In Rancagua, Chile in 1882, Rafael Correa i Toro was demanding a better democracy when he complained before a criminal court judge that election workers were absent during the legally prescribed hours for voter registration. Even though he could have returned on another day to register for the upcoming election, he brought this information to the court, giving this reason:
I wanted to contribute to the reestablishment of the public morality about elections with my grain of sand …. One cannot passively watch the citizen's first right [the right to vote] made into a joke these days in a country proud to be democratic. That is why I wanted to do my part with my access to money, to time, to patience, etc. so the problem is remedied.Footnote 1
Correa i Toro's presentation to the court highlighted characteristics of an ideal democracy that he and many other Chileans frequently invoked during the late nineteenth century. The ideal included fair practices and procedures and required local authorities to enforce the election laws.
For Correa i Toro, elections were a critical part of Chilean democracy and essential to the public's trust in the political system. He suggested that it was an act of “the purest patriotism” to participate in the electoral process and to ensure its integrity.Footnote 2 For scholars, his compatriots’ failure to uphold electoral regulations is not an unfamiliar story. Election laws and procedures in the United States, Europe, and Latin America have been important topics in recent studies.
This attention has been prompted in part by recent high-profile electoral disputes in the United States, by concerns about protecting democracy from authoritarian tendencies in Europe, and by efforts to reintroduce democracy in Latin America starting in the 1980s and 1990s. While a great deal of this work has focused on the current health of democracies in Europe and the Americas, some studies have taken these challenges as a call to examine historical-political practices and systems and to place current controversies in historical context.
Recent work in nineteenth-century Latin American history has used a wide lens to examine political life, including the relationship between the people and the government, the contours of republicanism, the development of the public sphere, the press, citizenship, and elections. Studies of early election laws and practices cite complaints like Correa i Toro's to argue that fraud and corruption were pervasive and, therefore, nineteenth-century efforts to establish democratic practices were meaningless. Also, scholars have noted that it is problematic to label a system democratic if a large portion of the population lacked the right to participate. In Chile, as in other Latin American nations (and in the United States and Europe), only a small percentage of the population could vote throughout most of the nineteenth century. Recent scholarship has recognized, however, that an increasingly larger part of the population became politically active during the period, despite the continuing limitations on suffrage.Footnote 3
Notwithstanding the limitations, participants themselves labeled the Chilean political system as democratic by the mid nineteenth century and called for their compatriots to honor the democratic ideal. Political speeches, newspaper editorials, and testimony in court cases frequently invoked the term “democracy” to justify their demands for political rights for individuals and groups. By “democracy,” Chilean participants and would-be participants in the political process meant a system in which citizens (defined constitutionally and in electoral laws) could register to vote, cast their ballots in regularly scheduled elections, and expect their government to reflect the will of the people as expressed in elections.
Nineteenth-century participants insisted that the existing laws clearly established the democratic ideal, but that it was marred by their partisan rivals’ fraud and corruption. Both citizens and scholars perceived fraudulent elections as a sign of an imperfect democracy and a violation of the public trust by officials who should find and punish perpetrators of fraud, whether within the government or outside it. However, perceptions about either contemporary or historical democratic practices do not always accurately reflect the real rate of political participation or the frequency and effects of fraud and corruption. As Eduardo Posada-Carbó has pointed out, contemporaries’ condemnations of corruption, fraud, and violence and scholars’ own understandings of how elections should work have turned many historians and social scientists away from studying electoral politics in Latin America. In an article in which he used the phrase “electoral juggling,” Posada-Carbó presented a survey of corrupt electoral practices in Latin America between 1830 and 1930, and called for “a new electoral history” of the region that would “determine the level and significance of electoral corruption.”Footnote 4
Over the nearly two decades since Posada-Carbó’s article, scholars have explored electoral practices and outcomes in many Latin American countries. The majority of those who work on Latin American elections and democracy note that they have been marred by corruption and fraud, but have not undertaken systematic research to understand their effects on voters or on election results. Only a small number of scholars have examined fraud and corruption in depth, and those have done so focused primarily on the twentieth century. For example, Fabrice E. Lehoucq and Enrique Molina's Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica examines elections and fraud in Costa Rica during the early twentieth century through petitions submitted to its congress to nullify electoral results. In Brazil, Paolo Ricci and Jaqueline Porto Zulini also use complaints filed with the Chamber of Deputies to study elections and fraud there.Footnote 5
Both popular and scholarly conventional wisdom tend to assume that the United States and Western Europe developed democracy earlier and experienced fewer electoral irregularities than did Latin America. Recent scholarship has begun to question these assumptions. For example, Tracy Campbell's Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition, 1742–2000 demonstrates that fraud and corruption have been pervasive and persistent throughout US history. Edward B. Foley's Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States also examines irregularities in elections throughout American history. Foley notes that, “examining the mechanisms by which a democracy handles its most competitive elections—the ones where the outcome remains contested even after the ballots are counted (and even recounted)—provides a valuable perspective on how robust is the health of self-government in the society.”Footnote 6 Both Campbell and Foley suggest that a better understanding of electoral fraud will improve reform efforts to promote the integrity of the democratic system. Likewise, Fabrice Lehoucq's survey of scholarly work on election fraud, broadly defined, considers studies that focus on Latin America, Europe, the United States, and Asia, and finds a general lack of understanding of the extent and nature of fraud for all of these regions.Footnote 7 While it would be inappropriate to suggest that electoral fraud has always worked in the same ways across different national and local contexts, the commonalities do suggest that similar scholarly methodologies might be used to investigate them further.
While a journal article does not allow for a thorough survey of electoral fraud and corruption, I argue that a careful reading of participants’ complaints to local authorities about electoral law violations can provide important clues to early political practices and culture in Chile and introduce a broad range of questions about how nineteenth-century Chileans understood and practiced democracy. Chileans’ complaints about improper electoral practices and results appeared frequently in newspapers, political speeches, and congressional debates, and these complaints used a shared rhetoric of democracy to demand fair treatment and compliance with the ideal of democracy, even though the democracy that was emerging was incomplete and imperfect.Footnote 8
In this article, I examine a set of criminal court cases from Chile to analyze elections and the nature of democracy in the nineteenth century. A survey of the Chilean judicial archives finds 74 criminal court cases centered around electoral incidents between 1869 and 1903, from the regions of Santiago, Copiapó, Rancagua, Linares, and Taltal. Cases from these diverse regions provide a representative sample of election-related conflicts from the period. Santiago is the capital region, and Rancagua and Linares are located in central Chile, south of Santiago. Copiapó and Taltal (which was hyphenated during the period, thus Tal-tal) are both in northern Chile. The judicial archives for Santiago are not indexed, so I reviewed the archives for the 1880s, the years that were most politically contentious during the late nineteenth century and for which the most cases were filed in other departments. For the other regions, I used the available indices to find cases related to elections between 1857 and 1904. The starting point represents an increase in partisanship, with the foundation of the modern Conservative Party. The end date I chose was the closing date for the corresponding section of the judicial archives in the Chilean national archives.
My analysis here focuses on the complete case records found in the judicial archives, not on the summaries or shorter references published in the Gaceta de los Tribunales (the official court records) or elsewhere. Scholars have long recognized the value of nineteenth-century judicial records, but have used them primarily in social history. Their use in political history has been limited to looking at questions related to state formation, including the administration of justice, the implementation of Republican-era legal codes, and the expansion and professionalization of the judiciary itself. Recent work by Juan Cáceres Muñoz considers the judicialization of politics between 1850 and 1930, noting that the elite filed complaints about elections to maintain their power. His work, however, focuses on the Consejo de Estado, not on criminal court cases.Footnote 9 Judicial records have much more potential. They are a rich but untapped source that allows us to ask new questions about the vibrancy of democratic practices, including who voted and who participated in elections in other ways, the strategies devised by political parties to improve their chances, and the ways in which fraud and corruption affected participants and results.
Nineteenth-century Chilean political history has not gone unexplored by scholars, and their efforts have been fruitful. The legal framework for democracy was established shortly after independence with relatively low property requirements for suffrage in the enduring Constitution of 1833. Most men with stable jobs qualified, including salaried workers, petty merchants, public employees, and artisans. An electoral reform law of 1874 more than doubled the number of eligible voters by eliminating the requirement to prove property ownership or income if one could read and write, effectively making literacy the only requirement for universal male suffrage. In a series of foundational works, J. Samuel Valenzuela examines the mechanics of nineteenth-century elections and convincingly argues that the reform law's changes to electoral procedures and voter qualifications were important steps in the process of democratization, even though not all eligible voters actually went to the polls.
Until permanent registration was introduced in 1888, voters had to register before each election. This element of the electoral process was critical because the likelihood of a party's or candidate's success in the election was usually indicated during the registration period. Before an earlier reform, in 1874, less than 2.5 percent of the population was registered to vote. Between 1874 and the 1891 civil war, about 5 to 7 percent of the population registered to vote. The highest level of voter registration in the period occurred in 1878, when nearly 7 percent of the total population, or about 30 percent of adult men, registered. It is worth noting that across Latin America, voter turnout in the nineteenth century usually ranged from 2 to 5 percent, which was similar to the percentage in western European nations at the time.Footnote 10 Rafael Sagredo argues in his “Prácticas políticas en Chile: 1870–1886” that the expansion of the electorate after 1874 led to new political practices, including national campaigns and party conventions that included representatives from the provinces.Footnote 11
Other scholars have examined a variety of aspects of nineteenth-century elections, including congressional and public debates over the expansion of suffrage and government intervention in elections.Footnote 12 There is wide agreement that democracy was limited, however. For example, scholars agree that large landlords were able to control the political sphere through manipulation of their inquilinos and other dependents. Women and illiterate men did not gain access to the ballot box until well into the twentieth century, although there is evidence that they participated in the public sphere and influenced the political process long before that.Footnote 13
Despite limits on participation and significant coercion, there is substantial evidence that a democratic culture was developing. As Macarena Ponce de León Atria and Juan Cáceres Muñoz have recently noted, there is much left to investigate in the history of Chilean democracy, and many types of sources have not yet been utilized. Ponce de León points out, “Elections were not defined by fraud or state control only. There is a [scholarly] obsession for anomalies, as if the history of elections were only the recounting of ‘bad practices.’”Footnote 14 It is also not evident that the “bad practices” that both contemporaries and scholars have lamented were as significant in every case as we have been led to believe. A more careful examination of allegations can lead to the discovery that voters were more independent than previously believed.
The conventional wisdom among scholars has been that the armed forces were enfranchised because their votes could easily be influenced in the government's favor, but Patricio Ibarra Cifuentes finds that National Guard members in the community of Nacimiento did not necessarily vote for the government's candidates in the parliamentary election of 1858.Footnote 15 This is just one example, of course, and perhaps National Guard members in other cities or in other elections were less independent, but such findings demonstrate that long-standing assumptions should be revisited with empirical study. In this article, I argue that contemporary allegations of fraud, corruption, and misconduct during elections, here seen through the judicial records, can inform us not only of the anomalies but also of the ways in which elections worked as expected, according to the laws and norms of the time. We can also see the ways that participants defined and defended the democratic ideal. Attentiveness to democratic procedures and principles and the rhetoric of democracy were already widespread by the latter half of the nineteenth century and demonstrate a consensus that support for democracy was an important ideal by which Chileans judged one another.
By the late nineteenth century, the Chilean political system contained many elements that participants considered critical in a democracy, including electoral laws that permitted participation by a relatively wide segment of the population, the regular and peaceful transfer of power following elections, and multiple political parties that presented candidates and contested ideas in the public sphere. Courtroom battles about electoral conflicts and allegations of fraud and corruption can provide a window into the political culture of the era. The set of court cases I examined shows significant partisan conflict, widespread concerns about processes and participation, and a widely shared consensus around a democratic ideal. They demonstrate how fraud occurred at every stage of the electoral process, and this is an important topic of study, but we miss an important part of the picture if we fail to see that many Chileans found fraud repugnant and sought redress in the courts. In the late nineteenth century, participants in the electoral process asked criminal court judges to investigate election administration. They disputed both procedures and outcomes at every stage.
Conflicts during voter registration
The conflicts that arose at the initial stages of voter registration serve as an informative introduction to the study of a burgeoning democratic culture. Several months before an election was to occur, committees (juntas) formed to register voters and to review the list of registrants to ensure eligibility. The electoral law of 1833 specified that municipal authorities would appoint junta members, leading to charges by the opposition that the process was unfair and prone to manipulation by the government. New procedures were put in place with an 1869 electoral law that excluded government officials and called on the highest taxpayers (mayores contribuyentes) from each department to form the committees that would organize the administration of the upcoming election.Footnote 16
Attendance at the taxpayers’ meeting was taken seriously.Footnote 17 This meeting, held at the municipal level, was the mechanism by which individuals were assigned to committees that would conduct voter registration or collect and tally ballots for municipal, congressional, and presidential elections. During or shortly after the meeting, a list of those who did not attend was forwarded to the local criminal judge, who then issued citations to the accused, demanding their excuses. There was a notable attention to procedure and a shared rhetoric that confirmed and supported the responsibility of individuals to uphold the integrity of democracy through their participation.
Most cases related to the responsibility of individuals to participate in the democratic process were quickly dismissed when judges determined that absences were legitimate because of age (those over 65 were not compelled to participate) or illness, but the fact that the cases were initiated and investigated is nonetheless important. At this early stage of the electoral process, individuals and party representatives who filed complaints about the participation of others were demonstrating their familiarity with the law. It is evident that concerns about fraud and corruption did not necessarily impede democratic development, but rather could make participants more attentive to the relevant laws in order to ensure compliance.
In Rancagua in 1875, a complaint was filed against Felipe Valdés for inaccuracy in producing the record of the taxpayers’ meeting that would serve as the basis for administering the upcoming election. The judge reviewed testimony from several witnesses, some of whom claimed that Valdés had changed the assignments of some individuals to precincts for voter registration after the taxpayers’ meeting had agreed on those assignments. Ultimately, the judge determined that the case was not worthy of further adjudication because the changes were minor and mainly typographical errors.Footnote 18
In another case, charges were filed against Pedro Fernández Concha, who served as the president of the taxpayers’ meeting in Santiago, because he assigned Ramón Bustamante to a registration precinct in 1884. Bustamante's neighbor, Juan Rafael Castro, cited specific statutes from both the electoral laws and the ley de tribunales (the body of laws regarding the courts) in his complaint before the judge, claiming that Bustamante was ineligible because he was a judge in a different department. Fernández Concha was acquitted because Bustamante's name did not appear on the list of government employees he had received from a local official and also because Bustamante had resigned from the judgeship before the taxpayers’ meeting.Footnote 19 Nonetheless, Castro's attention to the relevant laws and the court's investigation of the propriety of Bustamante's inclusion demonstrate that participants took the process and its integrity seriously. The roles of the citizenry in administering democratic processes are important in considerations of how well the system functioned. This case may also reflect partisanship, as Fernández Concha was a leader in the Conservative Party, but this was not stated in the court documents. Additional research into the accusers and defendants in these cases might reveal the dynamics of partisanship and partisan rivalries, and this is an aspect of election research that scholars could undertake in future projects.
There is no doubt that elections were affected by partisanship and fraud throughout the electoral cycle. In Copiapó, municipal official Arturo del Fierro filed a complaint against departmental treasurer Lesmes R. Sierralta in 1887 with an allegation that the list of taxpayers was incorrect. Sierralta's defense rested on two bases: an explanation that tax collection is dispersed throughout the year and therefore errors are easily made, and his insistence that he had always performed his duties honorably and well. He also noted that correcting the errors that del Fierro was concerned about would benefit his (del Fierro's) political party. The judge heard testimony from a number of witnesses on Sierralta's behalf, including two senators, multiple intendants and former intendants, and the current Chilean minister in Buenos Aires. After hearing their testimony about his honorable and correct fulfillment of various public duties, the judge ruled that Sierralta was not guilty of violating election laws.Footnote 20 The allegation suggests an avenue scholars might consider in evaluating electoral administration and participation: in a given district, who determined the list of highest taxpayers and how did parties attempt to increase their chances of winning elections?
Disputes over election administration demonstrate both minor and significant debates over procedures. During a dispute at the taxpayers’ meeting in Copiapó in 1884, the minority insisted on including their protest in the written acta and then filed a complaint with the court. They objected to the majority's decision to combine three small subdelegations into a single election precinct rather than to attach each one to its closest large subdelegation. Those presenting arguments on both sides cited specific parts of the current election laws, insisted that their interpretation was the correct one according to the spirit or intent of the law, and declared their rivals were acting in the interest of partisanship rather than fairness. Over the course of the case, which began with the local court in Copiapó and proceeded to the appeals court in La Serena and then to the Supreme Court in Santiago, several issues arose, including the way that the decision would affect election results by changing the district's majority and affecting voter participation.Footnote 21 Juan B. Avalos, a member of the majority from the taxpayers’ meeting, said in his defense that the minority's interpretation would mean that many voters would need to travel “more than thirty leagues, spending a relatively considerable amount of money and losing no less than a week of work, which for them, workers [jente de trabajo], is a lot to lose.”Footnote 22
Testimony in this case did not cite the democratic ideal, but important elements of democracy are in play here. Appeals to the spirit of the law, fairness, the idea that the election results should reflect the will of the majority, and concerns that access to the ballot box that might be affected by a potential voter's socioeconomic status were used by both sides, because they were part of a shared definition of representative democracy. The partisanship inherent in the claims should not lead scholars to overlook the language used by participants—the use of democratic rhetoric was important in shaping expectations and norms over the course of several decades, and contributed to the process of shaping democracy.
Partisanship was also at the center of concerns about the 1869 elections in Copiapó, where both the designation of election workers and the registration process itself were allegedly tainted, in this case with the assistance of armed troops. Tomás G. Gallo and Diego Carvallo claimed that the entire process was tainted, beginning with the presentation at the taxpayers’ meeting of “a preconceived plan to arbitrarily, capriciously, and illegally serve the interests of a political party.”Footnote 23 Their main complaint, however, was with the actions of election officials over several days of voter registration. Gallo and Carvallo submitted a lengthy statement to the judge that details how fraud and partisanship occurred.
Voter intimidation and violence
It was commonplace for governments to manipulate elections and their results, but scholars who repeat contemporaries’ claims of such occurrences have not always been specific about what happened. This court case and others provide historians with more complete details of government intervention in the electoral process. Municipal troops [soldados municipales], allegedly under the orders of the local police commander and “various officials,” blocked access to voter registration for some local citizens while allowing their own partisans to register unimpeded. Gallo and Carvallo worded their complaint carefully, generally referring to the government's partisans as “individuals” and using the term “citizens” to refer to the opposition. In this distinction, the two men were making a clear statement that those who were beholden to the government and voting for the government's candidates were not deserving of citizenship. Instead, only those who voted according to their own free will merited the label and, by implication, the right to participate in the democratic process.
The rhetoric of democracy is important in analyzing testimony and other documents from the period, because it indicates a shared belief that the ideals of the democratic system were important even if they were not always honored. The complainants in this case also noted that the troops had physically threatened and even harmed citizens who wished to register to vote. The troops were aided and abetted by voter registration officials who “witnessed these abuses and approved of them, busying themselves with registering individuals who had entered fraudulently.”Footnote 24
Multiple armed forces directed by different local and national officials were active in late nineteenth-century Chile. Soldiers directed by the department governor, the civic battalion of Buin, and the rural police all arrived at the plaza where voters in Maipo were to register for the upcoming elections in 1884. Liberal Party representative and observer Blas Urzúa filed a complaint because the registration table closed early. Voter registration officials informed the court that they had asked the department's governor to send soldiers because of rumors that they would be attacked and the register stolen by public armed forces. The governor sent eight soldiers, but the registration officials felt unsafe when “about fourteen” uniformed rural police on horseback and “several carriages” holding about 30 armed men from the civic battalion of Buin appeared. The registration officials felt intimidated by the latter groups and shut down their operations immediately.
Interestingly, observer Urzúa initiated the court case as if to seek an explanation, but in fact he had known about it ahead of time. He had shared the information regarding a potential impending attack with the voter registration officials, and a Mr. Infante who was there confirmed he had heard the same news. The three registration officials who insisted on closing the site early were found guilty of violating electoral law. The two who refused to sign the acta [official record] to conclude registration for the day were not charged, but their 200-peso fines were reduced to 20 pesos upon appeal.Footnote 25 It is evident that intimidation impeded political participation, in this case in Maipo and in the case above from Copiapó, and elsewhere as well. As we consider the relationships between the government and the citizenry, we must take into account how officials and citizens perceived the different types of armed forces or called on them for support during elections. Further research could find ways to evaluate the effects of intimidation in more specific ways and determine how much they affected election results, or whether there were any discernible patterns of intimidation.
Election participants and observers also rejected intervention by government officials, and went to the courts for redress when they felt their rights to a free election had been violated. Election laws specified that the electoral process was to be administered at the municipal level, and in 1869 prohibited intendants, governors, and subdelegates (all appointed by the president) from participating in electoral activities. This was important because it severely limited the president's ability to use his appointees to manipulate elections.Footnote 26 José Luis Salamanca initiated a complaint in 1882 in the department of Rancagua against subdelegate Ismael Moran of Las Hijuelas because as a citizen Salamanca observed the violation of “a law that gives us the right to elect the nation's representatives with complete freedom.”Footnote 27 According to Salamanca, Moran “took for himself rights that not only were not his, but which the law expressly denies him” when he took the alphabetical index of registered voters.Footnote 28 Witnesses also testified that they saw Moran writing something at the table where registration occurred, although no one knew what he wrote.
Ultimately, the judge did not have the acta of the registration precinct, and the case was not resolved with a verdict.Footnote 29 Regardless of the outcome, however, this case indicates both citizens’ lack of faith in appointed officials to comply with the laws supporting democracy and their simultaneous faith in the judiciary to protect the political system. Salamanca was familiar with the laws and insistent that the local officials and the designated registration workers should follow them. As a citizen, he saw it as his right to demand enforcement of the law.
Many election-related complaints from this time addressed observed or suspected violations of the law, but a number of court cases indicate that participants acted in deliberate ways to protect the integrity of elections from potential problems as well. Fermín González, wanting to ensure the integrity of the election he was administering in 1890, did not feel confident that the electoral registers for his precinct of Longavi (in the department of Linares) were secure in his home overnight between registration sessions. During the last two nights of voter registration, he took the registers in which voters’ names were recorded and stayed in someone else's house to protect them. He did not think that the six blank registers and two blank index volumes he also had with him were at risk of theft, so he left them locked in the train station, but they were stolen. The court's investigation of the theft heard testimony insinuating police or Liberal Party involvement in the incident, but there was no evidence justifying an indictment, so the case was dropped a few weeks later.Footnote 30
Like Salamanca's accusation that government official Moran was intervening in the election, or the theft of the blank electoral registers that González reported, many of the court cases analyzed here describe incidents whose effects are difficult to measure. Generally, it is not evident how much these incidents of fraud, corruption, or violence directly affected election results, but on some occasions, however, it appears that the effects were noteworthy. In these cases, scholars need to take a closer look at the details. For example, in Rancagua in 1876, voting for new municipal officials in the sixth subdelegation of Compañia nearly did not occur. According to his partisan rivals, election official Ramón Prieto had proposed that the precinct falsify the acta and divide the votes evenly between parties instead of collecting ballots from voters. When his colleagues rejected the idea and voting began, the precinct's officials disagreed about whether or not to accept a ballot from Eusebio Fernández and violence erupted. During the conflict, partisan rivals slapped and grabbed at each other. Of the election officials at the precinct, the Liberal Party officials (including Prieto) were in the majority and claimed that not only the minority officials present but also a “horde of bandits” more than 150 men strong were involved. Testimony in the case reflects conflicting partisan accounts in assigning blame for the destruction, but in the end the register was ripped to the point of being useless and the ballot box was in pieces on the ground.Footnote 31
Accusations of voter intimidation and violence associated with partisanship sometimes occurred during the period before elections as well. In one case in Santiago in February 1885, a political meeting at the Conservative Club “Diego Portales” was dispersing when some exiting participants saw police officer Eleuterio Galvez, a known Liberal sympathizer, nearby. Chaos broke loose, complete with gunfire. Hundreds of Conservatives soon formed a mob and wider violence erupted. A witness describing the scene noted that so many stones were falling that they seemed like rain; the mob was pulling the stones up from the sidewalk and throwing them at a city streetcar because they thought Galvez was inside. He was not, but the angry conservatives, worked up by the hours-long meeting that had just ended, chased the streetcar for several blocks until it overturned. The streetcar's occupants suffered injuries and one of the horses died. Galvez and his Liberal defenders claimed he was in the area because it was on his way home, while Conservatives were convinced he was waiting to attack his political rivals. They accused him of obstructing their right of peaceful assembly. Testimony in the criminal court investigation of the incident and accounts in both Liberal and Conservative newspapers used rhetoric emphasizing the importance of upholding democratic ideals to justify their (often conflicting) interpretations of that day.Footnote 32
Conflict between Conservatives and Galvez did not begin with this incident. The previous month, the policeman had filed a criminal complaint against El Estandarte Católico, a Catholic newspaper sympathetic to the Conservative Party, for abusing the freedom of the press by printing a negative article about him.Footnote 33 The article identified him by name as someone who was “commissioned by the Government party to assault voter registration precincts” and a “bandit.” It also accused him of wandering drunk around the Cañadilla neighborhood (where the Conservative Club was located) with other police officers, asking “an honorable artisan” if he was a Conservative, and ordering one of the officers to attack the man when he answered that he was not registered to vote but was Catholic (implying he was sympathetic to the Conservative Party).Footnote 34
The Galvez incident, too, demonstrates that participants across the political spectrum recognized the significance of basing political and judicial decisions on shared values, and that those values were increasingly democratic. As scholars continue to investigate the nature of nineteenth-century political systems with different levels of democratic practices, the rhetoric used to justify actions should be an important aspect of that research. The ways that partisans label their colleagues and rivals reflects the nature of partisanship and political rivalries. Both quantitative and qualitative methods could be used to measure and analyze democratic development through the rhetorical strategies used not only in judicial records but in other partisan, government, and media sources as well.
This incident of political violence in Santiago and other episodes can raise questions about the adequacy of preparations for elections and the atmosphere of voter registration and voting. When the electoral processes were marred by violence, the violent episodes could be strikingly different, depending on where they occurred and who participated. Violence could also be looked at as a way that individuals participated in the political process, even if it was ultimately harmful to themselves, others, and the process itself. A judicial investigation into a public disorder in Buin in late 1884 resulted in arrests and testimony about the roles of inquilinos (here, rural workers of the land) and servants from conservative landowners’ properties in election-related activities. Even though inquilinos did not own property, they could vote if they were literate. The testimony from a lengthy court case reveals conflicting stories about whether liberals or conservatives were planning to attack voter registration officials and steal the register. Dozens of individuals—by some accounts 40 or 50, and by other accounts more than 100—were moving around the plazas of Buin and Maipo (neighboring communities), in front of the jail in Buin and around the governor's home. All claimed to be there for the just cause of ensuring the safety and security of the voter registration process. While not all the details are clear because of conflicting testimony, it is evident that even illiterate inquilinos who were ineligible to vote were drawn into partisan conflict by their patrons and sometimes suffered arrest, injury, and possibly death when they participated in politics either voluntarily or involuntarily.Footnote 35
Witnesses in Buin and Maipo acknowledged that they were sent to protect their patrons, but did not identify the political party whose interests they were protecting. In this more rural environment, the politicization of the lower classes along party lines is much less clear in the documents than it was in the situation outside the Conservative Club in Santiago we saw above. In Santiago, participants in the mob violence testified that they had been listening to speeches telling them that the Liberal government would destroy their Catholic values and that electing Conservatives would restore Catholic marriage and cemeteries. Juan Ramírez y Lopes, who was arrested outside the Conservative Club for discharging his revolver, testified that attendees were urged to go, “to the door, to arms, because the police are here and we all must live or die for the nation [patria] and for religion.”Footnote 36
Historians who address late nineteenth-century elections have only briefly considered the similarities and differences between urban and rural precincts. Such research will be critical to a better understanding of how large landowners in rural areas and influential political leaders intersected and interacted with workers. Ulrich Mücke has noted that Peruvian elections in the 1870s involved organized partisan violence for control of the central plaza of the constituency to gain favorable election results—the party that controlled the plaza would win.Footnote 37 While fighting for control of the physical space where elections occurred does not seem to have occurred in a systematic way during Chilean elections, there were some court cases regarding partisan efforts to keep the opposition away or to prevent certain votes from being recorded. Far too little research has explored the ways in which political leaders interacted with working-class voters and non-voters. Judicial testimony could be an important means of uncovering those points of view, otherwise difficult to find.
Juan Ramírez y Lopes and others who testified in the Santiago case said that they had been invited to the meeting at the Conservative Club through their membership in the religious society “San José,” which also served as a mutual aid society.Footnote 38 This suggests some direct connections between confraternities and partisanship that should be investigated in more depth as we consider the intersections of religion and politics.
Regardless of participants’ political leanings and partisan affiliations, testimony from these judicial records shows how they defined the democratic ideal. Many Chileans saw democracy as a system that would accurately and impartially reveal the electorate's wishes for their government. They expected that the processes of voter registration, elections, and vote-counting would occur as prescribed by the law, and that government officials would refrain from improper interference. In their testimony about contested electoral practices, participants framed their actions in terms of fairness and justified themselves with the electoral laws.
The Limits of Electoral Laws
Thirty-one-year-old miner Francisco de Borja Ipinza was arrested in Copiapó in 1869 for objecting vociferously to the selective registration process that he believed would harm his Radical Party's chances in the upcoming election. As he was led away from the precinct, he cried out, “Citizens, I am being jailed for asking for compliance with the law!”Footnote 39 His primary objection was that the voter registration officials were not calling people randomly to the table to register, but instead were “calling those who were led up by the police officials charged with maintaining order, against my party's protests.”Footnote 40
Ipinza and many of his fellow Chileans insisted that enforcing the law would ensure a fair process. They filed complaints with local authorities, including the criminal courts, to seek justice when they saw fraud or corruption during elections. As I noted earlier, the court records demonstrate some of the ways fraud or corruption occurred, as well as how elections typically worked. Demands for enforcement of the law reveal how Chileans understood it. They also reveal the shortcomings of the electoral laws. Several court cases from this period resulted in acquittals not because of a lack of wrongdoing but because the law did not specify that the act under question was illegal. In other cases, the court was unable to determine who was at fault under the law and so the wrongdoing went unpunished.
Both of these occurred in an 1882 case in Rancagua over the sale of a falsified voter registration slip. The court's investigation on November 17 found that it had been sold three times since it was issued on November 8. The court believed it was falsified, but could not determine who committed the forgery. Two of the three people who purchased (and then sold) the slip testified in the case, but the judge could not convict either one of them because selling the registration was not a punishable crime under current election law.Footnote 41 In Copiapó in 1886, 32-year-old miner David Álvarez Martines was charged with attempting to vote with Antonio Frés's registration slip. He explained to the court that he had been very drunk at the time. When he sobered up, he realized he was in jail and asked the police sergeant why he had been arrested. He admitted to the judge that he did not know what he had done because of his inebriated state, but did not deny that he was guilty of wrongdoing. After this testimony, neither the promotor fiscal nor the judge believed him guilty. Only actually voting with someone else's registration was a culpable offense, not simply attempting it, so he was acquitted.Footnote 42
Individuals seeking redress over election results occasionally went to the courts for help as well. In 1888, three cases were initiated before Judge Guzmán in Copiapó on May 14 and 15 to nullify municipal election results because the winners were ineligible to serve. However, the judge could not rule on them because the law did not allow for the court to nullify elections.Footnote 43 The judicial system was a means of demanding democracy, but occasionally failed to satisfy complainants.
Through their judicial complaints, nineteenth-century Chileans demanded a better democracy, expressed their ideals, and voiced their expectations of the political system. Many complainants demonstrated their familiarity with election law and their willingness to take action to ensure that democratic practices followed the parameters set out in the election laws. Although the political culture in late nineteenth-century Chile did not yet demonstrate confidence that democratic ideals and practices would be shared and honored by all, these court cases demonstrate that many Chileans believed in democracy and worked to promote it.
There are many other sources historians can use to study elections and other aspects of nineteenth-century political culture in Chile and elsewhere: intendancy or state/provincial records, municipal records, newspapers, congressional debates, and petitions filed with the congress. Criminal court cases, however, are an untapped source that scholars should utilize in examining elections and political culture in general, as well as fraud and corruption in particular. Both the range of complaints filed and the testimony they contain can provide a new window into the perspectives and experiences of a wide range of voters and non-voters.
