Twenty Hanging Dolls and a Lynching: Defacing Dangerousness and Enacting Citizenship in El Alto, Bolivia
The lynching of presumed criminals is an increasingly common phenomenon in the poor peri-urban areas of Bolivia ( Defensor del Pueblo 2008; Goldstein 2005; Mollericona et al. 2007).1 In this essay I present an ethnography that sets the lynchings in relation to both everyday experiences of insecurity about crime and violence in the city of El Alto and the enactment of vecindad (neighborliness), understood here to entail a grounded notion of citizenship ( Lazar 2008). Focusing on the experience and management of insecurity and its paradoxical entanglement with the enactments of citizenship and state- citizen relations, I argue that people’s attempts to remain safe constitute a permanent process of making visible and defacing ( Taussig 1999) dangerousness and criminal subjects vis-à- vis the construction of community and local expressions of citizenship.
Lynchings may be considered “spectacular events” ( Goldstein 2007), instances of a performative practice in which marginal communities can become visible to a state undergoing neoliberal reforms including the privatization of civil security and justice ( Goldstein 2005). Alternatively, lynching may be seen as a sovereign practice and a means by which notions of proper behavior and social order are communicated internally, within a community ( Godoy 2006; Stepputat 2003). But whatever the conceptualization, lynch violence presents a challenge to Max Weber’s classic definition (1958: 82 – 83) of the state as “a compulsory association which organizes domination” and that “has been successful in seeking to monopolize the legitimate use of physical force as a means of domination within a territory.” From this perspective, the Bolivian state would be considered “unsuccessful.” Nevertheless, by applying a dynamic vision of states as historic entities in a “continuous process of construction” ( Hansen and Stepputat 2001: 5), one can develop an ethnographic analysis of the making and unmaking of the Bolivian state through practices, symbols, and rituals. In a similar fashion, the notion of community, as the conceptual counterpart to the state, also becomes denaturalized; in other words, its status as a fixed entity — imagined either as “backward and barbarian” or as a collection of “pure and good subalterns” (the two most popular positions in the Bolivian debate on lynching) — vanishes in the light of an analysis of specific communities and state-citizen relationships, a line of analysis I follow in this article.
Drawing on Veena Das and Deborah Poole’s (2004) writings on state margins, I seek to situate lynch violence ethnographically within the framework of the everyday insecurity about crime and violence that poor people in El Alto experience, as well as illustrate how this kind of “uncivil” ( Caldeira and Holston 1999) violent action becomes simultaneously an assumption of citizenship and a defacement ( Taussig 1999) of both criminals and the Bolivian state. Lynching, then, is the ultimate and lethal practice of defining and marking dangerousness, allowing urban order and community to make their mimetic opposition to the “criminal” and to the state. Central to this analysis is the character of los vecinos, “the neighbors,” who organize in order to prevent crime. By means of street patrols and the production of warning signs and hanged effigies, the neighbors situate lynching in a temporal framework whereby lynching appears not as a violent act carried out by specific people but rather as collective self-defense in reaction against criminal subjects. Further, in the Alteño vernacular, being a neighbor is intimately tied to the notion of citizenship ( Lazar 2008), and it is a central tenet of this analysis that participation in crime prevention becomes a way of enacting citizenship, even when these activities imply engagement in violent and extralegal procedures. My ethnographic exploration into the relational categories of state and citizens asks what becomes of citizens when their status as such coincides with that of the victim of crime and citizenship is enacted through violent, statelike activities such as the punishment of presumed criminals.
Neighbors, Specters, and Margins
The Bolivian media and the general population alike often refer to a lynch mob as los vecinos. In El Alto, as Sian Lazar (2008) points out, neighbor entails a grounded notion of citizenship, in the sense that the term is used as an everyday reference to collective citizenship. Thus participating in the junta de vecinos (neighbor committee) and other social organizations that build the locality’s social and material infrastructure — often in spite of the state — is in El Alto a grounded way of enacting citizenship. Juan Manuel Arbona (2006: 130) emphasizes how, starting in the mid-1980s, the neoliberal structures and reforms that marked the Bolivian state facilitated, as an unintended side effect, the rise of these relatively autonomous local political organizations and networks, in effect generating political agency from below. In a similar vein, Arbona (2008) shows how collective memories of the struggle of Santiago Segundo’s “relocated” miners became articulated in these local networks during the crises of October 2003 (the “Gas War”), when the Bolivian army massacred sixty-seven people and injured five hundred in and around El Alto during the protests that led to then president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s resignation and subsequent flight to the United States. However, with regard to lynch violence carried out by neighbors, to the multiple meanings of the term vecino is added yet another layer. In this regard the neighbors constitute both specific crime victims and a group of enraged citizens. This ambiguous position emphasizes the status of lynchings as both singular — one could be tempted to say “private” — events and collective actions, and it situates the neighbors as a legal “everybody and nobody,” a faceless entity carrying out deadly violence.
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Notes
Foremost, I would like to thank my Alteño interlocutors and friends for engaging with me in the difficult task of doing research on civil (in)security in El Alto. I am particularly grateful to Carmen Mamani Espinal, whose insights helped me enormously in my fieldwork. I would equally like to thank the staff at Centro de Estudios para del Desarrollo Local in El Alto as well as the Instituto de Terapia e Investigación para Victimas de Tortura and the Universidad de la Cordillera in the City of La Paz. I also thank Lotte Buch, Steffen Jensen, Veena Das, Elizabeth Povinelli, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Pamela Calla, who on different occasions offered insightful comments on early drafts of this essay. The essay’s final version also benefited enormously from suggestions by the reviewers for Public Culture.
- In January and February 2008, eleven people died in lynchings in Bolivia; there were also twenty-nine attempted lynchings. In 2007 there were fifty-seven cases of lynchings and attempted lynchings (Defensor del Pueblo 2008). By October 2009, fifteen persons had been killed in lynchings in El Alto that year (La Razón, October 18, 2009).
