Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Agenda
Author(s): Robert H. Holden
Source: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 435-459
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/157627
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Constructing the Limits of State
Violence in Central America: Towards
a New Research Agenda*
ROBERT H. HOLDEN
J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 28, 435-459 Copyright ? i996 Cambridge University Press 435
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436 Robert H. Holden
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State Violence in Central America 437
America, where state agents have long been occupied principally with the
organisation and deployment of violence, the mechanisms of which often
have not even been limited to the formal institutions of coercion. Yet the
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438 Robert H. Holden
Caudillismo
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State Violence in Central America 439
be accounted for? And why was the outcome of that process marked by
such extensive limits in the use of state violence?6 A basic framework of
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440 Robert H. Holden
The Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Costa Rican states appear to have been
the first to achieve a significant level of unified coercive control, by at least
the second decade of the twentieth century, followed by Honduras and
Nicaragua in the I93os. The historiography typically links strong 'coffe
oligarchies' in the first two countries (and their dependence on agricultur
exports) to their precocity in the consolidation of state-sponsored
violence, and the weakness of the oligarchies and the export economies in
Honduras and Nicaragua to their corresponding backwardness; the
achievement of centralised control in Costa Rica failed to broaden the
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State Violence in Central America 441
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442 Robert H. Holden
after 1940. What is not in doubt is the outcome: negotiation between the
agents of the state and its subjects did not result in the shrinkage of Tilly's
'perimeters to state violence' but in their expansion. How can such a
perverse result be explained?
Subaltern Collaboration
The landowner wanted labour, loyalty, and service in peace and war. The peon
sought subsistence and security. Thus the hacendado was a protector, possessing
sufficient power to defend his dependents against outside intruders, recruiting
officers, and rival bands. He was also a provider, who developed and defended
local resources, and could give employment, food, and shelter. By providing
what his dependents needed and using what they offered, an hacendado recruited
apeonada. This promitive political structure, born of personal loyalties, built upon
the authority of the patr6n and the dependency of the peon, was finally
incorporated into the state and became the model of caudillism.13
The caudillo offered offices, land, and favours in exchange for manpower,
arms and supplies, a vertical bond of loyalty and obligation that
undermined class affiliations. As the caudillos gradually yielded up their
independent control of the means of violence to the state, Lynch argued,
personalist politics hinging on loyalty to a leader and on relationships of
exchange did not wither away but became entrenched elements of Latin
American political culture. Government remained much less a source of
policy than a source of patronage; promises, in Lynch's words, were made
to 'people as clients with expectations, not citizens with rights'.14 The
general model suggests that state centralisation and market expansion
transform patrons into brokers, spawning a 'clientelist state' system of
linked, personalised power networks.15
In the passage from caudillismo to the clientelist state, two features of the
old order persisted: violence and collaboration. The centrality of violence
in caudillo politics has been well established and requires little discussion
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State Violence in Central America 443
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444 Robert H. Holden
By the I95os, army reservists (i.e., men who had completed their
obligatory military service) made up the core of an 'extensive paramilitary
structure' in the Salvadoran countryside, registering with local comandantes
as members of so-called escoltas militares. Members of these units - who
numbered in the tens of thousands - were rewarded with medical and
economic assistance,' which for a poor peasant family was worth most any
sacrifice... .19
Similarly in Guatemala, a state-directed strategy of paternalistic
cooptation towards the country's numerous semi-autonomous India
communities was characteristic not only of the mid-nineteenth centur
conservative rule of Rafael Carreras but also of the liberal regimes that
followed from the I87os to 1944. Local ladino caudillos successfully drew
Indian leaders into their orbit, according to Robert M. Carmack:
The militia, almost exclusively ladino under Barrios [i.e. President Justo Rufino
Barrios, I87I-I885], became the primary vehicle in this process. Indians wer
given not only a place in it, but also the opportunity to prove themselves and
even become officers. The traditional native social divisions were respected....
This highly paternalistic political order was in place by the end of the nineteent
century....
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State Violence in Central America 445
accounts in large part for the stability of that order until the revolution of
I944.
Michael J. Schroeder's recent reinterpretation of the Sandino rebellion
of 1927-34 in Nicaragua places it firmly in the context of rural caudillismo,
a system of 'family-based patron-client networks and private irregular
armies or gangs' in which political power was negotiated among national,
regional and sub-regional power brokers. The 'gang-armies' that fought
the frequent civil wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
consisted of 'dense webs of personal relationships' held together by
charisma and personal loyalty, and Sandino's army followed this tradition.
Powerful regional caudillos, identifying themselves as Liberals or
Conservatives, contracted the services of semi-autonomous 'gang leaders'
to eliminate or harass opponents; torture, murder and ritual terror became
essential elements of a politics that was 'fundamentally violent'. Sandino's
army, following this pattern, was in fact composed of' networks of... local
jefes and their followers, relatively autonomous nodes of power connected
by dense webs of relations to other such nodes of power'; Sandino himself
was only the most prominent of the chiefs who identified themselves with
the movement that bore his name. Violent struggles within and between
the sandinista bands were commonplace, just as violence itself was
'ubiquitous' in the Segovias as Indians, peasants and workers followed
patrons or party into battle.21 Jeffrey L. Gould and Knut Walter, in
separate investigations, confirm a pattern of subaltern collaboration in the
construction of the limits of violence by a Nicaraguan state still in
formation as late as the mid-i93os. Indian community officials, in the
service of the national state, often captured coffee-plantation deserters
fleeing debt-service jobs.22 President Anastasio Somoza consolidated his
grip on power in the 193os by recruiting thousands of civilian National
Guard collaborators into the extreme-right Camisas AZules and the Liga
Militar Liberal Nacionalista.23
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446 Robert H. Holden
Internationalisation
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State Violence in Central America 447
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448 Robert H. Holden
The trail of human and material wreckage left behind by a century of state-
directed violence in much of the isthmus can be traced back to a specific
historical process: the knitting together of dispersed power centres into a
coherent organ of coercion beginning in the late nineteenth century.
Detailed studies of that process should reveal just how the limits of state-
sponsored violence were initially defined, as warmaking and clientelist
politics blended to endow state agents of violence with virtually unlimited
reach. Not just violence but traditional clientelist arrangements themselves
were displaced upward in this process, drawing collaborators at all levels
of society into a network of state-centred violence and forcing non-
collaborators to resist violently. Nothing was more important in
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State Violence in Central America 449
Thinking about state violence in these terms has implications that raise
questions about some of the fundamental assumptions of the literature on
civil-military relations, the investigative category into which the subject
of state violence has been traditionally inserted. While the following
review of that literature will therefore be a critical one, I will return to a
theme touched on above - that of political culture - and offer a positive
assessment of the use of political culture in research on state violence.
Civil-Military Relations
Much of the scholarship on the problem of state-sponsored violence has
been confined to the study of'civil-military relations', a paradigm that has
tended to define state violence narrowly and ahistorically, focusing almost
entirely on the military institution and the extent of its 'participation' in
government while exaggerating the autonomy of the state from civil
society. The result has been a lavish, erudite, and 'policy-relevant' (and
thus well-financed) effluence of scholarship geared to analysing or
explaining discrete episodes of military rule, particularly that of the mid-
96os to the early i 980s, instead of the persistence of a singularly intensive
level of state-sponsored violence that has marked the region for more than
a century.29 It is time for a shift in emphasis, away from institutions and
towards a more broadly social treatment of violence and the state. The
following paragraphs summarise two shortcomings of the civil-military
relations literature and then suggest how a broader perspective might
profitably be applied to Central America.
In the civil-military relations paradigm, military participation in
government is typically conceptualised as a continuum between two
poles, one being direct military rule and the other civilian control. Along
the continuum are points at which power is shared between civilians and
29 This is not to argue that Latin America is 'more violent' than the rest of the world.
The United States and the European states (including Russia) have devoted more
resources to perfecting strategies of violence than to any other conceivable state
activity. Countless imperialist forays, genocidal campaigns of extermination directed
against internal 'enemies', two world wars and a half century of nuclear arms
production are enough to overshadow Latin America in any accounting of state-
sponsored violence. The subject here, of course, is not violence between nation-states
nor technical capacity but the intensity of overt violence accompanying statemaking
within national frontiers, a realm in which the Latin American countries have clearly
excelled since independence.
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45 o Robert H. Holden
30 These two premises permeate the social science literature on the Latin American
military, and multiple examples could be cited. Among many others, that of Alfred
Stepan must be mentioned, for its influential character; see especially Rethinking Military
Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton, 1988). Other recent examples: Augusto
Varas, 'Las relaciones civil-militares en la democracia', in Dirk Kruijt and Edelberto
Torres-Rivas, coord., America Latina: militaresy sociedad, vol. II (San Jose C.R., I99i),
pp. I 53-80; J. Samuel Fitch, 'Armies and Politics in Latin America: I975-I985', in
Abraham F. Lowenthal and J. Samuel Fitch (eds.), Armies and Politics in Latin America
(rev. ed., New York, 1986), pp. 26-58; and Jorge Zaverucha, 'The Degree of Military
Political Autonomy During the Spanish, Argentine and Brazilian Transitions', Journal
of Latin American Studies, vol. 25, no. 2 (May I993), pp. 283-300. Similar assumptions
underlie the work of historians who write about the military; prominent examples
include R. A. Potash's two volumes on the Argentine army - The Army & Politics in
Argentina I928-194 : Yrigoyen to Perdn (Stanford, 1969) and The Army & Politics in
Argentina 194-1i962: Peron to Frondizi (Stanford, 1980) - and the work of Frederick M.
Nunn - Chilean Politics I920-9-31: The Honorable Mission of the Armed Forces
(Albuquerque, 1970) and The Time of the Generals: Latin American Professional Militarism
in World Perspective (Lincoln, 1992).
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State Violence in Central America 45
31 Among the insights that made Samuel J. Huntington's Political Order in Changing
Societies (New Haven, I968) a pathbreaking achievement was its claim that it was not
the military itself but the 'political and institutional structure of society' that explained
military intervention in politics. However, Huntington and his disciples largely
confined themselves to studying the contemporary role of the military as an institution,
focusing not on the broader question of state-sponsored violence but on 'military rule',
and all but excluding any interest in the historical dimension. Of course, they also
launched a very different argument from that platform than the one that I am proposing
to make, claiming that increasing political disorder called into being an interventionist
military institution with middle-class roots that would somehow midwife 'modern'
civilian political institutions, thus subduing disorder and conflict (p. 194). For the
originality of Huntington's observation at the time, see Volker R. Berghahn,
Militarism: The History of an International Debate i86--I979 (New York, I982), p. 76.
32 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, vol. II of A Contemporary Critique of
Historical Materialism (Cambridge, 1985), p. 251.
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4 5 2 Robert H. Holden
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State Violence in Central America 4 3
Civilian political sectors have always been implicated in the military interventions.
A military clique rarely launches a 'putschist' adventure without a sectional
endorsement or without an alliance with civilian groups. The civilian-military
overlap, the permanent articulation of the two spheres, makes the 'extrication' of
militarism and the 'civilianisation' of power difficult. Contrary to a view marked by
liberal ethnocentrism, in a system so militarised, there do not exist two worlds entrenched like
two camps prepared for battle, with civilians on one side and the military on the other
[emphasis added]. Far from provoking a sacred union of the political class or of
the social forces organised to defend democratic institutions in danger, any
military uprising will enlist the public support of certain civilian forces competing
with their rivals.
36 Dana Munro, The Five Republics of Central America: Their Political and Economic
Development and Their Relations with the United States (New York, 1918), pp. 42-3.
37 Mario Monteforte Toledo, Centro America: Subdesarrolloy dependencia, vol. II (Mexico,
I972), p. 2I6. 38 Torres-Rivas, El tamano de nuestra democracia, p. 45.
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454 Robert H. Holden
Political Culture
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State Violence in Central America 45 5
Peace is always in the distance, even as daily operations continue. This may be
partially because NGOs [non-governmental organisations] have considered peace
as something that others should obtain (i.e., the military) and not something to
be constructed day by day, as part of our societies. How can we promote a vision
of peace as part of human dignity and therefore part of human development?
How does violence reproduce itself in society? How does this articulate with
sectarianism and ethnic, religious and political fanaticism?41
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456 Robert H. Holden
45 Alicia Hernandez Chavez, La tradicidn republicana del buen gobierno (Mexico, 1993
46 Richard Morse, New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas (Balti
I989), pp. I33-4, 98-o06, 2zz-6. The work of Roberto Da Matta, heavily cited
Morse, should also be mentioned here. Kindred historical interpretations have
offered by Glen Caudill Dealy, who traces the caudillo's ability to 'to use force w
good conscience' to a Thomistic 'dual morality'; Claudio Veliz, who locates L
America's political culture in a centralist tradition stemming from the Coun
Reformation; and Howard Wiarda, who holds up a distinctly Latin corpor
tradition. See: Dealy, The Latin Americans: Spirit and Ethos (Boulder, 1992), p
Veliz, The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Sp
America (Berkeley, 1994), p. 210; Wiarda, 'Toward a Model of Social Change
Political Development in Latin America: Summary, Implications, Frontiers', in
Wiarda (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Latin America: The Distinct Tradition, 2n
(Amherst, I982), pp. 329-59.
47 Norbert Lechner, 'La democratizaci6n', in Lechner (ed.), Cultura politica
democratiraci6n (Santiago, Chile, 1987), pp. 253-4 and Lechner, 'Presentaci6n',
pp. 7-9.
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State Violence in Central America 45 7
Observing that this kind of' structural violence' has been present in the
Andes even during nominally peaceful times, Enrique Mayer divided the
problem into different arenas of violence, one associated with domination
48 Brian Loveman, The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America
(Pittsburgh, I993), p. 63. This excellent study of the long history of constitutional
protection for tyrannical regimes is basically framed by the familiar civilian vs. military
dichotomy so that the problem appears to be one of 'military rule'. Yet, like Morse,
Loveman also recognises the complex origins of a political culture that nourished
authoritarianism; he points to the deadly combination of (i) the absence in colonial
Spanish America (unlike in Spain itself) of any parliamentary or representative
institutions that might have constrained the authority of the monarch and the
consequent practice of rule by royal decree, and (2) the late Bourbon policy of turning
over internal administrative functions to the military (3 5-6). The colonial-era practice
of yielding broad administrative authority to military powers was adopted and updated
by the former colonies (393-5).
49 Comisi6n Especial del Senado sobre las Causas de la Violencia y Alternativas de
Pacificaci6n en el Perui, Violencia j pacificacidn (Lima, 1989), pp. 34, 124, 39.
50 Comisi6n Especial, lViolenciay pacificacion, p. 43.
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45 8 Robert H. Holden
and the other with subordination: 'First, to what extent are there long-
term institutionalised patterns of violence that have been imposed by
state, church, and ruling elites? Secondly, regarding the responses from
below, is there an Andean cultural pattern of violence?'51 In this
configuration, the state and its allies initiate the cycle of violence,
generating a distinctive 'popular' kind of violence in response. A more
holistic approach is suggested by James B. Greenberg's study of the high
level of daily violence among the Chatino people of Mexico, which he ties
to the emergence of capitalist relations of production and exchange. As
community violence came into contact with the patron-client structure of
Mexican politics (itself, according to Greenberg, 'a well-known source of
rancor and violence'), local and regional political violence intensified.52
John Charles Chasteen's analysis of the 'discourse of insurgency' along
the Brazilian-Uruguayan border in the late nineteenth century is a
tantalising attempt to 'identify some of the conditioning factors and
constituent procedures of Latin American political culture, some of its
dominant themes and primary figures of speech'.53
Perhaps the most telling evidence of a shift in interest towards a more
culturally-sensitive understanding of state-sponsored violence comes
from the work of the distinguished Central American historian Edelberto
Torres-Rivas, best known for a bluntly structuralist interpretation of
Central American history anchored in dependency theory. Writing in 1992
of the fallen Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Torres-Rivas pointed
out that it is one thing for a revolutionary movement to destroy the
institutions of an authoritarian regime - the army, courts, penal system,
laws, regulations, etc. Substitutes can readily be fabricated, as they were
in Nicaragua after 19 July 1979. Not so readily replaced, however, are 'the
mores, the deep-seated habits, the collective mentality that comes out in
the everyday conduct between the dominant and the dominated in the
variety of their relationships'. Even today, he noted, the region remains
burdened by 'an authoritarian culture that infects social relations, values,
and the customs of Central Americans'.54 Since the late nineteenth
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State Violence in Central America 459
Conclusions
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