Introduction
On 23 February 1940, Albina Hernández and Francisca García petitioned President Lázaro Cárdenas in order to denounce the lynching of Simón García in the town of Quecholac, Tecamachalco, in the south-central state of Puebla.Footnote 1 In their letter they described how Simón, Albina's son and Francisca's brother, had been lynched by a mob of 30 people in what they described as an auto-da-fé. According to the two women, the mayor had instigated the attack. Having asked Simón to come to his office, the mayor accused him of giving away people's communal lands to the ranch of El Carmen, and then turned him over to the crowd. The lynch mob, armed with sticks, daggers and machetes, which was already waiting there, killed Simón and dragged his corpse through the streets of the town. In the letter, the women contended that Simón had indeed given away the lands, but only because the agrarian commissioner had ordered him to do so.Footnote 2 They further stated that the mayor had no right to ‘have sentenced Simón García to be lynched by the people’. They asked the president for justice, as the local authorities had done nothing to correct this ‘horrendous crime’.
Taking place in Tecamachalco, a municipality that actively participated in the 1910 Revolution and in the agrarian reform that ensued,Footnote 3 the lynching of Simón García brings to the fore the intricate connection between politics, extralegal violence and the lynch mob in twentieth-century Puebla. In particular, it highlights the fact that state officials were no strangers to the use of extralegal forms of violence and that communities were not alone in embracing lynching as a form of punishment. Archival sources as well as newspapers relating to the decades of the 1930s–50s reveal that this lynching was not an isolated event.Footnote 4 Rather, they show that the collective killing of Simón García was part of a general tendency within various communities to resort to lynching as a means to respond to conducts considered criminal or offensive. As this case suggests, the authorities did little to correct this practice and were in fact often instrumental in its organisation.
This article defines lynching as a collective, extralegal and public form of violence aimed at punishing individuals considered offensive or threatening by a given group or community. Despite its unlawful character, perpetrators of lynching consider it a legitimate means to attain justice.Footnote 5 In Mexico and Latin America more generally a lynching may or may not result in the victim's death,Footnote 6 but it often involves an unusual and excessive use of violence, such as the mutilation, hanging, torturing, or burning of the victim's body or corpse in visible public spaces. To the extent that they follow a specific sequence, lynchings may be considered a ritualised form of violence.Footnote 7 A lynching typically starts with an accusation made against a so-called offender. After the accusation spreads by word of mouth, perpetrators gather around the victim, dragging him or her into the streets or into a recognisable public space (usually a church, plaza, or school) in order to perform the ritualised act of beating, maiming, or hanging. In many instances perpetrators ring the town's church bells in order to signal the existence of a threat and attract a larger number of participants and spectators.Footnote 8
Despite their fleeting and seemingly spontaneous character, lynchings are grounded in particular social and historical phenomena that precede and inform their occurrence. These phenomena might refer to political or religious conflicts within given communities as well as to deep-seated conceptions of criminality and danger. Lynchings might also reflect citizens’ perceptions of, and interactions with, the state and its representatives.Footnote 9 This article focuses mainly on the latter aspect, as it investigates the relationship between lynching and state formation.Footnote 10
As argued by sociological theory, state formation refers to the ongoing process of institutionalisation and legitimation that allows the state to be recognised by citizens as the ultimate source of authority, sovereignty and legitimate use of violence.Footnote 11 Far from being a top-down process, state formation is understood as being contingent on the material and institutional capacities of the state, as well as on the cultural and symbolic aspects that render the state's use of force legitimate and desirable in the eyes of the governed.Footnote 12
Echoing these theoretical insights, scholars working on post-revolutionary Mexico have shown that the formation of state authority comprises both coercion and cultural politics and that the state's use of repression can give rise to dynamics of control, negotiation and resistance vis-à-vis citizens and communities.Footnote 13 As aptly explained by Wil Pansters, Mexico's state formation can be analysed by looking at both ‘zones of coercion’ and ‘zones of hegemony’, with the latter referring to processes ‘oriented toward establishing a common moral and social project between rulers and ruled’.Footnote 14
Drawing on a series of cases of lynching that took place in the state of Puebla between the 1930s and the 1950s, this article argues that its occurrence is at the crossroad of these symbolic and coercive dynamics of state-making. On the one hand, lynchings can be read as a reaction against the modernisation efforts promoted by the post-revolutionary state, all of which involved the state's interference in cultural and political matters – such as education, sanitation, religion and even crime control – that were traditionally regulated by local communities. On the other, lynchings emulated the brutality and visibility of extralegal killings perpetrated by public officials such as mayors and police officers. In this latter sense, lynchings constituted a practice that reproduced the climate of abuse that informed communities’ very own encounters with state representatives at the local level. Because of their cruelty and visibility, some of the killings perpetrated by public officials could aptly be described as ‘quasi-lynchings’: that is, acts of extralegal violence that, although perpetrated by the state authorities, resembled those of a lynch mob. As revealed by the lynching of Simón García mentioned at the beginning of this article, the blurred lines between lynching and state-sanctioned violence were even more evident in cases where state actors themselves took part in the organisation of the lynch mob.
This article suggests then that, rather that signalling state absence, the occurrence of lynching needs to be understood in light of a state presence that either was perceived as intrusive and illegitimate by local communities or that contributed, through the authorities’ abusive use of force, to the persistence of extralegal forms of violence at the local level.
The regional history of Puebla points to the existence of a post-revolutionary state that was at once contested in its legitimacy as well as capable of exerting violence with impunity. The inability of the post-revolutionary state to legitimate its presence through the different modernisation projects it promoted indicates that the reach and legitimacy of federal authority remained limited at the local level. Conversely, the use of extralegal violence on behalf of regional and local authorities, together with the impunity that characterised it, signals the federal authorities’ incapacity or unwillingness to tame the behaviour of local power brokers who were instrumental to maintaining the coherence and apparent unity of the post-revolutionary state.Footnote 15 In other words, these dynamics reveal a post-revolutionary state that was unable to legitimate its presence regionally and, for the same reasons, was dependent on provincial authorities and public officials who, more often than not, undermined the rule of law through their discretionary use of power.
The article is divided into four sections. The first section analyses the relationship between lynching and state formation. In particular, it reflects on the apparent tension between the occurrence of lynching and a process of state formation that, contrary to what classic sociological theory would predict, was not conducive to the state's monopolisation of violence. The second analyses cases of lynching perpetrated in opposition to the so-called modernisation efforts promoted by the post-revolutionary state. A third section looks at extralegal forms of violence committed by public officials, including ‘quasi-lynchings’. This section also examines cases of lynching perpetrated against police officers in retribution for their perceived illegitimate behaviour. The article concludes by briefly summarising its contributions, in light of a growing literature on lynching in Latin America.
Lynching and State Formation
Whether driven by religious and political differences or by disjointed attempts to deal with crime, the incidence of lynching squares poorly with traditional accounts of Mexico's process of state formation. According to these accounts, the country experienced a steady process of political consolidation, social pacification and economic development under President Lázaro Cárdenas's presidency (1934–40) and throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Following a period of instability and conflict during the 1920s and 1930s, social unrest was largely seen as having become tamed, while violence was understood as having been institutionalised through the rule of the hegemonic Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Revolutionary Institutional Party, PRI).Footnote 16 In the wake of a political regime that was thought to oscillate between co-optation and suppression, a certain peace – often referred to as the ‘pax priísta’ – ensued in Mexico.
The state of Puebla has been characterised along similar lines. After decades of political and social turmoil, the state allegedly reached a period of relative stability by the end of the 1930s.Footnote 17 This stability has often been attributed to Maximino Ávila Camacho, the feared cacique who governed the state through corruption and overt repression (1937 to 1941), and whose influence would be felt years after his governorship through the so-called ‘cacicazgo avilacamachista’.Footnote 18 Maximino's rise to power made possible the unification of different political factions as well as the overall disciplining of armed actors and rural powerbrokers – including caciques, military officers, bandits, peasant leaders and unionised workers.Footnote 19 To the extent that he was able to control and subdue much of the violence produced by these different forces, Maximino has traditionally been credited with the pacification of social and political conflict in the state of Puebla.
Given these characterisations, the occurrence of lynching at the height of Cárdenas's presidency and the Avilacamachistas’ rule over the state of Puebla seems counterintuitive. After all, according to classic sociological theories, the emergence and consolidation of a centralised authority entails the monopolisation of the legitimate use of physical force and the eventual decline in other actors’ claim to the ‘right to use violence’.Footnote 20 Furthermore, authors such as Norbert Elias and the early Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) argue that the process of state formation brings about a significant decrease in spectacular, cruel and overt forms of violence, as a result of both the institutionalisation of punishment and the observance of cultural norms that privilege civil behaviour and self-restraint.Footnote 21 The occurrence of lynching during a period that has traditionally been associated with the consolidation of state authority at both the national and regional levels raises important questions regarding the country's trajectory of state formation.Footnote 22 Specifically, it pushes us to inquire into the relationship between state formation and the perpetuation of this expression of violence.
The period comprised by the decades of the 1930s–50s is particularly appropriate for examining this relationship. The 1930s were marked by the central government's efforts to create a more cohesive and stable political reality at the national level.Footnote 23 After the 1910 Revolution and the Cristero Civil War (1926–9), post-revolutionary politicians aimed at developing social and institutional reforms that would enable the central state to gain a greater presence at the local and regional level. Cultural politics, capitalist development and the incorporation of teachers, workers and peasants into a network tightly controlled by the newly founded Partido Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party, PNR), afterwards the PRI, were central elements to this endeavour.Footnote 24 The transformations promoted by the central state, especially under Cárdenas's presidency, faced both support and resistance in Puebla, reflecting communities’ long-standing attitudes towards the intervention of the central state.Footnote 25
Maximino Ávila Camacho's rule in the state of Puebla during these years further illustrates the politicised and partial provision of security and justice brought about by the post-revolutionary process of state-building. During his governorship, Maximino countered the use of extralegal violence only partially and only when such countering was aligned with his political interests. On the one hand, he eliminated caciques who opposed his power and acted against pistoleros (gunmen) who threatened his interests and those of the agrarian and business elite that supported him.Footnote 26 On the other, he supported the presence of pistoleros and local power brokers (including caciques), so long as they were willing to expand his influence within given communities. Furthermore, he promoted a politicised provision of security when he enabled mayors, military officials and members of the police to repress workers, peasants and political opponents considered subversive.
As stated in the Introduction, lynchings can be read as part of the dynamics of both coercion and hegemony characterising Mexico's post-revolutionary process of state-building. That is to say, lynching not only mirrored the dynamics of abuse promoted by the authorities; it also constituted a response to the authorities’ attempts to incorporate and modernise local communities. In this sense, while the politics of lynchings at times coincided with the conservative and reactionary ideologies that prevailed amongst Puebla's political elites,Footnote 27 it was not determined by it. The lynching of health inspectors or military officers, for instance, had little to do with the regional elites’ interests and more to do with communities’ opposition to the state's interference in local affairs. In other words, these lynchings were ultimately grounded in communities’ prevailing conceptions of legitimacy and justice.Footnote 28
In the following section we will turn our attention to lynchings organised in reaction to the state's attempt to regulate matters of education, religion, sanitation and crime at the local level.
The Post-Revolutionary Project and Its Discontents
On 26 September 1931, local newspaper La Opinión reported that engineers Emilio Cuevas and Ignacio Herrera had nearly been lynched by a group of people in the town of Cholula, in Puebla.Footnote 29 The two engineers had been sent by the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Ministry of Public Education, SEP) to clean and restore the pre-Hispanic pyramid located in the town. In addition to being an important archaeological site, the pyramid hosted a Catholic church built on top of it during colonial times. The church was considered a sanctuary and constituted a place of pilgrimage for Catholics. When the engineers started to repair the site, a group of people – who believed the engineers were planning to destroy the church – surrounded the place and, armed with machetes and pistols, attempted to lynch the two men. The newspaper reported that the authorities were able to save the engineers from the ignorance of villagers, who did not appreciate the economic benefits that the site's embellishment would bring to the town.
Despite the newspaper's depiction of this incident as sudden and irrational, this and similar cases of lynching were informed by long-standing feelings of discontent and distrust that communities nurtured towards state authority. This case in particular reveals the bitter disagreements that had, for several decades, existed between state representatives and Catholic communities regarding the place that religious beliefs, practices and symbols ought to have at the local level.
These disagreements can be traced back to at least the nineteenth century, when liberal elites adopted anticlericalism as a means of modernising communities and ‘freeing’ them from the economic and political influence of the Catholic church.Footnote 30 Anticipating the tensions that post-revolutionary anticlericalism would bring about, Catholic communities reacted with opposition and outright resistance to any of the liberals’ anticlerical programmes, be it the prohibition of religious festivals, processions and ceremonies, or the potential expulsion of priests and other religious authorities.Footnote 31
For instance, on 12 December 1855 a riot broke out in the town of Zacapoaxtla in the Sierra Norte of Puebla.Footnote 32 The riot involved a group of parishioners who, encouraged by local priest Francisco Ortega y García, attacked the military barracks. Ortega y García had used the pulpit to spread the rumour that liberals were planning on arresting and expelling Puebla's bishop, Antonio Labastida. Although Labastida himself denied the rumour, townsfolk and local priests such as Ortega García decided to organise a popular revolt against what they regarded as an atheist assault on their religion. The event suggests a historical precedent for one particular aspect of the ritualised dimension of lynching and riots in post-revolutionary Puebla – the practice of ringing the church bells in order to alert and summon villagers.
As explained by Eric Van Young, the ringing of church bells allowed villagers to signal a moment of emergency or rebellion in nineteenth-century Mexico.Footnote 33 It was also, on a more symbolic level, the ‘aural manifestation’ of communities’ inclination towards self-defence. Nearly a century later, this time in 1930s Puebla, the ringing of church bells would be also instrumental to communicating the presence of an imminent danger as well as to summoning lynchers and rioters.Footnote 34 A case in point was the attempted lynching of an SEP inspector and two rural teachers in a town near Jonacatepec, Puebla, in November 1934.Footnote 35 After the church bells were rung, a mob of men and women surrounded the three men and threatened to kill them, while expressing their opposition to the socialist education reforms and the dangers they posed for practising the Catholic religion.Footnote 36 A similar incident took place a year later in the town of Tzintzuntzan, in Michoacán, provoked by a fight between the school's director and one of the town's residents. Following the ringing of the church bells, a group of villagers surrounded the school armed with pistols and stones. The villagers first torched the school's doors, and then proceeded to shoot the director and to attack the teachers. It was only the timely arrival of federal troops from Pátzcuaro that saved the teachers from being lynched.Footnote 37
Other cases involving the ringing of church bells were reported in Mexico City, where residents openly rejected the government's attempts to regulate Catholic institutions and symbols. For instance, in November 1935, a riot broke out outside the Espíritu Santo church in the Santa María neighbourhood.Footnote 38 When officials from the SEP and the Interior Ministry arrived at the church in order to close down a Catholic school operating in the area, a group of Catholics defiantly stood outside the church. Fearing the situation could escalate into a lynching, the officials called in the police. The presence of the police, however, prompted the rumour that the church too was going to be shut down and that the priest would be taken into police custody. This in turn led a group of residents to ring the church bells in sign of alarm. Armed with stones, the summoned residents attacked three police officers and forced all officials to leave.
As representatives of the church, priests exercised a considerable influence over Catholic villagers. In Puebla, communities strongly supported their presence and influence, even in preference to the official authorities. In October 1935, for instance, more than 300 people from the town of Amozoc went to Puebla City to protest against the authorities’ attempt to shut down a seminary run by the local priest, Mucio Cortés. They demanded that the seminary remain open and, in a gesture that signalled the villagers’ overall rejection of local authorities, they also asked for the removal of the president of the agrarian commission. A newspaper article describing the incident stated that: ‘In this capital, especially amongst official circles … it is believed that if the accused authorities are not removed, violent events may follow and even bloodshed may ensue.’Footnote 39
Indeed, in some cases, violence erupted. In June 1935 a teacher was tortured and tied to a rock in the municipality of Zacatlán. During the same incident the perpetrators also hanged the mayor and the president of the agrarian commission in protest against the socialist education reforms.Footnote 40 A year later, in the town of Cuatlancingo, a group of villagers attempted to burn down the school and killed both the teacher and the federal inspector. The event followed the local priest's urging villagers to avert the dangers of the socialist education reforms.Footnote 41 Similarly, a group of more than 15 men lynched teacher Manuel Hurtado de Mendoza on the road from Chilchotla to Tecamachalco in retaliation for carrying out the socialist education reforms.Footnote 42 The men were armed with clubs and pistols and left Hurtado de Mendoza severely injured. The press lamented the continuing victimisation of teachers, ‘in spite of the strong campaign developed by the federal government to make [people] understand their high mission for the benefit of the pueblo’.Footnote 43
As explained by Ben Fallaw, religion remained a contentious and unresolved issue of the post-revolutionary process of state formation.Footnote 44 In Puebla, conservative and Catholic villagers regarded the presence of teachers – educated, young and often from outside the area – as intrusive and even offensive.Footnote 45 In contrast, the federal government praised teachers as central to the official efforts to modernise and secularise the countryside. Puebla's liberal newspapers condemned the attacks on teachers and attributed the villagers’ violent reactions to their religious fanaticism and backwardness. One local newspaper openly denounced the aggression suffered by teachers in the Sierra Norte, stating that their only fault was to try to ‘get thousands of indigenous [people] in the most remote areas out of their ignorance’.Footnote 46
Newspaper El Nacional decried the fact that ‘religious fanatics’ were systematically using lynching as a tactic to oppose the spread of revolutionary ideas.Footnote 47 Nonetheless, evidence suggests that attacks against teachers were not only perpetrated by mobs but were also organised by well-armed vigilantes, or a combination of both.Footnote 48 A case in point was the lynching of teacher José Ramírez Martínez in the town of Cuautomatitla, in Puebla's southwestern Tochimilco municipality.Footnote 49 In a letter of petition to President Cárdenas written in March 1938, the secretary of Puebla's teachers’ union, Jesús Ceja, asked for justice for both the assassination of Ramírez Martínez and for the many more teachers who had been terrorised by religious fanatics in the state.Footnote 50 Ceja narrated how, in the company of a group of soldiers, a representative from the teachers’ union had headed to the town in order to investigate Ramírez Martínez's murder. Villagers showed willingness to cooperate but offered contradictory accounts of the event. They stated that a group of bandits under the command of the famous vigilante leader Enrique Rodríguez, alias ‘El Tallarín’,Footnote 51 had shot the teacher and then demanded that villagers hang his corpse from a tree in front of the mayor's office. Although the villagers claimed they had been forced by ‘El Tallarín’ to hang the teacher's body from the tree only after he had been killed, Ceja explained that the autopsy revealed Ramírez Martínez had actually died from asphyxia. From this and the villagers’ attitude, he inferred that they had actually participated in the teacher's assassination. In the same letter, Ceja expressed his concerns regarding Puebla's governor, Maximino, who time and again had downplayed violence against teachers by attributing attacks on teachers to ‘provocations made by some members of the teachers’ association’.Footnote 52
As indicated by this quote, Maximino was not favourable to teachers’ involvement in local politics. During his political campaign for Puebla's governorship, he promised the state would be freed from communism, while he promoted a discourse of unity and reconciliation.Footnote 53 Because of his proximity to ranchers and the Catholic Church, he opposed teachers’ interference in questions of landholding and privileged priests’ influence over local communities. What is more, Maximino showed sympathy – if not all-out support – towards those vigilantes who opposed the socialist education reforms.Footnote 54 Puebla's landowners and local priests also sided with anti-socialism, providing economic and moral support – even if this meant through violent means – for those who resisted secular ideas.Footnote 55
As illustrated by these examples, religion played an important role in the organisation of lynchings and in communities’ attempts to resist the authorities’ interference in social and political matters. Lynchings, however, were also directed against federal inspectors, soldiers and police officers, thus indicating villagers’ broader opposition towards the encroachment of the state in local affairs. For example, communities resisted the federal authorities’ attempts to control and criminalise the production of alcohol. Considered by post-revolutionary politicians as an obstacle to modernisation and a hindrance to the creation of a sober and rational citizenry, the consumption and production of alcohol was supported by communities as it was intimately connected to political interests and local economies.Footnote 56 On 24 August 1939, for instance, a newspaper article reported that villagers from the town of Nopalucan, Puebla, had attempted to lynch a group of alcohol inspectors sent by the federal government.Footnote 57 The town was known for producing alcohol in a clandestine manner with the support of a local congressman as well as of the town's mayor. Upon their arrival, the inspectors heard the ringing of the church bells, and soon thereafter found themselves surrounded by a group of angry residents whose emotions had been excited by the mayor's own words. The lynching was prevented only by the arrival of federal troops who were called in by the inspectors themselves.Footnote 58
Communities also resisted the presence of police and military personnel either because they disapproved of the way they dealt with crimes or because they regarded the authorities’ actions in their own right a source of illegitimate behaviour. This becomes evident in the attempted lynching of three policemen by a group of 300 people in the town of San Luis Tehuiloyocan in Cholula on 24 September 1930.Footnote 59 The policemen were trying to arrest Cristóbal Segundo, who faced criminal charges for having murdered a man, Luis Merlo, in the neighbouring town of Chipilo. When the policemen arrived with the local judge at Segundo's house in order to take him into custody, they suddenly heard the ringing of the church bells. Shortly thereafter they found themselves surrounded by a crowd. After being beaten by the mob, the policemen and the judge were taken to the mayor's office, who was apparently drunk and did nothing to defend them. In another incident, seven years later, policeman Manuel Osorio was attacked by a ‘heartless horde’ of nearly 100 men in a poor neighbourhood of Puebla city. Osorio was trying to arrest a drunkard who was causing trouble, only to be confronted by a large group who disapproved of the policeman's actions. During the course of the assault the assailants first took the public official's weapon and then subjected him to a brutal beating.Footnote 60 A parallel incident took place in the city of Puebla in August 1942, when a group of residents from the Belisario Domínguez neighbourhood tried to lynch a police commander in retaliation for harassing a local street vendor who was known for selling illegal products.Footnote 61
As these examples indicate, people were distrustful of the police and challenged their authority to arrest suspected criminals. Additionally, while communities’ perception of the military and of military policing was, overall, more positive than that of civilian policing,Footnote 62 soldiers were subjected to similar torments.Footnote 63 On 20 July 1939, in the city of Puebla, soldiers Francisco Espinosa and Pedro Díaz were nearly lynched when they were caught cutting firewood in preparation for a barbecue.Footnote 64 A group of residents attacked them with machetes, breaking Espinosa's arms and fracturing Díaz's ribs. Unlike Espinosa and Díaz, who were not wearing uniforms and were thus probably confused with common criminals, in 1936 two uniformed soldiers suffered a similar attack in Huejotzingo, a town near Cholula: they were lynched by a group of eight people, who mutilated one of them with machetes and hanged the other from a tree.Footnote 65 Although the press offered no further details regarding the causes for this lynching, other cases suggest that, when army policing was perceived as politicised and partial, collective violence could arise. Examples of this include the attempted lynching of a battalion in Nayarit in 1946 as well as the assault of an infamous colonel in Matamoros, Puebla, by an infuriated mob.Footnote 66
The presence of the army was also met with resistance in the context of the military draft promoted by central elites in the midst of Mexico's entry into World War II.Footnote 67 In Matamoros, Puebla, around 300 people organised an uprising in December 1942 in order to oppose military recruitment.Footnote 68 The same month, in Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, local authorities reported the attempted lynching of a military inspector, his escort and all the members of the municipal recruitment committee.Footnote 69 A group of women who opposed the conscription lottery led the mob. Letters written by mothers of young conscripts to the federal government suggest many opposed their sons being recruited due to the fact that they depended on them for their economic subsistence.Footnote 70
Similarly, the army-led campaign to eradicate foot-and-mouth disease during the 1940s created a great amount of popular discontent and was perceived as an intrusion on the part of the state. Communities regarded livestock as a basic means of subsistence and therefore rejected a campaign that often entailed the killing of cattle. In August 1949, peasants from Jolalpan, Puebla, attempted to lynch a group of health inspectors who were taken to be members of a foot-and-mouth disease vaccination brigade.Footnote 71 The inspectors, who were in town in order to vaccinate people against typhoid, were forced to hide in the municipal offices in order to avoid being lynched. According to a local newspaper, peasants blamed vaccinations for the death of both animals and humans. Underlying to this was their deep distrust of all ‘scientific procedures’.Footnote 72 Two years earlier, in the town of Senguio, in the state of Michoacán, a group of peasants – including many women – managed to lynch a captain, six soldiers and the veterinary doctor, who were all part of a brigade to eradicate foot-and-mouth disease.Footnote 73 Trying to explain the reasons behind the attack, one of the perpetrators stated they were merely protecting their cattle, which was as valuable to their economy and subsistence as any other member of their family.
The examples discussed thus far reveal that lynching expressed communities’ defiance and outright rejection of the authorities’ meddling in local affairs. Although the politics of lynching coincided at times with the anti-socialist and conservative inclinations of Puebla's political elites, it was ultimately communities’ understanding of what constituted acceptable or unacceptable forms of behaviour that precipitated lynching. As the next section will show, however, communities were not alone in embracing lynching and extralegal forms of punishment.
Blurring the Lines: Lynching and State-Led Violence
On 3 January 1930, Candelaria Osorio petitioned the president in order to ask for justice for the assassination of her son, Ambrocio Nieto, by the chief of the Defensas Sociales (Social Defence Forces) in Chimalhuacán (State of Mexico).Footnote 74 Together with a group of men, he had beaten her son and left his body hanging next to the cemetery. The killers were still free because, as Candelaria explained, they enjoyed the protection of Miguel Barbosa, a local congressman and cacique who was known for using his political connections to enable the assassination of both agraristas and rural teachers in the municipality of Tehuacán and its surrounding areas.Footnote 75 The president of the agrarian commission of the town of Xilocuautla in Huachinango denounced a similar incident on 10 April 1935. In a letter of petition to President Cárdenas he demanded justice for the abuses perpetrated by the local police, who, with the authorisation of Mayor Rafael Craviato, had broken into the houses of agrarista peasants, tortured them, and hanged two of their number.Footnote 76
As suggested by these examples, the authorities’ use of violence resembled – in its level of visibility and cruelty – the lynch mob. Comparable to the aggressions perpetrated against socialist teachers mentioned above, violence against agraristas was backed by local elites’ antagonism towards the policies implemented by the post-revolutionary state. Maximino, in particular, sided with the interests of landowners and agrarian elites and used the military as well as pistoleros to repress and control agraristas throughout the countryside.Footnote 77
Letters of complaint clearly expressed peasants’ frustration with the failure of state and local officials to investigate these killings, and with their apparent complicity and impunity. The letter written by Teodora Morales to the president is illuminating in this regard. Denouncing her son's assassination by armed men acting with the support of the authorities of Patlanalan, in the Sierra Norte, she stated:
You, Mr President, who know the traditions and dealings of the caciques of the sierra of Puebla, should be aware of the murderers’ cruelty and savagery … they kicked the corpses … you know that asking justice of the authorities of the state of Puebla is entirely useless, as the murderers are one and the same as the town's authorities and enjoy influence over the state.Footnote 78
Other letters similarly condemned the complicity of state authorities in extralegal assassinations. For instance, on 12 January 1936, Nicolás Gutiérrez petitioned the president in order to denounce the assassination of his nephew by Cholula's police chief, Vicente Jiménez, in the town's plaza. Gutiérrez demanded justice and stated that Jiménez enjoyed impunity because he served as the pistolero of a local congressman and was under the protection of the state's governor.Footnote 79
Maximino was quick to dismiss the validity of these letters by presenting victims as bandoleros (bandits). His response to Delfina Castro de García's demand for justice illustrates this point. In a letter of petition to the president, Delfina wrote that a colonel and two policemen had taken away her husband, José García Pinto, in July 1940.Footnote 80 She explained that, a few hours after he was taken away, her husband's corpse had been found hanging from a tree on the Texmelucan. In response to this claim, Maximino reported to the president that Delfina's husband had been a bandolero who, together with others, had opposed and threatened those supporting the candidacy of General Manuel Ávila Camacho (Maximino's brother) to the presidency.Footnote 81 Accusations of banditry were thus good enough reason to deny citizens’ rights to justice.
In addition to undermining the rule of law, this politicised and discretionary use of force stirred up feelings of animosity and discontent within communities. For instance, in January 1939, in the town of Chiautla de Tapia, members of the state police harassed and detained a group of residents who supported the presidential candidate Juan Andreu Almazán, in competition with Maximino's brother, Manuel. The inspector in charge of investigating the case narrated how, in response to a political rally organised in favour of Almazán in the town, police officers had been ordered to blanket the houses with propaganda in favour of Manuel Ávila Camacho.Footnote 82 This, together with the arbitrary apprehension of Almazán's supporters, so the inspector explained, had created a climate of hostility against the authorities. He further stated that, because they were convinced that the police had instructions to eliminate all ‘Almazanistas’, local residents were determined to ‘ring the church bells to repel the aggression or to stop the abuses of the municipal authorities’. The ringing of the church bells, as we have seen before, signalled both the existence of a threat and the probability of a lynching in post-revolutionary Puebla.
Letters of complaint and newspaper reports shed light on the persistent use of pistoleros in order to repress peasants and workers opposing the Avilacamachistas’ control over the state during the 1940s.Footnote 83 In a letter of petition to the president, a group of villagers from Ahuatempan denounced the assassination of their neighbour Pedro Ortega in June 1940 by elements of the municipal police and a group of pistoleros under the command of the local cacique.Footnote 84 Killed in the town's public square, Ortega's body was left visibly disfigured, riddled with more than 40 bullets. Just as in the case mentioned above, Ahuatempan villagers supported Almazán's candidacy to the presidency.
Similarly, in the town of Huachinango, peasants denounced the killing of their fellows by a group of pistoleros who enjoyed the protection of the authorities. Amongst the attacks they had endured was the murder of a young peasant who had been brutally killed with machetes, knives and pistols in October 1942.Footnote 85 In May of the same year, a group of women denounced the killing of their agrarista family members, who were being terrorised by pistoleros under the orders of the local cacique Cevero Ortega. The pistoleros, as in cases discussed above, once more operated with the protection, if not all-out blessing, of the town's mayor.Footnote 86
The cruelty and visibility of the violence exercised by law officers as well as by pistoleros operating on behalf of public officials reveals that the authorities were far from being agents of a ‘pacification process’ in post-revolutionary Puebla. It further suggests that extralegal killings perpetrated by the state authorities could aptly be described as ‘quasi-lynchings’, inasmuch as they involved the use of public executions, hangings, as well as the mutilation or disfigurement of the victims. Although in the Mexican context lynching is generally understood as a form of violence perpetrated by citizens rather than by public officials,Footnote 87 the practices of mayors and police officers on the ground suggest the existence of a ‘grey zone’ between state-sanctioned violence and lynching.Footnote 88
In addition to letters of complaint, newspaper reports offer important insights into the blurred lines between state-sanctioned violence and the lynch mob. For instance, on 12 August 1930, newspaper La Opinión reported the lynching of three salesmen in the town of Santa Isabel Tepetzala.Footnote 89 The men were wrongly accused of being part of a group of bandits who had broken into the house of the local cacique weeks before. After a woman had identified them as the wrongdoers, a large group of people surrounded, beat and dragged the three men to the mayor's office. Once there, the mayor, together with the local judge, rang the town's church bells in order to summon the residents. Before an angry crowd, the three men were hanged, with the clear acquiescence of the authorities.
The lynching of four alleged robbers in the town of Huitzilan in Telela in May 1937 was perpetrated under similar conditions. According to the press, the local authorities were responsible for the attack since they had apprehended the men and then turned them over to the ‘chusma’ (the mob) so they could take justice into their own hands.Footnote 90 The article also suggested an alternative interpretation: that the authorities might have hired the perpetrators in order to stage a lynching and be able to attribute the killing to the ‘pueblo’.Footnote 91
Another case of ‘quasi-lynching’ took place in the town of San Aparicio, in the municipality of Puebla, in September 1931. According to local newspaper La Opinión, the mayor wrongly accused two men – Felipe León and Ramón Mora – of having participated in the assault of the young woman María Antonia Flores.Footnote 92 Having taken them into the police station, the mayor dragged the two men out in the middle of the night in order to execute them. With the aim of staging their killing as a lynching, the mayor rang the town's church bells. The press explained that a group of people who believed the two men were innocent helped them escape, and prevented them from being executed through ‘the ley fuga’.Footnote 93 The fact that the press mentions the terms ‘ley fuga’ and lynching almost interchangeably is a further sign of the resemblance between these forms of violence. The case of Simón García mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this article also illustrates the blurred lines between lynching and state-sanctioned violence. In the letter written by Albina Hernández and Francisca García to the president they use the word ‘lynching’ to refer to Simón's murder, even when the collective killing was orchestrated by the mayor.
Citizens were not merely passive observers of public officials’ abusive and violent behaviour. In some cases, public officials’ actions enraged citizens in ways that caused them to respond with lynching. On 18 July 1932, for instance, dozens of people tried to lynch policeman Honorio García in retribution for shooting two men in Puebla City during the traditional celebration of the virgin of Carmen.Footnote 94 García claimed that he had attacked the two men in order to defend a fellow policeman who was allegedly being harassed by them. The press reported that it was doubtful that the event had unfolded in the way described by García, as ‘the multitude, upon hearing the shots, precipitated [themselves] against the policeman and beat him, throwing him against a fried foods stand [which caused] severe burns to his left arm’. In August 1943, the town of Paso del Macho, in the neighbouring state of Veracruz, villagers also decided to take matters into their own hands in order to retaliate against the actions of a police commander. According to the press, the police commander had assassinated two young men for no apparent reason. Learning about the ‘dual murder’, villagers, armed with machetes, pistols, clubs and stones, seized the commander and four more policemen from the municipal offices and lynched them.Footnote 95
The investigation and trial of policeman Alberto Andrade Ramos is also revealing of the hostility that characterised some encounters between citizens and police officers as well as of the consequences of police abuse. Andrade was accused and found guilty of the murder of Antonio Kuri Barquet in October 1958. According to witnesses Andrade arrived at the cantina Las Bugambilias in Puebla City with another policeman at around 3 a.m. After a few minutes, Andrade started a fight with a man called Ramón de la Fuente and then asked three more police officers – who had just arrived at the bar – to take him away. Outraged by Andrade's behaviour, Kuri confronted the policeman who, in turn, shot him. His defence, however, claimed that Andrade was acting in self-defence and that the reason he had used his ‘mauser’ against Kuri ‘followed from the fact that there were a good number of people in the place where the events took place, who could very well have lynched the policemen … as has happened on many other occasions’.Footnote 96
Although more evidence would be needed in order to establish a causal relation between the behaviour of local officials and the legitimation of lynching, these cases illustrate that violence perpetrated by police officers could certainly result in instances of lynching. More importantly, an analysis of the climate of abuse and impunity that permeated communities’ encounters with state representatives situates lynchings within a broader set of violent practices that were embraced and at times carried out by the public authorities. It further highlights the fact that lynching resembled, or indeed reproduced – rather than challenged – the barbaric and public forms of violence exercised by political elites and state actors.
Conclusion: Lynching and State Formation in Historical Perspective
An analysis of cases of lynching and extralegal killings perpetrated by state authorities in post-revolutionary Puebla allows us to illuminate the impact that Mexico's process of state formation had on the prevalence of cruel and public forms of violence. Modernisation projects promoted by central elites, including literacy, sanitation and conscription campaigns, gave rise to local forms of resistance that resulted in the killing of engineers, health inspectors, soldiers and rural teachers. Furthermore, the encroachment of the state into local affairs, including attempts to punish criminal conduct, was rejected by communities who were suspicious of the presence of police officers, and, to a lesser extent, of military personnel.
In addition to being a reaction to the state's efforts to regulate social life, lynchings reflected the ‘zones of coercion’ that made up the country's process of state-building. In particular, lynchings emulated the brutality and visibility of extralegal killings perpetrated by public officials such as mayors and police officers. The politics of these extralegal killings was rooted in a conservative and reactionary political agenda that contradicted and in many ways challenged the revolutionary politics advanced by Cárdenas's presidency. Thus, whilst the federal government promoted a socialist and secularising ideology through federal education programmes and the implementation of the agrarian reform, in Puebla a conservative and pro-clerical elite took hold of the state and provided a counterpoint to the modernising efforts at the federal level.
Led by Maximino and his allies, Puebla's local elite enjoyed the acquiescence of a federal government that turned a blind eye to his political abuses in recognition of his loyalty.Footnote 97 In terms of Mexico's process of state-building, this meant that central elites privileged loyalty over the observance of the rule of law. It also meant that the centralisation of authority did not go hand in hand – as sociological theories would predict – with the suppression of extralegal forms of violence. Rather, as illustrated by the case of Puebla, federal elites enabled regional and local powerbrokers to use force in a discretionary manner, so long as it was instrumental to maintaining their influence.Footnote 98 At the local level, this negotiation of rule between federal and regional elites translated into a political climate wherein mayors, police officers and military could routinely use extralegal forms of violence – including ‘quasi-lynchings’ – without, seemingly, any repercussions.
The dynamics of state formation discussed in this article were not limited to the state of Puebla. Historians working on twentieth-century Mexico have increasingly acknowledged and documented the central role of violence in the country's trajectory of state-building.Footnote 99 As demonstrated by this literature, far from being exercised in a top-down manner by a ubiquitous central state, violence was negotiated and privately appropriated by a multiplicity of actors, including caciques, pistoleros, crooked politicians, vigilantes and, as argued by this article, lynch mobs.Footnote 100
The occurrence of lynching is certainly not a phenomenon restricted to 1930s–50s Puebla, or to Mexico for that matter. In point of fact, various scholars have identified an increase in the frequency of lynchings in different Latin American countries over the last 30 years.Footnote 101 In addition to Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil figure prominently within a growing literature on lynching in the region. Written by sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists, this emergent literature has explained the apparent increase in lynching in Latin America in light of the region's rising levels of insecurity and crime, in the context of state institutions that remain limited in their capacity to provide security and justice.Footnote 102
By focusing on the relationship between lynching and state formation, the present article has turned our attention to historical and deeper socio-political undercurrents leading to the occurrence of this practice in post-revolutionary Mexico. Rather than signalling state absence, the evidence offered by this article shows that the occurrence of lynchings was informed by a state presence that was either perceived as intrusive by communities or was conducive to the perpetuation of extralegal forms of violence at the local level. To be sure, state agents were not always present when a lynching took place, and levels of impunity support the notion of a state that was, for all practical reasons, absent in terms of its capacity to deliver justice. Nonetheless, the fact that state officials supported and even participated in the organisation of lynchings and ‘quasi-lynchings’ counters the idea – implicit in traditional sociological narratives of state-making – that a greater presence of the state would automatically reduce the incidence of lynchings or of extralegal violence more broadly.
The fact that lynchings continue to occur in contemporary Mexico, and indeed with considerable frequency, indicates that the underlying causes of lynching – i.e. the state's partial administration of justice and citizens’ distrust of public officials – remain unresolved. The country's upsurge in levels of violence and brutality over the last ten years – which includes hangings, mutilations and mass killings – cannot be simply understood as a result of the recent increase in drug-related crimes. Instead, a historical analysis of lynching suggests that extralegal and overt forms of violence have been shaped by longer and deeper dynamics of state-making, including public officials’ recourse to extra-legal violence to punish alleged criminals.
By bringing to the fore the longer history of this practice, I am not implying that lynchings are driven by some inner cultural predisposition peculiar to Mexico. Rather, as illustrated by the opening case of Simón García, whose lynching was perpetrated by a mob summoned by the town's major, the occurrence of lynching has been contingent upon political factors that were – then and now – linked to the actions and omissions of state authorities. While this article has focused on how state formation impacted the occurrence of lynching, future research would benefit from exploring the legacies of the persistence of extralegal violence – perpetrated by both citizens and state actors – in the type of state that emerged in post-revolutionary Mexico.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the JLAS's anonymous reviewers, as well as Pablo Piccato, Federico Finchelstein, Jeremy Varon and Andrew Kloppe for providing valuable comments on previous versions of this article. A Charles A. Hale Fellowship from the Latin American Studies Association, a Women in the Humanities Fellowship from the Mexican Academy of Sciences and a Visiting Fellowship at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, supported research for this article.
