Crime, Truth, and Justice in Modern Mexico: Notes for a National History

With this lecture by Pablo Piccato, The Americas continues its collaboration with the New School for Social Research to publish its annual Lecture in Latin American History. The series features lectures by senior historians in the field of Latin American history across an array of topics. This is the fifth in the series.¹

Historia universal de la infamia, first published by Jorge Luis Borges in 1935, is a collection of stories about despicable characters across world history. Their actions took many forms but their common denominator was infamy, a “surface of images.” Borges wrote, for example, about Tom Castro, the implausible impostor, who after leaving prison gives conferences in which he either defends himself or confesses his guilt—according to the preferences of the audience. He wrote also about the Buenos Aires compadritos, who kill their adversaries and “devote their old age to recounting that clean duel.”² This interplay between facts and fiction is the central mechanism of Borges’s book, itself a work of fiction based on real sources. Borges dwelled on the contrast between the unspeakable cruelty of crimes (Billy the Kid’s casual killings, for example), and the careful, almost loving recording and telling of that violence by their authors (Billy the Kid scored 21 deaths, not counting Mexicans). The truth behind those stories was less important than the gloss of their memory.

As I worked on a monograph that was initially meant to be a continuation of my 2001 social history of criminals in Mexico City, I realized that it was impossible to ignore the interplay between facts and fiction that had served Borges in making sense of orillero violence in Argentina.³ Impunity had to be incorporated into any effort to reconstruct the history of crime and justice in twentieth-century Mexico, not ignored or dismissed as a gap in the data. The uncertainty associated with the work of the judiciary and the police, which produced the most important sources for that social history, had to be addressed as a historical problem, rather than attributed to an unchanging cultural trait such as corruption. Hence, the truth itself became an object of my project—specifically, the history of the criteria of truth embraced by institutions and those whose debates in the public sphere are concerned with criminals and punishment. The notion that the truth is a historical product did not force me, though, to accept the premise that there is no reality against which the truth could be verified—there are few things more real, after all, than violence—but did prompt questions about the changing ways in which reality made sense to actors in the past. Thus, I could not conceive this project as an exploration of concepts alone, an intellectual history for example. Ideas and practices shaped each other, involving multiple actors beyond intellectuals and the state. Crime and justice revealed their difficult relationship in multiple terrains. These included jury trials and the crime news, both spaces for freewheeling debates about guilt or innocence; the stories of murderers, whose actions and confessions conveyed intricate motivations; and the labor of detectives, who struggled to implement some method in their officious pursuit of the truth.⁴

Between the 1920s and 1950s the languages and themes that allowed citizens to talk about the disassociation between crime, the truth and justice found a coherent form, leaving an imprint that survives today, when the nexus between crime and justice is as troubling as ever. This was inevitably a national history because it focused on the infamy of crime in Mexico, and also tried to explain the infamy of Mexico, that is, the reputation of the entire country as a place where violence and impunity are endemic. My research questions were national because they could not be answered without probing the relationship between politics, media, and civil society; yet, my research focused on Mexico City, where institutions, newspapers, and social actors played a key role in the discussion of justice and the propagation of knowledge about the practices of policing and crime across the national territory.

The...