Bandit Nation: A History of Outlaws and Cultural Struggle in Mexico, 1810-1920

1. Armed Bodies of Men: Banditry and the Mexican State

1. Armed Bodies of Men Banditry and the Mexican State I have the honor to inform you . . . that today Congress . . . suspended constitutional rights for highwaymen and kidnappers . . . the prompt extirpation of this gangrene from society . . . requires strict adherence [to the law]. —Secretary of State Castillo Velasco to judicial officers, May 18, 1871 For seventy years, neither the walls of Mexico’s cities nor the vast solitude of its countryside could guarantee the security of life, honor, liberty or property. —Julio Guerrero, La genesis del crimen en México, 1901 After Mexico won its independence in 1821, banditry plagued authorities for more than seventy years. We do not yet know its precise magnitude, but banditry clearly thrived in the turmoil that followed independence , leaving a deep impression on the development of postcolonial society. Mexican authorities devoted considerable effort to suppressing banditry, but as the century dragged on the problem proved intractable, rooted as it was in the factionalism that divided the elites and frustrated postcolonial reconstruction until 1867. This created the very conditions—the weakening of integrative social processes, economic stagnation, warfare, and the militarization of politics—that nurtured endemic banditry. Deprived of any other effective means to maintain order and suppress banditry, the Mexican state therefore responded with increasingly harsh measures. To enable the prosecution and extermination of bandits, one government after another suspended civil liberties, passed emergency laws, built or expanded Armed Bodies of Men 21 prisons, authorized summary execution, and granted extraordinary powers to courts and tribunals. That the war on banditry reinforced an authoritarian and coercive reflex in Mexican statecraft is clear. This impulse reached its apex with the long regime (1876–1911) of Porfirio Díaz, which consolidated elite unity, stabilized the state, and experienced success in reducing banditry. However, the tenacity of the bandit problem had in the meantime contributed to the rise of imaginings that transformed outlaws into cultural icons. These narratives reveal that even the Porfirian elite enjoyed no more than a tenuous and incomplete hegemony over the lower classes; they express a range of understandings about banditry and Mexico that competed and collided , perhaps more often than they agreed: bandits were primitives, criminals, or rebels—depending on one’s taste in matters of class and nationality. In short, bandits—and the stories people told about them—were central to imagining and making Mexico. In this respect, the elite’s articulation of laws and criminal justice structures was not only a response to the real problem of banditry; they also constituted a discursive strategy that mobilized a broader understanding about banditry as an acute form of disorder among the lower classes. In this manner, the elite discourse on banditry intertwined with the struggle to create a durable state and national identity in postcolonial Mexico. The elite’s legal discourse on banditry was therefore a core element in state formation, and it developed through two broad stages in the nineteenth century. The first stage began with independence in 1821 and concluded with the restored republic in 1867. During this period the elites saw the lower classes as morally corrupt and criminally inclined—in essence, as the main source and cause of banditry. However, they disagreed over whether this condition was inherent to the lower classes or environmental. Different elite perspectives on the nature of the lower classes followed broader patterns of political and ideological conflict that cleaved the elites into hostile republican factions—federalists and centralists. These factions later evolved into the liberal and conservative parties that would wage civil war from 1858 to 1867. Federalism attracted some provincial conservatives Armed Bodies of Men 22 who feared the erosion of local power by centralized state, but it was mainly a home for liberals who wished to emulate the constitutional system of the United States. On the other hand, centralist republicans were often ex-monarchists and royalists who wanted a strong state that resembled, as much as possible, the old colonial system. This included the vice-regal penal codes and judicial procedures, a framework that suited those who believed in the naturalness of inequality in the distribution of rights, privileges, social status, and justice. On the other hand, liberal-minded elites argued for a legal system that embodied the principle of equality before the law. As it turned out, elite factionalism prevented comprehensive legal reforms and ensured that the colonial-era penal code and judicial system remained intact...