Societies of Fear: The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin America

Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Fall 2000 by Policzer, Pablo

Koonings, Kees, and Dirk Kruijt, eds. Societies of Fear The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin America. London: Zed Books, 1999. Table, map, bibliography, index, xii, 335 pp.; hardcover $65, paperback $25.

Why has social and political violence been such an endemic feature of nation building in Latin America? The editors of this book have compiled a volume with an alluring title and an immediately captivating cover, with photos of Abimael Guzman's angry rants behind bars and Augusto Pinochet's self-confident gaze at the height of his power in 1987. The contrast between Pinochet and Guzman suggests the continuities and discontinuities between state and nonstate violence. Which kind of violence is more serious? Are they mutually contradictory or mutually reinforcing? This is an important issue that could well frame the book but, surprisingly, one on which the editors are largely silent.

Latin America, according to Koonings and Kruijt in their introduction, is characterized by socioeconomic inequalities and a legacy of social and political violence. They refer to three types of violence: violence committed to maintain traditional social order, as a necessary component of political modernization and incorporation, and as a product of the consolidation of democratic regimes. This suggests a conventional leftist position: that political violence serves to defend a social order, especially as new sectors are incorporated as a result of political and economic modernization. The same theme is echoed in more polemical instrumental Marxist terms by Edelberto Torres-Rivas's epilogue, which argues, "modern society has done no more than disguise the handing over of power, in its most brutal form, to the legitimate authorities, that depend in the last resort on the possibility of using force" (p. 288). Together, these two chapters take the view that violence in Latin America can largely be attributed to modernity and its trappings of domination, incorporation, and state force.

This is a perfectly plausible view, but it is not the one that serves as the organizing framework for the book. The editors admit that "concrete cases of violence and fear in Latin America are not confined by the analytical typologies of violence" they offer. Instead, the chapters are organized according to an "approach based on an empirical distinction between different contemporary political settings" (pp. 19-20). The first part of the book describes cases of violence in various civil wars, the second part focuses on more secretive violence, and the third on violence in the context of democratization. The book's organizing framework, in other words, is very weak; and not surprisingly, the results are a mixed bag.

In his own chapter on Guatemala and Peru, Kruijt claims that the "civil wars" in each of these countries are fundamentally class conflicts that eventually took on "strong ethnic dimensions" (p. 33). Class inequality is present throughout Latin America, but in Guatemala and Peru the ruling sectors "have succeeded in the creation of a kind of third-class citizenship for their Mayan and Quechua population" (p. 53). Kruijt falls into the common Marxist trap of reading history backwards. He believes that the actual outcome-the rise of Shining Path in Peru, for instance-was the necessary one, given the history of class divisions in the country. Is this the case? What is most striking about Shining Path is not so much the old-the voice of long-simmering grievances Kruijt describes-but the new. The Shining Path under Abimael Guzman succeeded early on because it combined a potent ideology and superb organizational abilities with a monstrous capacity for cruelty.

Carlos Ivan Degregori's excellent chapter on Peru takes up this theme. He corrects Kruijt and affirms that Shining Path was not a reaction against traditional class domination. Instead, as the old hierarchy under the gamonales broke down, Shining Path used unprecedented levels of violence to take their place. For a time, the peasants accepted their new boss and even his punishments (of which Degregori provides a chilling account). But Shining Path abhorred native Andean culture, and in its ruthless struggle for domination its crossed a fundamental cultural line.

Traditionally, patrones and peasants had operated under the code "punish but don't kill" (p. 71). Although the gamonales meted out often severe punishment, they understood that killing transgressors would have left families without economic support and would upset the social order. Shining Path's violent massacres destroyed this balance and created deep resentments. The new masters failed to win legitimacy; and in government-sponsored rondas campesinas, peasants rebelled against, and eventually defeated, the would-be rebels.

Arij Ouweneel and Alan Knight provide similar contrasting perspectives on Mexico. Ouweneel believes the Chiapas rebellion to be an expression of a larger "pan-Indian" movement in Mexico and Guatemala. As evidence, he provides interpretations of the analogies between Zapatista symbols and classic Maya myths. For instance, wearing masks (such as Subcomandante Marcos's famous balaclava) has deep roots in Mayan history. "Faceless and masked men are not only shielded against insult and ridicule or, indeed, against violent assaults; by their masks, they can also act as men ritually transformed into deified warriors" (p. 94).