Complaining Like a Liberal: Redefining Law, Justice, and Official Misconduct in Venezuela, 1790-1850

One night in April 1822, a slave snuck into Caracas' main plaza, and under cover of darkness, threw the feces of his entire household into the public well. A month later, a local magistrate appeared at the store of José Castellano and Manuel Gonzalez with a contingent of soldiers and arrested them for having ordered their slave to commit this heinous crime. From their jail cell, the two men asserted their innocence and insisted that the magistrate had behaved unacceptably: "Because we have never had any previous warning, because we have not previously been called to appear in court and also because there is no proof . . . [the magistrate] cannot have been authorised to commit the public insult that he has shamelessly and scandalously put upon our persons."¹ Their defense relied not only on questions of evidence but also on attacks against the magistrate's civility; they claimed that his actions had transgressed both proper legal and social behavior. This combination of legislative and non-legislative concerns was typical for complaints against officials from the colonial period, and we see it persist directly after independence. In the coming years, however, the formal responsibilities of government employees would change, as would the paradigm for complaints against them.

From the mid-eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, the Bourbon colonial government, and then the independent republican government attempted to establish a more regularized, centralized administration than had previously been in place. In so doing, both states sought to establish legislation from the central government as the preeminent factor for determining the codes of justice. This objective called for myriad changes in state institutions, official behavior, state-subject relations, and the standards of what would be considered legitimate behavior. This study illuminates one facet in this ambitious project—changes in the criteria for determining whether an official behaved in a legitimate manner.

This investigation tracks changes in the architecture of complaints presented to state institutions against state officials. This essay does not study laws themselves, nor does it seek to examine actual criminal behavior. Rather, it adds to the study of administrative practice by considering the paradigms of administrative and judicial discourse, which thus far have received little scholarly attention. The sources derive from court documents² as well as correspondence within the Ministry of the Interior and Justice. The study will show that from the 1790s through the 1840s, a significant change took place in the standards used within state institutions to determine the legitimacy of official behavior. At the beginning of this period, complainants used numerous norms to address matters of misconduct. By 1840, however, legislation had become the preeminent norm for addressing misdeeds within these state institutions.

The magnitude of this change should not be underestimated, as the ascent of legislative norms required significant modifications to the character of law, justice, and state responsibilities from what they had been under the old regime. The Bourbon Reforms of the late eighteenth century sought to regularize administrative and judicial practices and make them conform to royal legislation. Such efforts, however, had inconsistent success at best. The colonial government continued to gain its legitimacy through compliance with an array of norms such as religion, reverence for the monarchy, written law, tradition, and local custom. These norms were not arranged in any particular hierarchy, so that governmental legislation was not afforded any greater importance than, say, local customs or religious law.³ Good, legitimate government upheld tradition and sought to establish a "regime of justice" that maintained these norms in a harmonious balance.

After independence, republican leaders promoted ambitious changes using the language of republican and liberal revolution. Many of their "revolutionary" goals had obvious antecedents in the Bourbon Reforms, i.e., the efforts to establish a more centralized state, a regulated administration, state dominance over the Church, and to reshape the masses to be more orderly and economically productive.⁴ Of particular interest here, the republic continued the effort to establish legislation as the dominant norm, so that laws created by congress would always be afforded greater respect and...