Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City

by Daniel M Goldstein

Overview

In Outlawed, Daniel M. Goldstein reveals how indigenous residents of marginal neighborhoods in Cochabamba, Bolivia, struggle to balance security with rights. Feeling abandoned to the crime and violence that grip their communities, they sometimes turn to vigilante practices, including lynching, to apprehend and punish suspected criminals. Goldstein describes those in this precarious position as "outlawed": not protected from crime by the law but forced to comply with legal measures in other areas of their lives, their solutions to protection criminalized while their needs for security are ignored. He chronicles the complications of the government's attempts to provide greater rights to indigenous peoples, including a new constitution that recognizes "community justice." He also examines how state definitions of indigeneity ignore the existence of marginal neighborhoods, continuing long-standing exclusionary practices. The insecurity felt by the impoverished residents of Cochabamba—and, more broadly, by the urban poor throughout Bolivia and Latin America—remains. Outlawed illuminates the complex interconnections between differing definitions of security and human rights at the local, national, and global levels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822353119
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/21/2012
Series:	Cultures and Practice of Violence
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Daniel M. Goldstein is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia and a coeditor of Violent Democracies of Latin America, both also published by Duke University Press.

Read an Excerpt

OUTLAWED

BETWEEN SECURITY AND RIGHTS IN A BOLIVIAN CITY

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By Daniel M. Goldstein

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5311-9

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Chapter One

Security, Rights, and the Law in Evo's Bolivia

The law is like a snake: its bite is worse for those who must go barefoot. —LOCAL SAYING

On Sunday, January 25, 2009, Bolivians voted to approve a new constitution for the country. The Nueva Constitución Política del Estado (New Political Constitution of the State) was endorsed by 60 percent of the voting public, which President Evo Morales interpreted as a strong mandate for what had been his administration's signature objective since his election in December 2005. For Evo (as he is popularly known) and his supporters in the Movement toward Socialism (the Movimiento a Socialismo, or MAS), the new constitution represented the formal reversal of centuries of institutionalized oppression and discrimination against Bolivia's "original indigenous peasant" peoples, who compose the majority of the national population, and a significant step toward the goal of "refounding" the Bolivian "plurination" (Morales 2011). For Evo's opponents, both in the Bolivian highlands and in the lowland media luna region, the new constitution was another blow to their prestige and power in the nation, a frightening and unworkable tangle of articles that threatened to limit the size of individual landholdings, change the legal definition of property to allow for communal ownership of land, limit the autonomy of regional governments, and give the federal government more control over the nation's natural gas reserves. Evo's political antagonists (including many observers in the United States) cited the constitution's allocation of increased power to the state as more evidence of the president's demagoguery; such critics frequently referred to the controversial president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, as an example of the extremes toward which Evo was tending. Evo's supporters, viewing him as their ally and kinsman, pointed to the constitutional guarantee of rights for Bolivia's indigenous peoples as evidence of his progressive leadership and proof that, after centuries of discrimination and marginalization, there was now room for them in the national configuration.

Among its most important and controversial propositions, the new Bolivian constitution marked the formal recognition of justicia comunitaria (community justice) by the Bolivian state. According to the stipulations laid down in this document, "the nations and original indigenous peasant communities (las naciones y pueblos indíena originario campesinos) will exercise their jurisdictional functions through their authorities, and will apply their own principles, cultural values, norms and procedures" in implementing community justice (Nueva Constitución Política del Estado 2008, 45). Within their "indigenous jurisdictions," local authorities would have the right to resolve their own conflicts and disputes according to an indigenous legal tradition, which would apply to other members of those nations or communities. Formal state law would exist parallel to this indigenous justice, but the constitution prescribed that the state had the obligation to "promote and reinforce" original indigenous peasant justice, and to make itself available to indigenous authorities should they desire the intervention of state judicial instruments (Nueva Constitución Política del Estado 2008, 45).

The formal recognition of community justice by the Bolivian state exemplified the profound changes that the country experienced following the election of Evo Morales in 2005 (he was reelected in 2009). For centuries indigenous peoples of Bolivia had been denied any sort of voice within national politics. Now they found in Evo an advocate in the Palacio Quemado (the Bolivian White House), a self-identifying indigena who actively promoted the agenda of expanding indigenous rights and representation in the country, while valorizing indigenous cultures and traditions and giving them formal legal recognition. With Morales in power, struggles that formerly took place in the nation's streets moved to its courts and legislature, as the law itself was transformed to reflect the ruling party's ideology and objectives. The community justice provisions in the new constitution represented an official acknowledgment of Bolivia as legally plural: the constitution put indigenous usos y costumbres (us ages and customs) on an equal footing with national law and required the latter to recognize the legitimacy of the former, creating spaces within the national territory where state law might be discretionary and contested, rather than hegemonic. Even as the constitution co-opted indigenous tradition through recognition, this was still a remarkable move, running contrary to five hundred years of history in which indigenous Latin Americans had been subordinated within a national racial hierarchy, and their beliefs and customs denigrated within national society.

Despite its rather heroic implications, the promotion of community justice and, more generally, the valorization of original indigenous peasant peoples and customs within national law and national ideology was a project fraught with contradictions. As this book explores, even as rural traditions of community justice have been elevated to national prominence, vast numbers of indigenous peoples living on the margins of Bolivia's cities remain without any legal protections whatsoever. In these so-called barrios marginales (marginal neighborhoods), no system of law —neither state nor indigenous—operates to provide support or recourse to the residents, and few authorities—neither official nor traditional— exist to administer justice. In these marginal urban spaces (particularly in Cochabamba, Bolivia's fourth largest city), vigilante or "self-help" practices of apprehending and punishing suspected criminals have emerged as a frequent response to crime, as some barrio residents take the law into their own hands to administer a locally understood form of collective "justice." The indigenous residents of the barrios are, in various ways, outlawed— they live outside the protections of state law, yet they are multiply subjected to its constraints; they must do without the law's benefits, but they are criminalized as illegal occupants of urban space and perpetrators of mob justice. The experience and consequences of this precarious position— of being outlawed—is a principal theme of this ethnography.

The MAS-led effort to refound Bolivia as a nation that includes (one might even say that it prioritizes) indigenous peoples and their traditional languages and customs was a radical political project, representing a sharp break with the past (perhaps most especially with the recent neoliberal past) and defining a new era in Latin American politics and social life. And at the time of its drafting, the new Bolivian constitution, with its formal recognition of indigenous rights and practices, may have been the most radical document of its kind in the world (Goodale 2009). In terms of its vision and governing philosophy, the MAS project was undoubtedly a step forward for Bolivians of indigenous heritage, the realization of a long-held ambition of moving from the margins to the center of Bolivian national politics. The rise to power of Evo Morales marked the culmination of decades of political work by those representing the indigenous movements in Bolivia, and the rewriting of the constitution signaled the remarkable overhaul of the Bolivian state and the laws governing the Bolivian nation (Pearce 2011; Sivak 2010; Webber 2011).

However, despite the many transformations in Bolivian law, state, and society, the important processes that have the most impact on the daily lives of indigenous Bolivians unfold at the most local of levels, and these processes are in many ways disconnected from the ideological and legislative work performed at the level of the state. In some senses, despite the MAS government's rhetorical and political efforts to include indigenous people in the fabric of the Bolivian nation, many of those people have continued to enjoy more or less the same basic relationship to the MAS state as they did with its earlier incarnations. Marginal urban areas in particular—where the majority of Bolivia's indigenous people now live (Instituto Nacional de Estadíticas de Bolivia 2001, 2003)—are marked by a continuous experience of poverty and neglect, characteristic of Bolivia's urban indigenous communities since at least the middle of the twentieth century. As subsequent chapters of this ethnography explore, urban indigenous people fit poorly in the legislative agenda of the MAS government and its conceptions of what constitutes indigeneity, leaving a considerable sector of the indigenous population to experience an ongoing exclusion from the protections and benefits of the state.

For urban indigenous people themselves, their condition of quotidian poverty, vulnerability to violence and criminal predation, and lack of access to the most basic forms of public services and infrastructure is encapsulated in a single concept: insecurity. To be insecure is to occupy a habitus of fear and uncertainty that is at once social, psychological, and material. Living in one of the poorest cities on the planet (M. Davis 2006), the residents of Cochabamba's marginal barrios feel insecure: insecurity colors their entire worldview, the way they relate to their neighbors, residents of nearby communities, and strangers in their midst; it shapes their relationships with entities as distant as state and municipal authorities, and as close as their spouses and children. To be insecure is to lack the power to make effective change in your own life, to protect those small investments you have made in your home and livelihood, and to defend your family from crime. Insecurity physically shapes your home; it structures your movements through space and conditions your relationship to personal property. Insecurity means there is no reliable police force in your neighborhood to whom you can turn in times of crisis—it means instead that you call 911 over and over again, and if anyone answers they offer promises but no actual help. Insecurity is having to leave your children alone and untended while you go to work, never knowing if a robber or a rapist might visit while you are away. It is about vulnerability, especially to the work of petty thieves, embodied in the spectral figure of the ratero—a quasimythical being who haunts the margins of the city, preying on the unwary and posing an unending challenge to local peace and stability. Insecurity is fundamentally about disorder: It is a sense that the world is unpredictable, out of control, and inherently dangerous, and that within this chaos the individual must struggle desperately just to survive. It is about uncertainty, the unknowable, what Ellen Moodie (2010, 170) has called "not-knowing," an inability to know how to manage risk, which emanates from spectral sources that seem to transcend the local, the recognizable, the real (see also Taylor 1997). It is in some ways part of what Michael Taussig identifies as a culture of terror, "based on and nourished by silence and myth in which the fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious flourishes by means of rumor and fantasy woven in a dense web of magical realism" (1984, 469). This is the lived experience of insecurity for the marginalized urban poor in Cochabamba—as it is in many other cities throughout Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America—and it is a condition that remains unchanged despite the many political reforms that Bolivia has experienced in the administrations of Evo Morales.

In a place of insecurity, a variety of personal dispositions and social phenomena can arise. The insecure place is dangerous, both for those who live there and those who visit. The insecure place is highly unstable, characterized more by fragmentation and unpredictability than by order and routine. People living insecure lives cannot rely on what generations of social scientists have called traditions or norms or cultural patterns, much less on state laws or government institutions, to regulate their lives and behavior. In the space of insecurity, people have to continually reinvent themselves and their behaviors, calling on what they know or think they know about the world in order to act purposively and meaningfully in it. In this way, they hope to establish the very sense of order and pattern that their worlds otherwise lack, a sense of control over their environments, their livelihoods, and their lives. For this reason, the marginal barrios—like other marginal zones (Das and Poole 2004)—are spaces of tremendous creativity, where people must assemble modes of living and making do outside the guarantees of the democratic state and its rule of law.

Despite this disorder, however, the insecure space of the marginal barrio is not devoid of law; it is not truly outside the reach of the state, though it may feel that way to those who live there. Indeed, as the chapters of this ethnography explore, the law operates with power in the marginal barrio, as the state attempts to make legible and minimally control the outlawed settlements on its urban fringes. This observation runs counter to the claims of many barrio residents, who describe the state as absent and their relation to it as one of abandonment, and to the critiques of many social scientists, who similarly regard the neoliberal state as having been negligent and abandoned its responsibility to its citizens. But although there is law in the marginal barrio, the law does not protect against insecurity: it does not give residents a sense that they are protected from the work of criminals, or that they have somewhere to turn if they are the victims of a crime. The law operates instead to erect obstacles, sometimes to the very security that people so desperately crave; it strains to impose its own conception of order, which may not conform well to the kinds of social order that barrio residents desire. The law excludes people by failing to attend to their needs while including them in select regulatory regimes of its own devising—a double outlawing that leaves people both outside the law and problematically within it, but in neither sense secure. Contrary to expectations in the global north, the distinctions between legal and illegal, just and unjust, can be blurry in the marginal barrio, and matters of class, race, gender, and social position influence its operation. "The law is like a snake," poor people sometimes remark. "Its bite is worse for those who must go barefoot."

Take, for example, the question of land legalization. As I discuss in chapter 3, establishing legal title to land is a lengthy bureaucratic process requiring barrio residents to jump through an inordinate number of hoops in order to receive state recognition of their land claims. For poor people on the urban margins—who have little time, fewer resources, and scant knowledge of the arcane workings of the legal system—the process is onerous, confusing, and often fruitless because the irregular manner in which they originally purchased their land renders these transactions un-legalizable from the outset. Barrio residents in such circumstances are thus unlawful squatters in the eyes of the state. From their perspective, though, the state and its laws failed to protect them from the unscrupulous tactics of the land speculators who originally sold them their lots, and the laws of land titling impose further damage by making this circumstance painful and unresolvable, consigning them to a perpetual limbo in which legalization and the rights of citizenship that it conveys remain forever out of reach. The law, then, becomes not a force for ordering things and making them knowable and predictable (as the foundational theories of legal realism seem to suggest; see, for example, Llewellyn and Hoebel 1941), but something that in local perspective is barely distinguishable from illegality. A similar point can be made about criminal law and the prosecution of criminal cases. In the absence of a reliable police or judicial presence in their communities (see chapters 3 and 4), barrio residents are again left outside the law, which gives them no avenue to the resolution of conflicts. Indeed, the law perversely seems to require evidence to sustain a conviction, evidence that the absent and corrupt police are obviously incapable of producing—which leaves criminals free to continue their practices and crime victims unable to claim restitution. In the way it apparently favors criminals over crime victims, the law (along with transnational notions of human rights; see chapter 6) again presents itself as a force of illegality and chaos, rather than of peaceful and equitable ordering.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from OUTLAWED by Daniel M. Goldstein Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 Security, Rights, and the Law in Evo's Bolivia 1

Chapter 2 Getting Engaged: Reflections on an Activist Anthropology 35

Chapter 3 The Phantom State: Law and Ordering on the Urban Margins 77

Chapter 4 Exorcising Ghosts: Managing Insecurity in Uspha Uspha 121

Chapter 5 Community Justice and the Creative Imagination 167

Chapter 6 Inhuman Rights? Violence at the Nexus of Rights and Security 203

Chapter 7 An Uncertain Anthropology 239

Notes 257

References 281

Index 305

Editorial Reviews

"Outlawed will undoubtedly inspire important debates on the place of 'engaged anthropology' in our discipline, while inadvertently showing that our scholarly production is often not as collaborative as our activism."

Ellen Moodien Ethnologist

Although Outlawed is an ethnography based on fieldwork with participant observation, traditional ethnographic description occupies only about forty percent of the text. The remainder is roughly forty percent theory and engagement with other literature, and twenty percent discussion of the personal role of the anthropologist. Each of the three elements contributes something to make Outlawed a valuable… work.

The Latin Americanist - Gary Van Valen

Outlawed presents a theoretical tour de force that draws the reader into complicating and questioning long-standing tropes of urban/rural, indigenous/civilized, and neoliberal/ communal that clearly continue to affect governmentality and everyday experiences of citizenship in contemporary Bolivia. As such, it is a must-read for scholars of the Andes, of neoliberal citizenship in all its manifestations, and—more importantly—for anyone concerned with the renewed scrutiny of security in the global south.

Journal of Anthropological Research - Isabel M. Scarborough

[A]stute and useful….[T]his book provides a thought-provoking examination of human rights, fear of crime, and the ways in which people create new forms of justice. Given that it addresses fear of and daily responses to crime, a central concern of many Latin Americans today, this book will be widely read by anthropologists as well as those interested in Latin America, inequality, and "post-neoliberalism." It should also be adopted in courses on criminal justice and inequality.

Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies - Miriam Shakow

"Outlawed will undoubtedly inspire important debates on the place of 'engaged anthropology' in our discipline, while inadvertently showing that our scholarly production is often not as collaborative as our activism."

American Ethnologist - Ellen Moodie

Daniel Goldstein has written an elaborate and rich ethnography of the ‘present absence’ of the Bolivian state in a marginal barrio in the city of Cochabamba. . . . In many ways, Goldstein’s book is a testimony to ethnography at its best: it elucidates large critical issues by way of meticulous attention to local contexts and dynamics.

Journal of Latin American Studies - Anders Burman

Through compelling, sensitive, and lyrically written ethnographic analyses, Goldstein takes up a number of key problems for contemporary anthropology. . . . After Outlawed, it is no longer possible to view the role of human rights as a dominant mode of contemporary world-making in the same way.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute - Mark Goodale

Daniel Goldstein has written an elaborate and rich ethnography of the‘present absence’ of the Bolivian state in a marginal barrio in the city of Cochabamba...In many ways, Goldstein’s book is a testimony to ethnography at its best: it elucidates large critical issues by way of meticulous attention to local contexts and dynamics.” - Anders Burman, Journal of Latin American Studies


“[A]stute and useful….[T]his book provides a thought-provoking examination of human rights, fear of crime, and the ways in which people create new forms of justice. Given that it addresses fear of and daily responses to crime, a central concern of many Latin Americans today, this book will be widely read by anthropologists as well as those interested in Latin America, inequality, and "post-neoliberalism." It should also be adopted in courses on criminal justice and inequality.” - Miriam Shakow, Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies


"In Outlawed, Daniel M. Goldstein tackles one of the most critical issues confronting Latin America today, namely, the insecurity experienced by numerous citizens who fear falling victim to theft, robbery, burglary, assault, rape, or homicide as they go about their daily lives. He proceeds in a smart way, by examining the Bolivian state's representations of violence, Bolivian citizens' experiences in a local neighborhood, and the notions of community justice and illegitimate violence that circulate locally, nationally, and internationally."—Susan Bibler Coutin, author of Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States


"This is a terrific work, lively and engaging. It adds to the anthropological understanding of the law in practice in several ways. First, the book demonstrates that while the state does not protect those in Cochabamba's poor urban settlements from crime, it is present in their lives as a set of onerous bureaucratic and legal requirements. Second, it challenges legal pluralist arguments that there is an entirely separate legality operating in city slums. It reveals the legal systems of the urban poor not as entirely separate from the state but as fractured conjunctures of state and other legalities. Third, the book emphasizes the creative ways—from vigilantism to selective reliance on state services and local leaders—that marginalized communities handle legal problems. Taken together, its arguments are a major contribution to the field."—Sally Engle Merry, author of Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective

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