Professional Documents
Culture Documents
GOLDSTEIN
College of the Holy Cross
A B S T R A C T
Vigilantes in the marginal communities of a Bolivian city take the law into their own hands both to
police their communities against crime and as a
way of expressing their dissatisfaction with the
state and its official policing and justice systems.
In this article, I examine an incident of vigilante
violence (lynching) in one such Bolivian barrio to
explore the ways in which vigilantism acts as a
moral complaint against state inadequacy, challenging state legitimacy and redefining ideas about justice, citizenship, and law in the process. I also analyze the range of discourses that surrounds
lynching in contemporary Bolivian society, exploring the interpretive conflict that results as barrio
residents attempt to counter official representations of the meaning of vigilantism in their
community,
contest the ways in which society is ordered and represented (Coutin 2000; Lazarus-Black and Hirsch 1994; Merry
1995). As the socially disadvantaged begin to criticize and
advocate for change in the prevailing order, they frequently
turn to the discourses and practices of the legal realm for
ammunition in their struggle: "The crucial challenge we
face," Comaroff suggests, "is to establish when and why
some seek legal remedies for their sense of dispossession
and disempowerment; when and why others resort to illegalities, to techniques of silent subversion or to carnivals of
violence" (1994:xii).
Responding to this challenge, I detail the panoply of
competing interpretations offered by observers of and participants in one such "carnival"the attempted lynching of
suspected thieves, described in the police report above, that
occurred in the urban barrio (settlement, neighborhood) on
the outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia, in which I was doing
fieldwork in March of 1995. Acknowledging the horrific violence of the lynching itself, I analyze the prevailing discourses about lynchings in Bolivian media and official legal
circles as well as those deployed by the vigilante actors
themselves, examining the ways in which these discourses
intersect, overlap, and blend to produce compelling narratives about justice, power, and law in a context of urban migration and marginality. What emerges from this analysis is
a picture of vigilantism as more than simple "mob violence,"
the spasmodic reflex of enraged sociopaths bent on retribution (cf. Thompson 1971). Rather, I suggest that we regard
such acts as a form of political expression for people without
access to formal legal venues, a critique of the democratic
state and its claim to a rule of law. Through such violent
practices, the politically marginalized find an avenue for the
communication of grievances against the inadequacies of
the state's official legal order, while at the same time deploying the rhetoric of justice and law to police their communities against crime. As was the case with the 19th-century
English peasants described by Hobsbawm and Rude, violence emerges as the socially subordinate and politically
and economically powerless attempt to communicateto
themselves as well as to those power holders whom they regard as having failed themtheir grievances, their anger,
and their political potential.2
In Bolivia, the absence of what is generally referred to as
seguridad ciudadana (citizen security) is an important component of what people call "la Crisis" (the Crisis) facing Bolivian society today. As the Bolivian state has wholeheartedly pursued a neoliberal democratic model emphasizing
free market reforms, privatization or "capitalization" of
state-owned industries, and the withdrawal of the state
from social service provision, escalating levels of crime and
violence, particularly in the marginal zones of the nation's
cities, have produced heightened fear, anxiety, and social
tension among the populace. The Bolivian national police
force is widely viewed as corrupt, and the judicial system,
23
24
Locating vigilantes
Although characterized as occurring "outside the law" (Harris 1996), vigilantism"taking the law into one's own
hands" in order to achieve some political end (Brown 1975;
Rosenbaum and Sederberg 1976)is not necessarily antagonistic to the power of the state but, rather, presupposes
its existence. Vigilantes are "autonomous citizens"
(Johnston 1996) whose actions seek to compel the state to
live up to its own claims of legitimacy by providing security
and order for its citizens (Huggins 1991). In other words,
vigilantes in contemporary urban Bolivia are not simply "resisting" the state in order to create an autonomous polity
unto themselves. Rather, what they reject is their marginalization from the benefits promised by the modern democratic state, including security for persons and property
(Caldeira and Holston 1999); it is precisely because the state
has failed to protect its citizens from crime that local people
justify collective violence in their communities. Vigilantism
in this context may be understood as a political or moral
violence is inherently contradictory. On the one hand, vigilantism in contemporary Bolivia represents, to use LazarusBlack's phrase, a kind of "pragmatics of inclusion," a practice by which political actors attempt to "claim new rights
and negotiate structural transformations that enable them
to enact those rights" (2001:389). By decrying the state's neglect of their rights as citizens to security and safety in their
homes and communities, vigilantes in Cochabamba, Bolivia, are attempting to call attention to their predicament,
to insert themselves forcibly into the official justice system
of the state by their insistence on citizenship, a rhetorical
cornerstone of the state's inclusive politics (part of what
Trouillot [2001:132] calls its "identification effect"). At the
same time, however, vigilantism marks a challenge to and
rejection of the state and its official justice system (Foucault
1980) by proclaiming for people themselves the right and
the capability of making justice "by their own hands" (including the right to administer capital punishment).6 If a
monopoly on the "legitimate use of physical force" (Weber
1958:78) is the defining characteristic of the modern state,
then efforts to "privatize" the administration of justice and
the exaction of punishment pose direct challenges to state
authority and legitimacy (Caldeira 2000).7 Vigilante violence
thus represents a simultaneous embrace and rejection of
the official order; it reaffirms the power of the state to enforce the law, while at the same time suggesting that justice
may be attained apart from the law, that the two are, perhaps, separable (contrary to what official state ideology insists) and indeed may at times be in opposition.8 Vigilantes,
in their role as autonomous citizens, are thus also "insurgent" (to use Holston's [1999] term), for their actions raise
the possibility that legitimate citizenship itself may be derived outside of or apart from the state, which has forfeited
the moral authority to bestow it (Pardo 2001) .9
In what follows, I offer a historical and ethnographic
framework within which competing interpretations of vigilante violence in Bolivia can be understood and evaluated. I
examine the recent history of the southern zone of Cochabamba city (the zona sur), its growth and development over
the last 30 years, and the formation of "illegal" or "marginal"
barrios within this sector. The discourses of illegality and
danger posed by migrants to Cochabamba that were established during this period of the city's history have had important and lasting consequences, providing an interpretive
context for later acts of vigilantism in the zona sur. I then examine these discourses, reflecting on the ways in which the
media have perceived the violence and the ways in which local interpretations of the attempted lynching in Villa Pagador respond to and attempt to counter these dominant
representations.10 What emerges is a picture of intense social conflict, a landscape in which physical, structural, and
ideological violence are intimately conjoined.
25
American Ethnologist
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been drawn from the rural areas of Cochabamba department itself, by 1976 the majority of migrants arriving in
Cochabamba originated from Bolivia's high, cold altiplano
departments of Potosi, Oruro, and La Paz (Aguilo 1985).12
This trend continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and
by 1992 the urban population of Cochabamba had reached
407,825 (Instituto Nacionalde Estadistica 1992).13
The municipal government of Cochabamba (the alcaldia) responded to this rapid expansion and change in
composition of its urban population with a series of measures intended to control and regulate the new arrivals. During the 1950s and 1960s, the municipality drew up and attempted to implement a Piano Regulador (Regulatory Plan),
which identified areas of the city that could be settled by incoming migrants and designated other areas to be used as
parks, farmland, roadways, or sites for public buildings (Urquidi Zambrana 1967). To the urban planners, such "green"
or public areas were essential to the "rational" growth of the
city. They anticipated that leaving such spaces unpopulated
would serve to limit the number of people who could set up
residence in a given area, thus controlling population
growth. At the same time, such open areas would enable
Cochabamba to retain its long-standing civic identity as the
Ciudad Jardin (Garden City) of Bolivia, with parks and green
spaces to serve as recreation areas where citizens could enjoy nature within the confines of the city (Urquidi Zambrana
1986). To the migrants, facing a grave housing shortage and
uncommitted to the maintenance of Cochabamba's urban
identity, such green areas were nothing more than vacant
lots that the city unfairly kept them from settling. Invasion of
land and (what Holston [1991] calls) the "autoconstruction"
of housing soon commenced, and incoming migrants, organized into sindicatos de migrantes (unions), began to
transform the cityscape by constructing sprawling, unregulated communities.
The formation of barrios by the migrant unions met
with a great outcry from the native Cochabamba population. The invasion of the green areas was characterized in
the press as an attack on the body of Cochabamba by an
alien force, threatening the very life of the city.14 Like bacteria invading a vulnerable host, the migrant groups were portrayed as precipitating the destruction of Cochabamba with
their dirty, dangerous out-of-placeness (cf. ColloredoMansfeld 1998; Weismantel 2001).15 The migrant settlers
were painted as "bad citizens" and selfish violators of the
public trust, thieves of public spaces and transgressors of
urban rationality, turning parks and farmland into settlements for their own interests (Urquidi Zambrana 1986). The
process of urban expansion and settlement, governed by its
own laws of availability and obliging need rather than the
bureaucratic rationality contained in the Regulatory Plan,
was characterized by government officials, media commentators, and native cochabambinos as "irrational," "anarchic," and "absurd" as well as deeply threatening to the city
and its inhabitants (cf. Lobo 1982; Orlove 1994). The response of the alcaldia was to declare all of the southern zone
of the city "illegal" and thus to exclude it from membership
in the city proper, denying to its residents those city services
(including such basics as water, sewers, and police protection) ordinarily provided by the municipality.16
It was within this context that Villa Sebastian Pagador
came into existence. Located on the far southeastern periphery of the city of Cochabamba, the barrio was founded
in 1977 by a group of Aymara and Quechua migrants from
the altiplano department of Oruro, seeking a better life in
the mild climate of the Cochabamba valley (Goldstein 1998).
After a period of temporary residence in rental properties
throughout Cochabamba city, these migrants (most of them
expeasants displaced from rural livelihoods or urban
tradespeople relocated from Oruro city) got together and
bought a parcel of land on the outskirts of town, naming
their new settlement in honor of Oruro's prerevolutionary
hero, Sebastian Pagador.17 Ignorant of the municipal government's Regulatory Plan, however, the migrants had unwittingly founded their new community on agricultural land
that the city had not intended to be used for urban habitation. Thus, Villa Pagador was designated an "illegal" or
"clandestine" settlement by city authorities.18 However,
spurred on by a strong cadre of leaders in charge of the local
junta vecinal, or neighborhood council, the barrio became
politically organized, and early on in its history was active in
securing, through informal channels, local improvements
that could not be formally acquired. By establishing ties of
patronage with individuals within the municipal government and by seeking assistance through contacts with nongovernmental organizations, barrio leaders were able to secure for Villa Pagador development aid and services that the
municipality was unwilling to provide (CERES/FORHUM
1993).
For example, one of the most conflictual issues in the
southern sector of Cochabamba is access to water.19 In addition to its natural dryness (scarcity of surface water is compounded by frequent droughts in the Cochabamba valley),
the zona sur suffers from a lack of potable-water delivery
systems, construction of which requires a large public investment that has long been lacking because of the "illegal"
designation of the communities of this sector.20 Nevertheless, in the early 1980s a group of men in Villa Pagador got
together to strategize ways of bringing a water system into
the community. One of the men, it turned out, had a compadre de bautizo (a ritual kin relationship formed through
sponsorship of a child's baptism) who was fairly highly
placed in the city's water department (later called SEMAPA).
And so barrio leaders began a campaign of persuasion
aimed at this individual, attempting to impress on him Villa
Pagador's need for water. After about a year of regularly visiting the offices of the water department to make their pitch,
the men of Pagador were rewarded: It seems that the World
People's complaints to the authorities generally fail to produce results, underscoring the widely held belief that the
police themselves are in league with the criminals, looking
the other way when they commit crimes or releasing them
in exchange for a small bribe. Crimes that are reported to the
police typically go uninvestigated or unsolved and rarely
find their way to court. Barrio residents cite this lack of attention and honest service to explain the police department's inability to identify a suspect in the murder of a
young barrio resident in February of 1995, a few weeks prior
to the attempted lynching described in this article. Their
sense of their own insignificance in the eyes of the state,
measured by their vulnerability to crime, conditions local
people's responses to the lack of police protection in their
community and sets the stage for the reaction in Villa Pagador to the capture of the thieves and the attempted lynching.
Interpreting lynchings
Apparently, Bolivian sociology has a new object of study:
the lynching. It reveals the level of social degradation to
which Bolivian society is descending.
Yuri Torres, 2001
Most residents of Villa Pagador accept the police report's
version of the sequence of events relating to the attempted
lynching of March 10, 1995. Three individuals were apprehended in broad daylight, stolen goods in hand, on a street
in one of the poorest sectors of Villa Pagador. An alert neigh
bor, noticing something strange going on in the house next
door, began shouting the alarm. Others, hearing her cries,
began to blow whistles and, in seconds, a crowd gathered,
seizing the astonished thieves and tying their hands behind
their backs with plastic strips. (One of the thieves recounted
in her statement to the police that she had been captured by
a "mob" of people, appearing out of nowhere "like ants.")
The prisoners were marched up a hill to a high-tension electrical tower, where they were tied up, insulted, beaten and
stoned, their hair was cut off, and, finally, they were doused
in gasoline. One of them was set on fire by the angry crowd,
his skin falling from him, in the words of one woman, "like a
potato peel." He reported to the police that, had his plastic
bindings not melted in the fire, allowing him to roll on the
ground and extinguish the flames, he surely would have
been incinerated.25
Shortly thereafter, the police arrived to disrupt the
lynching. First on the scene were the three local police officers, who ran the length of the barrio from their station near
the plaza, only to be showered with stones and abuse by the
barrio residents. These officers retreated and called in reinforcements, who arrived in patrol cars, dressed in full riot
gear. These policemen, too, were attacked by stone-throwing people in the crowd, and stones shattered the windows
of three of the police cars parked at the bottom of the hill
28
The romanticizing of the city's past, it must be remembered, recalls an era prior to the migration boom of the last
three decades, before the arrival of rural migrants who expanded and diversified the city. Now vigilantism is described
29
was abuzz with discussion and analysis of the event, in particular, the effect that the incident would have on the barrio's reputation in greater Cochabamba. As discussed
above, although widely viewed in the city as a "marginal
barrio," illegally settled by thieves of public space, Villa Pagador also has a reputation in Cochabamba as a highly organized and progressive community, politically active in
making demands of the local authorities and in trying to
bring needed services and development initiatives into the
community. To this end, individual male barrio leaders rely
on the public perception of Villa Pagador as a community of
good citizens and willing collaborators, people who are capable of participating in self-help development schemes.29
Many of these leaders were thus fearful that the negative
reputation Villa Pagador seemed to have acquired after the
attempted-lynching incident might imperil these other efforts and that NGOs and government officials would begin
to regard the community as an enemy of the state rather
than a good collaborator in development enterprises.
Thus began a local effort to counter images of the barrio
being produced and disseminated through channels outside of local control. Barrio leaders and residents offered
their own narratives and interpretations of what took place
during the attempted lynching and what its larger political
significance was, whenever possible seeking avenues to present this interpretation to a wider audience. These efforts
mostly targeted the media (see below), but in my role as ethnographer and author, I, too, was offered "insiders' " interpretations of events.30
30
Expectations of "right" behavior, standards of accountability, and norms of conduct for state officials, in other
words, come from social groups as well as "the state."
Sometimes these standards and norms converge; more
often, they do not. Thus, there are always divergent and
conflicting assessments of whether a particular course
of action is "corrupt." [Gupta 1995:388]
From the perspective of state law, a police officer intervening to stop an illegal lynching is acting in accordance with
his assigned duties, but a barrio resident perceives this same
action as a violation of the moral precepts of the community, a defense of the thieves against the people, and thus as
a corrupt action. The resident's perception also is informed
by the bribe taking generally imputed to corrupt individual
officers. This set of perspectives creates an impossible situation for the police, who disrupt the lynching in the name of
law and order but, in doing so, appear to the people in the
crowd to be rescuing their accomplices, the thieves whom
the crowd is attempting to punish (cf. Brass 1997). In trying
to impose the state's law (including right to a trial, i.e., due
process, instead of summary judgment) by rescuing the
thieves, the police's actions put them in opposition to the
pueblo. From a police perspective, the subsequent attack
demonstrates the lawlessness of the crowd; seen differently,
police corruption has delegitimized the law as a means of
securing justice, requiring the crowd to pursue it through
other means.
This idea is expressed in Don Celestino's narrative, in
which the sequence of events is critical to accomplishing
one of the narrator's rhetorical objectives: establishing responsibility. Contradicting the official narrative contained
in the police report, the burning in Don Celestino's account
did not occur until after the police came to defend the
wrongdoers, thus transferring responsibility for the event to
the police authorities. Such a rhetorical move is important
as a way of protecting individuals and the community itself
from possible retribution, both from "delinquents" returning to seek revenge on the people of the barrio and from the
police seeking to do the same. By transferring responsibility
for the burning from the people of the community to the police, Don Celestino intends to stave off the possibly violent
retribution by the state against the people who challenged
its authority. He asserts that only after the police had demonstrated their complicity with the thieves, thereby opposing themselves to the interests of justice, did the people respond by assaulting the police.
Afinalpoint to make about this narrative is what it reveals about the political effectiveness of unanimity in acts of
vigilante violence.i4 Don Celestino's narrative closes with
the pueblo defiantly reminding the authorities of their inability to prosecute the community for the attack and of the
"safety in numbers" that the group action provides. ("Now,
'If you want to take us in, fine, take all the people.' That was
the key.") This is complemented by the refusal on the part of
31
those involved to identify individual perpetrators: The lament that one hears in the final lines of the official police report ("in the place where the incident occurred nobody
wants to furnish any information about the events") attests
to the effectiveness of this tactic (cf. Scott 1985). In his analysis of the "arts" of political resistance, Scott (1990:140-152)
has identified anonymity as one of the "elementary forms of
disguise," whose strength lies in protecting the powerless
from possible retribution by the powerful whose authority
they have challenged. Unanimity seems a parallel to this
technique, likewise functioning by disguising the identities
of individual perpetrators of violent or resistant acts: If the
police cannot single out individual actors to punish, they
have no recourse but to abandon prosecution of the entire
incident. Owing to their effectiveness as a form of protection
in a context of state-sponsored violations of human rights,
techniques of unanimity appear quite frequently in accounts of lynchings in the Cochabamba valley.35 The failure
of authorities to prosecute or punish vigilantes has itself
been interpreted as an indictment of the police and the formal justice system; as one federal prosecutor puts it: "If the
State were more efficient in the investigation of these acts, it
would jail all those who instigate and carry them out, but
since the legal entities charged by law with guaranteeing
personal security have failed to do so, they lack the moral
authority to try the lynch mob, and so these cases fizzle out
and are forgotten" {Los Tiempos 2001 i).
Despite their patent illegality, lynchings remain impervious to the efforts of the Bolivian legal system to prosecute
via formal legal channels both the people doing the lynching
(los linchadores) and those whom they lynch (los linchados).
This is because of features of the law itself. According to the
New Penal Procedural Code (Nuevo Cddigo de Procedimiento Penal) of the Bolivian state, intended to limit arbitrariness in police procedures, to investigate a crime the police
need proof that a crime has been committed and someone
to make a formal accusation (Los Tiempos 2001m). This requirement means that the linchadores are rarely if ever arrested, because the police are unable to establish proof of
the culpability of any single individual. Similarly, because
they lack faith in the honesty of the police and the efficacy of
the justice system, the linchadores rarely make formal denunciations of suspected thieves to the authorities, preferring to send a warning to thieves by means of the lynching
and hoping to recover the items that were stolen from them.
Also, were an individual to step forward to make a formal
denunciation, he or she would in effect surrender the cloak
of anonymity conferred by membership in the crowd and
thereby would risk prosecution as a linchador. Thus, despite
the obvious violence and other illegalities that have occurred, in the absence of a perpetrator and an accusation,
the police and the district attorney find themselves unable
to gather sufficient evidence to establish the existence of any
crime at all. This situation is especially galling to the legal
32
picked up on one of the key themes that the leaders were attempting to put forth to the authorities: the barrio's potential for self-reliance and collective action. Viewed positively,
this image connects with the barrio's reputation for collaboration and self-help; viewed negatively, it suggests the barrio's threatening disrespect for the authorities and the law.
The repetition of these elements of local reputation in the
news report suggests the presence of an active leader, taking
the opportunity to transmit the theme of barrio unity to a
suddenly receptive audience.38 This theme was reiterated
during the visit of the commandant, which took place later
that same day. The commandant, a colonel of the national
police, spoke to a group of several hundred barrio residents
gathered on the football field, promising to augment police
protection in the barrio and to provide a patrol car to the
area one night a week. Following his address, Juan Mamani,
a leader speaking on behalf of the community, offered this
response:
Sr. Colonel, on a previous occasion there occurred
something similar to what is happening to us now. At
that time you promised to grant us the personnel necessary for the tranquility of the barrio. Again we were
promised 24-hour protection, and shortly thereafter it
was forgotten. And these are the consequences, when
we can't count on the support of the authorities. We
understand, Colonel, that there are very few police personnel. But also it is necessary that you give them to the
areas where their protection is most required for the
well-being of the citizenry itself. The promise that you
just made, we would like to ask you very respectfully that
you fulfill it, and that here, we don't want to go to extremes, Colonel! . . . We are beseeching you that you
grant us this security. And if there is not going to be the
security that we are asking you for, Colonel, I think that
this place that now welcomes you will have to take matters in a direct form. And we don't want to do that. We
are very respectful of the authorities. We are citizens
that, we are battling here in order to be able to live. But
also we need the cooperation of you all. That is what I ask
for, as a citizen, and as a resident of Sebastian Pagador.
This speech reflects the dual themes that appear
throughout local discourse on the lynching: a desire for inclusion within the official justice system of the state, against
a willingness to take the enforcement of justice under local
authority when the legal apparatus of the state is unwilling
or unable to provide it. Don Juan, as a spokesman for the
community, invokes the inclusive discourse of citizenship
to call for improved police protection for the barrio. He follows this with the community's threat to take matters into
its own hands, directly referencing the violence of the lynching as a warning to the state to meet the needs of its citizenry
("We don't want to go to extremes, Colonel!"). Don Juan presents the residents of the barrio as loyal subjects of the state
("We are very respectful of the authorities"), an amusing
34
the poorer sections of Villa Pagador, those who are most vulnerable to crime and who participated most actively in the
attempted lynching. For these people, too, political office is
less attainable than it is for men living in the older, more established sections of the community, and their recent arrival in the city means that they are less likely to have ongoing
ties of clientage with politicians and bureaucrats in the city
center. For the poorest people, then, as for women of all social classes within the barrio, the negative side of the barrio's reputation (i.e., as a place of savagery and danger) is
more efficacious (i.e., as a tool to ward off delinquents) than
is the positive side emphasized by the male barrio leaders.
Conclusion
In an article entitled "Democracy and Violence in Brazil,"
Teresa Caldeira and James Holston (1999) observe that, despite a constitutional commitment to democratic politics
and values, newly emerging democracies in Latin America
have largely failed to institute and abide by a rule of law that
guarantees justice and protects the rights of citizens. Although by political measures (and especially in contrast to
the authoritarian regimes of the recent past), these societies
might be defined as democratic, when considered in terms
of the basic rights of citizens to justice, security, and freedom to live without fear of violence, they come up far short
of the democratic ideal. This "disjuncture" between a
democratic politics and the lived reality of fear, violence,
and insecurity for many within these democracies is characterized by Caldeira and Holston as an overall failure of "civil
citizenship," the consequences of which include
the delegitimation of many institutions of law and justice, an escalation of both violent crime and police
abuse, the criminalization of the poor, a significant increase in support for illegal measures of control, the
pervasive obstruction of the principle of legality, and an
unequal and uneven distribution of citizen rights.
[1999:692]
A critical point these authors make is that analysts of newly
democratic societies must look beyond the political to the
realm of law, not just as it is produced through executive
and legislative initiatives but as it is practiced and enforcedadequately or inadequatelyin the protection of
civil rights by the apparatus of the judicial system, namely
the police and the courts: "Such a rule of law is necessary for
full democratic citizenship, on which the legitimacy of democracy as both a political and a social project ultimately
depends... .A democracy must secure the legitimacy of law
on its own terms of citizenship. If not, it becomes discredited" (Caldeira and Holston 1999:724).
In this article, I have attempted to explore ethnographically the ways in which this failure of legitimacy is experienced
in a context of urban marginality and political discontent in
one city in Bolivia. It is worth noting that one of the key insights to emerge from a study of law and law enforcement in
a space legally defined as "marginal" is that such places
might not be marginal at all. Villa Pagador is an example.
Since the barrio's founding, it has been defined by city
authorities as "illegal," owing to the fact that its lots were
purchased and its homes constructed in violation of the
codes set forth by the city to regulate such settlements. As a
result, the people themselves came to be identified as illegal
and, as such, marginalized, effectively ignored by the state,
their petitions for legal services such as police protection left
unanswered by the legal authorities. This process coincided
with the institution of national, neoliberal programs of political and economic reorganization, which heightened inclusive democratic rhetoric although in practice reduced
state capacity for promoting legal reform and citizen security. The result is a grave crisis of confidence in the state
among this urban population, which views the municipal
and national governments as actively antagonistic to their
needs. The violence that is being perpetrated by these people, sometimes directed against state authorities themselves, is a visible expression of their dissatisfaction with the
democratic transition as it is unfolding in Bolivia today. And
so this community, like other so-called marginal barrios, is
in many ways at the forefront of the struggle for the future of
Bolivian democracy. If the state cannot secure its legitimacy
in a place like Villa Pagador through a democratic rule of
law, then it is quite likely that a democratic politics will give
way to more authoritarian measures to guarantee "law and
order" on the urban periphery. From the perspective of the
Bolivian state, resolving the difficulties posed by the people
on the margins may be central to the nation's political future.
From the perspective of these marginal citizens themselves, things are not so clear cut. The discussion presented
in this article reveals the complexity of interests and interpretive frames that surround issues of justice and law enforcement, which are operative at even the most seemingly
unproblematic level, that of the face-to-face community,
what Don Celestino calls "the pueblo." In analyzing the
struggles over meaning that follow events like the attempted
lynching, it is perhaps not surprising that there should be
differences of opinion between forces that exist at what we
might call the national and the local levels, that is, between
agents of the state and its associated apparatuses (including
the media) and members of the group that initiated and participated in the violent action, often glossed anthropologically as "the local community." What is not as immediately
evident, however, is the extent to which members of the local community may themselves disagree about the meaning
of a particular violent incident or which of several possible
meanings people in the community want to put forth as the
singular local interpretation (what I have referred to as the
"official" local response). Consensus, in other words, even at
the level of "the community," cannot be assumed by the
35
American Ethnologist
36
This critical discourse increasingly appears in periodicals and public commentaries such as those quoted
here, as Bolivian intellectuals, politicians, and journalists,
weary of the problems brought on by the national economic
crisis of the last few years, begin to interject a new theme
into the discussion, one that reflects the inclusive political
goals of the vigilantes themselves. This shift makes the discursive picture more complex as efforts to present a more
critical sociological perspective on the lynchings sit uneasily
beside condemnations of barrio vigilantes as criminals and
savages. Criticism of state inadequacy, including attacks on
corruption, frequently appear in commentaries on national
politics and political leaders, as mainstream Bolivians increasingly express their dissatisfaction with the deep flaws
within the nation's political and judiciary systemsa point
expressed by writers advocating for a "new kind of political
leader," whose greatest challenge will be to "restore public
confidence in the political system" (Parada Mendez 2001).
This new leader will be less beholden to the old alliances and
more attentive to the needs of the "popular majority," a sociopolitical space whose parameters in Bolivia are currently
being negotiated (see Himpele and Albro n.d.). Discursive
intersections between this media commentary and the
rhetoric of vigilantism suggest that lynching itself may represent an intervention into the national political arena, an
attempt by marginalized groups to insert their voice into the
national conversation about the future of Bolivian politics. It
also suggests that as "la Crisis" continues to worsen in Bolivia, accompanied by mounting violence and decreasing
confidence in the ability of the state to control crime and
provide security, the Bolivian middle class is increasingly
coming to sympathize with the aims of the lynch mobs patrolling the barrios of the urban periphery.
Reflection on this congeries of discourse returns us to a
consideration of vigilantism as moral complaint, an expression of political dissatisfaction with the ruling regime of law
that purports to offer justice but instead brings greater injustice and suffering into the lives of those already vulnerable to criminal predations. Despite its patent disregard for
the human rights of its victims, the visceral outrage expressed
in the lynching serves as a clarion call to state officials, reminding them of their public responsibilities. It also poses a
challenge to state legitimacy, accusing the legal authorities
of neglecting the needs of the people, deploying the inclusive discourse of citizenship to forge a new kind of political
relationship between the marginal communities and the
state. Given the powerful political potential of vigilante violence and the immunity to formal legal prosecution that it
confers on its practitioners, it is not surprising that street
justice of the kind described here is increasingly emerging
as a response to state failures and inadequacies, from Indonesia (Siegel 1998) to 1-ast Africa (Fleisher 2000) to Mexico
(Fuentes Diaz and Binford 2001; Quinones 2001; Vilas
2001a, 2001b) to Fxuador (Castillo Claudett 2000; Colloredo-
Notes
Acknowledgments. The research on which this article is based
has been ongoing since 1994. Recent work has been supported by a
Grant for Research and Writing from the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation, a Richard Carley Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and a Summer Faculty
Fellowship from the College of the Holy Cross. Earlier research was
funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, FulbrightllE, the University of Arizona, andSigmaXi. During
my research in Cochabamba, I was affiliated with the Centro de
Estudios de la Realidad Econdmicay Social (CERES); I thank Roberto
Laserna, Alberto Rivera, and Humberto Vargas for their support.
Research assistance was provided by Lee Cridland, Kathy Ledebur,
Ruben Perez, and Laura Peynado; Tom Kruse and LaDona MartinFrost kept me current on events in Cochabamba. Thanks also to Rose
Marie Acha and her colleagues at Accidn Andina and to Dra. Sara
Fuentes, Agente Fiscal of the Ministry of Justice. Portions of this
article were presented at the 100th annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C., in December,
2001; thank you to Sally Engle Merry, Elizabeth Mertz, and Susan
Philips for their helpful commentary. I would also like to thank
Robert Albro, Andrew Brown, Philip Coyle, Jane Hill, Billie Jean
Isbell, Aldo Lauria-Santiago, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Susan Rodgers,
Ralph Saunders, and the anonymous AE reviewers for their comments and feedback on different versions of this material. Responsibility for omissions or errors is mine alone.
1. I am referring here to the theoretical framework of critical legal
anthropology, which analyzes issues of law within broader sociopolitical, discursive, and economic contexts, viewing the law as a
process within which both domination and resistance are possible
(Greenhouse et al. 1994; Hirsch and Lazarus-Black 1994; Maurer
1997; Philips 1998).
2. The comparison of the Bolivian case with the agricultural uprising of 1830 described by Hobsbawm and Rude" (1968) raises the
question of typology. I find it exceedingly difficult and, for my purposes, fruitless to attempt to classify lynchings like the one described
in this article as one type of public manifestation or another, a
problem of "framing" collective action (Tarrow 1994). Are they "uprisings," to use the terminology of Hobsbawm and Rude (for Latin
America, see Chasteen 1993)? Following Brass (1997), we might call
lynchings "riotous behavior" or (if we focus on the second part of the
incident described here) "police-people confrontations." More
broadly, if we consider the political significance of these events, they
might be better characterized as components of a social movement,
of the sort described by the contributors to Escobar and Alvarez 1992
or Alvarez et al. 1998. But such efforts to typologize obscure more
than they clarify. What is more relevant here is an understanding of
the violence of the lynching, looking to what Coronil and Skurski call
its "specific manifestations, to the way its effects are inseparably
related to the means through which it is exerted, and to the meanings
that inform its deployment and interpretation" (1991:289).
3. The argument I am making here is not intended to have universal application, so as to account for any violent response by a group
that feels itself to have been wronged by the powers that be. My
attempts to illuminate the events of the lynching described in this
article should not be read as efforts to rationalize it, norwould I wish
American Ethnologist
3B
of any luxury items on the list (apart from an occasional boom box)
also is telling.
38. Inviting the press to witness a lynching may be becoming part
of the routine for such events. Following an incident in a barrio on
Cochabamba's south side, where a young man was caught in the act
of burglarizing a home and verbally abused by angry barrio residents, an unidentified individual is quoted in the paper in defense
of his community: "The residents here behaved with restraint, we
didn't try to lynch him, we called the Police and the press" {Los
Tiempos 2001h).
39. This contradicts Abrahams, who comments:
I am confident that the large majority of those who are
currently and historically identifiable as vigilantes are and
have been men, and few women have apparently been
keen to stake their claim to an active share in the proceedings. It is less clear, however, that this pattern will continue
in the future. [1998:1371
40. Whether such practices as lynching may be considered part of
indigenous legal custom is the subject of future research. As Mayer
(1991) points out for Peru, whereas collective violence is often
viewed as morally justifiable as a last recourse in defense of the
indigenous community, it is not necessarily a sanctioned aspect of
indigenous law. Indeed, armed groups in rural Andean communities
have at times appealed to the "right" of self-defense to justify violence that augments their own local power at the expense of the
legally protected rights of others (Orlove 1980; Poole 1988). The
extent to which community self-policing and punishment in the
urban barrio is a direct extension of rural "tradition" is another topic
of debate by Bolivian intellectuals and the media (e.g., Los Tiempos
2001i).
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