Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America - Softcover

Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804753830 ISBN 13: 9780804753838

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Popular Injustice focuses on the spread of highly punitive forms of social control (known locally as mano dura) in contemporary Latin America. Many people have not only called for harsher punishments, such as longer prison sentences and the reintroduction of capital punishment, but also support vigilante practices like lynchings. In Guatemala, hundreds of these mob killings have occurred since the end of the country's armed conflict in 1996. Drawing on dozens of interviews with residents of lynching communities, Godoy argues that while these acts of violence do reveal widespread frustration with the criminal justice system, they are more than simply knee-jerk responses to crime. They demonstrate how community ties have been reshaped by decades of state violence and by the social and economic changes associated with globalization.

About this title

About the Author

Angelina Snodgrass Godoy is Assistant Professor of Law, Societies, and Justice in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

From the Back Cover

Popular Injustice focuses on the spread of highly punitive forms of social control (known locally as mano dura) in contemporary Latin America. Many people have not only called for harsher punishments, such as longer prison sentences and the reintroduction of capital punishment, but also support vigilante practices like lynchings. In Guatemala, hundreds of these mob killings have occurred since the end of the country's armed conflict in 1996. Drawing on dozens of interviews with residents of lynching communities, Godoy argues that while these acts of violence do reveal widespread frustration with the criminal justice system, they are more than simply knee-jerk responses to crime. They demonstrate how community ties have been reshaped by decades of state violence and by the social and economic changes associated with globalization.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Popular Injustice

Violence, Community, and Law in Latin AmericaBy ANGELINA SNODGRASS GODOY

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5383-8

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................ixPreface.............................................................................xi1. Examining Popular Injustice......................................................12. Legacies of Terror in Postwar Guatemala..........................................403. Militarization and Lynchings.....................................................764. Modernization, Crime, and Communities in Crisis..................................1015. Civil Society and the Contradictions of Neoliberal Democracy.....................1276. Convergence at the Poles ... and Not on the Polls................................150Notes...............................................................................183References..........................................................................201Index...............................................................................223

Chapter One

Examining Popular Injustice

HARROWING INCIDENTS OF MOB VIOLENCE like the one recounted in the opening to this book are not uncommon in contemporary Guatemala, where an average of nearly ten linchamientos (lynchings) per month were reported during 1999 (Misin de Verificacin de las Naciones Unidas en Guatemala [MINUGUA] 2000b). Between 1996, when the government and guerrillas signed the final peace accords to bring the country's thirty-six-year civil war to a close, and the end of 2002, the United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala reported 482 such incidents; many more have likely gone undocumented. In the incidents the mission was able to verify during this period, 240 people were killed and 943 injured; yet only thirty-nine defendants had been brought before the courts, twenty-four of whom were found guilty (MINUGUA 2002).

In a country the size of Tennessee, with a population of roughly 11 million, these numbers suggest the emergence of an alarming trend. Although Guatemala's history has long been scarred by violence, incidents of this sort are unprecedented; under authoritarianism, the grip of military repression made such open, independent forms of collective action simply unthinkable. The lynchings began as the war ended; in Guatemala, as in Brazil (Holston and Caldeira 1998; Caldeira 2000), South Africa (Comaroff and Comaroff forthcoming), and other parts of the postcolonial world, extralegal violence in the name of justice has been a disturbing dividend of democracy. Today, lynchings occur in urban and rural settings alike, among indigenous and mestizo (ladino) communities, and they target individuals from within the community at least as often as they do interlopers. And although in the United States the word "lynching" conjures up images of racially motivated violence, in Guatemala I found no evidence for such a dimension to the phenomenon. Indeed, although collective violence is often assumed to be targeted against members of an identifiable out group, defined in ethnic, religious, cultural, or other terms, in the dozens of Guatemalan cases I investigated the only common thread linking the victims was the accusation of criminal activity. In the context of a very serious contemporary crime wave, many Guatemalans openly support vigilante behavior: one recent survey found that 75 percent of the population expressed at least partial support for these killings in the name of "justice" (Ferrigno 1998).

I first became aware of the phenomenon on a 1996 human rights research trip to Guatemala. I was instantly curious: unlike the state-sponsored repression that had shaken the country for decades, this appeared to be a new kind of abuse-one that rose up from below. If the struggle for democracy had for so long been a battle against the oppressive state, what did it mean when previous victims of state violence were the ones doing the killing?

Of course, I quickly learned that it was not so simple. Like virtually every case of violence in Guatemala, the lynchings are open to multiple readings. By 1996, although the trend had yet to take off in earnest, there were various interpretations of early incidents swirling about, and I soon learned that the analysis offered by any one commentator often said more about his or her political sympathies than it did about the incident in question. As with so many other things in Guatemala, the hard facts were elusive, and the answer often simply came down to whose rendering of events one chose to believe.

As in other cases of human rights abuse in Latin America, the best-documented cases are often (though not always) those where the victims are foreigners from wealthier countries. When I first began asking people about lynchings, in 1996, the best-known incidents were a series of mob attacks and attempted attacks on U.S. citizens falsely accused of stealing Guatemalan babies. The most serious of these incidents involved the Alaskan environmental activist June Weinstock, who was stoned, stabbed, and beaten nearly to death by a crowd in the rural village of San Cristbal Verapaz in 1994. Accounts of her ordeal, pieced together from eyewitness accounts and two videotape recordings of the event, paint a harrowing picture. A tourist, Weinstock had spent the morning of March 29 strolling through the village market and taking pictures, including some of local children. But when a mother suddenly noticed her young son was missing, Weinstock was yanked off a departing bus by an angry crowd who accused her of stealing the baby. Not fluent in Spanish, Weinstock had no way of knowing what was brewing, but a missionary stationed in the town intervened to translate and, along with two policemen, to try to hold the mob at bay for as long as possible. These men hurried Weinstock to the local judge's office in an attempt to protect her, arriving at around 11:30 A.M., according to the U.S. Embassy. Tear gas was used in an attempt to disperse the crowd that gathered outside, and a priest from nearby Cobn attempted to mediate; one eyewitness reported that some in the crowd threw stones at him and yelled, "We don't want your blessings, we want blood." The judge eventually fled the building, as did the missionary, who was attacked and beaten twice before the police were able to escort him to safety; Weinstock was left alone to barricade herself in the bathroom. The mob shattered windows and tried to set the structure afire. Eventually, they used a bench as a battering ram, broke through the doors and, around 4:00 P.M., located Weinstock and brutally beat her with fists, feet, sticks, and stones; the attack only stopped after police convinced the crowd she was already dead. Although she was in fact still alive, her injuries were sufficiently grave that months after her return to Alaska, Weinstock had still not regained the ability to speak, walk, or respond to environmental stimuli (W. Booth 1994; Morello 1994).

Rumors of baby stealing and organ harvesting by foreigners posing as tourists have a long history in Central America (and beyond-see especially Scheper-Hughes 1996), but in these, as in many cases of violence in Guatemala, there were indications that the apparently spontaneous attacks may have been deliberately instigated to serve certain political ends. The attack on Weinstock came only weeks after another U.S. citizen, Melissa Larsen, was either arrested (according to some reports; see W. Booth 1994; Morello 1994) or "placed into protective custody" (Intelligence Oversight Board [IOB] 1996) by the Guatemalan authorities for a period of two weeks after a mob accused her of baby stealing in Santa Luca Cotzumalguapa. At the same time, graffiti had appeared overnight in Guatemala City denouncing gringo baby thieves, the simultaneity of which, to some, suggested a deliberately coordinated campaign.

But who would stand to gain from such violence? These events took place during the negotiations between the government and guerrillas over the Global Human Rights Accord, one of the most significant and sensitive in the series of agreements that, in their entirety, comprise the Peace Accords that in 1996 finally ended the country's three decades of armed conflict. Among the points most hotly contested by the military and far right was the 1994 agreement to welcome United Nations personnel into the country to verify both sides' compliance with the peace process. In this context, there are indications that individuals linked to the armed forces may have concocted these incendiary rumors as part of an effort to create a climate of hostility to foreigners, thus undermining the U.N. mission's eventual ability to carry out its human rights work. Some observers spotted military men among the crowd at the lynching of Weinstock, and some villagers in Santa Luca Cotzumalguapa reported that they had been warned about coming violence prior to the attempted attack on Larsen (W. Booth 1994).

The U.S. government, in its 1996 Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) report detailing incidents of violence against U.S. citizens and their family members in Guatemala, lent some credence to these analyses, reporting intelligence information that suggested these acts had been promoted by forces associated with the Army and far right. But there was blame for the other side too: the report also noted that during the war, the guerrillas had deliberately spread rumors linking U.S. citizens to organ theft as a way to encourage opposition to U.S. policy, which had long supported the Guatemalan government in its struggle against "communism" (IOB 1996). Guatemalan government officials publicly attributed the attack on Weinstock to guerrillas trying to destabilize the country. And of course, the dozens of men arrested for the crime saw nothing, knew nothing, and had nothing to say about how it started (W. Booth 1994). As one Western diplomat told a Washington Post reporter in Guatemala who was investigating the incident, "Even when you think you know who is pulling the strings, you don't know ... if you eventually find out who benefited from some act, you don't know if they pulled the strings to get what they wanted or whether someone else pulled the strings to make it look like they did it" (quoted in W. Booth 1994).

Today, most lynchings do not involve foreigners accused of baby snatching (and most do not result in international inquiries or dozens of arrests, either). A surprising number are actually carried out against residents of the very community in which the lynching occurs. For the most part, those lynched appear to be more or less what their attackers say they are: suspected criminals. They are most often accused of property crimes, sometimes no more serious than the theft of a chicken; there are cases of attacks on accused rapists, murderers, and child molesters, there have also been attacks on alleged witches, public servants accused of corruption, and those responsible for traffic accidents. How do such accusations erupt in lethal violence?

The more I spoke to Guatemalans about the phenomenon of lynchings, the more it perplexed me. At one level, it was of course very plausible that politically motivated campaigns of misinformation fed into this trend. But could they be its cause? Why would crowds sometimes numbering into the thousands be persuaded to summarily execute someone-even one of their own neighbors-to suit a national political agenda? Were people being forced to participate against their will? How would anyone carry out such a massive campaign of coercion? Although the army's well-documented orchestration of a decades-long counterinsurgency campaign targeting church workers, health promoters, literacy advocates, and unarmed indigenous villagers as threats to national security certainly lowered the threshold of believability about how far they might be willing to go to achieve their ends, it didn't make sense to me that the army would mount such an elaborate effort to crack down on chicken thieves. Why?

Furthermore, as I began investigating the lynchings, I became aware that the apparent surge in collective vigilante practices was not unique to contemporary Guatemala: extrajudicial executions of suspected criminals at the hands of large groups of citizens were also being documented elsewhere with increasing frequency in the late 1990s. In Venezuela, the human rights group Programa Venezolano de Educacin y Accin en Derechos Humanos reported 164 lynchings between October 2000 and September 2001 (Programa Venezolano de Educacin y Accin en Derechos Humanos [PROVEA] 2001); the rate of lynchings in Caracas alone reached one death every three days in July and August 1999 (Luna Noguera 1999; Monasterios 1999). The anthropologist Daniel Goldstein (2003) reports that more than thirty lynchings occurred on the outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2001. And in Mexico, Carlos Vilas (2001) investigated some 103 lynchings between 1987 and 1998; other reports have suggested many more. Related incidents have been reported in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, and other countries. In many of these cases, there was no plausible postconflict explanation, no way to see things through the binary lens of "army or guerrilla" that so frequently tempts observers of Guatemala; rather, citizens and residents of marginal communities (both urban and rural) appeared to be rising up and taking justice in their own hands in response to a growing sense of insecurity caused by rising rates of common-not political-crime. What was going on? How could it be that in so many communities across the Americas, people who had struggled for human rights for so long, many surviving periods of brutal state violence, could now themselves be carrying out acts of violence-even invoking terms (such as mano dura) that recalled authoritarianism, in deliberate defiance of the human rights discourse? Could this be a new form of poor people's "justice"?

What's more, within and beyond Guatemala, I soon learned that the lynchings were but the tip of the iceberg. Owing to their high visibility and visceral impact, they captured headlines, attracting press and would-be mediators (police, military, human rights professionals, and in Guatemala, U.N. personnel) who sought to intervene (sometimes successfully, sometimes quite heroically, almost always at great risk to their personal safety, but all too often in utter futility) to prevent or limit the bloodshed. Yet many respondents told me of similar practices-often called "social cleansing" or simply "cleansing" (limpieza)-whereby real or suspected criminals were summarily executed under cover of darkness, without witnesses, without spectacle. Bodies were often secretly disposed of, residents said; in any case, no one dared to ask what had taken place, although many were tacitly grateful that the "criminal" was gone. In some cases, people told me about death squads that were specifically constituted for the purpose of carrying out these executions; in others, people said, a locally powerful man (in rural areas, often a landowner) took the responsibility to do the "dirty work" upon himself (or to hire someone to do it for a fee); in others, particularly in urban Guatemala City, local drug gangs or other criminal organizations would "clean up" the neighborhoods in which they lived or operated. Lynchings, then, were simply the most sensationalized, the most visible, and the best documented of a whole set of clandestine practices that claimed to crack down on crime by excising criminals from the body social.

Such behavior clearly defies the expectations of the many scholars, citizens, and observers who welcomed the recent "democratic opening" in Latin America. Democracy, many expected, would allow civil society to flourish, rising up to fill the gap left by the retreat from repression and bringing with it increased citizen participation. This was assumed to be a positive development; most believed this empowerment would serve as a check on violence, not a catalyst for it. Although state violence has indeed decreased in most cases, its replacement by violence at the hands of nonstate actors has therefore come as a surprise. As Dirk Kruijt and Kees Koonings observe, violence in Latin America has "ceased to be the resource of only the traditionally powerful or of the grim uniformed guardians of the nation. [It] increasingly appears as an option for a multitude of actors in pursuit of all kind of goals" (1999: 11). Some of this violence is undoubtedly attributable to petty crime, random acts of personal retribution, by-products of the burgeoning drug trade, or other developments; but some of it constitutes a new form of counter-criminal violence: organized and deliberate, though illegal, acts taken purportedly to stem the tide of common crime.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Popular Injusticeby ANGELINA SNODGRASS GODOY Copyright © 2006 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804753830
• ISBN 13: 9780804753838
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256