By their own hands: mass lynchings in contemporary Mexico

1. Introduction
2. Violence in plural societies
4. Conclusions and hypothesis for further research
5. Appendix
6. References

Introduction

Lynching, as a distinctive expression of collective violence, is not attached to a specific type of society. It is conducted in a great variety of social settings and times, including the current ones –which has not prevented its mechanical association to backwardness or primitivism. A balanced analysis of these brutal events is particularly uneasy due to their conflict with the basic legal and moral standards of the academic profession. Yet, it is necessary to understand them, as much as it is necessary to identify the many factors intervening in their build up. Despite their frequency, lynchings in Mexico have not aroused a great deal of interest in the social sciences, in contrast with many important studies of similar events in other Latin American countries or in the United States. Reactions have been mostly of an emotional vein.

To this author’s knowledge, this is the first systematic effort to mobilize the resources of the social sciences for the study of the phenomenon. It focuses on the more than one hundred lynchings conducted in Mexico since the mid 1980s. During this time Mexican society experienced a dramatic process of economic and institutional transformation. It was a tensioning and conflictive time at both the macroeconomic and institutional levels (including such processes as economic de-regulation, income concentration, privatization of public assets, and electoral reforms) and the micro social one of daily life. Lynching inserts itself into this matrix of pervasive social and political tensioning. Triggered by offences attributed to the victims (robberies, rapes, assassinations, violations of community rules) in settings of massive poverty, insecurity, police or military abuse and impunity, most of lynchings show poor people taking justice into their own hands, or extracting revenge, against other equally poor people.

The first section of the article develops the hypothesis that these facts are revealing of the type of state/society relations and the complex articulation of tradition/modernity in multicultural settings mixing varied standards of organization, domination and social and political legitimacy. The results gathered by the investigation are discussed in the second section. The final section summarizes the main conclusions. A methodological appendix spells out the criteria that guided the gathering of information.

I. Violence in plural societies

The conventional characterization of the state as having the monopoly on the use of physical force implies at least two basic questions: that which relates to the degree of effectiveness of the state monopoly, and that which inquires about its legitimacy. Effectiveness refers to the degree in which the state has put an end to the dispersion of violence and of armed power in the hands of private individuals or groups. Legitimacy points to the consent gathered by that monopoly, as much to its actual existence as to the way in which state coercive power is exercised, and to the goals it looks to attain.

In not a few Latin American countries state monopoly on the use of physical force is more formal than real, in that a number of ways of co-existence between private violence and state force still persist. Illustrations include the private armies of Brazil´s nordestino landowners, the guardias blancas of large estate owners in southeast Mexico, the rondas campesinas in Peru, the patrullas de autodefensa civil in Guatemala, the autodefensas unidas in Colombia, the fusion of economic power and political-military power in the large estates of the most modern agroexports, the armed drug trafficking bodies, or the armed entourages of protection for business people.

Legitimate domination is that which the population of the state accepts out of conviction much more than out of fear for the punishment that would be brought by confronting it, even though the fear of punishment usually helps to enhance that conviction. The web of social interactions and the effective role of public institutions affect decisively the sustenance of legitimate state power. Participation in organizations is based mainly in an implicit system of reciprocities, and the state does not escape this (Service 1975; Moore Jr. 1978). The intensity and scope of the consent that individuals give to authority are usually tied to their belief that whatever they provide (in work, personal services, taxes, products, observance of rules, participation in activities…) keeps a proportional relation with what they get in exchange (institutional services, security, recognition, employment or whatever other thing that is considered valuable). State power and the legal system are then considered to be legitimate and social order is perceived as a just one. Not all incorporation in an organization is the exclusive product of consensus. Observing state’s rules and participating in its institutional network are usually questions of an absence of alternatives as we are born in the territory of a state and in a matrix of relations configured by the state or articulated to it. Yet the actual level of involvement is usually related to that notion of reciprocity.

The discourse of the conventional political actors (such as political officials, parties, government agencies, unions, business groups) tends to focus on the macro political and macrosocial dimensions of legitimacy (e.g. compliance with constitutional and legal rules or with government goals) yet most of people build their judgments of legitimacy at the microsocial level where they have, or expect to have, some influence. Legitimacy tends to be expressed in a concrete manner in daily life, as a response to the effects, at this level, of larger social, economic and political processes. It stresses the way in which those effects are interpreted by individuals as a result of the trade-offs between formal and even abstract institutions and policies (such as the educational system, media, churches, political organizations, relative prices…) and more personal agencies or settings (family, neighborhood, friends, parish). The legitimacy of the state political order and its normative system usually maintains a strong dependency on the judgments that the population brings to bear with respect to the effective way in which certain agencies or public institutions penetrate local societies or realms of everyday life, much more than the grand definitions from constitutional politics or institutional discourses. The effective functioning of the neighborhood’s or village’s school, health care center, or police force, is usually more important in this sense than the government’s educational, health or national security policies (Vilas 1995:20ff).

Legitimacy is as basic an ingredient to the state as the effectiveness of the occupation or physical control of the territory by certain institutions. The institutional power of the state is converted into authority when it is recognized as legitimate. The formal institutions are put to the test by their performance in everyday life. The formal legality of the army, the police, the tax collection agency, the courts, can and tends to dim with abuses of authority, complicity with crime, negligence, resort to conflicting value standards, etc., in local settings. It is suggestive, in this sense, that the facts which motivate mass lynchings are usually related to daily questions in which there is an absence of state penetration –that is to say, the ineffectiveness of the public institutions— or state penetration in valued as illegitimate from the perspective of certain population groups. At bottom, these conflicts point to the complexity of the processes of effective and legitimate state formation in multicultural societies, as well to the impunity characterizing, in certain social settings, the effective performance of state institutions.

The equalization of legitimacy to legality and the precedence of the latter vis-à-vis the former are characteristics of Western capitalism: they derive from the abstraction of commercial and social relations and the prevalence of the form of relations to the detriment of its contents. Its manifestation as legal positivity is supposed to provide security and stability to transactions; it also permitted drawing objective limits to state actions thus guaranteeing realms of individual action free of interference from political power. Positivity gives objective existence to rights, independent of the will of the powerful. The relative divide between a public realm and a private one, together with the principle of the rule of law flow from, and are associated to, the identification between legitimacy and legality and the formal, positive expression of the latter.

The development of the nation-state in multicultural societies implies the progressive imposition of a specific type of domination and a particular form of legitimacy –the "rational-legal" legitimacy of Weberian sociology— that conflicts with other types of rule and other forms of legitimacy emerging from the heterogeneity of the social structure and the plurality of criteria of political authority. A number of studies call attention, precisely, to the cultural dimension of the process of state formation (e.g. Anderson 1983; Corrigan & Sayer 1985; Badie 1992; Joseph & Nugent 1994; Thruman 1997; Steinmetz 1999; etc.). Citizenship, a characteristic institution of the official conception of the political system and foundation of the Western nation-state, coexists and is articulated with practices of clientelism and patronage, with patrimonial and charismatic forms of power holding, all at the same time and in the same territory. What comes out is a tension between formal institutions and social practices, between politics as state format, and culture as social practice –as seen in the usually conflictive coexistence of multiple patterns of authority, of justice and of rationality.

These tensions endow the state in peripheral societies of a peculiar "combination of power and fragility" (Clapman 1986:39). Power, in that the penetration of its agencies and processes in society always have a strong dimension of imposition, and in the sense that the coercive ingredient of state organization should be maintained permanently to guarantee that the tensions crossing its complex social base will not reach the point of dissolution of the political body. Fragility, because the very heterogeneity and conflictive social or cultural identities and interests make the attainment of a basic consensus and the endowment of a minimum legitimacy to the state, its apparatuses and functions, –i.e. the conversion of power into authority– extremely fragile. In societies crossed by divisions and ruptures so profound the harmonization of the variety of interests, demands and expectations becomes a particularly complex task. The state faces serious problems to perform as the "organizer of social heterogeneity" (Heller 1985:257-268) and is perceived by many as the institutional expression of disorder.

In social structures like these the state’s legal system coexists with alternative normative systems with parallel procedures for the resolution of controversies, and with mechanisms of legitimization other than those enforced by the state. In multiethnic societies as those of Mesoamérica and the Andean area the state institutionalizes a matrix of power relations that is class-based as much of as culturaly-biased; alternative legal systems known as "customary law" or "communal law" usually co-exist with state law in a subaltern and usually conflictive manner (see Collier 1973; Fitzpatrick 1983; Stavenhagen & Iturralde 1990; Rizo Zeledón 1991; Sieder 1997); etc.

When cultural diversity overlaps with deep socioeconomic and regional inequality, legal pluralism moves along two-way paths. Coexisting normative orders –the positive law of the state and the alternative law of the ethnically differentiated communities—define one of these directions, the more visible one: that which goes from the social ground to the state. In the configuration of the power matrix enforced through the state, it is a question of issues peripheral to the interests of the ruling classes and the capitalist economy. Clashes between customary law and the state legal system are circumstantial and discrete: they do not question state power or its social foundations, but rather some specific aspect of its performance. Nevertheless, the reiteration over a long period of time of petty challenges to the state power can lead to the undertaking of actions of confrontation of a more significant reach.

Persistence of this alternative law and its ways of resolving conflicts is caused by several of factors of uneven incidence. By definition, communal law regulates controversies that do not go beyond the community, or quarrels between neighboring communities; they involve small numbers of people and small financial figures in relation to the large aggregates of the national or regional accounting. They are, so to speak, marginal conflicts of interests from the perspective of the central state and the power structure that is expressed through it –small scale robberies, communal boundary disputes, misuse of ejido lands, making mockery of communal practices, and the like—but which are strategic for the preservation of community life. The mandatory character of this law is usually restricted to the members of the community. In exceptional cases it can be extended to outsiders who in some way violate communal rules or villagers’ rights or properties; in such cases punished outsiders do not hold positions of economic or political power t the community relies upon or cannot oppose to. Regional characters such as large merchants or landowners or cattle-raisers, and the like, are usually out of the reach of communal legal procedures. Communal law is one whose enforcement refers to equals, where criteria of equality refer as much to kinship and friendship as to locality and economic precariousness.

Furthermore, poverty make it difficult to access judicial or administrative institutions to complain, make demands or resolve conflicts. Official legality is expensive; it demands spending on lawyers and notaries which usually goes beyond the possibilities of the communities; it is necessary to travel to the provincial or even the national capital; despite the legal or constitutional recognition of multiculturalism, in court matters it is better to conduct oneself in Spanish than in ones own language because outside the region it is difficult to find civil servants or judicial officers who either speak or understand it. In all, these factors add an effect of physical separation to the cultural distance that lies in between state and communal institutions. Finally, the state juridical order expresses a value system that often does not coincide, and even clashes with that which is expressed and reproduced through the communal normative system. The state order does not consider many of the issues raised by the community to be significant matters, or it considers them in a different manner. Courts move slowly; the right to legal process, gradation of offences and punishments, etc. are experienced as arbitrariness, denial of justice, protection of criminals. In sum, these issues underline the tensions and difficult coexistence between both normative systems as carriers of differing methodologies for dealing with social dynamics and conflicts. All this in a historical and social setting of exploitation and domination, of unattended demands and of effective violation of rights.