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CONCLUSION Emboldened and Constrained The legal system and particularly criminal litigation reveal much about the governments under which they operated. To encourage the populace to embrace the mantra of order and progress, dictatorial governments in Guatemala engendered a desire for order by creating threats of disorder. Decrying and criminalizing the methods and in some cases even the very existence of certain indigenous livelihoods did just that. As the twentieth century progressed, the state increasingly deployed criminology, biomedicine, and other modern “sciences” to embolden its position. Convinced that indios were susceptible to and propagators of disease because they lacked hygiene, for example, authorities used modern notions of public health to add an air of legitimacy to their campaigns against bootleggers, midwives, and market vendors.¹ When authorities arrested these entrepreneurs for plying their trade while only lightly reprimanding men for beating their wives, they established the state’s priorities in opposition to the needs of local communities and individual freedoms. Adjudicating these forces of state rule, the courts were crucial to the government’s legitimacy. Guatemalan historiography, Kaqchikel historical narratives, and novels like Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El señor presidente depict Estrada Cabrera ’s regime as a time without law,² yet the legal system was functioning and helped to maintain social stability during his reign. The judiciary similarly served Ubico, even though he, like Estrada Cabrera, was more interested in maintaining the rule of order than the rule of law. Couched in the discourse of modernizing and moral reforms, the state established the parameters for what constituted legal and illegal activities. The impulse for action based on these laws, however, was as likely to come from subalterns as state agents. By affording multiple avenues to restitution and retribution, the very lack of a clear, standardized judicial process that held the potential to destabi- 226 I Ask for Justice lize Guatemala’s legal system instead buttressed it. Even though Estrada Cabrera and Ubico risked underinstitutionalizing the courts when they intervened in, overruled, or disregarded the legal system, indígenas and poor ladinos perceived the judiciary to be legitimate. As the archival record demonstrates , indígenas understood the state to be multifarious, complex, and contradictory. When they did not achieve their goals in one venue, they knew they could approach another. For every department judge who returned a case or redirected a petition to the municipal court, there was another (or a jefe político or president) who entertained petitions that had bypassed local procedures. Instead of undermining its legitimacy, the malleability of the system bolstered it. In light of historian William Stuntz’s critique that the U.S. justice system ’s preoccupation with procedure often precludes justice, the Guatemalan judicial system’s pliability may have made it more just.³ If a victim knew local officials to be corrupt or in cahoots with her offender, she could appeal to their judicial or political superiors. The sixty-year-old widow Tomasa Pérez did so in 1931 when she learned that the man who raped her daughter had arranged with the alcalde auxiliar (assistant mayor) of her village to block the case from getting on the local court docket.⁴ As in other areas of Latin America, the arbitrary nature of Guatemala ’s legal system likely informed both the elasticity that some litigants attributed to the law and the exaggerated sense of optimism that some poor, indigenous, and female plaintiffs held toward the eventual outcome of legal procedures. The law was “an ambiguous, malleable, and slippery arena of struggle” where the rules of the game were defined not just by legislators and judges but also by litigants whose perceptions of crime, legality, justice, and rights were far from static.⁵ In an indication of how litigants and their stories could influence decisions, at times plaintiffs, such as women who accused men of infanticide, reworked the law to advance their agendas and in doing so shaped how judicial officials conceived of justice. Any study of crime invariably discloses the difference between de jure and de facto reality. As was true elsewhere in Latin America, tensions between the two often arose when the state attempted to legislate, litigate, and explain differences such as those based on gender, race, and class. Codi fied laws more closely reflected national leaders’ and legislators’ ideals than reality.⁶ The indígenas who persevered as bootleggers, market vendors, buhoneros, and in other trades that attracted authorities’ attention demonstrate how little laws affected...

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