The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies | Vol.

4, Fall 2006 | pages 4963

Altamiranos Demons
Mara del Pilar Melgarejo Acosta,
University of Pittsburgh
Joshua Lund,
University of Pittsburgh
And the angel of the Lord went forth, and slew a hundred and eightyfive thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men arose early
in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies.
Isaiah 37:36.

Era la ley de la salud pblica armando a la honradez con el rayo de la

muerte.
Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, El Zarco

I1
After pollution, frogs, stinging gnats, mosquitoes, anthrax, boils, hail,
locusts, and thick darkness, there descends the infamous tenth plague, the
massacre of the first-born (Exodus 7:812:23). All are marked for death:
the oldest child of the Pharaoh, of the maidservant, of the captive, even of
the cattle in the fields (11:45; 12:29). Only the Lords chosen nation, the
enslaved Israelites, shall be excepted (11:7). The agent of this mayhem is
not easy to discern. Neither pestilence nor assassinor perhaps bothit
is revealed to the Israelites by Moses as simply the destroyer (12:23). In
similarly apocalyptic passages (e.g. Second Samuel 24:16; Isaiah 37:36) the
Lord walks in the company of an angel of death whom he releases and
retracts at will. But in the decisive scene of the tenth plague, the distinction between the Lord and his messenger is ambiguous. And while we are
briefly confronted with the destroyer, it is thoroughly unclear as to whether
this force represents a figure sent forth by the sovereign, an extension of the
sovereigns will, or if it is, in fact, sovereignty itself: For I will pass through
the land of Egypt that night, and I will smite all the first-born in the land
of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute
judgments: I am the Lord (Exodus 12:12).
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Exterminating angel is the term sometimes ascribed to Gods agent

of destruction. This is precisely the term invoked by Ignacio Homobono
Serapio Manuel Altamirano (18341893) in reference to Martn Snchez
Chagolln (El Zarco 308), the most enigmatic figure of his literary work,
appearing in the final four chapters of the authors final novel, El Zarco:
Episodios de la vida mexicana en 18611863 (1888). In many ways the allegorical reference is not especially elegant. El Zarco is a historical novel, and
its context18611863, the bandit-infested, tumultuous years leading up to
the French invasion and occupation of Mexicocould only through the
most extravagant turns of rhetoric resemble the border conflict that defined the Israelite rebellion against Egypt. This historical clumsiness aside,
Altamirano hits the nail on the head in terms of the political allegory at
work in this mysterious image. For Martn Snchez blurs the boundary between the sovereign and his messenger, to the point where law is neither deliberated nor applied, but rather suspended, reduced to an immediate question of decision and judgment, well outside the limits of any covenant or
constitution. I am the Lord: the plagues have nothing to do with justice. As
Herbert May and Bruce Metzger, the editors of The New Oxford Annotated
Bible (1973), convincingly put it, as early as the seventh plague (hail) we
perceive that the ineffectiveness of the plagues up to this point is not due
to the Lords weakness but to his patient determination to demonstrate his
sovereignty (778; see Exodus 9:1516). The massacre of the first-born, as
much as it anguishes the Egyptians, is meant for the Israelites. A promise
(of security) and a threat (of untold suffering), it is both foundation and
transcendence of the covenant that authorizes it.
In contemplating this allegory and its potential meaning in El Zarco, it is
important to recall that an angel is also always a kind of demon. Historically
moving from the pagan idea of a divine being to its Christian association
with the diabolical (diaballo), the conflict implied in the demonic is filled
with both hope and terror. The Judaic idea of an exterminating angel
captures this etymological ambivalence. At once salvation and perdition,
this angel is the figure that establishes the law by operating beyond the law,
and that regularly appears in the discourses of Americas nineteenth-century nation-builders. This is the case in El Zarco, and therein we find that
Altamiranos demons were explicitly bound up with the delicate question
of state sovereignty and the effective articulation of its covenant with the
national population. Two figures emerge here, figures whose legacies still
loom in the political conflicts that continue to beset a number of American
nation-states: the bandit and the vigilante. Today we might call them guerrilla and paramilitary. In El Zarco they are called el Zarco and Martn
Snchez. Commentary on the figure of el Zarco is ample. Commentary on
Martn Snchez is almost non-existant. This essay will focus on the latter.

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51

II
While aesthetically inferior to the earlier Clemencia (1869), a novel that
foreshadows much of its basic formula, El Zarco is Altamiranos most ambitious literary work. It is remembered today as a tale of national consolidation that pertains to a popular genre of its time: the bandit novel. Four major characters are lined up with more or less personal integrity, wherein the
darker-complexioned protagonists show themselves to be model citizens,
and with the impure (164) white bandit and his lover cast in the most
reprehensible of moral terms. After intrigue and hijinx, the good citizens
marry, although, as we will see, it is not exactly in the happiest of settings.
The first chapters of what would eventually become El Zarco were
drafted as early as 1874 (Sol 29) and the manuscript was finished in 1888.
Due to editorial carelessness, it went unpublished until 1901, nearly a decade after Altamiranos death.2 This means that the novels gestation from
idea to book spans a significant chunk of the so-called Porfiriato, the liberal
dictatorship of Porfirio Daz (18761910). It thus traces a particularly intense period of nation building, marked, as Andrs Molina Enrquez puts
it, by Dazs commitment to amificacin, that is, his talents for balancing
political antagonisms and incorporating the former enemies of liberalism
into the rapidly consolidating state apparatus (Molina Enrquez 136; see
also Hale 9). The novels very context, then, provokes its dominant interpretation today: we read El Zarco allegorically, as a lesson in a barbarous
nations process of civilization or as a wager upon national reconciliation,
what Doris Sommer has famously called a foundational fiction. The
pedagogical intent of Altamiranos literary writings were well explained by
the author himself (e.g. Revistas literarias de Mxico (18211867) 56) and
have been extensively analyzed, indeed, beginning with Francisco Sosa,
who in 1901 described the novel, in the prologue of its first edition, as nothing other than un libro ameno instructivo (Sosa 3). With this in mind,
most readings of the text find in the love story between the indio Nicols
and the dusky Pilar a didactic allegory of the formation of a new national
spirit embodied by productive citizens. Sommer herself has described the
work as one in a long line of Mexican novels that articulate romance and
nationalism thus joining a tradition of marriages between politics and
passion (231). A number of critics, in one way or another, have followed
suit (e.g. Cruz 73, Schmidt, Conway 97, Ruiz, Lund 91). While suggestive
and certainly not without merit, these interpretations of the novel in terms
of national romance and reconciliation, made intelligible through the requisite formula of mestizaje, seem to wither before a particular problem: in
order to resolve the crisis of national disarticulation, Altamirano does not,
in fact, turn to love. He conjures a vigilante.

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We think that it may be symptomatic of the ideological power and

narrative force of mestizaje and amificacin that none of the national romance readings do much, if anything, with the figure of Martn Snchez.
This despite the fact that he dominates the resolution of the narrative (see
Chapters 2125). Martn Snchez Chagolln first interrupts the text at a key
moment, when news of his existence throws a pall over the bandit dance
party that provides the context for the long and colorful twenty-first chapter. It is surely no accident that the chapter is titled La orga (the orgy).
It is a depiction of the social chaos that Altamirano associated with banditry, and Martn Snchez, whose narrative function is to bring down the
hammer of order, ends the fun. He does this even in absence. His initial
presence in the novel is purely narrative: he arrives as news when varios
bandidos, cubiertos de polvo y con el traje desordenado (296) burst in to
tell their leaders that Martn Snchez and his men had ambushed an allied
group of twenty bandits, routing and hanging them on the spot. Alarmed,
the bandits get serious and immediately begin to plot their revenge (297).
So far we learn little else about Martn Snchez, other than that he is accompanied by a sizeable force of about thirty, and that he carries muy
buenas armas, a minor obsession for Altamirano (297cf. 118; 126; 203; 209;
254; 297; 306; 311; 324; 315; 320; 330).
The following chapter is dedicated to a brief biography of the vigilante.
We learn that he is a humble campesino with no history of participation
in the civil war (sin antecedentes militares [303]). Like all of Altamiranos
masculine protagonists, he is noted to possess brazos hercleos (304).
Significantly, given that the race-nation couplet exhibits considerable allegorical strength in the novel, he has a cara morena (305). His campaign
against the bandits is waged out of vengeance: his son and father were
both murdered in a bandit raid (305). Finally, it is essential to note that
his actions go beyond himself, and that he operates as a kind of populist,
embodying a larger social frustration with the weakness of the state. Or
perhaps it would be more precise to say that he represents the wishful arrival of the sovereign. The chapter ends with these words: Los bandidos
deban temblar! Haba aparecido por fin el ngel exterminador!... Martn
Snchez era la indignacin social hecha hombre (308).
He is compared to Judge Lynch (308). He rides with a posse (311). He
wears black (311). His vision of justice is Hammurabic: Ojo por ojo y diente por diente. Tal era su ley penal (308). His authorization is explicit,
but vague, with permissiongranted to him by a local prefectto perseguir ladrones but only con la condicin de someter a los criminales que
aprehendiera al juico correspondiente (306). The prefect also gives him a
semi-official title: jefe de seguridad pblica. But since the law of the state
doesnt really apply to an exterminating angel, Martn Snchez clearly
operates in a juridical margin. With the words Seguridad Pblica (306)

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53

emblazoned on their hats, Martn Snchez and his men act exceptionally, issuing decisions upon what constitutes justice: Los plateados eran crueles?
l se propona serlo tambin. Los plateados causaban horror? l se haba
propuesto causar horror (308). Justice and vengence are conflated as one.
In the concluding chapters, he is at the center of the action. When the
hero, Nicols, finally captures el Zarco, Martn Snchez urges that he be
immediately strung up. Fortunately for el Zarco, Nicolsa good citizen
(328; see also 208, 220), Altamiranos symbol for the liberal ideal between
state and subjectis there, and insists that justice take its proper course.
Unfortunately for Nicols, the state is incompetent in carrying out its juridical responsibilities, and el Zarco is quickly rescued at the risky pass
known as Las Tetillas (320). The end of the novel, then, depends upon the
intervention of a third, neither state nor regular citizen: Martn Snchez.
There is, of course, a wedding, but the novel does not end on this note.
Rather, the final scene is that of the wedding party, as it happens to stumble across el Zarcos extra-juridical execution. Martn Snchez apologizes
to the newlyweds, and suggests that Nicols and Pilar move along. They
do, momentarily horrified by the pleas for their intervention on the part
of Manuela, Pilars erstwhile best friend, the blond maiden who had once
snubbed Nicols as ese indio horrible (120). El Zarco is executed by firing
squad, and then hung from a tree (334). Manuela begins to spit up blood
and promptly dies, of shock, we suppose. The penultimate words of the
novel belong to Martn Snchez: Pues enterrarla y vmanos a concluir
la tarea (335). And the final words belong to the narrator, who speaks not
of the nations model civil union, but of the exterminating angel and his
host: Y desfil la tropa lgubre (335).

III
Let us quickly return to Martn Snchezs irruption into the narrative flow
of the national romance. Recall the scene here: it is the bandit camp, a
space defined by the total lack of reason, where chaos, passions, mistrust
and greed govern. It is a space of disarticulation, a quality that seeps into
all aspects of the camp and all human interaction that takes place there.
Beyond the confusion between space and function (an old church is now
a lair of sin [253]), this disarticulation applies all the way up to the horror
of its aesthetic production, as we can see from this description of bandit
music (a forerunner of the corrido, later romanticized as the peoples music in the wake of the Mexican Revolution): Manuela los vio con horror;
ellos cantaron una larga serie de canciones, de esas canciones fastidiosas,
disparatadas, sin sentido alguno [] y que no puede orse mucho tiempo
sin un intenso fastidio. Manuela se sinti fastidiada (272). Fastidio
is the operative word here, the only possible reaction of the even semi-en-

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lightened before this welter of cien bocas torcidas (291). If the goal of El
Zarco is to write an articulate nation governed by reason, then the bandit
camp stands as a space of exception, disarticulate chaos without possibility
of any harmony. It is important that Martn Snchez exacts his violence
here, in the camp, a point on which Altamirano is explicit: Quin era
el hombre temerario que se haba atrevido a colgar veinte plateados en los
lugares mismos de su dominio? (303 our emphasis). Only the exceptional
figure himself can effectively enter into the space of exception. 3
Who will emerge victorious in this struggle between competing exceptionalisms? Even the narrator pretends not to know: Quin ganara?
Quin sabe! (308). The literary result is in doubt, but the struggle is
historical. Rigorously historical (303). Like the figure of Martn Snchez
himself, who, we learn, joins the bandits el Zarco, Salom Plascencia, and
others as a character that Altamirano pulled from Mexicos recent past.
Indeed, Martn Snchez figures in a number of accounts of the epoch.4 In
the semi-historical collection of war stories, Los plateados de Tierra Caliente
(1891), Pablo Robles dedicates a chapter to him, called Pueblos heroicos:
Martn Snchez Chagolln. Published in 1891, Robles would not have
known of Altamiranos novel, and would not have been a source for it. The
almost exact correspondence between the two versions thus suggests a certain popular memory around the man. Marked for death, it is the bandit
gangs that give Martn Snchez his nickname, Chagolln. Robles explains
that prior to his vigilanteism he was a silversmith, and the chagollo was
the low-grade silver used to make counterfeit coins and iconic figurines for
religious purposes, both also referred to in popular speech as chagollos.
Robles then makes the case for his protagonist: Snchez no hizo caso del
sobrenombre y aunque era militar chagollo, improvisado, daba pruebas de
lo contrario, porque el metal sali de buena ley (142).
Far more important than the historical biography of Martn Snchez,
however, is the way in which his surprising dominance of the final chapters
points to a political conundrum that was clearly on Altamiranos mind:
how to square the liberal ideal of a voluntaristic and constitutionally-ordered nation-state couplet with a sovereignty that was ineffective in the
face of, among other competitors, bandits?
Altamirano, who lived through and participated in the civil wars and
national resistance against the French invasion that provided the context
for the proliferation of bandit gangs, was preoccupied with this problem
throughout his writing life. 5 He addresses these concerns even more directly in his political writings. One of these, an essay produced in 1867
the momentous year in which the Republic was finally restored, and the
liberal state far more precarious than the 1880s era Pax Porfirianatakes
up the issue head-on, and is particularly relevant when read in the light of
El Zarco. Altamirano writes:

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55

Por todas partes aparecen gavillas armadas, de tres, cinco, diez, veinte y
cien hombres que asaltan a los transentes, y cuya aparicin hace paralizar
la agricultura y el trfico, y arruina el comercio, al mismo tiempo que reduce a la miseria a los trabajadores y a los propietarios. Hace algunos meses
que los caminos estaban seguros, gracias a las fuerzas rurales que los recorran constantemente. Hoy, merced a una sabia medida del seor ministro
de la Guerra, que del seor ministro de la Guerra haba de ser para que
produjera tan ptimos frutos, las fuerzas rurales se han suprimido, y como
por encanto, los bandidos aparecieron por todas partes, no sin agradecer,
en lo profundo de su alma, la disposicin ministerial que les limpiaba las
carreteras de todo obstculo para ejercer su noble profesin (Polica 104).

The first four lines of this citation serve as a kind of sketch for the social
problematic that propels El Zarco: its not just that the bandits are criminals, but that they are gumming up the gears of capitalism. 6 The early
chapters of El Zarco are filled with references to the insecurity that stalks
agriculture, traffic, commerce and highways, a threat to the life and livelihood of laborers and property owners alike. More bracing, however, is
the reference to the fuerzas rurales that defend against bandits. Clearly
semi-autonomous and operating under their own authority, these vigilante groups stand as the protagonists in the essay, titled, no less, Polica
(1867). The police, agents of the law-making violence on which the state depends, are here independent of the state, indeed, something that the state
has opted to supress. In short, the essay is not really about the police
but rather their absence. What Altamirano is speaking to here is the desperate situation in which national development must cede its security to
the independent work of others: para-militaries, or, in the words of Robles,
improvised militias. Now, as the editorial interventions that punctuate
El Zarco make clear, these improvised militias were at the root of the bandit
problem: gangs of thugs were recruited by a bankrupt state to rout instransigent Conservative strongmen who were still exercising authority in the
countryside after the Liberal victory in the War of Reform.7 Armed, hardened by battle, and unemployed, these groups of men reconfigured into
the plateados of Altamiranos novel. To what extent Altamirano wants to
demonstrate as much is unclear, but there emerges the brute fact that at the
root of the bandit problem is not so much the misguided youth as it is: the
state. And with this in mind, one can not help but be somewhat unnerved
by Altamiranos solution to this problem: fuerzas rurales, that is, more
paramilitaries. Neither moral nor juridical, the crux of the matter here is
political, and rests on the difficult question of sovereignty.

IV
A frankly incredible scene interrupts the climactic flow of the novel, and
it is one to which we must now turn. The twenty-fourth chapter is called

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M ar a del Pil ar Melgar ejo Acosta / Joshua Lu nd

El presidente Jurez. A scant seven pages, the chapter centers on the audience that the embattled President of the Republic, Benito Jurez, grants to
Martn Snchez. Expecting to be snubbed, Martn Snchez is pleasantly
surprised to find the president fro, impasible, pero atento (322), and
predisposed to help. His reason for the visit is to gain further and more
authoritative legitimacy for his actions and, more importantly, to request
support in the form of arms. Martn Snchez puts it bluntly: Lo primero
que yo necesito, seor, es que me d el gobierno facultades para colgar a
todos los bandidos que yo coja (323). Jurez grants his request of the
authority to hang and offers one hundred rifles. The final paragraph is a
tightly-knit expression of several of the key themes that define the novel:
race, nation, law, republic. We read: el uno moreno y con el tipo de indio
puro, y el otro amarillento, con el tipo del mestizo y del campesino; los dos
serios, los dos graves, cualquiera que hubiera ledo un poco en el futuro se
habra estremecido. Era la ley de la salud pblica armando a la honradez
con el rayo de la muerte (326).
We think that this scene represents the political center of the text.
Mysteriously, it is almost totally ignored in the critical bibliography around
Altramirano, a lack that also applies to the figure of Martn Snchez more
generally. However, two relatively recent readingsprovocative and, indeed, heterodoxicalhave been particularly helpful to us in thinking
through the implications of Martn Snchez. In Lectura ideolgica de dos
novelas de Altramirano (1997), Evodio Escalante reads El Zarco in terms
of the juridical problematic that its narrative traces. He criticizes what he
reads as the authorization (199) of extra-judicial violence contained in
the last sentence of Chapter 24. He asks: O es que alguien osara llevar
a juicio a la honradez? Alguien se atrevera a condenar a una ley, mxime cuando se trata de una ley, como se nos dice, de salud pblica? (200).
What he shows us in answering these questions is a law (of public health,
even) that is not applied, but simply attached, to historical actors, embodied by them, and thereby converting them from men into ideas. Ideas, free
from potential prosecution and thereby from responsibility (199). He understands this alleged circumvention of constitutional authority as nothing less than a scandal (199). In a manuscript (Imagining Mexican
Bandits) presented at the 2003 meeting of the Latin American Studies
Association, Amy Robinson offers a reading that refreshingly outlines the
moral order at work in El Zarco by thinking it in politicalrather than
civilizational or romanticterms. Less concerned with the scandal of an
apparent anti-constitutionalism than Escalante, Robinson focuses on the
ways in which Altamirano seeks an aesthetic of moral-acceptability that
can explain away the contradictions of liberalism when confronted with
historical conditions that its theories cannot resolve. She argues: Nicols
and Martn Snchez become heroes in spite of the corrupt state authority

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57

because the national problem is, in fact, the institution of authoritys inability to define and enforce a national sense of right and wrong (n.d.).
Extremely suggestive, these readings can not resist the temptation of
associating Martn Snchez with another, a position first articulated by
Salvador Ortz Vidales in 1949, when he interprets the vigilante as completely identical to the bandit himself, el Zarco, based on their equally
exceptional status vis--vis the law (36). Robinson complicates this relationship, and formally associates Martn Snchez with social banditry in
general (and, by extension, el Zarco), but also places him politically in the
terms of a moral ally to the chaste Nicols (n.d.; see also Sommer, 226).
Nevertheless, these attempts to locate Martn Snchez within the neoclassical quadrangle of love interests (Nicols/Pilar v. el Zarco/Manuela) seem
to fail to grasp the dimensions of his singularity within the narrative, suggested in the way in which his presence makes a mess of the structure of the
plot. Yes, Martn Snchez is exceptionaloutside the lawlike the bandit.
Thus he might be a mirror for el Zarco. Or he might be the hammer for the
ideal, law-abiding citizen, Nicols, thereby operating as his other half. But
he is far more than each of these figures, which is another way of saying
that he is reducible to neither, and transcends both.
Escalante, by paying ample attention to the encounter with Jurez,
comes close to illuminating what we perceive as the true face of Martn
Snchez. But he also seems to go too far in reading the scene in palpably
indignant terms, as the installation of the ley de la selva (199). But the
law of the jungle is not at issue here; rather, what we are confronted with
is the law of salud pblica. In an 1880 letter directed to his young friend,
Rafael de Zayas Enrquez (director of Ferrocarril, a Veracruz newspaper),
reflecting on the suspension of constitutional guarantees of December 11,
1861, Altamirano himself speaks to the question of the relation between
the law and the so-called salud pblica: se guarda la ley en una arca
cerrada y no se consulta ms que la salud pblica. Entonces se da fuerza
al gobierno, armndolo con todos los derechos y con todos los rayos de
la guerra (1880, 57; our emphasis). Without the vitality of the national
body, the question of law itself becomes academic; law can be protected
by being temporarily suspended, while the forces of salud pblica treat the
gangrena que corroe a la sociedad (52). It is only in these extraordinary
circumstances, granted to Jurez as facultades omnmodas by the Congress
in 1861 in the face of foreign invasion (the French, Spanish and British were
forcibly landing at Veracruz in order to collect debts), only in this state of
exception, that a figure like Martn Snchez can emerge. While he may be
the exceptional opposite of el Zarco, Martn Snchez is not the bandit.
He is not the necessary counterpart of Nicols. He is Jurez. No. He is the
sovereigns messenger: the exterminating angel. He is the very expression of
sovereignty. Where, then, is the scandal of which Escalante speaks? Both

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M ar a del Pil ar Melgar ejo Acosta / Joshua Lu nd

he and Robinson are led to the conclusion that El Zarco should be read as
making a favorable case for the existence and actions of Martn Snchez.
For Robinson, the figure of the vigilante allows Altamirano to leverage a
certain popular appeal around the social bandit, rearticulating this energy
as a force for the re-establishment of social order and the states authority.
More tendentious, Escalante is scandalized by what he understands as a
bald legitimation of despotism, the treason of the popular sovereignty supposedly embedded in the liberal republic.
Re-reading the text in a more sympathetically post-colonial register,
however, complicates these interpretations. While there was certainly
something attractive, maybe even necessary (see, again, Polica), about
Martn Snchez for Altamirano, the text itself resists this reading. Paying
attention to these subtleties may obligate us to rethink the nature of the
political narrative that we confront in El Zarco. We think that this becomes
even more the case if we read it in the light of Altamiranos very existence
as a man, which locates him smack in the middle of an extremely complicated set of political challenges in which he often played a central, and
always polemical, role. By the time that he finishes the novel, he is now a
dinosaur of sorts, increasingly marginalized by the new mandarins of the
social-political order, some committed to a vigorous critique of the early
liberal republic that he helped to build, and he is certainly not happy about
this fact. In his 1880 letter, he politely reminds his worried correspondent
that his generation was locked in a fight to the death, and that the liberal
ideal crashed no less than fourteen times: fourteen constitutional suspensions, fourteen states of exception. Times were different, and times were
not easy. A close reading of El Zarco seems to communicate this message
to us, making it more difficult to see it as a simple and cynical case for the
violence of Martn Snchez (Conway 98). Altamirano was well aware of the
contradictions of sovereignty implicit in any liberal republic. In a far too
quick sketch of some key turns in the text, we will attempt to close by arguing that Martn Snchez represents nothing less than the nebulous and,
indeed, menacing nature of the sovereign.

V.
Altamirano was quick-witted and tough, but he seems unsettled by his
own turn to the vigilante. 8 Recall this odd line embedded in the passage
that closes the key twenty-fourth chapter, the portrait of the meeting between the sovereign and his messenger: cualquiera que hubiera ledo un
poco en el futuro se habra estremecido (325). Not cualquier bandido;
just cualquiera, anybody even slightly capable of looking into the future
(toward the Porfiriato?) would have experienced a physical sense of foreboding at this transfer of sovereign violence. This does not seem to be the

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59

beginning of the road to happiness. Then there is the spooky passage in

Chapter 23, El asalto, in which Martn Snchez and his posse are represented as living dead men, spectral figures imbued with the harbinger of
death. The first time we meet their physical presence is at a crossroads ominously called La Calavera (the skull), described as a place that is siniestro
en demasa, an abandoned stretch populated by bandits: Parecan fantasmas, y en aquella venta de La Calavera, y a aquella hora, en que los objetos
iban tomando formas gigantescas, y cerca de aquellos montes solitarios,
semejante fila de jinetes, silenciosos y ceudos, ms que tropa, pareca
una aparicin sepucral (311). A page later we read that there is suspicion
around his actions: Ya haba colgado un buen nmero de plateados, pero
ya lo haban acusado muchas veces de haber cometido esos abusos para los
que no estaba autorizado, pues, como lo hemos dicho, slo tena facultades
para aprehender a los criminales y consignarlos a los jueces. Pero Martn
Snchez haba respondido que no colgaba sino a los que moran peleando,
y eso lo haca para escarmiento. En esto es muy posible que ocultara algo, y
que realmente l fusilara a todo bandido que coga (312, our emphasis).
The narrator goes on to mount a tepid defense of questionable relevance,
noting that Martn Snchez and his posse, in this scene, was not yet at its
full strength. This tangent regarding his actions, completely unnecessary
for the plot, opens up two possibilities, indeed, probabilities. First, that he
immediately violated his mandate and issued vigilante justice against any
bandit, on the spot (recall that he attempts to hang el Zarco extra-judicially
[317]). Second, that his judgment was also immediate, and that along with
bandits he killed ordinary, if suspicious, civilians.
Martn Snchez was the Lynch Law incarnate (308), and Altamirano indicates in other writings of the time that this is a form of law that should be
resolutely avoided. In another work from 1880, an essay called Ladrones
y asesinos, he vehemently defends the necessity of the state power to suspend algunas garantas individuales, en vista de la amenza que pesa sobre
la sociedad, a causa de los bandidos que infestan los caminos (15). But in
the same gesture, his liberal spirit compels him to cite Article 29 of the
Constitution: En los casos que pongan a la sociedad en grande peligro o conflicto, el Presidente de la Repblica, de acuerdo con el Consejo
de ministros y con aprobacin del Congreso de la Unin y en los recesos
de ste, la diputacin permanente puede suspender las garantas otorgadas
en esta Constitucin, con excepcin de las que aseguran la vida del hombre
(18). Against Agamben, Altamiranos state of exception does not render the
citizen homo sacer and thereby killable, but must rigorously (the emphasis
is his) assure life.9 He continues: Ya se ve, que hay algo antes que la ley de
Linch [sic] y el estado primitivo para salvar el orden pblico y tranquilizar a
la sociedad azorada por la impunidad de los criminales (ibid.).10

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M ar a del Pil ar Melgar ejo Acosta / Joshua Lu nd

Back to El Zarco. Perhaps most prominent of all for a reading of

Altamiranos ambivalence toward Martn Snchez is the meeting with
Jurez himself. Granted exceptional powers by the Congress, the figure of
Jurez is a true sovereign in this scene, largely unfettered by the trappings of
constitutionalism. He wraps up the meeting by thanking Martn Snchez
for his patriotism, noting that the country will soon be embroiled in a war
against a foreign power, and that only because of this need for focus will he
grant the request. At the outset cool and impassive, a cascade of reminders and disclaimers make Jurezs decision seem suddenly tortured, indeed,
hysterical. Here it is: Y mucha conciencia, Seor Snchez, usted lleva facultades extraordinarias, pero siempre con la condicin de que debe usted
obrar con justicia, la justicia ante todo. Slo la necesidad puede obligarnos
a usar estas facultades, que traen tan grande responsabilidad, pero yo s a
quin se los doy. No haga usted que me arrepienta (325, our emphasis). The
last line jumps out, but the whole passage is full of suspicion. No less than
seven times does Jurez express preoccupation before what he is granting.11
One gets the sense that Jurez had been down this paramilitary road before, which he had, and with disastrous results. The narrator is indicating
as much. Too, at the very introduction of Martn Snchezs petition, which
opens with a request for the right to extra-judicial hangings, he adds the
pledge that: y prometo a usted, bajo mi palabra de honor, que no matar
sino los que merecen (323, our emphasis). We cannot help but hear the
armchair psychoanalyst here, confronted with the neurotic: I do not hate
my mother. The patient always also says yes.
We have already mentioned the end of the novel, but its worth the reminder: any nation-state articulation here is full of ambivalence and trepidation. A criminal is executed on a threshold beyond the law. A wayward
girl dies of fright. The hinge of this articulationmuch less the NicholsPilar copula than the solitary presence of Martn Snchezutters a last
wordenterrarlabefore his tropa lgubre marches off. There is no
more sense that this is the end of paramilitary violence and gang warfare
than that it might be the beginning. As much as finding its moral foundation, the nation seems to equally quake before its political reality.
Altamirano had demons. To be sure, one was the bandit. Indeed, social
formations of all kinds, resistant to both reason and the statebeyond
bandits (whether social or criminal), we could include Indians, fanatics,
conservatives, the church, the Frenchcould be counted among elements
ripe for transformation or extirpation within his vision of the nation-building project. But another demon, explicitly thought by Altamirano, was the
sovereign, that nebulous figure who can consolidate the rights of those
ruled over, or who can send forth unspeakable terror (Martn Snchez is
terrible [325]) and destruction. The place of sovereignty in liberal republics is ambiguous, until it momentarily resides in the figure of the execu-

Altamiranos Demons

61

tive, showing its potential for menace. A careful reading of Martn Snchez
demonstrates that Altamirano was unsure about and uneasy with this
contradiction at the center of the liberal state. And yet like the God of the
Israelites, it would seem that sovereignty needs its plagues. The bandits, a
competing model of sovereignty produced for the state to exterminate, are
expressed in these terms: precisely, a plague of bandits (241). A byproduct
of the very state that seeks their elimination, they ultimately become the
prelude to the final plague in which the state contracts out its sovereignty
to another. The exterminating angel descends upon us, and it is here that
we are faced with Martn Snchez and a legacy of paramilitarism in the
Americas. This is a history that is clearly on-going, and one that confronts
us urgently today.

Notes
1 Our sincere thanks to Amy Robinson for granting us permission to cite from her manuscript
Imagining Mexican Bandits: The Literary Construction of Late Nineteenth-Century Criminality.
2 El Zarco was first published in Barcelona. The original editor, Santiago Ballesc, justifies the long
delay between the delivery and the publication of the manuscript by explaining that the copyist
lost part of the original, which went unrecovered until much later (Ballesc). Manuel Sol, in his
introduction to the extraordinary Veracruz edition that we are handling here, argues that the text
that we know as El Zarco that descends from the Barcelona edition must have been transformed
at the editorial stage. He explains that it was probably modified by a second copyist who introdujo algunas modificaciones con el propsito de adecuarlo a lo que l consideraba correcto y
que, en la mayora de los casos, correspondan a algunas normas del espaol de Espaa y, en general, a las reglas y acepciones de la Gramtica y Diccionario de la Real Academia Espaola. Normas
y criterios que no eran ciertamente de Altamirano (17). For example, embellecido is replaced by
ennoblecido which would have a connotacin nobiliara totalmente ausente en un mexicano de
espritu liberal como Altamirano.
3 On the relations between spaces and figures of exception, such as the bandit and the sovereign,
see Agamben.
4 See, for example, Robles; Popoca Palacios; Pineda.
5 Which was also in the most literal senses of the term a political life. He participated in the rebellion of Ayutla (1854), in the War of Reform (18581861), and was a committed nationalist in the
face of French intervention. His youthful participation in armed conflicts impeded the completion of his studies for the title of licenciado, often exposing him to shallow but biting criticism in
a society where title carried significant weight. He was an important ally, though often critical,
especially around the questions of amnesty, of the first president of the liberal Republic, Benito
Jurez. He viewed the rise of Porfirio Daz, and especially the new class of scientific bureaucrats
that surrounded his administration, with suspicion.
6 This is a good point to remember that bandit, of course, was a rhetorical weapon wielded by
the state (much like terrorist today). Social formations of all kinds, especially peasant communities that actively asserted their constitutional rights, had a way of finding themselves suddenly
inscribed as bandits even if they did not literally participate in the practices (robbery, extortion,
kidnapping) usually associated with banditry. One fascinating example of this process can be witnessed by tracing the transformations in state rhetoric over time as it confronted the Julio Lpez
uprising of 1868-9. Leticia Reina has collected all of the relevant documents around the Lpez
case in one place: see her Las rebeliones campesinas en Mxico (18191906) (1988).
7 Obligadas las tropas liberales, por un error lamentable y vergonzoso [la amnesta], a aceptar la
cooperacin de estos bandidos, en la persecucin que hacan al faccioso reaccionario Mrquez [un
general conservador], en su travesa por la tierra caliente, algunas de aquellas partidas se

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M ar a del Pil ar Melgar ejo Acosta / Joshua Lu nd

presentaron formando cuerpos irregulares pero numerosos, y uno de ellos estaba mandado por
el Zarco (El Zarco 1656, our emphasis).

8 Once, while serving as a government deputy, a conservative legislator mocked Altamirano, greeting him as: Buenos das, licenciado sin ttulo. Altamirano shot back, for all to hear, Buenos das,
ttulo sin licenciado (Chvez Guerrero 103).
9

Dont misunderstand us: we offer no apology of Altamiranos authoritarian tendencies, but

rather an attempt to understand his position. In defending life, what he recites here is nothing
less than the central Enlightenment gesture of sovereignty, a fundamentally biopolitical gesture,
one that Michel Foucault captures in the slogan make live and let die (1976). Altamirano would be
happy to let the bandit die. But he does not call for the people to take his life. He calls for him to
be brought to justice, within the constitutional order.

10 This comment is made in the context of a specific debate over the ineffective institutions of
criminal justice that were at work throughout rural Mexico. One aspect of this conversation
turned around the advantages of the semi-formalization of Lynch laws (basically paramilitarism)
versus the so-called estado primitivo in which each community or even individual would have
the right to take justice into its own hands. Attacking a common line in favor of both of these positions in newspapers such as La Libertad, La Industria Nacional and La Tribuna, which saw in these
turns to popular justice el nico recurso a que tiene que apelar el pueblo para hacerse justicia
(15), Altamirano writes: antes que apelar a la ley Linch [sic] y al estado primitivo, es decir, a la desesperacin, hay que echar mano de un recurso conocido, prescrito por las leyes, obligatorio para
la administracin, cuando las leyes comunes no bastan para dar seguridad al pueblo (19). The law
provides for its own exception.
11 1: Y mucha conciencia, Seor Snchez. 2: Usted lleva facultades extraordinarias, pero siempre
con la condicin de que debe usted obrar con justicia. 3: La justicia ante todo. 4: Slo la
necesidad puede obligarnos a usar estas facultades. 5: Que traen tan grande responsabilidad.
6: Pero yo s a quin se los doy. 7: No haga usted que me arrepienta (325).

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