Constructing The Limits of State Violence in Central America - Towards A New Research Agenda

Constructing the Limits of State Violence in Central America: Towards a New Research
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
Abstract. This analysis of the historically high level of sta

in Central America, typically explained in terms of 'auth
military relations', argues for according it a more indepe
Three historic dimensions of state-sponsored violence
which caudillo violence was displaced upward in the late i
of subaltern collaboration with the agents of state vio
clientelist politics, and the intrusion of US military p
proposed. The implications for the utility of political cul
reevaluation of the literature on civil-military relations ar
The scale and intensity of state-sponsored or 'officia

dramatically after the I870s in most of Central Ame
weak states, substituting coercion for the consensus a
were beyond their reach, expanded the limits of
enhanced their capacity for destruction while turnin
of that power to increasingly autonomous military
that deployed it with impunity. This upward shift i
destructive power coincided with the beginning of a
isthmian international conflict, leading not to more w
but to more domestic violence.
Yet despite the pivotal role and often catastrophic consequences of

state-sponsored violence in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and
* The author gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Richard N. Adams, Marvin

Barahona, Brian Loveman, Michael McIntyre, Andrew Schlewitz, Michael J.
Schroeder, Marco A. Valle Martinez and Rina Villars for comments on earlier drafts of
this article and on the ideas presented here. I am especially indebted to the anonymous
reviewers for their helpful advice. Earlier forms of this article were presented as papers
at the Social Science History Association meeting in Atlanta, 13-16 October 1994, and
at the seminar 'Estado, participaci6n politica e identidad nacional en Centroamerica,
siglos xix y xx' in San Jose, Costa Rica, 23-25 February 1995, organised by the
Universidad de Costa Rica. I am indebted to the panellists and audience members
at both events for a relentless interrogation. Old Dominion University supplied
indispensable financial support.
Robert H. Holden is Assistant Professor of History at Old Dominion University,

Norfolk, Virginia.
J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 28, 435-459 Copyright ? i996 Cambridge University Press 435
436 Robert H. Holden
Nicaragua during the twentieth century, our understanding of its sources,

the reasons for its persistence and its social impact is rudimentary at best.
To be sure, the range of human behaviour encompassed by the category
'violence' (state or non-state), its ubiquitous and even commonplace
nature, would seem to pose major obstacles to historical investigation.
Violence, the objection might run, is only an artifact, the residuum of
structural conditions or rational choices which are themselves the proper
subjects of research.
My concern here is limited to the violence associated with the state, and
so I will answer this objection by suggesting that an enduring - but
nevertheless unacknowledged - theme of the historiography of Central
America is state-sponsored violence enrobed as 'authoritarianism', a
concept even more nebulous than violence. As a result, much of the social
science literature turns on an elusive search for the 'obstacles to
democracy' or on explanations of the persistence of authoritarian

military rule, the latter giving rise to a vast body of research on t
American military institution and its relations with 'society'.l I a
from the case of Central America, that underlying both of these tradi
themes is the growth in the scale and intensity of state-sponsored viol
A reconceptualisation along these lines should yield both theoreti
empirical benefits, first by clarifying fundamental research prop
revolving around the distribution of power and second by fosterin
ways to exploit the data available for testing those propositions.
Centralised control of the means of violence, Anthony Giddens
suggested, stands with capitalism and class conflict as one o
'independent influences upon the development of modernity'. Yet,
argues, social theorists have largely ignored the linkage betw
modern state and the staggering increase in violence that marks t
two centuries. Peter H. Smith observed more than a decade ago tha
American violence 'cries for research', while noting that some ki
violence constitute 'workable and widely acknowledged instrumen
promoting group interests... and one of the analytical challenges
detect and define the thresholds of acceptability'.2 Giddens's reas
and Smith's invitation, seem particularly compelling in the case of
1For recent examples of the 'obstacles to democracy' approach, see Die

Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Devel
and Democracy (Chicago, i992), Chapter 6, 'Central America and the Caribbe
Edelberto Torres-Rivas, El tamano de nuestra democracia (San Salvador, 1992), pp
The civil-military relations literature is cited below.
2 Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. II (B
1987), The Nation-State and Violence, pp. I-5, 22-23, 30; emphasis added. Pe
Smith, 'A View from Latin America', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol.
pp. 3-27.
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
historiography of the region frequently trivialises the growth of state-

associated violence by treating it as an artifact of export-oriented capitalist
development and class conflict (i.e., 'coffee' or 'bananas'), implicitly
minimising its significance before the period of export growth and
insinuating that state violence would diminish as the economies diversify
and modernise. The evident intractability of state violence in Central
America, and the controversy evoked by the US government's prominent
role as its quartermaster both before and during the bloody I980s, has
only just begun to incite scholarly interest in state violence as a research
category, understood as an independent subject worthy of study in its own
right and not merely as the inevitable byproduct of political contention or
class conflict.3 By emphasising its independent status I wish neither to
propose state violence as the primum mobile of Central American politics
nor to assert a parthenogenetic origin for it. Rather, my objective is to
highlight the pivotal role of state-sponsored violence in shaping Central
American society and to offer an explanation for its persistence, while
pleading the utility of a more holistic approach to what is typically
identified as 'militarism'.
I will begin by exploring both the concept of state-sponsored violence

and its importance as a variable in Central American history by breaking
it down into three distinct but closely related historical processes:
statemaking and caudillismo, subaltern collaboration with the agents of
state violence, and the internationalisation of state violence. Next I will
show how these processes might be linked to a reassessment of both the
literature on civil-military relations in Latin America and the concept of
political culture.
3 Historically grounded studies of proto-state violence as an autonomous category in this

sense have been scarce for the rest of the continent as well. Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and
John Markoffs observation nearly two decades ago that, 'As a background condition
violence is readily forgotten' by scholars who tend to see violence as 'straightforward
and uncomplicated' is still an accurate one: their study of what they called 'the
tradition of violence' on the cattle frontiers of Latin America is practically unique. See
'Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle Frontiers in Latin America', Comparative Studies in
Society and History, vol. 20, no. 4 (October 1978), pp. 587-620. Their claim was echoed
much more recently by Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski's comment that 'Although
political violence has played a central part in the formation of nations, its historical
constitution and its role in representing nations have received scant attention.'
Violence is too often 'reduced to a practical tool used by opposing social actors in
pursuit of conflicting ends. Whether treated as a cause, function, or instrument,
violence is generally assumed rather than examined in its concreteness'. 'Dismembering
and Remembering the Nation: The Semantics of Political Violence in Venezuela',
Comparative Studies in Socciety and History, vol. 33, no. 2 (April I99I), pp. 288-9.
Caudillismo
To a degree unsurpassed elsewhere in Latin America, progress in the

formation of the state in Central America can be defined by the increasing
concentration of destructive power in unified military institutions and
by its more intensive application on a national scale.4 By the 193os,
institutions of surveillance and repression were absorbing the bulk of state
resources and overshadowed in importance all other agencies of the state.
And yet, of all Latin America, the countries of the isthmus were among
the most politically fragmented during the ninetenth century by the
centrifugal forces of caudillismo or regional strong-man rule, a feature of
politics that persisted longer here than elsewhere on the continent.5
Central America, therefore, was distinctive in two different, even
paradoxical, ways relative to the rest of Latin America. Ranking higher in
the dispersion of destructive power throughout the nineteenth century, it
gave birth to states that achieved remarkable success, by the second third
of the twentieth century, in consolidating and deploying fairly unified
instruments of coercion. One could add that in general, this trans-
formation constituted the only success of the Central American states
(outside Costa Rica), whose governments tended increasingly to base their
rule on the deployment of violence. A historically grounded explanation
of the intensity and scope of state-sponsored violence in twentieth-century
Central America will rest on the answers to two key questions. How can
the displacement of violence upward, from caudillo armies to state armies,
4 While 'authoritarianism, militarism and violence' have been 'transitory' features

elsewhere in Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay) they have been
'quotidian, traditional and permanent' in Central America, rooted in the isthmus'
'economic reality, social organisation and political culture'. Rodolfo Cerdas Cruz, El
desencanto democrdtico: Crisis de partidosy transicion democrdtica en Centro Americay Panamd
(San Jose, C. R., 1993), pp. 21, 23.
5 A species of caudillo, identified as 'oligarchic dictators' in Lynch's quasi-evolutionary
schema of caudillismo, endured in Central America beyond their natural lifespan
elsewhere; while retaining caudillist features such as personalism, patronage and the
use of violence, the post- 870s dictators worked in a more centralised environment and
confronted more complex social forces. 'The sanction behind the modern dictatorships,
it is true, was still violence and state terror, but the political process was no longer as
crude as that of their predecessors.' John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, I8oo-i8so
(New York, 1992), pp. 429-30. A descriptive treatment of this period of 'caudillismo
frente a constitucionalismo' that highlights its centralizing tendencies, especially in the
deployment of violence, is Arturo Taracenca Arriola, 'Liberalismo y poder politico en
Centroamerica (I870-1929)', in Las republicas agroexportadoras (I87o-I94y), ed. Victor
Hugo Acuna Ortega, Tomo IV of Historia general de centroamerica (Madrid, I993), pp.
I67-254. For an analysis of the earlier period of caudillo rule that emphasises the
'devastating' rivalry among regional strongmen, see R. L. Woodward, 'Central
America from Independence to c. I870', Cambridge History of Latin America, ed.
Leslie Bethell, Vol. III, From Independence to c. 1870 (Cambridge, I985), pp. 471-506.
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
analysis is suggested by Charles Tilly's study of the statemaking process

in Europe, the birthplace of the modern nation-state.
Tilly argued that in Europe statemaking in many ways was warmaking,
with the state augmenting its own use of violence as it eliminated regional
competitors and overcame potential rivals in the non-state sphere.7 But in
the very midst of this 'warmaking-statemaking', the European states also
bargained with their constituents over the limits of state-sponsored
violence: 'The process of bargaining with ordinary people for their
acquiescence and their surrender of resources - money, goods, labour
power - engaged the civilian managers of the state in establishing the
limits to state control, perimeters to state violence, and mechanisms for
eliciting the consent of the subject population.' People gained oppor-
tunities to participate in politics while the state extended its rule and its
repressive apparatus, though under conditions shaped by the bargaining
process.8
In Central America, also, warmaking drove the displacement of violence
upward from regional strongmen and local bosses to central authorities,
defining the modern-day 'perimeters to state violence'. But the process
here relative to that in Europe and elsewhere in Latin America was not
only more concentrated in time (c. I870-1930), and not only redistributed
violence more radically (i.e., from greater relative dispersion to greater
relative concentration), but also resulted in a markedly more generous
'perimeter' to the exercise of violence by the middle of the twentieth
century in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Therefore,
it is to the period beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century that
6 By 'violence' I mean physical harm inflicted on people or their property; for a

discussion of violence in these terms, see Torcuato S. Di Tella, Latin American Politics:
A Theoretical Framework (Austin, 1990), pp. 76-9. By 'limits' I mean the freedom of state
agents to (a) both define and control (through sanctions or inducements) enemies of the
state, (b) avoid punishment for committing 'illegal' acts (i.e., impunity), and (c)
informally deputise non-state agents in the exercise of state-sponsored violence (death
squads). Variations in the elasticity of these freedoms would constitute shifts in the
limits of state-sponsored violence. While such variations would be most conspicuous
during periods of intense change, it is above all the secular character of these limits,
their routinised, taken-for-granted quality over the course of decades and centuries,
that would be of greatest relevance to the study of violence in the region. I borrowed
the phrase 'upward displacement' from Perry Anderson, who applied it to the process
by which power was transferred from feudal lords to the absolutist state in Lineages of
the Absolutist State (London, I979), p. I9.
7 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capitaland European States, AD g9o-I99o (Cambridge MA, 99o0)
pp. 68-9.
8 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984), pp.
9-IO.
we must turn in order to comprehend the well-known outcome - military

domination, the fierce repression of reformers and reform movements,
state terrorism, and impunity for the perpetrators of repression.
At the moment, only the broadest of generalisations may be ventured
about the transition from local and regional power holders to state-
controlled instruments of coercion and surveillance in Central America.
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
limits of state-sponsored violence owing to its unique land tenure patte

and a more 'capital-oriented' oligarchy. US intervention or hegemony
also said to play a role, particularly after 1940, though the reasoning he
is often vague and contradictory. The basic picture that emerges in th
literature is of a military-dominated, dictatorial state ruling on behalf
oligarchical or foreign interests everywhere in the isthmus by the lat
I93os except in Costa Rica, where the limits of state-sponsored violenc
were sharply restricted after the collapse of General Tinoco's golpista
9
regime in I 919.
Nevertheless, the mechanisms governing the transition from local and
regional power holders to a unified state apparatus of coercion and control
in Central America remain almost completely unknown, while neither the
relative level of centralisation nor its character and timing can be specified
with confidence. By returning to the two 'key questions' proposed above
it should be possible to develop empirically sound analyses of the
transition in each country. Tilly's claim that the European transition was
9 For standard interpretations of the transition see two articles by Nicolas Mariscal,
'Regimenes politicos en El Salvador', Estudios Universitarios, no. 365 (marzo 1979), pp.
139-52, and 'Militares y reformismo en El Salvador', Estudios Centroamericanos,
no. 351/352 (enero-febrero 1978), pp. 9-27; Ronald H. McDonald, 'Civil-Military
Relations in Central America: The Dilemmas of Political Institutionalisation', in
Howard Wiarda (ed.), Rift and Revolution: The Central American Imbroglio (Washington,
1984), pp. I29-66; Alain Rouquie, The Military and the State in Latin America, trans.
Paul E. Sigmund (Berkeley, 1987), Chap. 5; Lynch, Caudillos, pp. 425-30; Rodolfo
Pastor, Historia de Centroamerica (Mexico, 1988; reprint, Guatemala, I990), pp. 191-196,
2I0-12 (page references are to reprint edition); Rafael Guidos Vejar, El ascenso del
militarismo en El Salvador (San Salvador, I988); and a critical analysis of some of the
theories by Steve C. Ropp, 'Teorias sobre el comportamiento de los militares
centroamericanos', Estudios Centroamericanos, no. 451/452 (mayo-junio 1986), pp.
411-30.
marked by a combination of violence and negotiation furnishes an

especially suggestive framework to govern the isthmian investigation.
When and under what conditions was the transition mediated by
bargaining? By violence? Among whom did bargaining take place? What,
under the social conditions prevailing in Central America, was exchanged?
The literature reviewed above suggests an unproblematic answer to
these questions. Whatever bargaining accompanied the centralisation of
state coercive power was a transaction limited to caudillos and the elite
interests they protected.'? As a result, the process of upward displacement
merely had the effect of amplifying the limits of official violence, the state
in essence absorbing the protective function of the caudillos. Bargaining
with the lowly over protection from state-sponsored violence was not an
option for two reasons: the agro-export development strategy that
prevailed after 1870 depended above all on the elite's continued use of
force to ensure ready access to land and labour; while racism in ethnically
divided societies further inhibited elite interest in conceding protective
privileges. These conditions prevailed to a much lesser extent in Costa
Rica, and as a result the bargaining process struck deeper roots there.
Moreover, whereas a developing sense of nationality and citizenship
among subalterns could have acted to restrict the limits of state violence,
as they apparently did in Europe,1 the majority of the inhabitants of
Central America shared little or no sense of national identity. They served
not in citizen armies but as impressed peasants and Indians, in effect
'foreigners' in a nation defined by the elite. And so military power was
never 'nationalised' but remained instead an elite tool; the absence of
nationalism thus led to expanded limits for state violence. After the 1930s,
bargaining was unnecessary as the elites increasingly relied on the United
States for military assistance.12
While elements of this interpretation may be sustained empirically, as
a whole it omits essential features of the transition to a more centralised
management of violence. My alternative hypothesis is that bargaining

between the state and subalterns was a much more common feature of the
transition than the conventional view would suggest, while contested

notions of citizenship and nationality in fact played important roles in the
bargaining process. Although US military and police assistance con-
tributed decisively to the Central American regimes' capacities for violence,
bargaining over the deployment and application of violence did not cease
1o Caudillos in their relation with the popular sector were largely the agents of the elite,
whose interests they protected from popular insurgency and social unrest; caudillos
were 'the necessary gendarme'. Lynch, Caudillos, pp. 234-6.
11 Tilly, Coercion, Capital, pp. I03-4, 122-4.
12 Tilly himself proposes this possibility for Third World societies after World War II;
Coercion, Capital, pp. 218-23.
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
Bargaining, it must be recalled, was the soul of the patron-client

relationship that defined caudillismo. Caudillos may well have served elite
interests, but their ability to do so rested on a relationship of exchange
between them and their clients. The patron-client system itself began on
the hacienda, which served as the 'model' of caudillismo in Latin America,
according to Lynch:
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
13 Lynch, Caudillos, p. 406. 14 Ibid., pp. 433-7, 4-5.

15 The classic expositions of this model are Eric Wolf, 'Aspects of Group Relations in a
Complex Society: Mexico', American Anthropologist, vol. 58 (1956), pp. I065-78 and
John Duncan Powell, 'Peasant Society and Clientelist Politics', American Political
Science Review, vol. 64, no. 2 (June 1970), pp. 411-25. For a subsequent refinement, see
S. N. Eisenstadt and L. Roniger, Patrons, Clients and Friends: Interpersonal Relations and
the Structure of Trust in Society (Cambridge, I984), pp. 231-44.
here;16 collaboration does, however. Although patron-client bargaining

takes place within a vertical power relationship of gross inequality, it
embraces three kinds of contradictions:
[F]irst, a rather peculiar combination of inequality and asymmetry in power with

seeming mutual solidarity expressed in terms of personal identity and
interpersonal sentiments and obligations; second, a combination of potential
coercion and exploitation with voluntary relations and mutual obligations; third,
a combination of emphasis on such mutual obligations and solidarity... with the
somewhat illegal or semi-legal aspect of these relations.17
The historiography of what may be broadly classified as 'caudillismo', not

only in the isthmian countries but in all Latin America, has dwelled almost
entirely on the unequal and coercive features of the patron-client
relationship. Yet its solidaristic and voluntary aspects, above all in
combination with the historic exaltation of violence and clientelism's
endless potential for coercion, decisively shaped the modern-day limits

state-sponsored violence in Central America. As the agents of the state a
the local agents of subaltern groups bargained (not over 'democracy' b
over special services or dispensations), the outcome favoured th
expansion of Tilly's 'perimeters to state violence' and the privilege
impunity for the agents of that violence, notwithstanding their status
leaders or followers, patrons or clients.
In a pathbreaking study of state formation and violence in El Salvado
Ana Patricia Alvarenga wrote that after the process of state build
began in the I87os, clientelism was the rule as
government supporters, especially local leaders and occasionally base organiser
received favors for participating in campaigns. In exchange for participation
most political activists received only the satisfaction of belonging to a group t
they perceived to be powerful, and also the hope that, when they got in trou
the authorities would give them special consideration.
The popular sectors as well as the state turned increasingly to violence

political mobilisation increased. The state's use of civilian collaborators
the application of violence and terror, a practice that began in t
countryside in the i88os and culminated in the organisation of ORDEN
the rural and anti-communist group that recruited some oo00,000 peasa
in the 1970s, divided rural communities and further inflamed t
16 In their classic theoretical treatment of caudillismo, Eric R. Wolf and Edward C. Han
affirmed that caudillo leadership rested heavily on the demonstration of masculinit
which they defined as two closely related attributes: the domination of females and
readiness to deploy violence; see Eric R. Wolf and Edward C. Hansen, 'Caudil
Politics: A Structural Analysis,' Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 9, no
(January I967), pp. 174, I77. For thick (and entertaining) description, see John Char
Chasteen's recent reconstruction of the careers of the Saravia brothers, Heroes
Horseback: A Life and Times of the Last Gaucho Caudillos (Albuquerque, I995), ch.
17 Eisenstadt and Roniger, Patrons, Clients and Friends, p. 49.
countryside. 'Terrorism ... became fully integrated into the national

culture based on the violent resolution of social conflict in all spheres of
power relations. Terrorism went beyond the limits of the State, to be
present in daily relations between different social classes and within them'.
In El Salvador the distinction between violence carried out by public
officials and that by civilians became increasingly blurred:
In such a society there is no clear distinction about the control of repressive

mechanisms: it was socially accepted that civilians acted as policemen. With
groups of armed civilians, and violating the legal order, landlords tried to impose
their will on peasants and even on other rival men.... In sum, in El Salvador the
legal framework was not a respected social code. To impose power, the
cooperation of armed men was more important than being on the side of the
law.18
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....
Thus did the ladinos succeed in dividing Indian communities throughout

Guatemala as Indian militias sometimes even put down rebellions by
other Indians. While this strategy did not succeed in completely
subordinating the communities to the ladino authorities, its success in
securing Indian participation in what Carmack calls 'the political order'
18 Ana Patricia Alvarenga, 'Reshaping the Ethics of Power: A History of Violence in
Western Rural El Salvador, 1880-1932', unpubl. PhD diss., University of Wisconsin,
1994, pp. 23I-65, 267, 289, 365-78, 62, 7I-2.
19 Knut Walter and Philip J. Williams, 'The Military and Democratization in El
Salvador', Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, vol. 35, no. I (I993),
p. 47.
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
20 Robert M. Carmack, 'State and Community in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala: The

Momostenango Case', in Carol A. Smith (ed.), Guatemalan Indians and the State: I540 to
I988 (Austin, I990), pp. II6-36; quote is at p. 121. For the deployment of Indian
community militias in his own personal defence by Manuel Estrada Cabrera
(I898-I920), see Richard N. Adams, Etnicidad en el ejercito de la Guatemala liberal
(I871-191I) (Guatemala, I995), pp. 28-30.
21 Michael J. Schroeder, 'To Defend Our Nation's Honor: Toward a Social and Cultural
History of the Sandino Rebellion in Nicaragua, 1927-1934', unpubl. PhD diss.,
University of Michigan, 1993, pp. II4, I25-6, I96, 202, 209, 353-4, 77. See also his
article in this issue of the Journal.
22 Jeffrey L. Gould, 'Vana Ilusidn! The Highlands Indians and the Myth of Nicaragua
Mestiza, I880-I925', Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 73 (August 1993), pp.
420-I.
23 Knut Walter, The Regime of Anastasio Somo.a, 1936-19f6 (Chapel Hill,

97.
For Honduras, Marvin Barahona identified two key institutions in the

transition to centralised control of the means of coercion between I894
and 19 3: clubes politicos organised by caudillos with national aspirations
and the comandantes de armas scattered throughout the country, men who
often simultaneously held departmental governorships. The clubs began
to appear in the I88os, as presidential and legislative candidates for office
promoted themselves by organising dozens and sometimes hundreds of
temporary local committees to carry out propaganda activities. Although
the clubs were apparently overshadowed in importance by the political
preferences of the local 'comandantes de armas', the linkage between the
two institutions and their precise functions in the transition await further
research that may well disclose a very similar pattern to that identified for
El Salvador by Alvarenga.24
What these examples suggest is that the process by which the state
consolidated its control over the means of violence did include
contestation and bargaining with subalterns, but that the outcom

not be read as simply a failed attempt adequately to limit the stat
of violence. The terms of the bargaining had been fixed long ag
system of clientage. As a result, the intensification of state-spo
violence and the expansion of its limits were not solely the respo
of the new centralising states nor of the elites whose intere
basically served, but was also a collaborative project that incl
lowly as well. The examples point to a fundamental continuity b
the age of the caudillos and that of the modern state; as control
means of violence was displaced upward from the caudillos to the
state, traditions of personalism and clientage were not disca
maintained as the state in effect informally deputed subalterns t
its behalf in return for protection and favours - a policy that rei
budding culture of violence, with disastrous consequences.
Internationalisation
The period of statemaking that opened in Central America in the

of the nineteenth century coincided exactly with the onse
increasingly dominating presence in the region by US business
and the US government. Small, weak and divided, the emerging
of the isthmus furnished irresistible targets for an expansionist pow
in effect became a kind of transnational caudillo, distributing fav
acquiring clients by playing on elite divisions. The United
24 Marvin Barahona, 'Caudillismo y politica en Honduras (i894-1913)', paper

at the conference, 'Estado, participaci6n politica e identidad nacional en Cent
siglos XIX y XX', San Jose, Costa Rica, 23-25 February I995.
collaborated in the extension of the 'perimeters to state violence' by

arming favoured factions, intervening militarily on their behalf, and using
nonviolent devices (threats, bribes, loans, diplomatic recognition and so
on) to manipulate governments in power. Stability and deference to US
interests, Washington's principal objectives, were increasingly sought
through the selective enhancement of coercive power at the disposal of US
clients.25
World War II marks the division between two periods in the
internationalisation of state violence that correspond to the level of
consolidation of the forces of coercion. By about I940, unified military
and police institutions had everywhere succeeded in monopolising the use
of large-scale violence. Before 1940 US military power was likely to be
applied directly, above all in Nicaragua and Honduras, the last to
consolidate state coercive control; although the demonstration effect on
the rest of the isthmus was considerable, direct intervention was
unnecessary in Guatemala and El Salvador precisely because of the high
levels of violence-induced stability and compliance with United States
interests there.
With the generalised achievement of unchallenged control over the

means of coercion by the Central American states, Washington began to
focus on the new military and police institutions, gradually converting
them into accessories of US military power. Virtually unmediated
channels of communication between US and Central American military
authorities for the conveyance of materiel, training services, advice and
technical support by a variety of US military, police and intelligence
agencies were opened as early as the 1920S in Nicaragua but were
formalised throughout the region by the I94os, and expanded con-
tinuously through the I98os.26 While the precise domestic impact of
outside collaboration with state-sponsored violence is notoriously difficult
to gauge,27 US collaboration with state-sponsored violence in Central
America can for our purposes be analysed most profitably along two
25 Norman A. Bailey elaborated inventively on international expressions of caudillaje in

'The United States as Caudillo', Journal of Inter-American Studies, vol. 5 (July I963), pp.
3 3-24. The essential role of arms transfers in international caudillaje was developed
by Christopher C. Shoemaker and John Spanier, Patron-Client State Relationships:
Multilateral Crises in the Nuclear Age (New York, i984), pp. 14-15.
26 A quantitative analysis of the pace, magnitude and character of US collaboration can
be found in Robert H. Holden, 'The Real Diplomacy of Violence: United States
Military Power in Central America, I950-1990', The International History Review, vol.
XV, no. 2 (May I993), pp. 283-322.
27 For an excellent review of the problem see Deborah J. Gerner, 'Weapons for
Repression? United States Arms Transfers to the Third World', in Michael Stohl and
George A. Lopez (eds.), Terrible Beyond Endurance? The Foreign Policy of State Terrorism
(New York, I988), pp. 247-80.
distinct dimensions: the extent to which it augmented (a) the capacity of

state agents to apply violence, and (b) the limits of state violence.
The first dimension, in theory, can be measured by assembling before-
and-after inventories of material resources, personnel skills and the like.
That US transfers enhanced capacity is scarcely debatable; the question is,
by how much? Assuming the availability of appropriate documentation,
a rough estimate of the proportion of coercive capacity attributable to the
United States could be derived.28 The second dimension, limits, is partly
a function of capacity but even more so of features of Central American
history already reviewed above, i.e., caudillismo and collaboration. The
claim that those limits were shaped decisively by such 'international'
factors as foreign demand for coffee, which led to coercive labour relations
and land expropriations administered by the state, is contradicted by the
Costa Rican case. Nor did US military and police transfers significantly
enhance the limits of state-sponsored violence in Central America, which
were constructed within the region over a period of at least I 50 years. By
the 940s, the expansive character of those limits had already been defined.
Washington's collaboration with regional military and police bodies
served mainly to enhance both their effectiveness and their legitimacy (in
the ideological realm) as bulwarks against world communism (and
therefore any individual or group who could plausibly be associated
with world communism). The US programme of modernising and
expanding the capacity for violence unquestionably inhibited tendencies
favouring the reduction of the limits of state-sponsored violence. But
'modernisation' of the means of coercion was and remains the byword of
this kind of US intervention; it must not be confused with the creation of
conflict or with the augmentation of the limits of state violence, even if it
did contribute materially to the maintenance of those limits.
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
28 See Holden, 'The Real Diplomacy of Violence', pp. 307-II.
extending, consolidating and above all publicly identifying the limits of

state-sponsored violence than the practice of subaltern collaboration. The
ensuing internationalisation of state violence only hardened those limits,
now jealously guarded by military and police units authorised by their
northern benefactor to defend the limits in the name of anti-communism.
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.
45 o Robert H. Holden
the military in different proportions depending on the proximity of

those points to one pole or the other. One may detect points of
' accommodation' or' relative equilibrium' between the two forces, civilian
and military, tending in one direction or the other. It follows that policies
directed towards reducing the military's strength and augmenting civilian
power will bit by bit drive society towards full civilian control of the
military. Hence one may logically speak of a 'transition to democracy' or
'redemocratisation', or of a contrary 'remilitarisation'. State-sponsored
violence is therefore explained according to the level of military autonomy,
in a spectrum ranging from direct rule by the military to increasing
control by civilians over the military.
Secondly, the literature on civil-military relations frequently suggests
that the military, along with the state of which it is a part, has somehow
managed to extirpate itself from society altogether. Thus, controlling the
military is a matter of strengthening civil society vis-a-vis the state, or (in
the Dahlian tradition) encouraging the formation of a plurality of
institutions and associations capable of counterbalancing the state.
According to this tradition, Latin Americans have a state but no civil
society, or at any rate a civil society insufficiently informed, mobilised or
organised.30 What is too rarely acknowledged is that civil society,
understood as that realm of public life beyond the grip of the state, is
neither democracy itself nor is it necessarily capable of spawning
democracy, particularly where clientelism predominates, a problem that I
will return to below.
The burden of my argument is not that historians and political scientists

have ignored the play of class interests, economic forces or social
pressures in the study of military rule; they manifestly have not done so,
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).
as the 'bureaucratic-authoritarian' literatuie, and much of the work that

preceded it, demonstrates.31 Nor is my critique intended to question the
validity or importance of the research carried out within the civil-military
relations paradigm. The point is that the dependent variable has been
largely limited to 'the military' and to 'military rule', when in fact victims
of state-sponsored violence experience not merely the military or the
police or their surrogates but civilian bureaucrats, professional politicians,
judges and non-state actors who happen to enjoy informal access to state
agents whether the military is 'in power' or not. The historically and culturally
conditioned limits on the exercise of violence that were established during
the secular process of state formation shaped the behaviour of soldiers and
civilians alike. Further, civil society itself frequently tolerates or even
collaborates in the application of violence and the maintenance of its
limits. To return to Giddens: 'The issues raised by the existence of the
modern military must concern not just the distinction between civil and
military regimes, but the use of force in the process of governing.'32
Therefore, neither of the two principal assumptions underlying the
literature on civil-military relations can be said to fit Central American
reality. For that reason, I have sought in this article to subordinate the
notion of a continuum of civilian versus military power and to substitute
that of variations in the limits of state-sponsored violence. Detecting the
limits of state-sponsored violence means more than identifying the
constitutional space occupied by men in uniform. Civilian state agents as
well as the military and the police institutions operate in a certain socio-
political context in which the limits of state violence have been shaped
over the course of decades, or even centuries. These limits are of course
subject to redefinition by the military institutions themselves, but their very
freedom to do so is itself a function of historically defined limits. The generous
character of these limits may furnish non-military state agents as much
freedom to act as the men in uniform. Authoritarianism, impunity and the
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.
4 5 2 Robert H. Holden
kind of corruption that one associates with violence33 are characteristic

not only of the formal institutions of coercion but also of the state's
civilian institutions, and even of much of the private sector. They are such
well-rooted and extensive elements of the national political culture of
Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala that it is wrong to lump them
together as a problem in 'militarisation' or 'the military domination of
society'.
The first step in understanding the sources of'militarism' in Central
America is to look beyond the military as an institution. The proper
referent is state-sponsored violence, and the controlling question should
be: 'How were the limits of state-sponsored violence established?' One
way is to map the process by which state-sponsored violence has been
diffused and reconcentrated over time by imagining the existence of state
and non-state fields of violence divided by shifting, porous and
overlapping borders defined over the course of state formation. This way
of framing the problem links the components of a structure of violence
that underlies the prominence of the military in politics and addresses that
structure. The question is not, 'Why does the military dominate politics?'
but 'Why does violence dominate politics?' This framework turns away
from discourse about institutions and places the emphasis where it should
be: on social relationships.34
'The military' has never acted independently of other, non-military
agents of the state, and none of those agents has ever acted independently
of civil society. Both the clientelist and corporatist traditions in Latin
America have supplied multiple opportunities for reciprocal exchange
between 'state' and 'society'; the evident potency of vertical linkages
stemming from the hierarchical, non-contractual character of both
traditions effectively refutes the state-society dichotomy argument.35 It
follows that a distinctively Central American or Latin American pattern of
state-sponsored violence cannot be attributed to one institution but to the
particular way in which violence was diffused across many different kinds
33 Laura Kalmanowiecki insightfully links police corruption and violence in 'Police,
People, and Preemption in Argentina', in Martha K. Huggins (ed.), Vigilantism and the
State in Modern Latin America (New York, I991), pp. 47-60.
34 This line of argument is bolstered by Michael Mann's dictum to think about societies
not as ensembles of 'subsystems' but as 'multiple overlapping and intersecting
sociospatial networks of power,' in which organisation and function are not
coterminous but highly elastic, capricious or 'promiscuous' over time. The Sources of
Social Power, vol. I, A History of Powerfrom the Beginning to A.D. i76o (Cambridge, 1986),
Ch. I.
35 Fernando Garcia Argaiaris, 'The Mechanisms of Accommodation: Bolivia, 195 2-71,'
Review (Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and
Civilizations), vol. XV, no. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 292-94, develops this point to explain
the frequency of transactions that 'blur the boundaries between the state and the
private realm'.
State Violence in Central America 4 3
of social relationships and reconcentrated in particular ways within the

organs of state power. Yet only rarely has the historic imbrication of the
civilian or non-state sphere (at both the elite and the subaltern levels) and
the state been recognised by scholars of Latin America; research aimed at
uncovering the articulation of the two, such as that of Alvarenga, is rarer
still. For Central America, the following uncommon observations, made
at three widely separated moments during the twentieth century, merit
citation; they acknowledge a feature of state-sponsored violence that has
so far largely escaped the attention of researchers.
Dana Munro observed in 91 8 that military officers in Central America,
despite their 'immense power', were 'usually merely the tools of the
civilian politicians, who secure their support by giving them money and
conferring military honors upon them'.36 Mario Monteforte Toledo's
history of the isthmus concluded that
Many social sectors, not only the oligarchy, prefer order and stability under the
military to the uncertainty of free political struggle and the possibility of
structural transformations. One cannot exclude from this attitude a great number
of Indian peasants, artisans, privileged workers and sectors of the middle class
and a good part of the bureaucracy, which has nothing to fear from a new regime
that takes over without commitments [compromisos] and without party members
to whom it must provide public employment. Nor do young professionals or
ambitious businessmen, who see the possibility of advancement under the
protection of a team that always needs members of that sector to govern and to
mobilise the economy;...37
Twenty years later, Edelberto Torres-Rivas observed that 'In Central
America the authoritarians are not only the military but numerous social
forces of society [sic] that call on them and utilise them'.38
Alain Rouquie's equally trenchant observation on Bolivia is a reminder
that in this respect, at least, Central America is not unique in the
continent:
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.
A similar situation prevails in Argentina, Rouquie continued, leading him

to suggest that liberal-constitutionalism 'must confront models of
behavior that have been strongly internalised', and that thus require
'profound societal and cultural transformation'. Rouquie is not alone in
making this point, but it is one that seems to be rarely developed beyond
a kind of moralistic admonition, as in Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe
C. Schmitter's observation that
demilitarisation is not a problem referring only to the military. The political

tradition of the countries examined here [i.e., in Latin America] has been plagued
(and continues to be plagued) by civilian politicians who refused to accept the
uncertainties of the democratic process and recurrently appeal to the armed forces
for 'solutions', disguising their personal or group interests behind resounding
invocations of the national interest; in no case has the military intervened without
important and active civilian support.39
Political Culture
Alvarenga's claim that terrorism in El Salvador surpassed the limits of the

state and 'became fully integrated into the national culture' reflects not
only a growing interest among students of Latin America in the
convergence of the themes of violence, culture and fear, but above all an
awareness that it is time to look beyond the military in the search for the
sources of violence.40 Not only intellectuals but practitioners in the fields
of development and human rights are expanding the traditional
boundaries of debate on the subject. A US-based coalition of mainstream
religious bodies issued a call for research proposals in November 1995 in
order to better understand 'political and social violence' in Peru and
Chile, where:
39 Alain Rouquie, 'Demilitarization and the Institutionalization of Military-dominated

Polities in Latin America', in Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter and
Laurence Whitehead (eds.), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives
(Baltimore, 1986), part 2, p. 133. For O'Donnell and Schmitter's comment, see
'Opening (and Undermining) Authoritarian Regimes', in the same volume part 4,
p. 3I.
40 For a brief critical review of social-science approaches to national-level violence
Kay B. Warren, 'Introduction: Revealing Conflicts Across Cultures & Disciplines',
Warren (ed.), The liolence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Natio
(Boulder, I993), pp. 1-24. An excellent review of some recent work on the Andes
Enrique Mayer's 'Patterns of Violence in the Andes', Latin American Research Revie
vol. 29, no. 2 (I994), pp. 14I-7I. Also see James B. Greenberg, Blood Ties: Life
Violence in Rural Mexico (Tucson, I989); Frank Graziano, Divine Violence: Spectac
Psychosexuality & Radical Christianity in the Argentine 'Dirty War' (Boulder, I9
Deborah Poole (ed.), Unruly Order: Violence, Power, and Cultural Identity in the Hi
Provences of Southern Peru (Boulder, 1994); Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen,
Manuel Antonio Garret6n (eds.), Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in La
America (Berkeley, 1992); and some of the essays in Martha K. Huggins (e
Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America (New York, I99 ).
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
In short, after two decades of shunning and disparagement, political

culture theory has returned, as Gabriel A. Almond, its principal architect,
exulted not long ago.42 Long hindered by a conception of 'culture' as a
timeless entity, theories that drew on it as an explanatory variable were
notoriously unable to explain change over time. An alternative image of
culture as a kind of portable inventory of meanings and social practices,
itself shaped by interaction with institutions and structures of domination,
has since emerged. Ann Swidler's seminal contribution to the debate over
culture's causal role in directing human action regards 'cultural products'
as a kind of resource base, a toolkit or repertoire out of which strategies
of action are constructed. Arguing for a restoration of culture 'to a central
place in contemporary social science', Swidler urged a search for
new analytic perspectives that will allow more effective concrete analyses of how
culture is used by actors, how cultural elements constrain or facilitate patterns of
action, what aspects of a cultural heritage have enduring effects on action, and
what specific historical changes undermine the vitality of some cultural patterns
and give rise to others.43
Similarly, Harry Eckstein affirmed the explanatory value of 'political'

culture, understood as learned orientations to action, by emphasising
culture's flexibility and proposing a way to reconcile the continuity
implied by a cultural approach with political transformation.44 Alicia
Hernandez Chavez recently resurrected the concept to frame a reinter-
41 Interfaith Hunger Appeal, 'Interfaith Hunger Appeal Announces Grants For Overseas
Research', Internet bulletin, Nov. 3, 1995. The Appeal identified its 'partner agencies'
as Catholic Relief Services, Church World Service, Lutheran World Relief and the
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
42 Gabriel A. Almond, 'Foreword: The Return to Political Culture,' in Larry Diamond
(ed.), Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries (Boulder, I993), pp. ix-xi.
43 Ann Swidler, 'Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies', American Sociological Review,
vol. 5I (April i986), p. 284.
44 Harry Eckstein, 'A Culturalist Theory of Political Change', American Political Science
Review, vol. 82, no. 3 (September i988), pp. 789-803. Political culture as a 'historical
creation', and its reciprocal relationship with political action, are stressed by Keith
Baker, 'Introduction', in Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture
in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), p. Io. Ruth Lane analyses the application of
the concept since its introduction in 1956 by Gabriel Almond, favourably assessing its
utility for integrating 'the sociological and the individual' in 'Political Culture:
Residual Category or General Theory', Comparative Political Studies, vol. 25, no. 3
(October I992), pp. 362-87.
pretation of Mexico's political history, defining political culture as

'normas de convivencia', variable over time and space, fashioned by
individuals 'para dar orden a traves de la politica a las diferencias y
tensiones que se dan entre ellos.'45
Among historians of the region, no one has searched more diligently
for (and written more convincingly about) the roots of a distinctive
political culture in Latin America than Richard Morse, who conceded that
his subject was a 'ticklish' one. Beginning with the colonial period, Morse
argued for the primacy of patrimonialism (via neo-Scholasticism) over
feudalism in Spain and her territories overseas, giving rise to societies
guided not only by the familiar (to North Americans) individual ethic, but
a 'relational ethic' that has yielded 'structures of authority [as opposed
to structures of legal-rational domination] and casuistical applications of
principle....' The result is a political culture as readily capable of
association with 'hierocracy' as with 'democracy'.46 Norbert Lechner
gingerly grasped this thread, juxtaposing the absence of a 'democratic
culture' with unspecified lines of continuity between dictatorial regimes
and the distant past, in which 'authoritarianism belongs to a past cycle
and expresses its crisis'. Lechner, recognising that not all interpretations of
authoritarianism can be reduced to the socioeconomic structure, suggests
that values and beliefs have played a role. And it is clear that 'democratic'
values and beliefs have not been prominent among them.47 Similarly, in
his study of Latin American 'regimes of exception', Brian Loveman
postulated a 'diverse, but widely shared, Spanish American political
culture' whose central feature he identified as 'a lack of consensus
regarding the legitimacy of any particular political regime and a tend

for violence to determine the timing and character of governm
succession', as well as 'a nasty mixture of Spanish and liberal intoler
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.
for so-called enemies of the state, factions, and subversives. Opponents

were dangerous enemies and critics were heretics who threatened the
revealed truth of the new order - and the government in power'.48
One of the most suggestive statements of the connection between
culture and state-sponsored violence appeared in a recent study by a
special commission of the Peruvian Senate. It identified 'structural
violence' as the outcome of a long-term process in which 'order, legality,
and the organisation of power become expressions of a structural violence
that accumulates, reproduces itself, and tends to perpetuate itself...'. Such
violence is rooted in asymmetrical power relations that go back to the
Incan era and that have impeded the formation of an integrated and
democratic nation. The state, which has habitually preferred violence to
dialogue and negotiation, reflects the broader social conditions of
violence: 'In effect, with violence operating at the centre of social
dynamics, a society was structured with authoritarian patterns and
behaviours that led the State, in its composition and in its behaviour, to
express itself as an entity that developed tendencies toward privileging the
use of violence, coating it with legality.' The threat of violence or the use
of violence make up part of the political repertoire at the disposal of
various social groups. What the Commission called 'illegitimate' state
violence 'is in reality part of the historically accumulated structural
violence' of Peruvian society.49 The Commission goes so far as to identify
an underlying 'culture of violence' in Peru:
In a generic way one can argue that the process of socialisation in Peru, through
the family, school, social relations and communications media, has collaborated
in the creation of a culture of violence [emphasis in original], which stands in the
background and reinforces other manifestations of violence.50
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.
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
51 Mayer, 'Patterns of Violence', pp. 143-4. 52 Greenberg, Blood Ties.

53 But Chasteen, in his haste to disavow cultural determinism, argues that 'cultural
patterns are entirely as contingent as economic ones, in process no less constantly and
multidimensionally', thus undermining (it would seem) the explanatory power of the
very 'conditioning factors' that he is attempting to illustrate. 'Fighting Words: The
Discourse of Insurgency in Latin American History', Latin American Research Review,
vol. 28, no. 3 (1993), pp. 83-1 I2.
54 El tamao, pp. 38, 41, 29. Similarly, Franz Hinkelammert noted that in Central America,
'the first thing that a government requires of the opposition is to demonstrate that it
is not its enemy. The opposition must constantly demonstrate that it is a defender of
the social system in order to be accepted.' Hinkelammert, 'El concepto de lo politico
segiin Carl Schmitt', in Lechner (ed.), Cultura politica, pp. 235-6.
century, according to Torres-Rivas, a political culture of authoritarianism

has been evident in: (i) the absence of fair elections; (2) a persistent
inability to distinguish between the public and the private spheres; (3) the
arbitrary and discretional quality of many public functions; and (4) a
political intolerance that turns politics into warfare, a 'sickness... that is
contagious and endemic'.55
Conclusions
I have tried to suggest that treating state-sponsored violence as a mere

derivative of class conflict and international economic forces, or as a
problem in civil-military relations, hinders much-needed research into its
sources and persistence while undervaluing its broad, constitutive
character. During the twentieth century Central America has been scarred
by this kind of violence as few other Latin American societies have been.
A description of the mechanisms by which caudillo violence was
transformed (albeit at different moments and with distinctive outcomes)
into state violence still awaits us. While historians have traditionally
sought evidence of resistance to the state, it seems likely that clientelist
politics led to a certain level of collaboration (or at least a tacit agreement
not to cooperate with those who resisted) with the agents of state
violence, on the part of subalterns as well as different factions of the elite.
The limits of state-sponsored violence were thus constructed well before
the large-scale intrusion of foreign military power that began with World
War II. Washington's subsequent modernisation and expansion of the
region's military and police forces decisively enhanced the capacity for
state violence while inhibiting any tendencies towards contraction in the
limits. Contraction was also inhibited by a distinctive political culture in
which clientelism and the recourse to violence had practically become, to
quote Cerdas, 'quotidian, traditional and permanent'.56 The armed forces
and their police agencies on the isthmus achieved an extraordinary level
of informal autonomy even for Latin America. But that autonomy was
achieved, and has been sustained, by a correspondingly high level of
tolerance for and collaboration with the state's agents of repression,
among non-military agents of the state and within civil society itself. This
is the dimension of state-sponsored violence that now awaits the attention
of researchers.
55 Torres-Rivas, El tamaio, p. 29. 56 See note 4.

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Constructing the Limits of State Violence in Central America: Towards a New Research

Abstract. This analysis of the historically high level of sta

The scale and intensity of state-sponsored or 'officia

Yet despite the pivotal role and often catastrophic consequences of

* The author gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Richard N. Adams, Marvin

Robert H. Holden is Assistant Professor of History at Old Dominion University,

Nicaragua during the twentieth century, our understanding of its sources,

democracy' or on explanations of the persistence of authoritarian

1For recent examples of the 'obstacles to democracy' approach, see Die

historiography of the region frequently trivialises the growth of state-

I will begin by exploring both the concept of state-sponsored violence

3 Historically grounded studies of proto-state violence as an autonomous category in this

To a degree unsurpassed elsewhere in Latin America, progress in the

4 While 'authoritarianism, militarism and violence' have been 'transitory' features

analysis is suggested by Charles Tilly's study of the statemaking process

6 By 'violence' I mean physical harm inflicted on people or their property; for a

we must turn in order to comprehend the well-known outcome - military

limits of state-sponsored violence owing to its unique land tenure patte

marked by a combination of violence and negotiation furnishes an

management of violence. My alternative hypothesis is that bargaining

transition than the conventional view would suggest, while contested

Bargaining, it must be recalled, was the soul of the patron-client

13 Lynch, Caudillos, p. 406. 14 Ibid., pp. 433-7, 4-5.

here;16 collaboration does, however. Although patron-client bargaining

[F]irst, a rather peculiar combination of inequality and asymmetry in power with

The historiography of what may be broadly classified as 'caudillismo', not

endless potential for coercion, decisively shaped the modern-day limits

The popular sectors as well as the state turned increasingly to violence

countryside. 'Terrorism ... became fully integrated into the national

In such a society there is no clear distinction about the control of repressive

Thus did the ladinos succeed in dividing Indian communities throughout

20 Robert M. Carmack, 'State and Community in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala: The

23 Knut Walter, The Regime of Anastasio Somo.a, 1936-19f6 (Chapel Hill,

For Honduras, Marvin Barahona identified two key institutions in the

contestation and bargaining with subalterns, but that the outcom

The period of statemaking that opened in Central America in the

24 Marvin Barahona, 'Caudillismo y politica en Honduras (i894-1913)', paper

collaborated in the extension of the 'perimeters to state violence' by

With the generalised achievement of unchallenged control over the

25 Norman A. Bailey elaborated inventively on international expressions of caudillaje in

distinct dimensions: the extent to which it augmented (a) the capacity of

28 See Holden, 'The Real Diplomacy of Violence', pp. 307-II.

extending, consolidating and above all publicly identifying the limits of

the military in different proportions depending on the proximity of

The burden of my argument is not that historians and political scientists

as the 'bureaucratic-authoritarian' literatuie, and much of the work that

kind of corruption that one associates with violence33 are characteristic

of social relationships and reconcentrated in particular ways within the

A similar situation prevails in Argentina, Rouquie continued, leading him

demilitarisation is not a problem referring only to the military. The political

Alvarenga's claim that terrorism in El Salvador surpassed the limits of the

39 Alain Rouquie, 'Demilitarization and the Institutionalization of Military-dominated

In short, after two decades of shunning and disparagement, political

Similarly, Harry Eckstein affirmed the explanatory value of 'political'

pretation of Mexico's political history, defining political culture as

regarding the legitimacy of any particular political regime and a tend

for so-called enemies of the state, factions, and subversives. Opponents

51 Mayer, 'Patterns of Violence', pp. 143-4. 52 Greenberg, Blood Ties.

century, according to Torres-Rivas, a political culture of authoritarianism

I have tried to suggest that treating state-sponsored violence as a mere

55 Torres-Rivas, El tamaio, p. 29. 56 See note 4.

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