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Why did Latin America Lose Faith in the Law?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2023

Timo Schaefer*
Affiliation:
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Abstract

Colonial Latin America had the fame of being a land where lower-class people were forever suing their betters. To Latin America's popular classes, the law was an indispensable instrument for claiming rights, solving conflicts, and advancing interests. Fast-forward to the middle of the twentieth century, however, and Latin American law held a very different fame. The law was now something to be shunned. It was seen as an instrument of power, manipulated by the rich and influential. Public trust in the law was low, and support for alternative forms of justice, high. In comparison with the colonial era, we are faced with a baffling reversal. This article seeks to explain that reversal by elaborating three propositions: (P1) popular trust in the law declined because of the law's increasing formalism, particularly evident in the codification of civil and criminal law over the course of the nineteenth century; (P2) popular trust in the law declined because of the rise of patrimonial capitalism over the period of study; and (P3) popular trust in the law declined because a new generation of social rights became politicized, first under populist, corporatist regimes that arose in the region in the early and mid-twentieth century and then under the region's Cold-War military dictatorships.

Type
Original Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society for Legal History

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References

1 For two overviews, see Rettberg, Angelica, “Violencia en América Latina hoy: manifestaciones e impactos,” Revista de Estudios Sociales 73 (2020): 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Carothers, Thomas, “The Many Agendas of Rule-of-Law Reform in Latin America,” in Rule of Law in Latin America: The International Promotion of Judicial Reform, eds. Domingo, Pilar and Sieder, Rachel (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2001)Google Scholar.

2 Quoted in Renzo Honores, “Una sociedad legalista: Abogados, procuradores de causas y la creación de una cultura legal colonial en Lima y Potosí, 1540–1670” (PhD diss., Florida International University, 2012), 132.

3 Quoted in Owensby, Brian, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Quoted in Taylor, William, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 363Google Scholar.

5 For rich, empirical proof that in Latin America “the poor often see the law as an instrument of oppression in the service of the wealthy and powerful,” see especially the collection of studies in Méndez, Juan, O'Donnell, Guillermo and Pinheiro, Paulo Sérgio, eds., The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999)Google Scholar. The quote is from Pinheiro's chapter “The Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America: Introduction,” 11.

6 DaMatta, Roberto, Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes, trans. Drury, John (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 168 and 137–97Google Scholar for a larger discussion of the social dynamic expressed in the adage. Claudio Lomnitz discusses the adage's relevance for the Mexican culture of citizenship in Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 58–80. For a collection of other Latin American adages, expressing similar cynicism about the fairness of the law, see García-Villegas, Mauricio, “Latin America's Culture of Noncompliance with Rules,” in Routledge Handbook of Law and Society in Latin America, eds. Rachel Sieder, Karina Ansolabehere and Tatiana Alfonso (Routledge, 2019), 66Google Scholar.

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8 Kloppe-Santamaría, In the Vortex of Violence, 5.

9 Examples are Júnior, Caio Prado, The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil, trans. Macedo, Suzette (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 [1942])Google Scholar; Stein, Stanley and Stein, Barbara, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wiarda, Howard, The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. This view of the colonial origins of a Latin American legal deficit is still common in current scholarship on Latin American legal systems, see, e.g., García-Villegas, “Latin America's Culture of Noncompliance with Rules.”

10 See especially Ángel Rama's influential study La ciudad letrada (Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1984).

11 Silvio Zavala, Las instituciones jurídicas en la conquista de América (Mexico City: José Porrúa e Hijos, 1935) and Silvio Zavala, De encomiendas y propiedad territorial en algunas regiones de la América española (Mexico City: José Porrúa e Hijos, 1940).

12 Steve Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Woodrow Borah, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

13 Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, “Introduction,” in Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, eds. Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 7.

14 On the legally plural nature of early-modern European empires, see especially Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Karen Graubart, Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

15 On usage of the colonial justice system by indigenous nobles, see, e.g., Borah, Justice by Insurance; Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples, 158–83; and Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). On corporate groups using the law see, e.g., Owensby, Empire of Law; and Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples, 114–37. For a discussion of the formal aspects of colonial Latin American legal culture, see Victor Tau Anzoateguí, Casuismo y sistema: Indagación histórica sobre el espíritu del derecho indiano (Sevilla: Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho, 1992).

16 See, e.g., Tristan Platt, Estado boliviano y ayllu andino: Tierra y tributo en el norte de Potosí (La Paz: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1982); Mark Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); and Romana Falcón, México descalzo: Estrategias de sobrevivencia frente a la modernidad liberal (Mexico City: Plaza Janés, 2002).

17 Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided, 112–14.

18 The distance between the colonial and nineteenth-century states on the one hand and modern legal state on the other is particularly emphasized in François-Xavier Guerra, México: del antiguo régimen a la Revolución, trans. Sergio Fernández Bravo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultural Económica, 1988); Antonio Annino, “Imperio, Constitución y diversidad en la América hispana,” Ayer 70/2 (2008): 23–56; and Tamar Herzog, Upholding Justice: Society, State, and the Penal System in Quito (1650–1750) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

19 In the colonial period, scholars have associated that more individualistic legal culture especially with slaves, African freepeople, indigenous people, and women. See, e.g., Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87/4 (2007): 659–92; Michelle McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Charles Walker, “Crime in the Time of the Great Fear: Indians and the State in the Peruvian Southern Andes, 1780–1820,” in Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society Since Late Colonial Times, eds. Carlos Aguirre, Gilbert Joseph and Ricardo Salvatore (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 35–55; and, especially, Bianca Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). For the republican period, see, e.g., Sarah Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); and Reuben Zahler, Ambitious Rebels: Remaking Honor, Law, and Liberalism in Venezuela, 1780–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012).

20 On new Bourbon regulations and policing efforts, see Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico, trans. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Sergio Rivera Ayala (Wilmington: SR Books, 1999); Pamela Voekel, “Peeing on the Palace: Bodily Resistance to the Bourbon Reforms in Mexico City,” Journal of Historical Sociology 5/2 (1992): 181–207; Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mexico City, 1692–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Gabriel Ramón, “Urbe y orden: evidencias del reformismo borbónico en el tejido limeño,” in El Perú en el siglo XVIII: la era borbónica, ed. Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1999), 295–324; Chad Thomas Black, The Limits of Gender Domination: Women, the Law, and Political Crisis in Quito, 1765–1830 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), chapter 2; Jordana Dym, “El podern en la Nueva Guatemala: La disputa sobre los Alcaldes de barrio,” Cuadernos de Literatura 14/28 (2013): 196–229; and Sylvia Sellers-García, The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 201–32.

21 Premo, Enlightenment on Trial, 3.

22 Premo here adds to a considerable body of scholarship on the role of intermediaries in articulating colonial Latin American society, see, e.g., Kathryn Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences,” American Historical Review 110/2 (2005): 350–79, and Kathryn Burns “Making Indigenous Archives: The Quilcaycamayoc of Colonial Cuzco,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91/4 (2011): 665–85; Alcira Dueñas, Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City”: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010); Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, eds., Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). For the Brazilian case, see John Marquez, “Afflicted Slaves, Faithful Vassals: Sevícias, Manumission, and Enslaved Petitioners in Eighteenth-Century Brazil,” Slavery and Abolition 43/1 (2022): 95.

23 Premo, Enlightenment on Trial, 15. The statistical evidence is presented on pp. 97–101, 113–15, and, most extensively, 241–50 (Appendix II).

24 On the importance of the colonial justice system to how people understood independence, see Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolutions: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Scholars of colonial Latin America have also stressed the relationship between people's legal imaginaries and their decision to engage in acts of rebellion, see, e.g., Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), and Dueñas, Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City, esp. chapter 3.

25 See, e.g., John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions 1808–1826 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), and Antonio Annino and François-Xavier Guerra, eds., Inventando la nación: Iberoamérica.Siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003).

26 See, e.g., Sidney Chalhoub, “The Precariousness of Freedom in a Slave Society (Brazil in the Nineteenth Century),” International Review of Social History 56 (2011): 405–39; Daniela Marino, Huixquilucan: Ley y justicia en la modernización del espacio rural mexiquense, 1856–1910 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2016). Julie Gibbings, Our Time is Now Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 80–81.

27 Annino, “Imperio, Constitución y diversidad en la América hispana.” Timo Schaefer, Liberalism as Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Legal Rule in Post-Colonial Mexico, 1820–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), chapter 1.

28 Zahler, Ambitious Rebels, 107–19.

29 Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, and Sarah Chambers “Citizens before the Law: The Role of Courts in Post-Independence State Building in Spanish America,” in State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Republics of the Possible, eds. Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 356–74; Zahler, Ambitious Rebels; Schaefer, Liberalism as Utopia, chapter 4; Black, The Limits of Gender Domination, 232–37.

30 Matthew C. Mirow, Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 238.

31 Pinheiro, “The Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America: Introduction,” quote on p. 11.

32 The countries surveyed were Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The data are available at https://www.latinobarometro.org/latOnline.jsp, accessed February 26, 2023.

33 William Ratliff and Edgardo Buscaglia, “Judicial Reform: The Neglected Priority in Latin America,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 550 (March 1997): 61.

34 Linn Hammergren, Envisioning Reform: Conceptual and Practical Obstacles to Improving Judicial Performance in Latin America (State College: Penn State University Press, 2007), 31. For studies of the extensive use of torture in two recent high-profile criminal investigations in Mexico, see Anabel Hernández, La verdadera noche de Iguala: La historia que el gobierno trató de ocultar (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2016); and Jorge Volpi, Una novela criminal (Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2018).

35 Hammergren, Envisioning Reform, 31.

36 Charles Cutter, “The Legal Culture of Spanish America on the Eve of Independence,” in Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, ed. Eduardo Zimmermann (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1999), 12. See also Tau Anzoátegui, Casuismo y sistema.

37 Cutter, “Legal Culture of Spanish America,” 20.

38 For an illuminating biographical study of a contemporary critic of that process, see Christopher Albi, Gamboa's World: Justice, Silver Mining, and Imperial Reform in New Spain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021).

39 Sergio Serulnikov, “Customs and Rules: Bourbon Rationalizing Projects and Social Conflicts in Northern Potosí during the 1770s,” Colonial Latin American Review 8/2 (1999): 248. See also Gabriel Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), chapter 2.

40 Gabriel Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c. 1770–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 25–26, 35–36.

41 Lyle McAlister, The “Fuero Militar” in New Spain 1764–1800 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1957), 5–12.

42 Cited in Keila Grinberg, A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship, trans. Kristin McGuire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 129. See also Alejandro Guzmán Brito, “La influencia del código civil francés en las codificaciones americanas,” Cuadernos de Extensión Jurícica (Universidad de los Andes) 9 (2004): 21, and Victor Tau Anzoátegui, La codificación en la Argentina, 1810–1870: Mentalidad social e ideas jurídicas (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, 1977), 119–23.

43 For a synthesis, see Hilda Sabato, Republics of the New World: The Revolutionary Political Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

44 Casey Lurtz, “Codifying Credit: Everyday Contracting and the Spread of the Civil Code in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” Law and History Review 39/1 (2021): 97–133. Other aspects of the legal culture of the late-nineteenth century Soconusco are discussed in Casey Lurtz, From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).

45 Lurtz, “Codifying Credit,” 123.

46 Agustín Parise, Ownership Paradigms in American Civil Law Jurisdictions: Manifestations of the Shifts in the Legislation of Louisiana, Chile, and Argentina (16th–20th Centuries) (Boston: Brill Nijhoff, 2017), 85, 129.

47 Raúl Fradkin, “Ley, costumbre y relaciones sociales en la campaña de Buenos Aires (siglos XVIII y XIX),” in La ley es tela de araña: Ley, justicia y sociedad rural en Buenos Aires, 1780–1830, ed. Raúl Fradkin (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2009), 135.

48 Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided, 46.

49 Quoted in Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided, 113.

50 See, e.g., Stanley Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1957), 13–16, and James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 131–39, on Brazil; Catherine LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1850–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), and Hermes Tovar Pinzón, Que nos tengan en cuenta: colonos, empresarios y aldeas: Colombia 1800–1900 (Bogota: Tercer Mundo, 1995), on Colombia; and Emilio Kourí, A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), on Mexico.

51 LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest, xvi.

52 François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The Great Hacienda, trans. Alvin Eustis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 81.

53 Felipe Castro Gutiérrez, Nueva ley y nuevo rey: Reformas borbónicas y rebelión popular en Nueva España (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1996), 52–53; Schaefer, Liberalism as Utopia, 122–28.

54 Schaefer, Liberalism as Utopia, 194–95.

55 Quoted in Elizabeth Dore, Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 114.

56 Dore, Myths of Modernity, 116. For an especially detailed discussion of the quasi-judicial violence employed by plantation owners see also Gibbings, Our Time is Now, 169–79.

57 Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile's El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 49–55; Christine Mathias, “At the Edge of Empire: Race and Revolution in the Mexican Border Town of Cananea, 1899–1917” (B.A. thesis, Yale University, 2007), 16–18, 23–27. For further examples of the mingling of public and private power in mining camps and company towns in Chile and Mexico, see, e.g., Gabriel Salazar, Labradores, peones y proletarios: Formación y crisis de la sociedad popular chilena del siglo XIX (Santiago: Ediciones Sur, 1985), and Rodney Anderson, Outcasts in Their Own Land: Mexican Industrial Workers, 1906–1911 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976).

58 Sabato, Republics of the New World.

59 Paul Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981); David McCreery, Rural Guatemala 1760–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 179–81; Walter Fraga, Crossroads of Freedom: Slaves and Freed People in Bahia, Brazil, 1870–1910, trans. Mary Ann Mahony (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 212–13.

60 Klubock, Contested Communities, 51.

61 For examples see Lurtz, “Codifying Credit”; Palacio, La paz del trigo.

62 Brudney, Edward, “‘In Defense of Our Livelihoods’: Rethinking Authoritarian Legality and Worker Resistance during Argentina's Proceso de Reorganización Nacional,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 16/4 (2019): 67–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 For an overview and preliminary comparison of the Mexican, Argentine, and Brazilian cases, see Palacio, Juan Manuel, “Legislación y justicia laboral en el ‘populismo ‘clásico’ latinoamericano: Elementos para la construcción de una agenda de investigación comparada,” Revista Mundos do Trabalho 3/5 (2011): 245–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the workings of the Mexican labor tribunals, see also Middlebrook, Kevin, The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 56–62, 185205Google Scholar, and James, Timothy, Mexico's Supreme Court: Between Liberal Individual and Revolutionary Social Rights, 1867–1934 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013)Google Scholar, chapter 3. On the Argentine tribunals see Palacio, Juan Manuel, La justicia peronista: La construcción de un nuevo orden legal en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI editores, 2018)Google Scholar, and Palacio, Juan Manuel, “The ‘Estatuto del Peón’: A Revolution for the Rights of Rural Workers in Argentina?,” Journal of Latin American Studies 51/2 (2019): 333–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Brazilian labor tribunals, see also Filho, José Marcelo Marques Ferreira, “Entre ‘direitos’ e ‘justiça.’ Os trabalhadores do açúcar frente à Junta de Conciliação e Julgamento de Escada/PE (1963–1969),” Cadernos de História 6/6 (2009): 211–47Google Scholar; Dabat, Christine Rufino and Rogers, Thomas, “Sugarcane Workers in Search of Justice: Rural Labour through the Lens of the State,” International Review of Social History 62 (2017): 217–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfe, Joel, Working Women, Working Men: Sao Paulo & the Rise of Brazil's Industrial Working Class, 1900–1955 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 52–56, 75Google Scholar; and French, John, Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 4652Google Scholar. Note that in Brazil, the labor courts moved from the executive to the judicial branch in 1946, after the ouster of Vargas.

64 Cited in Juan Manuel Palacio, “El peronismo y la invención de la justicia del trabajo en la Argentina,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (online journal, published on September 25, 2013), consulted on August 31, 2022, 11.

65 Palacio, “El peronismo y la invención,” 12–13.

66 Palacio, “Legislación y justicia laboral.”

67 Palacio, “The Estatuto del Peón,” 353.

68 Palacio, “Legislación y justicia laboral,” 266.

69 Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men, 55–56.