Histories in Red: Ways of Seeing Lynching in Ecuador (American Ethnologist)

CHRISTOPHER KRUPAEmory University

Histories in red:Ways of seeing lynching in Ecuador

A B S T R A C TIn this article, I examine the ways that ongoing“spectacle” lynchings in highland Ecuador havecome to generate public opposition to the country’sindigenous movement and the politicaltransformations it advocates. Focusing my analysison the recent lynching of an Afro-Ecuadorianmigrant in a small Andean town, I argue for anapproach to public violence that directs attentionback to the body of the victim and the significationsattached to it. I draw influence from studies of U.S.lynchings to ask about the relationship betweenvisual representations of violence and constructionsof political illegitimacy in rapidly transformingsocial formations. [violence, lynching, media,visuality, indigenous peoples, Ecuador, Latin America]

The year 2003 began with a curious twist in Ecuador. Midwaythrough the first month, two overlapping spectacles of neolib-eral hyperbole competed for the national spotlight, each seem-ing to offer a more prescient forecasting of the political challengesfacing Latin American countries at the start of the 21st century.

On the one hand, when Colonel Lucio Gutierrez entered the presiden-tial palace on January 15 to take up his post as Ecuador’s tenth presidentin as many years, he did so on a platform that would have been incon-ceivable at any other moment in history. Gutierrez billed himself as thefigurehead of a new sort of multicultural democracy, bringing 11 indige-nous leaders with him to act as deputies and ministers in his collabora-tive National Congress. Arguably, this alliance was, at the time, the mostradical materialization of the hemispheric commitment to ethnic plural-ism that has otherwise remained a rather empty rhetorical componentof state agendas since the end of the Cold War (Greene 2007; Hale 2002;Postero and Zamosc 2004; Seider 2003). On the other hand, any celebra-tion of political diversity at the center of power was undercut by evidenceof its complete undoing at the margins. On January 15, all eyes were, in-stead, on the small highland town of Cayambe, the center of a primar-ily indigenous region just north of Quito, where only two days earlier, acrowd of 1,000 people had broken Afro-Ecuadorian migrant Edwin MarceloQuinonez out of jail and then out of a hospital, doused him twice in gaso-line, and burned him to death. Quinonez was what Ecuadorians call an“R.C.,” or ratero conocido, a known criminal who had been continually inand out of prison the previous year on charges ranging from weapons vi-olations to rape and murder, many of them involving minors. In the na-tional and international press, images of Quinonez’s flaming, naked bodycompletely upstaged those of President Gutierrez in his ostentatiously new,nonmilitary business attire, generating a flurry of commentary not so muchabout crime as about the extreme measures Cayambenos took to addressit and what they revealed about the prepolitical unconscious lurking insuch off-centered places and among off-centered national subjects. Ac-cording to television reporter Jose Antonio Sanchez, broadcasting live fromthe lynching, the event would be a revelatory moment for the nation, an

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 20–39, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C© 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.01107.x

Histories in red � American Ethnologist

awakening to the existence of a dangerous mindsetthroughout the country that “doesn’t believe in tribunals orpenal codes [and yet] which hides in the dissatisfaction ofthe pueblos [peoples, towns] far removed from central pow-ers” (El Comercio 2003d).

Public lynchings push against the limits of human be-havior and human intelligibility. And yet, perhaps like allacts of violence, they are remarkably efficient producers ofexplanation, of some interpretive framework to tame theunsightly images of burning bodies and collective mur-der and render them more digestible, more knowable. Themoral cartography provided by the Ecuadorian media of-fered the public one such interpretive schema, one that dis-cursively insulated political centers from their peripheriesand elections from lynchings and that kept the figures ofthe new president and the seasoned criminal from bleed-ing into one another. As I show below, however, it did nottake long for this gulf to be breached and for the fates of theyear’s two leading men to completely intertwine.

Across Latin America, where lynchings have becomecommon, almost regular, occurrences over the past twodecades, explanations for public violence have achieveda considerable degree of coherence.1 Angelina SnodgrassGodoy (2004:625) has argued that a “commonsense con-sensus” exists throughout the continent about lynchings,shared by the public, the media, and suprastate organi-zations like the World Bank and USAID: During her workin Guatemala, for instance, Godoy claims, “everyone toldme that lynchings happen because crime is out of controland the justice system is at a virtual standstill” (2004:625,emphasis added). Social scientists have sought to countersuch common interpretations, which reduce lynching tocrime control, by offering a more expansive sort of ex-planation that treats lynchings as agentive moments ofprotest by populations pushed to the absolute limits ofmarginality by neoliberal restructuring programs and cap-italist globalization. As Daniel Goldstein has argued fromhis work in Bolivia, “In the contemporary context of neolib-eralism and the expansion of global capitalism, in whichmany postmodernist nation-states are increasingly con-fronted with their own inability to live up to modernism’spromised future of order, prosperity, and peace, violenceis not just a symptom of this failure but a spectacular re-sponse to it” (2004:21). Lynchings are not, then, residualforms of antilegal or prepolitical practice but, rather, verycontemporary engagements with the dominant form of po-litical economy present in Latin America today. Accord-ingly, Godoy has further suggested that lynchings be seenas the underbelly of the sorts of participatory governanceschemes advanced in official forums like Gutierrez’s elec-toral alliance, the “‘dark side’ of democracy,” she claims,but democracy nonetheless, in which extremely vulnera-ble “communities seek not only to punish and deter crim-inal activity, but, perhaps more importantly, to re-assert

themselves collectively as agents rather than victims” (2004:623).

In this article, I question how far social-scientific writ-ing on Latin American lynchings has departed from the“commonsense consensus” it is attempting to supersede.There is, I argue, a shared methodology at the heart of thesetwo forums, centering on what might be called a quasi-juridical turn to “motiveology”—a quest, that is, to explainlynchings by way of their causes, the push factors thatunderlie a community’s decision to burn a human beingalive rather than pursue more prescribed legal measures.As I discuss below, I find such an approach both unhelpfulintellectually in understanding lynchings in Ecuador andunsettling ethically for the role in which it casts us as an-thropologists studying violence in the world today. In thisarticle, I make no attempt to explain collective violence orto unpack the motivational psychology of a lynch mob. I, in-stead, follow Paul Eiss’s recent claim that a lynching “cannotbe understood fully through a consideration of the ‘lacks’[of security, police protection, etc.] that made it possible—its multiple causes—but rather in terms of what the lynch-ing does—its effects” (2006:12). Sorting out what a lynchingactually does or the effects it generates in any given societymust begin by attending to the particular understandingsthat accumulate around it. As media-oriented spectaclesfrom the start, acts explicitly designed to construct a broadcommunity of witnesses to them, lynchings produce a mul-tiplicity of knowledge effects that may, in the end, have ab-solutely nothing to do with the intended messages of theirprotagonists and everything to do with the sorts of press-ing national concerns that audiences may be encouraged toread into them. Such, I argue, is what occurred in Ecuadorat the start of 2003 and connected the lynching of an invet-erate criminal with the inauguration of a new president.

In this article, I discuss the ways in which a particularnarrative developed around Cayambe’s 2003 lynching thatmade it not simply into an exemplar of the extralegal vio-lence to which marginal subjects may be prone but also intoa statement, specifically, about the complete political aber-rance of indigenous society in Ecuador today. Of central im-portance to the impact of this interpretation were the videofootage, photos, and graphic descriptions of the deadly vi-olence inflicted on the victim that circulated widely in themedia; as violence became the key social fact of this event,the different positions that people maintained in relationto it—aggressor, victim, defender, witness—became codi-fied metonymically with different locations in Ecuadoriansociety as a whole. Ultimately, this lynching was seen asrepresentative of a larger ongoing struggle in the countryover the terms of political membership, state legitimacy,and, particularly, the place of indigenous society in the na-tional polity. As I show below, all highland lynchings, irre-spective of the identity of their protagonists, are discursivelyportrayed as Indian-like acts that threaten normative values

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American Ethnologist � Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

of political process and national state practice. But January2003 was an especially urgent time for these associations tobe made absolutely clear and visibly indisputable becausethey so effectively translated a set of gnawing anxieties indominant white–mestizo society about Gutierrez’s incipientpresidency into a palpable fear of indigenous occupationof the central state. Gutierrez was, after all, the presidentwhose electoral success depended on his association withactive indigenous federations and who was bringing theirmost radical leaders with him into the controlling bodiesof national government. The historic boundaries betweencenter and margin were suddenly collapsing. The lynch-ing of Quinonez in Cayambe, one of the most notorioussites of indigenous activism in Ecuador, provided an oppor-tune moment to assert the need for these boundaries to beupheld.

My efforts in this article to unpack the connectionsbetween representations of violence and constructions ofcultural alterity draw considerable influence from AllenFeldman’s insight that “violence and its consequences areautomatically associated with aberrant cultural difference,and then tamed by exclusions that enable the self-servingperceptual negotiation of that difference” (1994:19). Whattames the relationship between violence and difference inthis case, I argue, is the rebounded identification of theviewing public with both Quinonez, the victim, and the val-ues attached to a defensive, protective state under siege.Bringing this approach to the study of lynchings in LatinAmerica demands a turn to precisely those features of pub-lic violence from which scholars of the region have mostdecisively averted their attention, namely, the physical vi-olence inflicted on the victim (which is often regarded asso materially objective as to need no explanation) and themedia’s representations of it (which are often regarded assimply voyeuristic and sensationalist). More helpful in thisregard is the century of work devoted to studying lynchingsin the U.S. South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,which has thus far almost exclusively been deemed irrele-vant to the study of violence in Latin America today becauseof the historical differences between the two cases.2 Yet itwas U.S. scholars, particularly black antilynching activists,who most insightfully realized that the real terrain of lynch-ings was not so much law, politics, or even race or sexual-ity per se but, rather, public opinion about these issues andthe effects these opinions could have in reconfiguring thestructure of political society at a pivotal moment in nationalhistory. Before turning to the Cayambe lynching in detail, Idiscuss similarities in the historical contexts that informedpublic perceptions of lynchings in the United States a cen-tury ago and those undergirding the interpretive politics oflynchings in Ecuador today. I then compare the approachestaken by scholars of the United States and Latin America tothe study of lynchings with the hope of bringing a numberof critical contributions of the former to bear on the work

of the latter. I offer this study of one particularly importantLatin American lynching as a first step in that direction.

The politics of interpretive production:Contextualizing lynching in the United Statesand Ecuador

To study lynching through its effects is to ask about the re-lationship between particular styles of violence and specifichistorical conditions. It is to avoid deterministic cause-and-effect explanations for acts of violence by situating their in-terpretive potency in the material contexts in which theybecome meaningful. The “red record” of lynching in theUnited States offers an especially important source for com-parative research into the conditions that make this form ofviolence such a powerful representation of social tensionsat particular historical junctures (Wells-Barnett 2002).

In both the southern United States and the Ecuado-rian Andes, lynching started to command widespread pub-lic attention at times when the two states were under-going remarkably similar and equally radical processes ofrestructuring, postbellum Reconstruction in the former andneoliberal adjustment in the latter, which opened officialavenues for political participation to each nation’s mostpolitically marginalized, economically disadvantaged, andracially stigmatized populations. In the United States, Re-publican discourses of emancipation and enfranchisementbrought African Americans into the political process insimilar ways that discourses of multiculturalism, partici-patory democracy, and state decentralization did for in-digenous peoples in Ecuador. In both countries, claims onfull and equal political citizenship were taken up quicklyand to remarkable effect by subaltern populations, withactive enfranchisement leading U.S. blacks and Ecuado-rian indigenous peoples to occupy key positions in civicadministration, to be elected to key positions in local andregional government, and to be not only constitutionallyrecognized as full legal subjects but also actively involvedin rewriting constitutions. In the United States, over “onehundred [black men] won election or appointment to postshaving jurisdiction over entire states” (Hahn 2003:219),and between 1,000 and 1,500 held posts in local govern-ments in former Confederate states during Reconstruc-tion. In Ecuador, the indigenous Pachakutik party, formedin 1996, won key seats in municipal governments acrossthe highlands in the 2000 elections, including the mayoral-ties of three municipalities, one of which was Cayambe(Becker 2008b). One of the first actions of the new Cayambeadministration was to rework local land tax policies tochannel millions of dollars from elite agroindustrialists toindigenous communities, an act promoted publicly as afrontal attack on the historical exploitation of the indige-nous sector by white–mestizo society (Krupa 2005).

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These political gains were made possible in each caseonly by a long history of organization and activism, muchof it clandestine, by blacks and indigenous people in thedecades leading up to their official recognition. But theywere equally dependent on the dissolution of the old eco-nomic systems that had restricted black and indigenousparticipation in each nation’s political, economic, and so-cial formations. Public lynchings emerged precisely onegeneration after the abolition of plantation slavery in theUnited States and one generation after agrarian reform lawsdismantled the hacienda structure in Ecuador to whichthe majority of that country’s indigenous people had beenbound in various forms of resident peonage for generations(Becker 2008a; Krupa 2005). These transformations initi-ated cycles of economic crisis and aggressive capitalist in-dustrialization and, as importantly, broke down the divi-sions of livelihood (if not yet class) and spatial segregationthat had long distinguished rulers from ruled and citizensfrom subjects in both countries. In the U.S. South, duringReconstruction, blacks became property owners, openedretail outlets and newspapers that competed with the whiteeconomy and press, earned wages for their labor, and par-ticipated actively in the rapid urbanization of the region,either alongside white homeowners or in the formation ofall-black enclaves in towns and cities. In Ecuador, as ex-hacienda land was being turned over in the 1970s, withvarying degrees of success, to newly formed juridical “peas-ant communities” (in Cayambe there were seven before thereforms and 120 immediately after), members of indige-nous landholding families simultaneously began to enterthe construction boom or informal economy in major cities,sell produce in urban markets, and work for wages along-side mestizos in expanding agroindustries and new manu-facturing industries across the country.

If the immediate “prehistory” of lynching in both theUnited States and Ecuador involved the rapid dissolution oflong-standing social and political boundaries, it also stim-ulated a profound anxiety among the traditional ruling sec-tors in each country. What Steven Hahn says of U.S. whitesat this time applies in equal measure to Ecuadorian elites:To them, “nothing seemed more menacing or illegitimate,nothing more vindictive or humiliating, than the installa-tion in positions of official political power of former slaves,of abject and ‘ignorant’ dependents belonging to an ‘in-ferior race’” (2003:237). In Ecuador, however, this menacehad, by the start of the 21st century, been pushing at thefoundations of state power for over a decade, most no-tably in the form of a coordination of indigenous activism(led by the Confederacion de Nacionalidades Indıgenasdel Ecuador [Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities ofEcuador], or CONAIE) that was thoroughly implicated inColonel Lucio Gutierrez’s rise to power.

At the time of his inauguration, Gutierrez was alreadyseen by Ecuadorian elites as something of a subversive char-

acter, having been one of the military officers who joinedindigenous sectors to overthrow right-wing President JamilMahuad in 2000. His slim electoral victory over Ecuador’srichest man, banana magnate Alvaro Noboa, three yearslater was made possible only by formalizing his alliancewith the Pachakutik party and drawing indigenous voteslike no other candidate before him. Eight months later,however, the partnership had gone sour. Gutierrez’s effortsto renegotiate Ecuador’s loans with the IMF caused his in-digenous deputies to question their ability to change thestate’s course from within. Facing continual death threatsfrom the Right and critiques from their base communi-ties, all 11 Pachakutik delegates were forced out of congressby August. Two years later, when Gutierrez tried to annulthe Supreme Court, popular sectors threw him out of of-fice, an act that was widely referred to as a “lynching”—specifically, a “political lynching” or “virtual lynching”—not only of the president but also of the entire democraticprocess. Despite the notable lack of indigenous participa-tion in Gutierrez’s ousting,3 many Ecuadorians, in edito-rials submitted to national newspapers, likened the eventto the paros, or highway blockades, that indigenous sec-tors have used since 1990 to press for such things as lowercooking-gas prices, constitutional amendments, and a re-versal of market-oriented agrarian policy—both were seenas evidence of a political society gone wrong, of a “paıs tor-cido” (twisted country), as the title of one editorial claims(El Comercio 2006b).4 The author of that editorial, in an ear-lier article, had developed this idea in a sarcastic portraitof his country’s political climate, claiming that, in Ecuador,“the lynching prospers and displaces a sense of justice. Theobjective is to ‘lynch’ he who puts himself forward, he whodoesn’t share the points of view of the loudmouth. . . . Thismentality has stuck in the pueblo, encouraged by those whomanage the ‘geopolitics’ of the paro. . . . The inevitable ques-tion now is ‘what purpose does the State serve?’” (El Comer-cio 2005).

In both the United States and Ecuador, lynchingemerged at points of radical democratization of state–citizen relations, of unprecedented openings of official po-litical spheres to subaltern populations, and, as a result,managed to inspire pressing questions among the publicabout the continuing legitimacy and justness of the centralstate. These similarities should not in any way obscure theimportant structural differences between these two cases–the actual practice of lynching in Ecuador is not directedagainst the category of the “politically active Indian” in thesame way that it was practiced in the United States as a formof political terrorism against newly emancipated blacks.This difference is of central importance to the investiga-tion that follows and underscores the need to direct greaterattention to the politics surrounding how violence is rep-resented, interpreted, and investigated. For what becomesmost curious in setting the U.S. and Ecuadorian cases into

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dialogue are the ways that the violence of lynching—itsextralegality, visibility, and collective enactment—seems tocondense dominant anxieties into a message about politi-cal rule and subalternity, and about the boundaries of po-litical legitimacy and illegitimacy, in a way that is some-how extremely mobile, as able to leave a mark on the statusof lynching’s victims as it is on its perpetrators, as I ex-plore in detail below. Given the transformative political con-texts enveloping the rise of public lynchings in these cases,what approach are we, as researchers, to take in under-standing them and the extremely fluid messages they haveproduced?

Latin American lynching and the seductions ofrelativism

Gyanendra Pandey begins his Routine Violence: Nations,Fragments, Histories (2006) with an important observationabout how people approach the category of “violence”: Wetend to employ this category, he asserts, not in reference toany specific act of aggression or intent to cause harm butto those acts we deem unsanctioned or wish to index asantithetical to modern political and legal rationalities. It isin this sense that Pandey argues, “Violence remains a pre-modern category in the contemporary usage . . . in that ithas to do, supposedly, with what happened before rationalthought and organization governed society, and what stillhappens when these are at a discount” (2006:1). The no-tion of “violence,” then, is categorically a critique (Donham2006). With respect to lynching, it thus matters a good dealnot only how the violence of the event is represented butalso where, or on whom, we choose to locate it.

One of the most unifying features of the new litera-ture on Latin American lynchings is the attempt amongits contributors to shift the focus away from the physicalviolence inflicted on the accused and, instead, toward anexamination of the more entrenched “structural” or “sys-temic” violence suffered by its protagonists (Farmer 2004).As Benevides and Fischer Ferreira claim from their workon urban violence in Brazil, a lynching “must be seenas part and parcel of economic marginalization, anotherstructurally rooted form of contemporary urban violence.The economically marginalized are exposed to the daily vi-olence of unemployment, malnutrition, precarious hous-ing, and inadequate health and transportation services”(1991:35). Lynchings are thus treated as symptoms of socialsuffering, expressions of populations pushed to the brinkof marginality by the economic and political forces struc-turing the post–Cold War Latin American landscape. Sucha reorientation is significant because it shifts ultimate re-sponsibility for the death of the lynching victim away fromthe community of perpetrators and onto the more amor-phously defined agents of global capitalism and the neolib-eral state. To Guerrero (2001:224), lynchings mark an im-

portant transition in the dominant form of state violence inLatin America, from states being ostentatious in their abil-ity to kill during the Cold War period to their being equallycavalier under neoliberalism in their ability to simply “letpopulations die.” Lynchings are a response to this, LeighBinford and Nancy Churchill claim, in that, by “carrying outcitizen (in)justice, the participants critique the state for in-action and pose ‘popular justice’ as a necessary substitute”(in press:15).

What authors who take this approach share is a ten-dency to treat lynchings not as primary acts of violence butas “responses” to it, in which the burning body of the crim-inal becomes a communicative device in the reciprocal cy-cle of violence between citizens and the state (Girard 1972).According to Vilas, in Mexico, “lynchings represent a formof reappropriation of violence” (2001:140) from the state. AsGoldstein has written of such violence in Bolivia, “Lynch-ings in Cochabamba are more than attempts at vengeance. . . they also must be seen as expressive moments in thelives of people historically silenced, denied avenues to com-municate their demands or to lament their conditions toan audience that might be able to offer them official re-dress” (2004:182). Godoy similarly argues that lynchingsin Guatemala must be seen as “an attempt by embattledcommunities to reassert their autonomy and agency afterdecades of repeated assault by state armies, locally powerfulelites, a shifting rural economy, criminal bandits, and otheradversaries” (2004:623, emphasis added).

What these statements show is a general effort amongsocial scientists to present lynchings not exactly as justi-fiable events but certainly as understandable ones, in thesense that the actions of a “lynch mob” can, in fact, be ex-plained and that this explanation is to be derived from anunderstanding of the local world of experience in whichsuch a “mob” is formed. Anthropologists, in particular, mayfind something of the uncanny in this explanation and therole it casts us in. Demonstrating the rationality behindthe seemingly incomprehensible aspects of human behav-ior has been a core part of our enterprise since its begin-ning. Violence has played an important part in the develop-ment of this approach, well before it became a specializedtopic of ethnographic inquiry, as marking both the extremeends of cross-cultural understanding and showing the innerconsistency of cultural systems. Anthropologists have longchallenged readers to suspend the particular moral judg-ment and sense of horror that attach to acts categorizedas “violent” and asked them, rather, to understand prac-tices such as head-hunting, human sacrifice, and infanti-cide as components of larger cultural, ethical, and political–economic systems, from which their local meaning derives(Bloch 1992; Girard 1972; Rosaldo 1980; Scheper-Hughes1992).

It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that writings onlynching in Latin America today tend to be rooted in rather

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subtle appeals to cultural, or perhaps cultural–political, rel-ativism. Readers are invited to join an author in a projectdetermined to understand the rationality behind the seem-ingly aberrant and incomprehensible decision to burn a hu-man being alive or join a lynch mob. The quest for suchknowledge leads to a familiar place—a specific social con-text defined temporally and spatially as the experience ofLatin American neoliberalism. This is to say to readersin the North: You too might drop the match or pour thegasoline were this your life. Indeed, a lower-middle-classGuatemalan informant of Godoy’s described lynchings inhis country as “savagery. But . . . an understandable sav-agery . . . imagine,” he continued, “if you live in Totoni-capan where there’s a tiny little station of a few police whobasically just patrol up and down the highway. Someonerapes one of your daughters. You know who it was . . . youknow that a trial could take years and lots of money. Seewhat I mean? Lynchings are an understandable disgrace.They’re deplorable, but understandable” (2004:626). Socialscientists have certainly added much to this explanation—showing, for instance, how lynchings are “not only aboutcrime” but are also the result of larger neoliberal insecu-rities and “a desperate expression of autonomy and self-defense in the face of multiple assaults” (Godoy 2004:628,643)—but they have in no way departed from it. Joining thismedia–public–World Bank consensus rests on asking read-ers, however deplorable they find lynchings, to likewise findthem understandable. I find something deeply unsettlingin this request. This is not a position anyone writing todayon the history of lynching in the United States could ask ofreaders.

U.S. lynchings and a return to the body

Many of the first contributors to the sociology of lynchingin the United States adopted a position that resembles theone advanced by Latin Americanists today. They focusedtheir attention primarily on the community of perpetratorsand sought to understand lynching as an outgrowth of theirparticular historical, geographical, and juridical–culturalcomposition in the turn-of-the-century United States. Forinstance, writers like James Elbert Cutler (1905) saw lynch-ing as evidence of a distinctly U.S. approach to law, onethat held, beneath the formal charter of the Constitution,a solid faith in “popular sovereignty” and a belief that, be-cause people make the laws, they also retain the right to acton their higher principles of “justice” when necessary. Oth-ers sought to understand lynching as an outgrowth of theparticular political and cultural formation of the U.S. South.To writers like Wilbur Joseph Cash (1941), what definedthe mentality of the postbellum South was its new “fron-tier” status in the republic. Southerners’ distrust of north-ern “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” gave them little faithin central government and allowed every plantation owner,

according to Christopher Waldrep, to “imagine himself asmuch in control over his own life as to have little need forlaw or courts” (2006:18). Adding to this view were writerslike John Carlisle Kilgo who attributed lynchings to the “feu-dalism” bequeathed to southern culture by its Spanish andFrench colonizers, evident in such things as the “highly ner-vous temperament and . . . intense sensitiveness” (1902:5)shown by southern gentlemen, particularly in the protec-tive attitude they adopted toward their women.

As is well-known, the justification offered by southernwhites for lynchings, from the 1890s on, rested on the ac-cusation that black men were raping white women, mak-ing the formally freed black male the iconic victim of U.S.lynching during this time. As South Carolina Senator ColeBlease asserted in his 1930 reelection campaign, “When-ever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue ofthe white women of South Carolina, I say to hell with theConstitution! . . . White supremacy and the protection of thevirtue of white women of the South comes first with me”(Raper 1933:293). Kilgo and later authors, however, arguedthat such expressions “cannot be charged to racial preju-dice” but, rather, should be seen as an example of the cul-tural “consistency in revenging the outraged sensitiveness”(1902:9) of southern white males. Black journalist Ida B.Wells (Wells-Barnett 2002) most famously exposed the fal-sity in this claim—not all victims of lynching were male oreven adults, and not even a third of them were ever, in fact,accused of rape. To Wells, there was a deeper political andracial logic at work here, in which the “rape mythos” dis-guised lynching’s function as “an overwhelmingly southernresponse to [black political] enfranchisement” (Wiegman1993:456). As Hazel V. Carby has written, “Wells knew thatemancipation meant that white men lost their vested inter-ests in the body of the Negro and that lynching and the rapeof black women were attempts to regain control. . . . Themurder of blacks was so easily accomplished because theyhad been granted the right to vote but not the means to pro-tect or maintain that right” (1985:269). Lynching was partof a broader “attempt to eliminate black people, politically,economically, and, indeed, physically” (Carby 1985:270).Similarly, Trinidad-born sociologist Oliver Cromwell Coxsaw lynching as a means to continue the castelike divi-sion between whites and blacks after the end of slavery.As “a special form of mobbing—mobbing directed againsta whole people or political class” (Cox 1948:549), lynchingprovided a window into the broader racial and political log-ics of U.S. society in the early 20th century. “Lynching is cru-cial to the continuance of the racial system of the South,”Cox wrote, “a necessity” not “in the mores” of the South but,rather, in “the whip hand of the ruling class. It is the mostpowerful and convincing form of racial repression operat-ing in the interest of the status quo” (1948:555).

Among scholars who sought to understand lynchingin the historical particularity of turn-of-the-century U.S.

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society, then, one group saw it as a legal-cultural question,framed by the thin acceptance of national juridical institu-tions across the southern “frontier” and the lingering feu-dal structures that substituted for the state in a plantationeconomy. Another group saw it as a political question thatcentered on the struggles over emancipation and the newpolitical potential of black society. The first group of schol-ars focused on the protagonists of lynchings and asked whysomeone might join a lynching, whereas the second groupof writers focused on the victims and asked about its func-tions or, more accurately, asked, “What does a lynching do?”Studies of Latin American lynchings have largely pursuedthe former approach, finding little of comparative value inthe U.S. case. Following the lead of critical writers like Wellsand Cox, however, leads to a very different approach tothe study of Latin American lynchings, one that necessar-ily forces attention back on the physical violence inflictedon the victim and its representational value in the shift-ing fields of national and continental politics. Such an ap-proach begins by reconsidering what sort of “spectacle” onetakes lynchings to be.

What sort of spectacle is lynching? The visualpolitics of public violence

Stimulated by the traveling Without Sanctuary exhibit oflynching photographs in 2000, several scholars have re-cently come to ask about the broader visual and repre-sentational politics of lynching in U.S. life (Allen et al.2000; Apel 2004; Apel and Smith 2007; Goldsby 2006). U.S.lynchings were extensively photographed, and these im-ages circulated throughout the country on the front pagesof newspapers and in pamphlets, were sold openly in pic-ture cards, and were printed widely on postcards. Lynchingphotographs did more than construct a dispersed commu-nity of witnesses to an event: They performed an idealizedand accomplished version of the social order that southernwhites were seeking to construct in the United States af-ter emancipation. As Robert E. Snyder notes, “Encoded inlynching cards for generations to come . . . were messagesthat community virtues were protected, and to what extentfathers would go to realize the ideal” (2001:170). This idealwas made manifest in the style of the photographs them-selves. According to Jacqueline Goldsby, “The intensity ofviolence, coupled with the technology of picture making,accentuated the social vulnerability of blacks as visual sub-jects and thus extended the political disenfranchisementof African Americans in the public sphere” (2006:230). Inthe photographs, racial divisions were made demonstra-bly real and nonnegotiable markers of human differenceand divided political trajectories. The images portrayedblacks as silent and naked objects of white control. “Theirbroken necks and mutilated bodies pressure the picture’sforeground; their unsightliness proving both the unlimited

range of the mob’s rule and African Americans’ perceivedunfitness as citizens who deserve state protection” (Goldsby2006:231).

As photographs became an increasingly important partof lynching in the U.S. (advanced by the Kodak camerabecoming a staple of technology in U.S. households), sotoo did lynchings themselves become more “spectacular.”Grace Elizabeth Hale (1998) charts the origins of “specta-cle lynching” to the 1893 killing of Henry Smith, accusedof the rape and murder of three-year-old Myrtle Vance,the first such event to anticipate its own representation inphotographs and pamphlets and their circulation amongtravelers on the newly expanded railroad system. The ex-pectation it generated affected the form of all subsequentlynchings, each becoming a “ritualistic” reproduction ofthose preceding it. “Beginning in the 1890s, no matter thespecific characteristics, representations of spectacle lynch-ings increasingly fell into a ritualistic pattern as the narra-tives constructed by witnesses, participants, and journal-ists assumed a standardized form” (Hale 1998:206). Moststandardized was the full incorporation of the spectator’s–narrator’s gaze into the act of lynching itself.

The notion of “spectacle lynching” has been im-portant to scholars of Latin America, most evident inGoldstein’s (2004) ethnographic study of urban violencein Cochabamba, Bolivia. To Goldstein, “Lynchings inCochabamba today can be conceptualized as a kind ofspectacle, a visually arresting and attention-getting display,by which the invisible and ignored make demands on astate that has shown itself unable or unwilling to provideorder and security to their communities” (2004:3). As “vi-olent spectacles,” he continues, lynchings “are intended tocall attention to the predicament of insecurity in which theactors currently find themselves, as well as to criticize thefailures of the democratic state and its claim to a rule of law”(Goldstein 2004:182).

But, if lynchings are primarily message-sending events,as Goldstein and others suggest, it is simply not enoughto conceptualize their communicative logic in such uni-directional terms, beginning with the protagonists’ appealand radiating outward to an audience removed to vary-ing degrees from the scene of violence.5 As U.S. scholarshave demonstrated, the spectator is, instead, already in-side the event, an essential part of the violence, and his orher reception of the message is an already implicit condi-tion of its possibility. Any “spectacle lynching” (a term thatis by now redundant) is thus completely overdeterminedby the visual economy of violence in a given society andthe broader structural conditions that become meaningfulwithin it. Analysis of lynching thus demands a “dialecticalconcept of visual culture,” which W. J. T. Mitchell has said“cannot rest content with a definition of its object as the so-cial construction of the visual field, but must insist on ex-ploring the chiastic reversal of this proposition, the visual

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construction of the social field. It is not just that we see theway we do because we are social animals, but also that oursocial arrangements take the form they do because we areseeing animals” (2002:171).

It is only by working along such dialectical lines thatAmericanist scholars have been able to show how lynch-ings fit into the broader struggles around race, politicalsociety, and sexuality in postemancipation society. As Coxwrote in 1948, “As a means of schooling children in theSouthern principles of race relations, there could hardly bea more effective method” (1948:560) than bringing themto lynchings, and yet, as Dora Apel notes, “many children. . . were traumatized by the horror of lynching” (2004:37).6

Because the demand for mass consumption had alreadybeen internalized in concrete visual form, lynching imageryand photographic representations occasioned multiple un-intended effects and were put to many different uses bypeople positioned differently in these struggles. MargaretRose Vendryes (1997), for instance, has shown how north-erners produced their own counterpresentations of racialviolence in antilynching art shows in the mid-1930s. Apel(2004:ch. 2) has likewise written about the use of these pho-tographs by the National Association for the Advancementof Colored People (NAACP) to expose the terror of south-ern society, and Wells inspired the formation of antilynch-ing committees in Europe by showing these images on herspeaking tour of England, Scotland, and Wales in 1893 and1894 (Royster 1997:33–39).

These actions, like the lynchings themselves, all re-lied on the visual displays of bodily violence for their im-pact. The body of the victim here appears as much morethan simply a neutral device for some message; instead,it is the message or, better, the messages. The U.S. caseshows clearly that lynchings only “work” as spectacles,catch the eye, draw media attention, and incite public com-mentary because their trope is violence: bloody and deadlyviolence. Protests against all the “structural conditions”that protagonists of a lynching are said to be really try-ing to showcase—marginality, poverty, disenfranchisement,an inattentive state, lack of police protection, and so on—would not have the same effect, or perhaps would have noeffect at all, without recourse to this mode of violence. Theconsequence, however, is that this violence overwhelms theprotest in its entirety: As what catches the eye, it is also allthe eye can see. Lynchings underline Alfred Arteaga’s as-sertion that “violence is not apart from blood, but ratherthe hot articulation of it. It is a blood act; it is a red event.It is the red of death and the push toward death. . . . Thered of the body is real. Real bloodletting is real life spilled.. . . Violence, act and event, is red” (2003:vii–viii). Yet, un-like the images of car crashes or homicide victims that linethe covers of Latin American tabloids, images of lynchingwork into the political imagination. Their specialty is link-ing critical issues of political society with those of bloody

violence. They work into questions about the political bodyand the body politic, its nature as well as the terms of itsproduction and destruction. It is this link—between poli-tics, bodies, and violence—that gives lynching images andnarratives their weight and that, therefore, must be exam-ined both historically and within the current political con-juncture that overdetermines an interpretation of lynchingin Latin America today. Such is the approach I take to exam-ining the recent lynching of Quinonez in Ecuador.

The lynching of Edwin Marcelo Quinonez

Quinonez was 27 years old when he was burned to deathon January 13, 2003. Born in the coastal city of Esmeraldas,Quinonez was among the thousands of Afro-Ecuadorianswho have migrated to the small highland town of Cayambeover the past decade to work in the cut-flower plantationsand supporting industries that have been steadily trans-forming the region into one of the most important agroin-dustrial export-production zones in the country. As one ofthe only labor-receiving, rather than labor-exporting, zonesin Ecuador, boasting zero unemployment and a highly or-ganized network of peasant communities and indigenousfederations around its urban core, Cayambe seems to bearlittle affinity with the informal and disintegrating peripheralsettlements often said to typify “lynch-prone” areas of LatinAmerica. Rapid economic growth has, however, sparked so-cial and demographic tensions in Cayambe. Its urban pop-ulation doubled in the last decade of the 20th century, fromaround 13,000 people in 1990 to over 30,000 in 2001, leadingcity officials to complain about their inability to serve sucha rapidly growing population and to control the criminal ac-tivity growing up within it (Instituto Nacional de Estadısticay Censos [INEC] 1990, 2001). A headline in the nationalnewspaper El Comerico (2003a) that appeared shortly afterthe lynching made this problem public: “Cayambe: 14 Po-lice Officers for 70,000 People.” Other newspapers revealedthat Cayambe had become an important hub for some ofEcuador’s most notorious youth gangs and credited MayorDiego Bonifaz with “relating this social phenomenon to themigration of people from [the coastal cities of] Manabı andGuayaquil who come to work in the canton” (Ultimas Noti-cias 2003a; see also Ultimas Noticias 2003b).

These bits of data provide an important map to the lo-cal context and mood surrounding Quinonez’s lynching in2003. A primarily indigenous (rural) and mestizo (urban)region is undergoing a major economic and demographictransformation; blacks and criminality, two apparently newfeatures of the urban landscape, are discursively associ-ated with one another, and police protection is grossly un-equipped to handle this new reality. Quinonez, a blackmigrant with a long list of criminal accusations againsthim, embodied all of these concerns. The bulky file heldon Quinonez in the National Police Headquarters in Quito

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shows that he was in and out of prison repeatedly over thetwo years before his death and he had been rescued once bypolice from being lynched at a high school basketball courtfor an attempted rape in December 2001.7 Subofficial JoseJaramillo of the Cayambe police force blamed Quinonez’srelease after previous arrests to a change in the legal sys-tem in the 1990s requiring that material proof of criminalactivity and formal accusations be submitted by victims,which most residents were either unable or too scared to of-fer. Indeed, the Cayambe police records from the last threemonths of 2002 show that, whereas 28 arrests were made, 33prisoners were released because of lack of evidence, amongthem, Quinonez, who was released from a rape and murdercharge in December 2002. Against Mayor Bonifaz’s claim,following the lynching, that there “is no God, no law, nojudge to issue arrest warrants, no prosecutors,” the prob-lems of justice in Cayambe may have been the result of toomuch legal formalism rather than not enough of it (CBSNews 2003).

Although much of this backstory to the lynching madeits way into the press, it was completely overshadowed byimages of Quinonez’s burning body and detailed narrationsof the violence repeatedly inflicted on him. To be sure, hiswas an especially prolonged and dramatic killing. It started,according to reports, with over 1,000 people storming themunicipal police station, breaking through the door to thecell in which Quinonez was held in custody, and dragginghim into the street. He was apparently beaten badly, per-haps stabbed numerous times, stripped naked, and set onfire before being rescued by police and transported to thelocal hospital. A crowd subsequently pulled Quinonez fromhis hospital bed, dragged him to a nearby bullfighting sta-dium, and set him on fire once more before he was res-cued a second time by police and escorted to a hospital inQuito, 70 kilometers away, where he later died. But the morethese events, this violence, became the story of the lynch-ing, the one that reached national and international au-diences through newspapers, television, and the Internet,the more a very specific discourse crystallized around thelynching that framed its intelligibility in locational terms, asan act typical of places like Cayambe, and in demographicterms, as an act typical of an indigenous pueblo (as shownin the television reporter’s comments quoted at the start ofthis article).

As is true of the photographs and reports documentinglynching in the U.S. South, instructions on how to interpretthe violence of the Ecuadorian event are contained entirelyin the differentiated positions the news images and de-scriptions offered to viewers and readers, variously guidingone’s gaze to different inhabitable perspectives in the scene.In this way, the richly descriptive narrations of Quinonez’skilling absorb and reproduce the affective potency of pho-tography (even as photos and video footage accompany it).Ecuadorian correspondent Salud Hernandez, covering the

event for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo (2003), lingersover moments of acute confrontation and gore in her blow-by-blow description of how the “negro Quinonez died atthe hands of a crazed mob in Ecuador.”8 In the hospital af-ter the first burning, for instance, a “nurse attends to hishead, because part of his skin has come loose from hisskull. Quinonez doesn’t complain even once. He himselfpulls loose shreds of charred, dry skin. Five minutes later,the residents [vecinos] arrive. They ask that their trophy bereturned to them” (El Mundo 2003). Quinonez is draggedinto the bullfighting ring, in “front of a green wall, deco-rated with the slogan of the coliseum’s sponsor, ‘Color isLife,’ [where] they again douse him with gasoline. A matchis lit, but the man manages to put it out, rolling around onthe ground. With each turn he leaves behind a piece of skin,a chunk of meat” (El Mundo 2003). In police custody again,in the ambulance en route to Quito, “he on occasions liesdown and at times sits. He cannot see. An eye has burst andthe other has closed from all the strikes. Hardly any skin re-mains. In spite of everything, he feels secure. He recognizesthe voice of the police. ‘To the hospital,’ they order. ‘Water,’he insists” (El Mundo 2003).

This final passage is a particularly remarkable pieceof journalism. It provides readers with a cathartic orien-tation to the scene, as if they, with the journalist, are, atthe end of the day, separated from the crowd, accompa-nying victim and police back to the nation’s capital andcomforted by partaking in a reciprocal exchange of recog-nition and regenerative fluids. This description helps tofasten down, conclusively, real social identities over thestructural locations of perpetrator, normative law, and vic-tim, produced around violence and positions the readerhim or herself as a witness to it. These locations arerather starkly delineated in Hernandez’s article. The first,identified as the “multitude,” “crowd,” “mob,” justicieros,”or simply “Cayambe” gets reduced to the synecdoche ofthe indigenous woman-plus-child. Throughout Hernan-dez’s report, only two Cayambenos appear, both name-less, both indigenous, both mothers. Through them readerslearn about motive:

A middle aged india [Indian woman] shouted louderthan the rest. Someone comments that she is themother of a 15 year old adolescent girl, victim ofQuinonez’s brutality. Not content to rape her, he cut hernipples with a pocketknife. She didn’t report this. Likethe rest of his victims, she feared the repercussions that[Quinonez] himself had announced. “If you go to thepolice, I’ll kill you.” Now it’s her turn. [El Mundo 2003]

The second position open to readers is that of thestate, represented by the police officers (the only named ac-tors), doctors, and pedestrians in Quito. Unmarked by anyrace, color, or “local” geography, this is also the positionof “nation,” which looks down on the scene from above,

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backgrounds the mountainous peasant landscape, and barsthe gates against the clamoring, violent mass that ever lurksbehind the veneer of tranquility and peace:

The commander of the post, Colonel Cesar Espinosa,divided up his men around the precinct. He positionedfour on the roof, armed with tear gas canisters. Fromthese heights, Corporal Flores divided the mountainsthat surround the municipality of Cayambe, an hourand a half from Quito, an agrarian town, quiet until thissunny Monday morning. Another five were sent to pro-tect the main doors, where more residents were bang-ing. [El Mundo 2003]

Hospital workers are ascribed an equally defensive role, oneof them shouting, “This is a hospital of the people, of all ofyou. Get out,” to which “nobody pays . . . any attention” (ElMundo 2003). And shortly before Quinonez dies, in Quito,“the people who see him enter [the hospital] look on horri-fied at a walking cadaver” (El Mundo 2003). Here the gaze ofthe reader encounters itself as a character in the text, as theunmarked national pedestrian catching a glimpse of horror.And what exactly is the source of this horror? What is seenin this figure, this “walking cadaver,” by the pedestrian-as-reader whose vision is now framed by the precedingnarrative?

Quinonez, the third position offered to readers in thetext, is marked in very specific ways. As the ideally dislo-cated black male body, he starts out as matter so out of placein the highlands as to become immoral, criminal, and de-monically possessed. His condition leads “more than oneto think that he is possessed by the devil or a drug addict”or that “only his demonic condition allowed him to survivesuch torture” (El Mundo 2003). Quinonez is never separatedfrom his blackness in these accounts. The crowd’s originalorder to the police is simply to “send out the black man.”Throughout his beating, he is accused not simply of being a“killer” or “rapist” but a “black killer, black rapist,” set offagainst the green walls of the bull ring on which a paintcompany’s slogan mocks “color is life.” Only facing death,arriving at the national hospital, does he release himselffrom this mark of blackness and come to be seen by all, Her-nandez reports, as suddenly “whitening in color”:

When they arrive [at the hospital], the human plunderhas just enough strength to take a few steps. The peo-ple who see him enter look on horrified at a walkingcadaver, covered in blood and dirt, whitening in color.Shortly after, he collapses. . . . “Nobody has ever with-stood this martyrdom [martirio], a five hour agony,”comments Corporal Flores, with sadness. “He was cor-pulent and very strong.” [El Mundo 2003]

Coming to its end, in other words, Quinonez’s body hasbeen completely transformed. It has traversed national ter-

ritory, from the coast to the rural highlands and arrived atdeath in the capital city. In the process, it has changed itscolor from black to red to (nearly) white. The closer it getsto the heart of national society, the imagined location ofthe newspapers’ readers, the more its suffering comes toinspire sympathy and a request for recognition. At death,Quinonez finally becomes a national citizen-subject: plun-dered, martyred, and fully human. This is the completeopposite of lynching images produced in the U.S. South,which, as Goldsby claims,

figure the dead as signs of pure abjection who radi-ate no thought, no speech, no action, no will. . . . Fail-ing to restore positive bonds between the viewer andthe dead, lynching photographs do not as a rule seekto summon the dead back to an imagined life. Rather,a kind of “scopic aggression” rages in lynching pho-tographs, thwarting any such identification betweenthe viewer and the black (dead) subject. [2006:231–232]9

In Ecuador, however, any such “scopic aggression” is pro-gressively transferred from the dying subject to the lynchmob, the latter losing its capacity for named identity,speech, and signification, to Quinonez who, likewise, trans-fers his capacity for abjection through criminality to themultitude known only as “Cayambe,” the Indian mother,through violence described in minute and harrowing detail.

Although the city of Cayambe has been historicallypopulated by nonindigenous mestizos and is home to anincreasing number of Afro-Ecuadorians, the region (whichalso bears the name Cayambe) has long been identified na-tionally as an overwhelmingly indigenous rural enclave inthe northern Andes. In no writings about the lynching is thecomposition of the crowd examined in detail; it is, rather,identified exclusively, as in the reports quoted above, withthe indigenous mothers made to represent it, showing quiteclearly to readers that Quinonez’s death is brought about byviolence inflicted by unmistakable Indian hands. This in-cident, notably, does not transpire behind the back of thestate or in some space marked by its absence: It starts in apolice station, passes through two state hospitals, and in-volves two rescues by police officers. Rather than exempli-fying political marginality, the entire event is narrated as apower struggle between two rival forces, Indians and thestate, for which Quinonez becomes, in Hernandez’s words,the “prize” or “trophy.” The victory of the former, despitethe noble efforts of state officials, is achieved only throughviolence and ends in, as any objective passerby can clearlysee, horror and repulsive death.

Narrations such as these have made lynchings intosupremely important spaces for producing understandingsabout the broader set of political struggles occurring in21st-century Ecuador, particularly those between indige-nous people and the state. But it is not only the Quinonez

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lynching that draws an association between indigenous so-ciety and lynching. As the following cases show, Indiannessis one of the central tropes for making lynchings into com-prehensible events in highland Ecuador.

Indianizing highland lynchings

Although lynchings have been reported in all parts ofEcuador in recent years, from the Amazonian Oriente tocoastal provinces, only those occurring in the Andean high-lands tend to be saddled with the interpretive markings ofindigeneity. The most common method of Indianizing alynching in the media is by associating it with various prac-tices that indigenous Ecuadorians have historically used topunish members of their communities, from immersing theaccused in cold water (“bathing”) to stripping them, whip-ping them with a spiny nettle plant (“el ortigazo”), forcingthem to carry heavy loads, and temporarily isolating themfrom the community. Media articles often lump lynching inwith these practices, tracing a progression in a single eventfrom the stripping of the accused to setting him or her onfire, and characterizing the entire set of practices under therubric of “indigenous justice.”

For instance, an article appearing in the Madison, Wis-consin, Capital Times (2003) (written by an Ecuadorian cor-respondent) bears the headline “Ecuador [sic] Indians Strip,Whip 2 Women in Vigilante Justice” and tells of the pun-ishment inflicted on two urban women accused of tryingto sell false lottery tickets to members of the indigenouscommunity of Guamanloma, in Tungurahua province (seeFigure 1). It states that the

villagers forced [the women] to strip down to their un-derwear before whipping them with bunches of nettle.They were doused with cold water and locked into asmall room overnight. Public beatings are sometimescarried out in isolated Andean villages in accord withEcuadorian legal practices that allow Indian communi-ties not served by police to apply vigilante justice. . . .

The reporters said that two men poured gasoline onthem and threatened to set them on fire. [Capital Times2003]

Similarly, in May of 2002, Ultimas Noticias (2002) ran atwo-page cover story detailing the punishment of a youngman accused of murdering a cargo truck driver from theindigenous community of Guangaje, near the central high-land city of Latacunga. In three pictures accompanying thestory, the accused, Jose Manuel Toquisa, from the indige-nous community of Tigua, is shown in his underwear, en-circled by men and women in typical Indian ponchos andbowler hats. The crowd looks on him as, in anguish, he isdoubled under the weight of a sack of stones that he car-ries on his back while being whipped and pushed aroundon a bed of thorny nettles. The article begins by noting that

Figure 1. The vigilante justice of “Ecuador Indians.” Capital Times ofMadison, Wisconsin, May 10, 2003. Photo: Dolores Ochoa/Associated PressImages (used with permission).

the “plaza of Guangaje was overflowing with indıgenas [in-digenous people] searching for the best location from whichto see the punishment, crying out to burn the assassin andkill him” (Ultimas Noticias 2002). Readers are informed ofthe beating and whipping endured by the accused and ofthe weight of the stones he is forced to carry, all charted tothe time of day and fleshed out with quotes from both thedeceased’s widow and the accused killer. Following a sevenand a half hour meeting of community leaders, a decision isreached to not burn him (which leaves the “majority in dis-agreement”) but, rather, to “beat him badly” and “hand himover to the justicia de los blancos [the justice of the whites],”also referred to in the article as the “judges of white jus-tice” (Ultimas Noticias 2002). It is the boldly printed titleof this article, which seems to sigh with exasperated re-lief, that I find most suggestive: “Indıgenas: Didn’t BurnJose Manuel” (“Indıgenas: No quemaron a Jose Manuel”;see Figures 2 and 3). This reads as both a statement and,in offering an example of restraint, a plea. It positions thereader, that general and unmarked—although definitivelynot indıgena—national subject, as speaking a command,through this case, to other indıgenas (as in “Don’t burn yourJose Manuels”) and, in so doing, locates both in opposi-tional moral–political spaces of “justice,” differentiated ul-timately by the fact that one side of this divide burns hu-man beings alive and the other is repulsed and outragedby it. A writer for El Comercio (2002), covering the sameevent, breathes an even louder, more hopeful sigh, claiming

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Figure 2. “Indıgenas: Didn’t Burn Jose Manuel.” Photo by Paul Rivas/Ultimas Noticias of Ecuador, May 16, 2002 (used with permission).

that, because an “accused killer who risked being burned”was not, “indıgenas are desisting to apply their own justicesystems.”10

Loaded with such symbolic associations, practicessuch as the use of nettles and bathing in cold water maybe mentioned in newspaper articles about a lynching and,without ever disclosing the identity of the protagonists, In-dianize them and the whole event. For instance, an articleappearing in El Comercio at the end of April 2006 reporteda story of four thieves who were caught in the act by a cit-izen patrol team in Carapungo, an extension of Quito thattrails off to the north into the highland desert that leads tothe semirural area of Guayllabamba and on to Cayambe.

Figure 3. “All the indıgenas circle around the plaza to watch the pun-ishment.” Photo by Paul Rivas/Ultimas Noticias of Ecuador, May 16, 2002(used with permission).

The article summarizes the event as follows: “Residents de-cided to beat the suspects and throw them in cold water.The Police maintain that they intended to burn them alive.However, a team from the Police Group of Intervention andRescue (GIR) went all the way up into the neighborhood tostop the execution [ajusticiamiento]” (El Comercio 2006a,emphasis added). So even though Carapungo is a kind ofliminal zone between urban and rural Ecuador, somewherebetween mestizo and indigenous space, the author empha-sizes its remoteness by stressing the distance this specialpolice squad needed to travel to arrive there (confirmed as“local,” not “national” space, safely beyond Quito) and theIndianness of this form of justice by mentioning the sup-posedly “customary” practice of bathing the criminals be-fore setting them on fire. Lynchings thus appear not simplyas justicia por mano propia (justice by one’s own hands) butas justicia por mano india (justice by Indian hands).

Representational strategies that group lynching to-gether with “customary” forms of punishment practiced inindigenous communities carry with them a double effect.On the one hand, they subvert questions about the con-temporary relevance of lynchings in Ecuador by displacingtheir essence into a premodern time of “tradition” and theextranational space of the mythical “isolated” community.Rather than being a symptom of the present, neoliberal orotherwise, lynchings are treated as anachronisms of sorts,coming from the world of custom and the primitive. This isa common media strategy that authors writing about vio-lence in other countries with large indigenous populations,such as Mexico, Guatemala, and Bolivia, have noted (seeGodoy 2004; Goldstein 2004:186). Carlos A. Mendoza hasgone so far as to argue that, in Guatemala, a municipality“with a higher percentage of indigenous population is more

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likely to punish a suspected criminal by means of collec-tive violence” (2006:15). And Eiss has shown how the Mex-ican press attributed the “barbarism” of the 2004 lynchingof police officers in Tlahuac to the “indigenous backgroundof many of its residents” and drew on 19th-century racetheorists like Gustav LeBon to find evidence of the “usosy custumbres,” or traditional customs, of indigenous peo-ple in the actions of the “anonymous, bloodthirsty [lynch]mob” (2006:5; on this case, see also Binford and Churchillin press).

These are old discourses, to be sure, with as long a his-tory in the Andes as in any other part of the Americas.11 Andyet, perhaps because of this legacy, anthropologists havetended to dismiss such claims as evidence of either me-dia sensationalism or the high degree of racism that hasplagued these countries for centuries, leading them to treatindigeneity as merely a trope for enabling the public to un-derstand lynchings. I argue the reverse. In Ecuador, lynch-ings have become a trope for producing public understand-ings of Indians. Descriptions such as those I have discussedserve to contain Indians in time and space, as relics or resid-uals trapped in the repeating drama of their own customs,which cannot but bump up against real, national politicalsociety in a barbaric and savage sort of way. This is the sec-ond effect of these representations. They are respectacular-izations of the violence in lynching, reconfigurations of itsmessage, which raise questions about political society thatcannot be easily dismissed into the same ethers of redun-dant historicism they cast indigenous society into; ratherthey force us as scholars to ask what such representationsare doing in the present and how they work into the cur-rent political imagination in ways that connect their mean-ing to the contemporary tensions and struggles with whichindigenous society is presently involved. In the represen-tational struggles around political practice, which acts of“justice” metonymize here, is a growing mass of visibly realbloody and corporeal evidence to suggest a basic incon-gruity between Indians and the state.

Justicia por mano propia–justicia por manoindia

Over the last decade and a half, indigenous political op-position in Ecuador has been granted official validationby legal and constitutional changes that have been wononly through the enduring efforts of indigenous activistsagainst persistent negation from central state representa-tives. Key among these was the addition in August 1998 ofArticle 191 to Title Eight of the Constitution, which statesthat the “authorities of the pueblos indıgenas will exercisefunctions of justice, applying their own norms and proce-dures in the solution of internal conflicts, conforming withtheir customs or customary right, whenever not in con-tradiction with the Constitution and the law. The law will

render compatible such functions with the national systemof justice” (Republica del Ecuador 1999:54). Several schol-ars have since pointed out the paradoxical logic and anti-subversive tendency of any such attempt to ratify juridicalplurality under the singular charter of the nation-state (cf.the papers collected in Salgado 2002). As Ecuadorian writerEnrique Ayala Mora laments, “The very legislation that isarguably in favor of indigenous rights, conceives of themfrom within a national, unified juridical system” (2002:108).Catherine Walsh adds that, although such legislation effec-tively incorporates the particular rights of indigenous peo-ples within a “new normativity,” the “indigenous intentionsin the process of constitutional reform were others—to de-mand the transformation of the monocultural nation-stateand not simply to add their cultural difference to the mix-ture of existing dominant norms” (2002:28, 29).

Intended perhaps as a strategy directed against this“new normativity” of juridical pluralism, social scientistshave chosen to write in ways that expand on the “cul-tural distinctiveness” of indigenous forms of justice, val-idate them as ancestral components of indigenous soci-ety, and promote them as a basis for continued indige-nous solidarity and identity. Fernando S. Garcıa, for in-stance, summarizes indigenous notions of justice as “an-terior in historical terms to positivist rights,” abstractedinto the general social structure of indigenous societiesrather than administered in a specialized “legal” sphere,and directed toward “reestablishing the internal harmonyof the group” (2002:13). “As anyone can see,” he continues,“the start and end points of indigenous rights and positiverights obey distinct propositions and cultural conceptions”(Garcıa 2002:13). Continuing the argument of the above au-thors, the main threat that official recognition is said to poseto indigenous systems of justice is its ability to flatten outtheir true distinctiveness under a homogenizing and inte-grative national norm. Once again, part of the response thatsocial scientists seem to be committed to offering is a pushtoward cultural, political, and (now) juridical relativism. Butis this addressing the real, and even most pressing, dangerof legislated juridical plurality?

I suggest that the danger, in fact, lies elsewhere andmay be greatly accentuated by relativist approaches thatfortify identifications between nonnormative systems ofjustice and indigenous identity. Part of this has to do withthe work that “culture” does in establishing a certain dis-tinctiveness from national norms of juridical conduct. Itis “culture” in Latin America, like “ethnicity” in the UnitedStates, that establishes minority status, against the “major-ity” that never has to marshal such justification for its be-havior. It is significant that despite constitutional claimsthat Ecuador is a pluricultural country, it is only indigenouspeoples—all of them together, without distinction—whoare identified with the practice of alternative forms of jus-tice, a potentiality that has since become a key condition

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of performing “indigeneity.”12 “Culture,” is, as such, onceagain thoroughly essentialized. It at once defines, racially,the category “Indian” or “indigenous” and attaches it tononstandard forms of justice, such that they too becomeracially codified as “Indian” or “indigenous.” As Marisol dela Cadena (1999) has argued, culture, much more than bi-ology, has always been the basis of Latin American systemsof racial classification and has subsequently served to char-acterize cultural deviance and normativity, morality, andimmorality, in racial terms.13 Given this, the real danger ofArticle 191 may be that it enshrines in law a fundamentalincongruity between indigenous and national political so-cieties by absorbing the range of alternative forms of justiceunder the indigenous banner, rooting them in the quasi-organic composition of indigenous culture, and relegatingtheir rationality to the prenational past of custom and tra-dition. When lynching gets added to this picture, it becomesclear that the very legislation that was supposed to validateindigenous forms of justice works, in fact, to delegitimizethem. Indigenous lawyer Lourdes Tiban, president of theLatacunga-based Foundation for Kichwa Defense, says thatnonindigenous people “confuse justicia indıgena with ajus-ticiamiento or justicia por mano propia. Our Foundation,”she feels the need to emphasize, “has nothing to do withlynchings” (El Comercio 2003c).14 Nina Pacari, also an in-digenous lawyer, claims that when indigenous authoritiestry to apply Article 191 of the constitution to their activ-ities, there are always those “from the white-mestizo sec-tors who invoke jurisdictional unity to negate the exerciseof said right or, lacking that, qualify it as lynching or justiciapor mano propia in order to delegitimate a constitutionallyrecognized ancestral right” (2002:84).

Lynchings have themselves become competitivespaces to work out national principles of juridical norma-tivity and deviance. As Goldstein has written, a lynchingshows a community’s “willingness to take the enforcementof justice under local authority when the legal apparatusof the state is unwilling or unable to provide it” (2004:200).They are, according to Quinones, citizens’ “clearest state-ment today on the quality of justice they expect” (2001:43).Lynch mobs, therefore, are frequently portrayed in social-scientific texts not so much as challenging the state orthe legal apparatuses of the country as embodying them,“mimic[king] the functioning of the official judicial system,”albeit in a vernacular and “dark” form (Godoy 2004:637,623). As one Cayambe resident is reported to have saidafter the Quinonez lynching, “el pueblo . . . judged andsentenced someone considered one of the most practiceddelinquents in the region” (El Comercio 2003b). Yet howwilling is the public to accept such characterizations in apolitical context already fraught with tensions over officialand alternative conceptions of justice?

An editorial column printed in the first Sunday editionof El Comercio (2003d) to follow the Quinonez lynch-

ing chastises journalists for the tone of their coverage,saying they seemed to relish the excitement as much asa commentator at a soccer match, offering “cynical” and“ambiguous” conclusions as well as “fascistic justificationsfor the violence,” such as the “spontaneous expression ofpopular ire.” Of particular concern to this unnamed authorare the reporters’ descriptions of the lynching as “takingjustice into one’s own hands.” Accusing the reporters ofproviding “apologies” for the lynching, the author goes onto ask, “Justice? This term cannot be devalued by theseimages of death.”

So, although lynchings may be carried out under thebanner of “justice,” neither the social conditions of “struc-tural violence” that underpin them nor the criminal acts at-tributed to the victim may be enough to make them publiclyinterpretable as such. The notion of “justice” may in certaincases be too bound to an image of a proper state to let it slipinto certain hands, particularly those of the lower classes,the racially stigmatized, or those already codified as unrulyand defined as politically deviant.

Mercedes Prieto (2004) has shown that one of thedefinitive emotional complexes of early 20th-centuryEcuador was the fear of “rebellion and revenge of the In-dians,” closely connected to ideas of their accentuated ca-pacity for “spatial and cultural mobility” in the era of lib-eral reforms (2004:246). Although some liberals welcomedthe addition of Indians to the national labor market, forothers, she claims, “the autonomy of community-living In-dians was . . . risky: they struggled against the whites wholived in populated centers and small cities. The ghost of in-digenous rebellion and its revenge were seen as one of themeans of intervening in the political arena. Fear of revengejustified formulas for mitigating the latent rebellion” (Prieto2004:247, emphasis added).

Today, the dual focus of organized indigenous politicalactivism—at once working within official state processes tomodify them and orchestrating paros (blockades) or levan-tamientos (uprisings) to exert pressure from the outside15—combines in a unified image of the progressive “comingtrue” of the long-standing fears of the violent and unrulyindigenous mob descending from their assigned spacesin the highlands to overthrow the order and security ofwhite–mestizo society. It is precisely this sort of descrip-tion that frames media accounts of an attempted lynchingin Cayambe of a police officer from Quito accused of killingand robbing an indigenous taxi driver in June 2006. In an ar-ticle in El Comercio (2006c), “300 comuneros [community-living Indians]” from the majority-indigenous parishes of“Olmedo and Cancagua [sic, Cangahua]” are said to have“come all the way down from the comunas [communities]”and surrounded the police station. The “angry peasants andindıgenas” are reported to have “repeated constantly” that“we will not let him escape us. We’ll burn him.” To the jour-nalist, “despite the extreme security measures,” the police

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station “appeared hardly secure in the face of the multi-tude of comuneros . . . [who] climbed the walls and bangedthe doors insistently.” Although the 50 police officers guard-ing the station claimed the accused would be sentencedin court, “the comuneros didn’t want to negotiate. Theywanted to ‘burn the policeman alive.’”

As with the lynching of Quinonez in the same cityover three years earlier, the police are ascribed a defensiverole, shown to be sympathetically protecting the otherwisesolid and functioning institutions of state from the violentactions of the indigenous “multitude.” This image merelytransposes into the violent encounter of lynching the pointmade above regarding the ways that multicultural amend-ments to the constitution and the paradoxical discourse of“indigenous justice” help locate the site of struggle and fearin the state, or at least the idea of the state as a political cen-ter of gravity for those able to claim an unmarked identity ascitizens. In this sense, the more “legitimate” the channels ofentry of indigenous political leaders into the workings of thestate, the greater the “illegitimacy” of their being there at all.The ancient fear of indigenous takeover and the justifica-tion for a protective response, however modified by currentpolitical conditions, is one of the most important subtextsrunning through all representations of highland lynching inEcuador today. This is summarized well by Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, who notes that characters in Ecuador’s lynchingnarratives are inevitably

cast as players in the drama of the unceasing fight be-tween “Indian” and “Hispanic.” . . . In the rhetoric ofthis encounter, the urban, white mestizo populationfrets about being surrounded and under siege by anuntamed Indian population, [and] indigenous peopledespair of the transgression on their territory and cul-ture. . . . For all its connection to neoliberal political andeconomic circumstances, justice making still unfoldsthrough these narratives of the primordial encounter.[2002:642, emphasis added]

Conclusion: Ways of seeing lynching in Ecuador

The monological construction of reality applies both tothe way in which the Other is defined as different and tohow its difference is discursively constructed in orderto legitimize the exercise of violence and domination.

—Cristina Rojas, Civilization and Violence

Andres Guerrero has provocatively suggested thinkingabout lynchings in Ecuador as the flip side of soap op-eras. For indigenous people, looking “through this virtualwindow, from the other side of the ethnic divide, soap op-eras are interpreted pedagogically, more than emotionally.They give access to a knowledge of the world of [urban] cit-izens [and] . . . the reality of the life of ‘the whites’” (Guer-rero 2001:205). Lynchings have become the reverse sorts of

pedagogical windows, providing white and mestizo societythe impression of looking directly into the heart of indige-nous reality. More than this, however, lynchings provide theEcuadorian public and media with an important opportu-nity to discuss and produce understandings of the coun-try’s current political tensions. They employ symbols andrhetorical devices that have endured many shifts in politicalorientation and social relations to render them knowableas exemplary events warranting national concern. Lynch-ing narratives are organized around racial systems of knowl-edge. Characters are racially codified as are the spaces theyinhabit and the techniques they draw on in the act. Sub-suming the violence of lynchings within a set of practicescalled “indigenous forms of justice” marks the indigenoussubject in a parenthetical relationship to normative citizen-ship, political society, and the state. Opposing this is the vic-tim who, despite his or her identity at the start of the processor despite the crime he or she is accused of committing, be-comes, through suffering, the unmarked rights-bearing cit-izen, a hollow location progressively filled in as the viola-tions of rights to liberty, a fair trial, bodily integrity, and lifeincrease. The deracialization of the victim, as in the case ofQuinonez, is precisely what allows the victim’s dying body tooccupy the center of a racial system, its “cosmic” norm. Thepolice relate to the victim as they are expected to act towardtrue national citizens, in movements described as “saving”and “protecting” him or her from capture by the Indian mobbent on violence, pushing it back from the gates it clamorsagainst and threatens to overcome.

These representations work in an only partlymetaphorical fashion to portray the growing encroachmentof indigenous society on the inner workings of state, theillegitimacy of a state subverted along such lines, and theneed for greater vigilance and protection against furtherbreaches of the internal, structural conditions of nationalsecurity.16 They justify the actions by police and militaryforces that have occurred and continue to occur againstthe indigenous movement, especially during street protestsand blockades, which have resulted in many deaths. I haveseen indigenous babies carried in blankets on their moth-ers’ backs during these protests die of suffocation fromtear gas pouring out of canisters intentionally shot at themothers by the military to disperse crowds of protesters. Incontrast to lynchings, these are not categorized as acts ofviolence. They are a legitimate defense against it.

I conclude by suggesting three points that I think canmost readily be extrapolated from this analysis of publicviolence in highland Ecuador to similar inquiries else-where.17 First, if there is any reason to continue situatingcontemporary lynchings within the condition of neoliberal-ism and understanding them as, in some way, expressive ofthe tensions it has generated, then scholars must develop amuch richer understanding of these tensions and how theyimpinge on the construction of violence in Latin America.

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It simply is not enough to explain lynching as a responseto inadequate police protection, the rise of precariouslivelihood strategies and crime, or the general withdrawalof the state from the task of social governance. Other factorsas central to defining the neoliberal turn have been shownto be pivotal to understanding lynching in Ecuador, in-cluding the push toward multicultural forms of democracy(Hale 2002; Seider 2003; Van Cott 2000), the expansion ofexport-oriented capitalism into new areas (Harvey 2003,2004; Korovkin 2003; Krupa 2005), state decentralizationinitiatives (Cameron 2003), and struggles to define degreesof substate sovereignty in ethnonationalist terms (Greene2007; Ng’weno 2007; Postero and Zamosc 2004; Warren andJackson 2002).

Second, this study suggests the need to give greater at-tention to the significance of the actual physical violence in-volved in lynching and, with that, the ways that the body be-comes invoked as a particular kind of text for it. In Ecuador,it is this linkage between a very visual and gory type of vio-lence and very identifiable types of bodies that brings raceto the fore as the master code of highland lynching. It iswhat enables the condition of aberrance to be located inthe figure of the politically active Indian, particularly whenseen to be interfering with the techniques of state (suchas defining justice, punishing criminals, rewriting constitu-tions, and serving in the national congress). The case I haveexamined further allows consideration of how an emphasison the more “structural” sorts of violence that many ana-lysts have argued lie behind the rise of lynching may be readby local audiences as endorsing the sort of “revenge” scriptsthat Ecuadorian audiences already read into, and fear in, in-digenous political activity. In other words, attempts to bringa relativist perspective to bear on a population already iden-tified as suspect because its members lynch people mayproduce the reverse of empathy and actually accentuate im-pressions of their deviance and, thus, the need for protec-tion or defense against them.

The third point reiterates the overall approach of thisstudy, which can be summarized as an attempt to denat-uralize the horror that images and narratives of lynchingmay inspire in their audience. Horror, revulsion, fear, shock:These are, as scholars of U.S. lynchings have made clear,directed impulses, saturated with highly differentiated andsocially positioned interpretive frameworks and yet highlymalleable to rhetorical usage.18 How lynchings manage toevoke such emotions in people not immediately threatenedby them is a question that can only be addressed by ex-ploring the conditions that enable particular ways of seeingmeaningful relationships between violence, fear, and polit-ical action in the contexts of their production.

NotesAcknowledgments. I wish to thank Durba Mitra, David Nugent,

Bruce Knauft, Joanna Davidson, Ken MacLean, and Marc Becker

for helpful comments on drafts of this article. This article also ben-efited from generous commentary by Donald Donham and AE’sanonymous reviewers.

1. Statistics are unreliable in this regard, as many lynchings gounreported, get classified as general homicides in police reports, orare lost in the broad framework of human rights violations recordedby watch groups. The statistics that do exist, however, are alarming.The United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA;2002) reports that 482 lynchings occurred across that country be-tween 1996 and 2002. Andres Guerrero (2001:198) discovered that29 people died from lynchings in Ecuador between January 1996and September 1997. Eduardo Castillo Claudett (2000:217) foundreports of 330 lynchings in Peru between 1995 and 1999. CarlosM. Vilas (2001:155) reports that 103 lynchings occurred in Mexicobetween 1987 and 1998. Maria-Victoria Benevides and and Rosa-Maria Fischer Ferreira (1991:37) count 82 lynchings in Brazil be-tween 1979 and 1982.

2. According to Sam Quinones, “The Mexican lynching is differ-ent from its southern-U.S. counterpart, which was a weapon themajority used to oppress a minority. Nor is it similar to the lynch-ings in the Old West, where there was no law. Rather it is a bellow ofrage by the powerless majority against corrupt cops and politicians,protected criminals—against a justice system that people know tobe unfair” (2001:42–43). Godoy similarly advises that, although “theterm ‘lynchings’ often connotes a particular practice in the U.S.context—readers may have in mind the racially-motivated killings,by hanging, in the post-bellum U.S. south—in the Latin Americancontext the methods of execution are many and there does not ap-pear to be any consistent link to racial domination” (2004:644 n. 4).Although I neither follow Quinones’s interest in the emotional stateof lynchers nor find Godoy’s dismissal of race and stylistic consis-tency to match the Ecuadorian case, my principal point of diver-gence from these authors is in the resonances I find between theeffects and functions of lynching in the United States and Ecuador,as I discuss in the text.

3. This event is commonly referred to as the “rebelion de los fora-jidos” (rebellion of the outsiders), a term that the urban mestizomiddle classes of Quito, Cuenca, and other large highland citiesadopted to refer to their sense of sudden exclusion from the politi-cal process under the Gutierrez regime (Unda 2005). It is notewor-thy that neither the category of political “outsider” nor the protestthat developed around it was meant to include indigenous sectorsin any significant way. This, one can safely say, was precisely thepoint—indigenous people were no longer entirely outside the polit-ical decision-making process, and this historic reversal was impli-cated in both the irony of the mestizo protagonists’ autoidentifica-tion as the true “outsiders” and the confusion felt in the indigenousmovement over how to best react (see Tamayo and Serrano 2005 fora discussion of the various and contradictory actions of indigenoussectors at this time).

4. The implication of this assertion is that, at a time when Indi-ans had just entered, if temporarily and unevenly, into the centralhalls of state power, the urban middle classes had become some-what “Indian” in their chosen means of political engagement—truly evidencing a country whose political landscape had beenflipped completely upside down, a paıs torcido.

5. As the title of a piece Goldstein coauthored with FatimahWilliams Castro (“Creative Violence: How Marginal People MakeNews in Bolivia” [2006]) makes clear, the communicative theoryhere rests on a rather shorthand response to the old Spivakian(Spivak 1988) question of whether the subaltern or “marginal”person can speak. In most anthropology on the topic, the answeris unquestionably yes: The lynching says, “We are suffering, wantmore security, and are tired of the state’s unwillingness to pro-tect us,” and anthropologists are supposed to take up the task of

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helping this voice get heard. But as I read Gayatri Spivak, the pointis not really whether subalterns or marginals are engaged in formsof communicative practice (which is obviously true) but whetherthey may occupy the structural location of autonomous (if collec-tive) speaking subjects under the power relations prevalent in agiven society—those that, likewise, populate the categories of sub-altern and dominant, marginal and central, minority and majority,and so on. Spivak’s pessimistic response to her own question hasnothing to do with speech and everything to do with grammar. Sheforces one to locate the conditions of possibility for the former inthe capacities ascribed by the latter, that is, to see how the location“subaltern” or “marginal” becomes, by definition, that which is notable to ascribe on itself the capacity to “speak” or to “make news.” Iam tempted to here to propose a play on Marx’s famous opening tothe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to say that (marginal)people may make the news, “but they do not make it under circum-stances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directlyencountered, given, and transmitted from the past” (1963:15). As Ishow in the text, the reshaping of subaltern statements in the presscannot be so easily dismissed as misrepresentations; misrepresen-tations are themselves part of the very meaningful conceptual andpolitical arrangements that need to be unpacked to understand theweight that lynchings carry in society.

6. According to Dominic J. Capeci Jr., writing of the 1942 burn-ing of Cleo Wright in Sikeston, Missouri, the event “was most psy-chologically debilitating to children of five years and younger whowere paraded by Wright’s grotesque, seared corpse as an object les-son in the proper treatment of an inferior race. At least one childfrom a family of one daughter and two sons whose father escortedthem past the carcass required a doctor’s care before the sun set”(1998:35).

7. I thank Sergeant Jairo Bermudez of the National Police Head-quarters in Quito, who investigated the lynching in January 2003,for access to these files.

8. Although Hernandez spells the victim’s name Quinones, I havealtered the spelling to Quinonez in all quotations from her report inaccord with all other media reports and police files.

9. As Vendryes (1997:170–172) notes, however, this hyperinvest-ment of visual signification in the victim’s body allowed for consid-erable struggle over its meaning. In a 1935 New York City art exhibit,she notes, antilynching artists, particularly white ones, challengedprotagonists’ photographic presentation of lynchings by paintingand drawing images of victims with open eyes, writhing bodies,and mouths appearing to scream or speak. The point was to showa humanized image in which “the victim was still alive, as if rescuemight still be possible” (Vendryes 1997:170, 172).

10. As if to remind readers of the significance of this restraint tothem, the article concludes by stating that, although only “25 per-cent” of the national population is indigenous, “indigenous organi-zations showed their national power in January 2000 when they leda levantamiento [uprising] . . . that overthrew then-president JamilMahuad” (El Comercio 2002).

11. See Poole 1994, Orlove 1994, and Prieto 2004. As one promi-nent example of the dangerous effects of such images, see MarioVargas Llosa’s “Inquest in the Andes” (1983), published in the NewYork Times. In this article, Vargas Llosa reports on his investigationinto the 1983 killing of seven journalists by members of the Uchu-raccay community in Peru, which, as Enrique Mayer (1991) has bril-liantly shown, resorts to stereotypical images of indigenous cus-toms, barbarism, irrationality, and spatiotemporal distance fromnational modernity to explain them.

12. Contrary to the idea implied by this law that indigenouscommunities, by nature, have a certain “culture” of justice, Garcıaclaims that his research in various indigenous communities in thehighlands showed that the “majority of informants consulted pos-

sess a mostly . . . superficial knowledge about indigenous forms ofjustice. They are guided, principally, by what they had seen or heardin mediums of communication” (2002:85). He quotes a commu-nity member as saying that “information [about what ‘indigenousjustice’ means] has reached me through the press” (2002:85). Thesanction and threat I most witnessed during my years of living inindigenous communities in Cayambe was the cutting off of waterand electricity, which are community-controlled resources.

13. On the cultural definition of race in Ecuador, see the 1947Special Instructions for Census Enumerators in Otavalo, whichstates that the census taker will, under the category “Race,” record,for instance, “Indıgena” when the person “is dressed like an Indianand his mother tongue is Quechua [sic]” (Guerrero 2003:288). Onthe link with morality, see de la Cadena 1999 and Weismantel 2001.

14. Similarly, a recent publication by the Quichua federationEcuarunari is compelled to state that lynchings “have nothing todo with the indigenous legal system” (Cocha and Bolıvar Beltran2008:13) and blames the press for making such associations.

15. Since at least 1990, all national indigenous protests havebeen called “levantamientos indıgenas,” the same term BenjaminOrlove (1994:83) shows was used in late 19th- and early 20th-century Peru to name the fear of what the “violent Indian hordes”would do if they descended from the highlands to wreak havoc onthe towns of “honorable society.”

16. As Jose Almeida Vinueza argued at the height of Gutierrez’spresidency,

From the perspective of dominant sectors, the Ecuadorian in-digenous movement has obtained a dangerous political andmoral stature. The dominant sector is determined to absorba counteroffensive in order to control it. Ecuadorian elite un-derstands perfectly well . . . that gaining control over the defi-nition and use of “culture” is a successful strategy and may bethe best way to confront the indigenous movement. [2005:105]

17. One especially productive line of discussion, yet to emerge,would bring together scholars of Latin America and Africa to dis-cuss the comparative elaboration of public violence in the two con-tinents and the interpretive frameworks called on to understand it.I am thinking particularly of the rich tradition of work on Africa de-voted to studying the practices of “necklacing,” “witchcleansing,”“vigilantism,” and sorcery accusations in relation to what are of-ten described as the upheavals of modernity (Ashforth 2005; Aus-lander 1993; Bay and Donham 2006; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993;Geschiere 1997; Smith 2004).

18. On the productive, cultural–political uses of fear in the post-9/11 United States and earlier, see Robin 2004 and Bourke 2006.For a discussion comparing the representational and rhetoricaluses of lynching photographs from the United States with torturephotographs from Abu Ghraib prison, see Sontag 2004, Apel 2005,Eisenman 2007, and Philipose 2007.

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accepted September 23, 2008final version submitted October 21, 2008

Christopher KrupaEmory UniversityDepartment of AnthropologyInstitute of Critical International StudiesEmory University1627 North Decatur RoadAtlanta, GA 30322 USA404-727-9840

[email protected]

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