prado.
e Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (in
particular Shirley Kregar and John Frechione) gave me the opportunity and
funding to travel repeatedly to Latin America and Europe to collect data
relevant to this research. Also, they provided me (and many, many other
hopeful and inexperienced young Latinoamericanists) with invaluable guid-
ance and support. e Andrew Mellon Foundation allowed me to devote a
year exclusively to writing. I want to thank Sara Castro-Klarén and John
Beverley, editors of the University of Pittsburgh Press series “Illuminations:
Cultural Formations of the Americas,” and Peter Kracht, the press’s editorial
director, for giving this book a chance and helping to make it a reality.
In Boulder, colleagues at the University of Colorado’s Department of
Spanish and Portuguese provided me with a warm and encouraging environ-
ment in which to work and live. My friends Emilio Bejel, Peter Elmore, Leila
ix
x | Acknowledgments
Gómez, and Luis González del Valle discussed and patiently read this manu-
script. Ricardo Landeira, chair of the department, friend, and mentor, gave
me the support I needed to work toward my professional and personal goals.
Several chapters of this book were conceived and developed in graduate
seminars. To the graduate students who participated in them, my heartfelt
thanks.
e dedication, generosity, and knowledge of Sean Knowlton, bibliogra-
pher for comparative, Spanish, and Portuguese literatures, and of the out-
standing staff at the Interlibrary Loan office at Norlin Library (Jane o-
mas, Marty Covey, Betsy Gould, and Karen Taylor) were essential to this
research, to a degree I do not think they realize. Doreen Delisle, administra-
tor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, devoted many hours of
patient work to helping me handle all aspects of my professional work. Fi-
nally, the Council on Research and Creative Work and the Graduate Com-
mittee on the Arts and Humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder
provided me with funding to travel to Latin America and Europe to develop
and finish the research for this book.
Introduction
Nightmares of the Lettered City
Anyone who fights with monsters should take care that he does not in the process
become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back
into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
| Introduction
Bandits
Plateado, bandido, cangaceiro, gaucho malo, llanero, jagunço, bandolero, abigeo,
desertor, cabra, vago, malentretenido, insumiso, salteador, fanático, guerrillero,
gavillero, agavillado, forajido, malhechor, cimarrón, muchacho del monte, mon-
tonero, malandro, Hermano de la Hoja, matrero, malebolo. ese are a few
among the many names for those engaged in a particularly pervasive form
of violence in rural Latin America. Bandits are much more than rural thieves
(ladrones en despoblado) or cattle rustlers (abigeos, cuatreros). Although the
figure of the bandit is primarily associated with robbery or an attempt
against private property (kidnapping for ransom, blackmailing, protection
rackets, cattle rustling, jacquerie), brigandage may comprise such diverse
offenses as resisting authority, smuggling, homicide, conspiracy to commit
crime, possession of prohibited weaponry, vagrancy, desertion, rebellion,
and poaching. Any challenge to state rule could be and frequently was, at
one point or another, labeled “banditry.” is protean character of the ban-
dit is one of the reasons for its continued political relevance and cultural
productivity, and a determination to understand both of these aspects is
what gave rise to this book. Bandits and rural insurgents are among the bet-
ter known characters in Latin American history, from Tupac Amaru to Emil-
iano Zapata and Che Guevara through, of course, Pancho Villa (all four la-
beled as bandits at one point or another in their careers). However, little has
been done outside the realm of historical studies to examine in a compre-
hensive fashion (beyond particular cases or particular regions) the ways in
which banditry has been depicted in elite discourse, and how this represen-
Introduction |
tation has been crucial to the constitution of Latin American national cul-
tures as we know them today.
Although I draw upon the works of Adolfo Prieto, Josefina Ludmer, and
Nina Gerassi-Navarro, I intend for this book to fill a void in Latin American
cultural criticism. is work is particularly timely because in the academic
and political agendas of Latin American studies, the inquiry into the inter-
actions between elite culture and subaltern culture occupies a central posi-
tion.3 As such, part of my goal in writing this book was that it would be rele-
vant beyond literary criticism. I want it to be read as part of a series of
studies that map foundational tropes in Latin American national cultures of
the nineteenth century. Indeed, the exploration of the symbolic mecha-
nisms of construction and negotiation of identities—Latin American “fa-
bles of identity” (Ludmer 1999, 470)—has led to important works in the
field of cultural and literary studies that have “tried to articulate the founda-
tional period of national literatures with the nation-state process of forma-
tion and institutionalization in Latin America, trying to focus on the com-
plex process of mediations and representational strategies through which
social actors try to define themselves” (Moraña 1984, 42). e contention of
this book is that the rural rebel labeled a bandit by the state was among the
foremost cultural Others of Latin American modernity. As such, it is essen-
tial to our understanding of the form that said modernity assumed, as well
as its contradictions and shortcomings.4
As John Beverley states, the bandit (together with the Indian or the run-
away slave) was the “main demoniacal force in the liberal epic” of the nine-
teenth century (1987, 102). e meaning of this statement is twofold. e
bandit-as-demon (a topic that the European gothic novel took quite literally,
as in the case of e Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Count Jan Potocki)
can mean the bandit as “adversarial force” of liberal discourse. Additionally,
through the form of possession, the bandit is regarded as the evil, hidden
“driving force.” is ambiguity points to the constitutional split of the ban-
dit trope and its changing relationship to hegemonic identities.5
As an adversarial force, the bandit as Other is essential in the constitu-
tion of the citizen as Self. As Jean Baudrillard points out, “Power exists
solely by virtue of its symbolic ability to designate the Other, the Enemy,
what is at stake, what threatens us, what is Evil” (1990, 82). e cultural his-
tory of Latin American banditry amply proves this postulate. e letrado
| Introduction
elite excluded certain rural practices and rural subjects. is exclusion cer-
tainly had a crucial material dimension, since “bandits” were targeted for
suppression, but it was at the same time a rhetorical one, since it was made
possible by the mobilization of the trope of banditry.6
is labeling played an integral part in the legitimation of an elite-led
project of nation-state building in Latin America and thus was a defining
feature of the Latin American historical experience. As Miguel Ángel Cen-
teno brilliantly proves, Latin America “lacked [the] identification of an ex-
ternal enemy that encouraged the development of a national identity. As far
as state elites are concerned, the greatest threat to their power has not come
from competing elites across the border, but from the masses below. . . . e
enemy of ‘la patria’ was not perceived as the nation next door, but as those
in the population who threatened the social and economic status quo”
(2002, 90). Banditry is born as a trope when, from the state’s viewpoint,
popular illegalities are represented as crimes and its subjects as criminals
(Foucault 1975, 83, 292).7 is labeling is faced with resistance (cultural or
otherwise) from below, which is why, in the protracted debate on the exis-
tence and nature of social banditry, it has been hard to reach a concrete defi-
nition of what the bandit does (that is, the exact nature of his offense). e
bandit is not the thief, the smuggler, the poacher, the cattle rustler, or the
vagrant. ere would be no banditry without one of these offenses, how-
ever, and since no particular action is deemed banditry, any action could be
(and was) deemed banditry, a catchall word used much in the way that “ter-
ror” is currently used in the United States. Because of this, Gilbert Joseph
states that the term belongs to the “metalanguage of crime” (1994, 160).
is impossibility of defining banditry once and for all would account for
the conspicuous absence of banditry as a codified offense in penal codes, in
spite of the fact that we find the term everywhere in literary works, journal-
istic sources, travelogues, and memoirs. Mid-nineteenth-century Mexico
was, by all accounts, the golden age of Latin American banditry. In certain
areas, gangs numbered in the hundreds, waging war much like regular
armies, celebrating unofficial treaties with governments and controlling sig-
nificant tracts of territory (Vanderwood 1992). One would imagine that leg-
islation would reflect this situation, since banditry amounted to a formida-
ble challenge to state building. However, in the Mexican penal code of 1871,
the brainchild of liberal penal thought, banditry is not defined as a crime
(Vanderwood 1992, xxxv). Actually, the very word banditry does not appear
Introduction |
at all in the more than three hundred pages of the code. Different offenses
associated with banditry do indeed appear (such as highway robbery [robo
en despoblado], association to commit crime [asociación para cometer robo],
kidnapping for extortion [plagio], and rebellion), but banditry does not.
Similar situations are found in other Latin American penal codes of the
nineteenth century.
In any case, it is safe to say that a bandit is he who maintains through his
actions (which may not form part of a conscious “political program”) his
“right” (usually uncodified) to engage in certain practices that collide with a
legality-in-the-making that portrays such actions as out-and-out crimes.
Since banditry is the name for a conflict revolving around representation, it
does not name an essence but an identity in constant flux. Banditry is the
product of the encounter between a hegemonic effect of identification (La-
clau 1996, 3, 6) and popular illegalities. Each appearance of the bandit in the
text of a culture is the trace of a conflict, “not the majestic unfolding of an
identity but the response to a crisis” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 7).8
Rafael Muñoz, author of ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1931) and one of the
best writers of the genre called the novel of the Mexican Revolution, offers
an excellent example of banditry considered as a mark and a signifier. After
being defeated by the Carrancista general Álvaro Obregón, the División del
Norte (Villa’s famous army) was a shadow in constant flight and was limited
in resources and human support. In fact, the División del Norte was no
longer an army; it had become a “gang.” Tiburcio, the main character of the
novel, is loyal to Villa to the bitter end (until death), and unlike so many oth-
ers, he refuses to desert his chief. Tiburcio muses,
And now, what are we? . . . Tiburcio’s mind plunged into an abyss.
—We are bandits.
All of us? No! But there is a sign that makes us all the same, a mark that dis-
tinguishes us from the rest of humankind, a sign that separates and stops us. We
are bodies destined to the gallows. Once we are rounded up, once we are captured,
we are going to die. ose of us who do not get away will hang from the trees.
Anyone who sees us there will rejoice upon discovering the sign, the word
branded on our foreheads. Not all of us are bandits, but those who are captured
will not have time to say it, or even to implore clemency. (Muñoz 1931, 110)
With a lucidity arising from his utter hopelessness, Tiburcio realizes that he
and his fellow fighters have become bandits. ey are bandits indeed, but
not because they are more violent, greedy, or corrupt than before. Tiburcio
| Introduction
realizes that banditry is a mark (señal), a word that sets them apart from
the rest of humankind. (After the defeat, Villa, formerly the “Mexican Napo-
leon,” becomes a bandit who is hunted down like a wild animal, and as such
he hides in a cave to lick his wounds.) Being bandits is not something that
they do; in this case, they are just running away from their enemies and liv-
ing off the land much like they did before. Instead, it is an identity effect em-
bedded in a political conflict, a position before the law, like the outlaw in the
Anglo-Saxon tradition (Prassel 1993).
I mentioned that the bandit-as-demon was also a driving (possessing)
force. As such, it shows the lack of suture in the tissue of the social body.
at is, it exposes the precarious and contested character of all dominance
and all identity. Tiburcio clearly realizes that banditry is not a practice but a
“mark” (a signifier) branded on a practice and as such, it brings the practice
under the gaze of the state. erefore, contingency, or the lack of a “natural”
relationship between mark and practice, is its defining character. ere was
nothing that Tiburcio or Villa did differently to cause their demotion from
liberators to bandits. What was different was their position in a precarious
interplay of forces.9 However, for the same reason that the bandit trope
marks what needs to be excluded, subordinated, or suppressed, it also
marks what escapes the material and symbolic control of the elite. It is what
exceeds its paradigms. is excess denaturalizes the hegemonic identity and
its mechanisms of representation, since it shows the fissures that tear it. As
an “imagined” identity the bandit is a testimony of domination as well as of
resistance and of the anxiety that such resistance triggers within the elite.
erefore, the bandit can embody the mythopoetic power of the elite, as
well as the mythopoetic capabilities of what Pier Paolo Portinaro refers to as
“savage powers” (1999, 11), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), as
“constituent power,” or Baruch Spinoza as the “multitude.”
e bandit trope is, within the text of Latin American culture, both the
product of and the arena for the struggles between the lettered city and the
various social sectors that challenged its dominance. Banditry defines, in
a contingent, ever-changing fashion, the identities of the adversaries with-
in this struggle. In Latin America, banditry defied what Michel Foucault
called “the rule of optimal specification” as the cornerstone of the semio-
technique that defined the modern approach to the “power to punish.” is
rule, as Foucault reconstructs it, states that “for penal semiotics to cover the
whole field of illegalities that one wishes to eliminate, all offenses must be
Introduction |
defined; they must be classified and collected into species from which none
of them can escape. A code is therefore necessary and this code must be suf-
ficiently precise for each type of offense to be clearly present in it” (1975,
98).10
Banditry is crucial in the constitution of the paradigms of bandit/citizen
and outlaw violence/state violence. At the same time, however, it is what
makes those paradigms unstable and ultimately untenable. erefore, our
reading of the vast literary tradition dealing with banditry in the so-called
“long nineteenth century” will always be twofold and traceable to Derridean
deconstructionism. To begin, we should identify the operations through
which the letrado, in specific conflicts, carries out a mapping of the social
terrain in which the opposition between lawful and outlaw violence is the
defining feature. In addition, we should show the ways in which this very
opposition is interdicted and erased (again, in the Derridean sense) and how
letrado thinking is brought to its own limits.
e bandit is perhaps the most important in a series of dramatis personae
that in postcolonial Latin American culture function as frontiers between
“domains of sovereignty” (Chatterjee 1993, 6). is character is particularly
fit to embody the many unresolved ambiguities of Latin American moder-
nity. As such, an in-depth examination of the bandit trope would allow us to
“write into the history of modernity [i.e., Latin American modern culture],
the ambivalences, the contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and
the ironies that attend it” (Chakrabarty 1997, 288).
In addition to being a problematic juridical figure, the bandit is a literary,
historical, and scientific figure that makes conflict visible within the social
realm. is conflict has an economic basis, but it goes well beyond this no-
tion. e vast plains of Venezuela (llanos) and Argentina (pampas) offer im-
portant cases in point. Transforming the Venezuelan llanero bandit and
the Argentine gaucho malo, respectively, into totalizing metaphors for the
whole rural population was a strategy the elite used to intervene in a multi-
secular struggle for the appropriation of resources (wild cattle and horses).
is metaphor also highlighted alternative concepts of property (the liberal-
landowner concept versus the traditional community-oriented concept of
the seminomadic hunter-shepherd), alternative concepts of violence (the
state monopoly on violence versus the individual ownership and adminis-
tration of it), and alternative concepts of citizenship, community, and
rights. Following this “original” scene of formation of the bandit trope,
| Introduction
peasant movements that depend upon the material and cultural resources
of the peasant communities whose universe they express or defend (hence
the social character) but that are doomed to extinction with the advent of
modernity (Hobsbawm [1969] 1981, 10; 1973, 20).
Hobsbawm identified four varieties of social bandit: the noble robber
(e.g., Robin Hood), the avenger, the haiduk (or what Christon Archer aptly
called “guerrilla bandit”), and the expropriator.17 In Latin America, the
“guerrilla bandit” (Pancho Villa, Manuel Lozada) and the avenger (Lampião,
Juan Moreira) were the most prominent examples of the social bandit.
However, Latin American literature is also well populated by noble robbers,
even if they are not the most prominent figures in national imaginaries.
Among the better known bandits are Fiero Vásquez, champion of the in-
digenous community of Rumi in El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941) by Ciro
Alegría; Lucas Arvoredo in Seara vermelha (1946); and Lampião in Capitães
da areia (1937) by Jorge Amado; “Ñato Eloy,” Chilean brigand and popular
poet killed by police in 1941 (and hero of the 1960 novel Eloy by Carlos
Droguett); Heraclio Bernal from Sinaloa and Chucho el Roto, heroes of cor-
ridos and countless novels and movies; the Argentines Mate Cosido and the
Velázquez brothers (from El Chaco province); and Vairoletto (from the dry
pampas [pampa seca]) and the bandits who lead the Andean comuneros in
their struggle against the abuses of the Cerro de Pasco Corporation in
Manuel Scorza’s Redoble por Rancas (1970). To my mind, however, the most
clear-cut example of the noble robber is the commendable Tuerto Ventura
in Los días terrenales (1949) by José Revueltas (1914–1976). Ventura, a cat-
tle rustler and indigenous community leader, represents the dreams for jus-
tice of “Acamapichtli or Maxtla, of Morelos or Juárez” because of his face,
scarred by violence. e charismatic leadership of this bandit had no limits
since “everybody loved him, and everybody was ready to plunge with him
from a cliff” (1949, 14).
Some scholars, without flatly denying the relevance of the “social bandit”
model, understand particular occurrences of epidemic banditry as struggles
that revolve around different lines of conflict. For Pat O’Malley (who re-
searched the case of the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly) banditry is a form
of class struggle between the rural proletariat and rural bourgeoisie. Even
though such struggle happens outside the channels of institutional politics,
it still happens in a fully formed class society and not, as Hobsbawm pro-
poses, in a context of transition toward capitalism (O’Malley 1979, 494–
| Introduction
99). Other scholars, such as Ralph Austen (for the African case) or Alberto
Flores Galindo (for the Andean case) consider banditry a form of racial
struggle whereby banditry is part of a larger dispute over economic re-
sources or political predominance, where class is not necessarily the most
relevant category of analysis (Austen 1986; Flores Galindo 1990). Fernando
Ortiz, for his part, considers banditry in Cuba a byproduct of runaway slav-
ery (cimarronaje). erefore, he does not deem it a phenomenon related to
the displacement of “traditional peasants” by sugar plantations (since “tra-
ditional peasantry” was nonexistent in Cuba). Rather, he regards it as a phe-
nomenon of resistance with its origin in the plantation system itself, which
is to say he understands banditry not as a phenomenon triggered by the
transition toward capitalism but as a byproduct of rural capitalism (Ortiz
1995, 190).
In the latest edition of his book Bandits (2000), Hobsbawm acknowledges
the existence of social banditry in history before the rise of capitalism, as in
the case of rural societies that resisted the advances of other rural societies
(e.g., sedentary peasants raided by nomadic shepherds or rural communities
resisting the advances of rural empires). He also points out that banditry
can thrive in late capitalism, such as the contemporary banditry associated
with the demise of nation-states, Afghanistan, countries that comprised the
former Yugoslavia, and Chechnya all being examples (Hobsbawm [1969]
2000, 9).
Postnational, globalized banditry is also analyzed by Steven Sampson
(2003) vis-à-vis the contemporary process of reformulating the nation-
state. In Sampson’s account, this new form of banditry articulates the con-
flicts in a globalized arena, whereby banditry interacts and competes for
sovereignty not (or not only) with traditional nation-states but also with
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international peacekeeping forces,
mercenary private security outfits, and so forth. He mentions “northern Al-
bania, eastern Bosnia, sections of Kosovo, the northern Caucasus [including
Chechnya], [and] large portions of Africa” as places where the fragmentation
of traditional political units (e.g., communist states) are “hot spots” for this
new form of insurgency (2003, 314).
In some cases, banditry is not really a symptom of a crisis (a meaning em-
bedded in the term “primitive rebellion”). Rather, it may be part of a process
of negotiation either among segments of the elite or between rural elites
and sectors of the rural poor. For Hobsbawm, Ethiopian banditry offers a
Introduction |
case in point: it did not emerge as a sign of crisis; rather it was an accepted
venue of political competition for positions within the political order and
was therefore integrated into the social fabric. Ottoman banditry, as su-
perbly analyzed by Karen Barkey (1994), represents a rather different case.
In the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, bandits entered into complex
arrangements with Ottoman rulers. Under this arrangement, bandits did
not challenge the centralizing efforts of rulers; rather they became timely al-
lies in these efforts. In this way, bandits were able to mollify threats of peas-
ant unrest, which in the Ottoman Empire were kept to a minimum when
compared to similar situations in other regions of the Mediterranean Basin.
As a final example, in northeastern Brazil the cangaceiros functioned as re-
tainers for landowners (coronéis) or as the fighting force in decades-long
family feuds, and they were an accepted and appreciated way of conducting
politics in the absence of a strong state presence.
Hobsbawm’s model continues to inform many recent and current ap-
proaches to the problem. Examples include Gonzalo Sánchez and Donny
Meertens’s Bandoleros, gamonales y campesinos: el caso de la violencia en Co-
lombia (1983), Knight’s e Mexican Revolution (1986), Ana María Conta-
dor’s Los Pincheira: un caso de bandidaje social: Chile, 1817–1832 (1998), and
Hugo Chumbita’s Jinetes Rebeldes: historia del bandolerismo social en Ar-
gentina (2000). However, in the Latin American context, critiques of Hobs-
bawm’s model are abundant. e so-called revisionist school flatly denies
any social character to banditry (the main thrust of Hobsbawm’s model).
is line of thought is brought forth by the remarkable volume Bandidos, ed-
ited by Richard W. Slatta (1987), which was intent upon discussing (and
debunking) Hobsbawm’s thesis as applied to the Latin American case. Revi-
sionism objects to the very existence or at least relevance of the bandit-
peasant link, which is essential in the “social” character of banditry. In ear-
lier editions of Bandits (1969, 1972, 1981), Hobsbawm tended to emphasize
this horizontal link, based on material and cultural commonality and soli-
darity, either real or symbolic (vis-à-vis the landowning classes or state offi-
cials). It is in this way that banditry may become a forerunner of full-fledged
class struggle (hence the “primitive” in “primitive rebellion”). Revisionists
such as Paul Vanderwood, for Mexico, or Linda Lewin, for Brazil, deny this
link and emphasize the vertical alliances that bandits forged and preferred.
ese vertical alliances could cross class lines (as in the case of patronage
networks), or they could link bandits and landlords or local politicians, thus
| Introduction
upon refuting Hobsbawm’s model, has indeed produced some of the most
important case studies in the field.18 Revisionism considers banditry as just
another form of criminality. (Paul Vanderwood even coined an expression
counter to “social bandit”: the Mexican “profiteering bandit.”) Its social ef-
fects, if any, are not (as the legend goes) emancipatory; quite to the con-
trary, banditry favors the status quo since it may become an alternative way
of climbing the social ladder and an informal instrument of elite control of
the peasantry. For revisionists, banditry is, in the final analysis, compatible
with the interests of the elite.
Rosalie Schwartz makes another good point against the “social bandit”
model in her analysis of Cuban banditry. She opposes Louis Perez’s take on
Cuban banditry, which closely follows the “social bandit” model. Schwartz,
investigating class origins and regional patterns of nineteenth-century
Cuban banditry, shows that banditry was more intense in the most devel-
oped regions of Cuba and that the bandits were far from being destitute
peasants; rather they were sons of somewhat well-to-do ranchers and small
landowners. us, as Schwartz explains, banditry in the Cuban case lacked
any true “social” (in the Hobsbawmian sense) thrust and much more closely
resembled the profiteering banditry mentioned by Vanderwood (Schwartz
1982, 1989).
e distillation of this critical current can be summarized in the deliber-
ately terse definition provided by Slatta: “Banditry is the taking of property
by force or by the threat of force” (1994, 76). It should be noted that this def-
inition limits banditry to robbery, as conceived, for example, during the sev-
enteenth century in e ird Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England
(1634): “ ‘Robbery is a felony by the Common law, committed by a violent as-
sault, upon the person of another, by putting him in fear, and taking from
his person his money or other goods of any value whatsoever’ ” (Coke quoted
in Spraggs 2001, 1). e attack on property, as mentioned before, is a key el-
ement in the definition of banditry, but a definition limited to that aspect
leaves unexplored several factors crucial to the understanding of banditry.
e first factor is that, until the twentieth century, “property,” in the
Latin American context, was not an obvious and unequivocal concept. In-
deed, the concept was undergoing profound transformations. e bloody
struggles between liberals and conservatives in core zones of the region
were an expression of this phenomenon, because the ancestral corporative
rights of the peasant communities and of the Church were being challenged
| Introduction
by the new liberal concept of individual property. Even less clear was the
concept of property in frontier zones such as both banks of the Río de la
Plata or the Venezuelan llanos. In these regions the claim to property was
not established before the struggle. To impose a certain notion of property
rights was the ultimate goal of the struggle, since cattle (cimarrones or ore-
janos) often did not have a clear proprietor (Storni 1997). erefore, “crime
against property” was not a crime that was easily defined.
Secondly, as Centeno summarizes the situation, Latin America, with the
exception of the income related to foreign commerce, did not have a fully
functioning central tax system for most of its postcolonial history (2002, 6).
is lack of a revenue base made state support for armies and police forces
practically impossible. Due to this fact, “the taking of property by force or by
the threat of force” was one of the main activities of all armies and state
armed forces well into the twentieth century. e only differences between
banditry and army expropriations were the scale of plundering as well as the
inherently dubious state sanction of the army’s actions. erefore, unless
we agree upon the fact that Slatta’s definition applies to most armed forces
throughout the “long nineteenth century” (something that would not be
completely far-fetched, as the Mexican Revolution shows), one cannot ac-
cept Slatta’s definition unequivocally.
In 1968 Roberto Carri analyzed the case of the Argentine bandit Isidro
Velázquez (who thrived in El Chaco province in the 1960s), and he offers the
opposite critique of Hobsbawm. (He does, however, recognize the funda-
mental soundness of Hobsbawm‘s model.) Carri acknowledges the “social”
character of banditry but resists its definition as “pre-political.” For Carri,
the term has an unavoidable Eurocentric connotation because pre-political
means diverging from what qualifies as politics (e.g., party politics, unions,
NGOs, etc.) in a European (or Europeanized) perspective. Instead, he pre-
fers the term “pre-revolutionary,” which endows the bandit with a fully po-
litical character or at least gives a political aspect to the community’s per-
ception of the bandit’s actions. In Carri’s model, the bandit is not considered
primitive, although his actions are not yet fully articulated as a revolution-
ary awareness. us, Carri’s position was an early expression of the third po-
sition in the banditry debate. is position was adopted by historians spe-
cializing in Latin America who incorporated the contributions of Ranajit
Guha (1983) and James Scott (1985). Gilbert Joseph, Daniel Nugent, Flo-
rencia Mallon, and Rosalie Schwartz, among others, do not examine ban-
Introduction |
Not my men. ey had never seen their bodies in full before. I had to give them
that great gift, that feast: now, look at yourselves, move about, lift your arm, you,
dance a polka, get even for all the dark years in which you lived blind toward your
own bodies, groping in the dark in order to find a body—your own body—so
alien and silent and distant as all the other bodies that you were not allowed to
touch, or that were not allowed to touch you. ey moved in front of their own re-
flection in the mirror and the spell was broken, gringuita. (Fuentes 1985, 119)
| Introduction
A no less dramatic example can be found at the other end of Latin Amer-
ica. e sapukay is the distinctive yell uttered as a sign of joy or defiance, and
it is characteristic of the rural populations of the Argentine northeast (Cor-
rientes and Chaco provinces). In 1967, the region’s state police attempted to
ambush Isidro Velázquez, the famous bandit of the region. When he was
about to escape from his pursuers, he could not help but utter his cry of de-
fiance and contempt: “the last sapukay.” is act of pride made him a target
and ultimately led to his demise. Had he not cried out, he might have
slipped away. is act of rebellion and affirmation of his identity vis-à-vis
state violence is celebrated in Argentina to this day in the very famous
chamamé (a genre of popular music) entitled “El último sapukay,” by Oscar
Valles.21
omas Gallant has proposed a new notion of banditry with a twofold
goal: to mediate between those who, like Hobsbawm, link epidemic banditry
with the transition to capitalism and those, like O’Malley, who emphasize
the presence of epidemic banditry in fully developed agrarian capitalist
economies (e.g., nineteenth-century Australia and the post–Civil War Amer-
ican Midwest); and secondly, to mediate between those who see in banditry
a clear political thrust and those who see in it an exclusively economic moti-
vation (Gallant 1999).
In order to accomplish the first goal, Gallant turns to Emmanuel Waller-
stein’s model in e Modern World-System (1974), arguing that it is fruitless
to limit critical research to the development of a single, all-encompassing
model of banditry. Instead, Gallant proposes that several models must be
devised according to the different societies in which they emerge: core soci-
eties (such as England), semiperipheral (such as O’Malley’s Australia), and
peripheral societies (such as Ethiopia, the nineteenth-century Balkans, or
northeastern Brazil, Hobsbawm’s favorite cases). In order to accomplish the
second goal, Gallant coins the apt expression “military entrepreneur” (fol-
lowing Anton Blok’s Sicilian “violent entrepreneurs” and Volkov’s “violent
entrepreneurship” in Russia), thus capturing the ambiguous relationship
between banditry and the law (sometimes enforcing the law, sometimes
breaking it), and banditry and economic profit. He explains that “by ‘mili-
tary entrepreneur’ I refer to a category of men who take up arms and who
wield violence or the threat of violence as their stock in trade. I use ‘military’
here not in its contemporary common connotation of a national army, but
in an older, more ambiguous form referring only to the use of arms and
Introduction |
weapons. ey are entrepreneurs in the sense that they are purveyors of a
commodity—violence. ey may act in the employ of others or as agents in
their own right” (Gallant 1999, 26). e notion of violence as a commodity
has the particular advantage of helping us to avoid a common intellectual
mistake: that of speaking about violence as if it were a purely negative no-
tion. is mindset was the target of Hobsbawm’s critique of the liberal no-
tion of violence in his essay “e Rules of Violence” (1973).
My position is less about the history of banditry per se. I am concerned
more with the history of its representation within selected national cul-
tures. is depiction is always a site of conflict and contested meanings
where the state struggles with urban and rural sectors of civil society to im-
pose particular agendas through the “invention” of banditry. From this
point of view, and without giving in uncritically to the much-reviled (and of-
ten misunderstood) postmodern “textualism,” I maintain that the represen-
tation of banditry is as important as banditry itself. Furthermore, the dis-
tinction between these two elements is frequently difficult to perceive. e
dispute on meaning as being central to the definition of banditry appears
even in Hobsbawm’s classic definition, in which the double perspective (the
state’s view versus that of the peasantry) is what makes banditry relevant
for social history.
We know that the lexical meaning of bandido implies a state performance:
the calling by proclamation or edict. e dramatic (semiotic) element is not
accidental, and, as Foucault (1975) illustrates, it is one trait that existed well
before the penal reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it
lasted long afterward. Imperial Rome offers an interesting example. One of
the punishments reserved for bandits was to force them to take part in the-
atrical representations of a historic or mythological nature. e character
played by the convicted bandit died at the end of the play. e twist in this
case was that the death was not a special effect or a dramatization: the
actor-executioner really executed the bandit on stage (by crucifixion or ex-
posure to bears) when the plot so indicated (Harries 1999, 151). Today, the
punishment of criminals is something shrouded in secrecy, at least in West-
ern culture. Cheering, awe-stricken crowds no longer gather to witness exe-
cutions. However, what if not theaters of law are the many Cops-like reality
shows (including its Mexican counterpart, Policías) in which the drama of
crime and punishment is reenacted time and again, for the thrill and educa-
tion of an eager public?
| Introduction
Banditry and its relation to the state constitute a topic that goes to the core
of Latin American identity since it has been argued repeatedly that the
Spanish conquistadores, the founders of one of the most formidable and en-
during empires the world has ever witnessed (and of the social formation
now called Latin America), were little more than bandits (Hobsbawm 2000,
42). In fact, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and historiogra-
phy, perhaps picking up on the Lascasian theme in which conquerors are
persistently deemed cannibals and impious plunderers, abundantly express
this motif: from Félix Varela’s Jicoténcal (1826), the first Latin American
historical novel, to romantic novels (Miguel Cané’s Esther, from 1858) to
positivistic criminology (Julio Guerrero’s La génesis del crimen en México,
from 1901) to modernist essays (Leopoldo Lugones’s El imperio Jesuítico,
| Introduction
Manuel Lozada in Tepic, or of Inés Chávez García in the Bajío (all of these in
Mexico) could also be mentioned. Perhaps even more illustrative than these
examples is that of Antônio Conselheiro and his jagunços. Conselheiro es-
tablished a fully functioning, autonomous, and prosperous community (by
northeastern Brazilian standards) in the remote Bahian sertão. e authori-
ties of the fledgling Brazilian republic clearly understood the implications of
the success of this “opting out,” and the consequence was a massacre that
still haunts the Brazilian national imagination.
A brief discussion of the Argentine gauchos will give us a clear idea of how
this “naturalization” of state violence functions. In narrative, essay, and
journalistic works (mainly La guerra gaucha [1905] and El payador [1916])
Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), an organic intellectual of the Argentine oli-
garchy at the peak of its power, turned the gaucho, or vagrant Argentine
outlaw, into “the prototype for the modern-day Argentine” (1916, 66), the
only Argentine epic hero (1916, 170). Lugones regarded El gaucho Martín
Fierro (1872) and La vuelta de Martín Fierro by José Hernández (1879)—the
two-part poem that best told of the misfortunes of the gauchos at the hands
of state (in)justice—as the Argentine equivalent of Homer’s Iliad in its role
of expression and promotion of nationhood (Lugones 1916, 163–88). How-
ever, the epic interpretation of this bandit narrative is based upon two types
of forgetting. First, the gauchos did not have a clear notion of nationhood
in the modern (i.e., Lugonian) sense of the word that equated nation with
nation-state. e fatherland (patria) was most commonly the pago, that is,
the county, or the province at best, as many of these narratives show
(Guerra 2003, 32; Salvatore 2003, 128; de la Fuente 2000), or it intersected
with partisan identities in such a way as to make partisan affiliation more
important than nationality (Halperín Donghi 2003; de la Fuente 2000).
Also, the modes of political affiliation corresponded more closely (although
not completely) with the patron-client model than with the republican
model of the citizen in arms. In the second forgetting, the gaucho, as a chal-
lenge to the state’s monopoly of violence, was outlawed, dispossessed,
jailed, used as cannon fodder, and forced into labor by the same landowning
and commercial elite that would later elevate him to an heroic status. To
place the gaucho malo as a prominent figure in the state pantheon is to build
it upon paradoxical foundations: the state is paying eternal homage to those
whom it purposefully eliminated in order to achieve its monopoly of vio-
lence, “founding the nationality with their blood” (Lugones 1916, 81) and
Introduction |
then expropriating the voices of these victims in order to sing the patriotic
songs of the centennial of the May Revolution (the main thrust of La guerra
gaucha). is forgetting, as Benedict Anderson points out (1983, 1992), is
represented as a “reassuring fratricide,” crucial in the construction of the
nation as imagined community. In Lugones’s case, then, the bandit was uti-
lized as a dramatis persona in letrado fables of self-legitimation and the legit-
imation of his class against the “zoological tidal wave” (aluvión zoológico) of
immigrants from Central Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, which had
begun to threaten the hegemony of the landowning oligarchy. To oppose
this new enemy, Lugones did not hesitate in calling to duty the old enemies
who were now newly discovered brothers. He did this by inventing a selec-
tive tradition that allied the current masters and old subalterns (gauchos)
against the new subalterns (the European immigrants).
Banditry developed another relationship to state-making when the
threat of banditry was used as an excuse to increase state centralization (or
to stage a coup within internecine elite struggles). e repression of ban-
ditry was used as an instrument of legitimation for the establishment of
forces of direct control over regions and individuals. Several historical ex-
amples spring to mind: the “Santa Hermandad” in medieval Spain was cre-
ated with the overt purpose of finishing off the bandit epidemic that was a
collateral effect of civil war, but it was actually conceived by the Catholic
kings primarily as part of an effort to create a centralized state, erect a royal
monopoly of violence, and strip local lords of power (Lunenfeld 1970; Storni
1997, 75). In eighteenth-century rural Mexico the “Tribunal de la Acordada”
and in the second half of the nineteenth century the Rurales were not only a
police force but also tools used by the executive branch of government to by-
pass such institutions of control over the use of violence as the Audience,
the courts of law, and the congress, and to balance the power of regional
elites or disaffected corporations such as the army (MacLachlan 1974; Van-
derwood 1992).24
is paradox, in which banditry comfortably plays both sides of the law,
appears time and again in Western political thought. Writing in e City of
God in the fifth century, Saint Augustine of Hippo wonders,
Justice removed, then, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? What are
bands of robbers themselves but little kingdoms? e band itself is made up of
men; it is governed by the authority of a ruler; it is bound together by a pact of as-
sociation; and the loot is divided according to an agreed law. If, by the constant
| Introduction
addition of desperate men, this scourge grows to such a size that it acquires terri-
tory, establishes a seat of government, occupies cities and subjugates peoples, it
assumes the name of kingdom more openly. For this name is now manifestly con-
ferred upon it not by the removal of greed, but by the addition of impunity. It was
a pertinent and true answer which was made to Alexander the Great by a pirate
whom he had seized. When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the
sea, the pirate defiantly replied: “e same as you do when you infest the whole
world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you
do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.” (1998, 58)
In the Greek novel bandits are a staple of the narrative (much as in the
later Gothic novel). In e Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles
Tatius, the same word used for “king” is used for “bandit chief” (basil°a).
eory on the state, from so-called conflict sociology (proposed by Randall
Collins) to contemporary philosophy (e.g., Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari)
has picked up on this trope of the collusion between banditry and state-
making. Charles Tilly, in his pathbreaking work “War Making and State
Making as Organized Crime” (1985), considers the nation-state to be very
similar to a protection racket. In this and other works, Tilly places banditry
in a “continuum of state-making” whose “defining feature . . . is the extent
to which control over the use of force is concentrated in a single organi-
zation.” In his view, then, there is not a difference of quality but of degree
between the rural Sicilian mafia, banditry, the nation-state, and empire
(1975a, xx–xxiii).25
e risk of this intertwining and eventual conflation of banditry and the
state made it even more urgent for Latin American elites to impose a limit
between these two forces, in order to create the conditions and scene for
the foundation of a nation-state. If the nation is, as Anderson maintains,
an imagined community, then “imagined” necessarily means “knowable”—
stretching Williams’s notion (1973)—and as such it asks for a strict demar-
cation of its symbolic limits. Much of the fictional literature written on the
Mexican Revolution may be understood as an attempt to draw these limits,
to draw distinctions between the bandit, the true revolutionary, and the
corrupt representative of an oppressive state (who also calls himself a revo-
lutionary), in order to understand the Revolution as either the inaugural
event of Mexico as a modern nation or an opportunity forever lost. Some
early works (e.g., Los de abajo, by Mariano Azuela, first published in 1915–
16) as well as some later ones (e.g., El corrido de Juan Saavedra, by María
Introduction |
Luisa Ocampo, from 1929), show that these distinctions are difficult and at
times even impossible to make.
us, the most dangerous challenge posed by banditry was not chaos or
what passed for chaos in the eyes of the elites.26 e most dangerous chal-
lenge was symbolic. In its most developed forms, banditry did not challenge
a law or a right but rather the state as law-giver and ultimate source of legit-
imate violence (what Vanderwood called the “idea of banditry” as opposed
to its reality). Using the distinction proposed by Walter Benjamin between
law making violence and law maintaining violence (1921, 283), I am in-
clined to say that banditry presents the state with a form of violence that,
just like that of the state, creates law, albeit of a different nature (that is, one
that is local and oral). Its presence challenges not only the letter of the law
but also the position of enunciation that supports it (i.e., the judge as origin
of the sentence, the lawmaker as the origin of the law). is distinction has
of course the ambiguous nature of any statement concerning banditry. e
challenge that banditry poses, not necessarily in a self-aware fashion, and
that may be (and usually is) only the perception of the state (unlike modern
Marxist guerrilla warfare, where that challenge is deliberate) is a cause of
deep uncertainty and repulsion by the lettered city. In fact, the scene of the
personal encounter between the letrado and the bandit is a motif in and of
itself in Western narratives. e tone of this encounter ranges from the
warm brotherhood between bandit and lawyer in Alexandre Dumas’s Les
Frères corses (1844) to the happy acquaintance in which bandits and letrados
hit it off through mutual respect (as in Don Quijote’s encounter with Roque
Guinart on the outskirts of Barcelona or Rob Roy’s enduring and efficacious
protection of Francis Osbaldistone during his northern adventures in Wal-
ter Scott’s novel) to the somber destiny of the letrado in Antonio Di Bene-
detto’s Zama (1956), who has his hands cut off by a bandit.
Aside from these trusting or anxious fantasies, the real and theoretical
collusion between banditry and state formation during the nineteenth cen-
tury called for the ferocious repression of banditry. e Ley número 19 sobre
jueces de camino y persecución de ladrones en despoblado, passed in Mexico in
1852, established that the penalty for robbery with violence or the threat of
violence was death, regardless of the amount stolen or whether violence was
actually exerted. In the Ley general para juzgar a los ladrones, homicidas, heri-
dores y vagos, also from Mexico (1857), a clear distinction is established be-
tween rural robbery (robo en despoblado), punished with the death penalty,
| Introduction
and urban robbery, punished with hard time. Banditry deprived the culprit
of the rights and guarantees derived from citizenship. From the times of the
Acordada, brigands were subjected to special tribunals that held summary
trials without appeals, pardons, or amnesties, and the usual sentence was
immediate execution (Vanderwood 1992, xxxiv–xxxv).27
e forgoing of the rights entailed in citizenship in the case of bandits was
even a matter of pride for state officials. Ernest William White, in Cameos of
the Silver-Land, or the Experiences of a Young Naturalist in the Argentine Repub-
lic (1881), tells us the following about his experience in San Juan: “Until the
present Governor assumed office, the city suburbs lay at the mercy of a gang
of highwaymen. As lawless and daring, but not so merciful, as Dick Turpin:
black-mail was levied and submitted to by all travelers, under pain of death,
so that at last, locomotion beyond civic bounds became well-nigh impossible.
. . . [T]he Governor issued the order to his soldiers. ‘Go out, capture and slay
those ruffians without benefit of clergy!’ and forthwith ten of them slept and
San Juan became as peaceful as quackerdom [Quakerdom]” (396).
For Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an Argentine intellectual and father of
the famous civilization versus barbarism binarism, bandits were “enemies
of humankind” and to kill them on the spot, without due process, was a
“natural right” previous to laws and constitutions:
A man, because of revenge, rage, or any other cause, kills another man, just like
because of need or deprivation he steals something. is is a common crime, with
a name, a place, and a jurisdiction. Banditry targets anybody outside cities and
the protection of the law. Banditry victimizes not a particular individual, but
everybody, society as a whole, the human race as a whole. e highway robber has
as his backdrop the desert and the mountains, and in order for travelers to be safe
it is imperative to declare that the robbery outside urban areas is a crime against
humanity [delito contra la humanidad] and that the culprit is outside the common
law. is is why nations are expected to turn over famous bandits, even though
there may not be extradition treaties. A pirate on the sea and a bandit on land are
outside the law and can be killed, put to death, by anybody, anytime. is is at the
same time natural and public law, which supersedes any constitution, and there-
fore these constitutions cannot annul it. (1899, 206)
ing been called by a proclamation . . . does not appear in front of the judges [be]
declared an incorrigible and publicly condemned rebel, and we allow that any per-
son . . . freely offend, kill or catch said criminal, without fear of any reprisal . . .
bringing him in front of the court dead or alive [having either] dragged them, or
hanged, or quartered and exhibited on the roads or places where he committed
his crimes. (Tomo tercero de autos acordados, que contiene nueve libros, por el orden
de títulos de las Leyes de recopilación, Madrid, A expensas de la Real Cía. de Impre-
sores i libreros del Reino, 1775, 3:405, in Solares Robles 1999, 144–45)
Bandit Narratives
e purpose of this book is to reflect upon a number of narratives produced
throughout the nineteenth century following the numerous articulations (a
term defined by Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 105) of the bandit trope as an
arena of negotiation and conflict for the imagining of the nation-state and
its “others” in Latin America. I am particularly interested in the representa-
| Introduction
tion of banditry (or any form of peasant insurgency called banditry) by the
letrado elite as a decisive and urgent expression of the desires, contradic-
tions, and conflicts that define the “heterogeneous Latin American moder-
nity” (Herlinghaus 2000). We now recognize that banditry was key in the
definition of some of the founding paradigms in Latin American national
development (e.g., civilization versus barbarism, order versus chaos, mod-
ern liberalism versus colonial corporatism, city versus country capitalism
versus pre-capitalism, free market versus socialism), and Sarmiento seems
to give expression to this intuition in a particularly forceful way. While
speaking of the decisive showdown that would embody (and resolve) the Ar-
gentine riddle, he says, “In my opinion, a war that is possible (and even de-
sirable, if our fatherland cannot be spared that evil) is a war that would pit
freedom against caudillaje, a war that would have strategy and military sci-
ence on the one hand and banditry [bandalaje] and compulsive rural insur-
gency [alzamiento compulsivo de campañas] on the other; a regular army on
the one hand and irregulars wearing the red chiripá on the other; civilization
in the means on the one hand and barbarism in the ends on the other”
(1852, 301).
As Hall points out, “e nation state was never simply a political entity.
It was always also a symbolic formation—a ‘system of representation’ ”
(2000, 38). us, we must pay attention to the ways in which the European-
minded, lettered, Creole, male, urban elite depicted, through literature, a
form of nonstate rural violence in societies that were at that moment over-
whelmingly rural, illiterate, and nonwhite and followed rules of life that dif-
fered markedly from those of the dominant culture. By maintaining this fo-
cus, we can reconstruct a crucial segment of that “system of representation”
and of the conflicting conditions under which modernity took hold in Latin
America.
e term “bandit narratives,” which I use throughout the book, refers to
the vast corpus of writing that deals with bandits or with forms of peasant
violence called banditry. is corpus comprises novels, short stories, crimi-
nological treatises, essays, poems, and film. Beyond specific differences con-
cerning each format, the narrative form is common to them all, and they
share a paradigm of representation that I attempt to outline. Bandit narra-
tives are, to my mind, an essential part of the theater of law, and they take
the form of an allegory of the violent constitution of the nation-state. I fol-
low Fredric Jameson’s proposal in the opening pages of e Political Uncon-
Introduction |
scious when he disavows the distinction between cultural texts having a po-
litical resonance and those devoid of it. For Jameson, this false distinction is
“a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of con-
temporary life” (1981, 20), a political fact itself. Angus Fletcher maintains
that there is an inherently political character in all literary allegories, since
they enact “a conflict of authorities” (1964, 22), while Gordon Teskey shows
the nexus between allegory and state violence in the cultural history of the
West (1996, 137–38).
e relationship between allegory and theater of law is captured with
eerie precision in the anecdote of Remirro de Orco in e Prince (1513) by
Niccolò Machiavelli. (I am following, to a certain extent, Teskey’s superb ac-
count and interpretation of the scene.) Cesar Borgia had commissioned
Remirro to pacify the Romagna, which he did at the price of extreme cruelty
and the loss of Borgia’s popularity and prestige. In order to regain the good-
will of the citizenry and to placate any discontent, Borgia ordered Remirro
to be secretly abducted. One fine morning, Remirro’s body appeared at Ce-
sena Square chopped in half, a bloody knife by his side. “e ferocity of this
scene left the people at once stunned and satisfied,” Machiavelli recounts
(22). is ferocity did not reside exactly in the quartered body but rather in
the bloody knife. e knife was not (and could not have been) the murder
weapon, since a knife does not easily cut a human torso in half, bone and all.
Soaking the knife in blood and setting it by the corpse was an intentional
plus of meaning, an indication that in that death there was a message and
that the message went beyond treason and punishment: it was an allegoric
staging of the power and the violence of the sovereign (Teskey 1996, 137–
38). Bandit narratives are like that bloody knife: they are at the same time
traces and signifiers of state violence, documents of culture as well as of bar-
barism, similar to the “cultural treasures” of which Walter Benjamin speaks
in “esis on the Philosophy of History” (2006).
Doris Sommer (1991) proposes allegory as the privileged signifying
mode of nineteenth-century Latin American writing (or at least of narra-
tive). Sommer’s central thesis is that love that crosses racial, class, linguistic,
or legal boundaries was a metaphor with which the lettered city depicted its
utopia of national integration, or conversely, its malaise regarding the lack
thereof. Jameson, in his article “ird-World Literature in the Era of Multi-
national Capitalism” (1986), argues that the national allegory does not be-
long to a differentiated fictional corpus of a specific period but that it is a
| Introduction
feature pertaining to literature of the so-called third world (69). is idea
has triggered numerous criticisms and revisions, some of which are quite
powerful.28
At the same time, Sommer’s approach can be criticized on several
grounds, in particular because there is no theoretical attention paid to vio-
lence being as important a signifier as romance (even when violence is oc-
curring within romances). It may be argued that romance was her focus, but
then we would be forgetting that many (perhaps most) foundational ro-
mances are to some degree mixed with violence, and that violence is there-
fore the other side—an inseparable element—of the national romance.
I agree with Fletcher when he indicates that beyond allegory as a specific
literary genre, all fictions have an allegorical component to a certain extent.
He distinguishes between allegory and allegoresis, the latter partially inde-
pendent from the author’s intentions and based upon the act of reading
(1964, 4, 12). I offer several arguments in favor of the notion that “national
allegory” is continually productive. In Latin America a certain brand of liter-
ature finds its political dimension in the erasure of the distinction between
public and private, or the symbolization of the former in the terms of the
latter. (Nineteenth-century literature is exemplary of this fact.) In addition,
the literary allegory does not necessarily imply a closure of meaning in favor
of a pre-existent ideology. Quite to the contrary, allegory can question that
ideology, thus distinguishing allegory from pedagogy. is is the meaning of
allegory as it is put forth by Marthe Robert in her reading of Kafka, or by
Benjamin in e Origin of German Tragic Drama. Also, the national allegory
has a self-referential dimension that has to be read as an interrogation on its
instance of enunciation—a questioning of the role of the “national letrado.”
Finally, many of the cases I analyze locate the problem of rural violence in a
specific region (e.g., the northeastern Brazilian sertão, Morelos or Jalisco in
Mexico, the pampas in the Río de la Plata region, or the Venezuelan plains).
However, as Gerald Martin points out (1989), the region in Latin American
literature does not function as a strictly subnational unit but rather as a na-
tional or supernational trope. us, the pampas in Facundo o civilización y
barbarie by Sarmiento (Argentina, 1845) or the Arauca Valley in Doña Bár-
bara by Gallegos (Venezuela, 1929) are metaphors of Argentina or Vene-
zuela as well as of a Latin America torn apart by the conflict between civi-
lization versus barbarism. is link is created by means of the national
allegory.
Introduction |
Time Frame
is book analyzes representations of banditry during the long Latin Amer-
ican nineteenth century, running roughly from late colonial times to the
late 1920s. is period marks the incorporation of Latin America into global
markets based upon an export-led growth model (Bulmer-omas 1994).
is model, which had a clear colonial precedent, was imposed toward the
middle of the nineteenth century and secured the hegemony of a commer-
cial and/or landowning class that obtained maximum political and eco-
nomic benefits from it. is so-called neocolonial pact (Halperín Donghi
1997) implied a peculiar model of capitalism focused on the production of
agrarian commodities for global consumption (e.g., sugar, wheat, coffee, co-
coa, beef, and bananas), highly concentrated landownership, and a modestly
centralized state. Such an arrangement progressively expanded legal and
judicial systems, economic and administrative infrastructures, national
armed forces, and police that coexisted easily with less prestigious institu-
tions: debt peonage, the company store (tienda de raya), restrictions on
peasant mobility, forced military service, and out-and-out genocide. It also
coexisted with precapitalist modes of production such as the Indian com-
munity in its role as a provider of cheap labor (Mallon 1983). e dual
process of state building and establishing a particularly ruthless mode of
agrarian capitalism implied struggles and negotiations between local, re-
gional, and national elites. It also implied pitched struggles between elites
and popular sectors intent upon preserving landownership or autonomy
(Joseph and Nugent 1994, 3). It is rather easy to see how the bandit trope
acquires particular relevance during a period focused on land and popula-
tion control.
e Great Depression marked the end of this period as well as the begin-
ning of the so-called crisis of the neocolonial pact as a model of growth.
Even when banditry and rural unrest persisted well after this period (up to
today, as Sendero Luminoso in Peru, the endless Colombian civil war, and
the zapatism of the Chiapas region exemplify), all of these expressions are
qualitatively different from the phenomenon that I examine in this volume.
From the mid-1920s on (or later, depending on the case), most expressions
of peasant unrest and its representation were inspired (or were charged
with being inspired) by Marxism, which determined to varying degrees the
self-perception of the participants, the relations between rural and urban
| Introduction
insurgency, and the cultural character that the whole process acquired. is
political movement adds a whole new dimension to the “bandit problem,”
and therefore any analysis of post-1920s banditry should form part of a dif-
ferent project. Also, from the 1920s onward, the social landscape in rural
Latin America (particularly, the presence of the state) was more or less es-
tablished along lines fashioned by the elite, dramatically changing the ways
in which agrarian struggles were fought. Banditry thus changed its place in
the political and cultural arenas.
e reader will note that I devote little attention to the Mexican corrido, the
Brazilian literatura de cordel, the Río de la Plata payada, or the Argentine fo-
lletín criollista, which are the cultural expressions that first come to mind (in
part, due to media popularity) when one thinks about Latin American ban-
ditry. My decision to focus on the elite perspective of banditry was based
upon both methodological and theoretical motives. is perspective of ban-
ditry in cultural discourse (as different from police and court reports) has
received scant attention, although there is a well-established body of schol-
arship on the elite perspective on urban criminality. Moreover, to analyze
corridos or folletines from a purely textual perspective (the only one avail-
able to those with professional training as literary/cultural critics) would be-
tray their political-cultural specificity, thus creating a mere spectral counter-
point between popular and lettered culture. e political dimension in these
art forms is lost in formal textual analysis, since they exceed the protocols
that characterize literature (and upon which literary criticism methodolo-
gies are built). In some cases, the political dimension is distorted in a mere
folklorization. (ere are, however, brilliant works, such as Daus 1982, that
engage in textual analysis of popular culture.) Corridos, cantigas, and popu-
lar songs require specific multidisciplinary analyses that take into account
highly local contexts (e.g., communities of production and interpretation,
migration patterns of styles and motifs, complex interactions between pop-
ular, high, and mass culture). An additional difficulty is that many of these
expressions deal with transient entities that are sometimes not even well
defined—an advancing army, a famous trial or execution, an election, an
assassination—thus making the need for a grounded and detailed analysis
even greater. A classic example of this approach is found in Américo Pare-
des’s With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958). Paredes
Introduction |