Banditry

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Banditry

Banditry can be defined simply as the act of taking property from another by using force or the threat of force. But Latin American bandits have appeared in varied and complex guises. Some common criminals simply brutalized and abused their fellow men. However, banditry also arose because throughout Latin American history, elite rule restricted access to economic opportunity and political expression. Runaway slaves or maroons sometimes became highwaymen, stealing from travelers to survive. Domination by the wealthy forced the rural masses to defend their interests through various means. Eric J. Hobsbawm coined the term "social bandits" to describe Robin Hood-style outlaws who championed the oppressed peasants.

When elites denied them access to land or to a living wage, the rural masses struck back using legal and extralegal tactics, including banditry. In early twentieth-century southern Bolivia, the peasants used banditry, mass mobilization, or litigation, depending on the strength of their corporate identity and cohesiveness. During the Mexican Revolution, peasants formed regional bandit gangs to combat the encroachment of large haciendas or other forces of change that disrupted traditional Indian village life.

Some outlaws gained reputations as social bandits and were celebrated in folklore and music. The Latin American masses sometimes viewed bandits as heroes striking a blow against their rich oppressors. Argentina's rural poor identified with the persecution suffered by legendary gauchos like Juan Moreira and Martín Fierro. Lampião (Virgolino Ferreira da Silva) and Antônio Silvino in Brazil, Pío Romero in Bolivia, and Manuel García in Cuba became symbols of popular resistance to oppression.

But bandit myth, like most myth, expresses only half-truths. Peasant stories about bandits exhibit what Erick D. Langer has termed "a selective memory." Such tales romanticize bandits and ignore their ignoble deeds, such as robbing, terrorizing, and killing peasants. Few romanticized bandits actually lived the heroic, idealized lives attributed to them in popular culture or in Hobsbawm's social bandit model.

Myth and folklore color some famous bandits so completely that accurate historical depiction is difficult. To compound matters, official government sources often purposely blur the distinction between bandit and revolutionary. Elitist officials typically labeled as bandits any groups that threatened their political monopoly. The U.S. press and government officials of the 1920s termed Augusto Sandino's Nicaraguan forces "bandits" to discredit them. Sixty years later Ronald Reagan publicly referred to members of the Sandinista government as "thugs." The unduly positive images of historical bandits generated in folklore were offset by the negative images from politically motivated government sources.

MOTIVES AND SUPPORT

Why did bandits steal? A desire for profit motivated many gangs. Unlike mythical bandits, however, actual gangs acted more often on the basis of self-interest and opportunism than in the defense of peasant-class interests. As Paul J. Vanderwood has shown, the marginalized rural poor fomented disorder, including bandit attacks, and profited from the resulting conflict. Guerrilla bandits (discussed below) are one example of those who profited from disorder.

Eleodoro Benel (1873–1927), a bandit leader in northern Cajamarca, Peru, was one of many such grasping, rural petty tyrants whose main goal was self-aggrandizement. Such profiteers formed whatever alliances they deemed useful. Bandit leaders cooperated more often with the powerful, not the humble, elements of society.

Economic self-interest also motivated many nineteenth-century bandits, as in Cuba's La Habana Province, where they consciously pursued their own personal gain in an opportunistic fashion. Manuel García's career as a profit-minded bandit antedated his service to the Cuban independence movement.

In addition to a desire for economic gain, personal and familial conflict drove some men to banditry. Family feuds, endemic to the Brazilian backlands, moved Lampião to take up the outlaw life. The Brazilian "good thief," Antônio Silvino, followed the leads of his father and godfather into bandit life. And the gauchos of the Argentine plains often turned into outlaws after killing someone in a knife fight. There were so many cimarrón (wild, feral) bandits on the rural roads between central Peru and Salta in Argentina that they became a favorite topic in fiction, such as the short novels of Juana Manuela Gorriti, Gubi Abaya and El ángel caído.

Local elites, not the peasant masses, generally provided the support, material assistance (food, arms, clothing), hiding places, and intelligence needed by bandit gangs. In Brazil, Silvino and Lampião cooperated with elites, not the peasant masses. Bandits in Peru, Mexico, and Argentina operated in a similar fashion. These elite-bandit alliances helped keep local oligarchies in power and gave a degree of legitimacy to the outlaws. A politically powerful family could insulate bandits from police and legal authorities.

GUERRILLA BANDITS

If officials labeled revolutionaries as bandits, bandits sometimes professed to have political aims, to cover their crimes with a veneer of legitimacy. Christon Archer coined the term "guerrilla bandits" to describe opportunists who used war as an excuse to pillage. Marginal rural people became guerrilla bandits, drawn to war by coercion or by promises of booty. They exhibited little loyalty and switched sides according to their assessment of the best potential profit. Guerrilla banditry became common in Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, and elsewhere during the wars for independence and civil wars of the nineteenth century.

POLITICAL BANDITS

Unlike pre-political social bandits or self-serving guerrilla bandits, political bandits had a consciousness of and loyalty to a larger political movement. They did not switch sides for financial gain but instead labored for a political, partisan, or regional agenda. They exhibited clear partisan rather than class leanings. Political banditry was evident in independence-era Cuba, early-twentieth-century Cajamarca, Peru, and the Colombian Violencia of 1945–1965, which left between 100,000 and 300,000 people dead. The Cuban independence period illustrates both political banditry and the interpretive debates going on in the study of banditry. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., sees banditry in western rural Cuba as motivated by peasant resentment of their marginalization by expanding sugar plantations. In contrast, Rosalie Schwartz argues that western Cuba's banditry reflects neither class conflict nor social banditry. First, many bandit gangs emerged before the process of sugar plantation expansion began. Second, the land concentration that Pérez considers a cause of banditry in fact came after many bandit gangs had emerged.

The peasant villages that purportedly supported and sustained social bandits did not exist in the bandit-infested areas of western Cuba. Manuel García put banditry and extortion at the service of the independence movement. His letters and broadsides show a clear political agenda, not typical of Hobsbawm's social bandit.

The Colombian Violencia offers another example of banditry, which even Hobsbawm acknowledges to be "in essence more political than social." The serrano (mountain region) uprisings during the Mexican Revolution offer another good example of political banditry cutting across class barriers. In both cases, conflict and banditry broke down along partisan or regional, not class, lines. In both cases, there was a political consciousness and agenda at work, a situation not typical of the pre-political social bandit. Even Gilbert Joseph, who defends to a degree Hobsbawm's views, agrees that the political strategies of the peasants were not archaic "in the sense of being outmoded or pre-political."

Banditry, then, can be an expression of mass discontent, a means of achieving a political agenda, or a yearning for economic betterment. Banditry could be a tactic of rural elites as well as the rural poor; outlaw networks often cut across class lines. Many bandit gangs developed and profited from close ties to regional and local power brokers: the Caudillos (political bosses) or coroneis (planter elite).

What about female bandits? We know that a woman called María Bonita died with Lampião in a hail of gunfire in 1938. And "La Carambada," a female bandit who dressed in male clothing, robbed travelers in Querétaro, Mexico, during the mid-nineteenth century. Women most likely lived with male bandit gangs at their hideouts.

A more recent phenomenon has come to light regarding Salvadoran gang members. Many of these hoodlums learned their trade in exile in Los Angeles and other U.S. locations and were later deported back to Central America, where they have been applying what they learned.

Richard Slatta, Gilbert Joseph, and others have begun placing Latin American banditry in a broader, more comparative perspective. Wider comparisons highlight the similarities and differences among bandits as well as the roles of culture, regionalism, and other variables. Yet more research is needed. Instead of blithely accepting bandit images from folk legends and literature as fact, scholars must use them as lenses for viewing peasant cultures. Even if folk views of heroic bandits do not reflect historical reality, they do reflect much about the yearnings and values of Latin America's rural masses.

In sum, Latin American elites and masses both participated in banditry. The rural poor sometimes used banditry to express political sentiments. At other times banditry represented an economic alternative in a world of opportunity narrowly restricted by the elite. On occasion, economic self-interest and political rebellion came together, as in the case of guerrilla banditry.

Latin American elites long have recognized the dangerous political potential of banditry and have made vigorous efforts to contain it. But although they have been victimized by the elite, the rural poor have not remained passive victims. If denied legitimate means of survival and participation, people will strike back violently at their oppressors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Billy Jaynes Chandler, The Bandit King: Lampião of Brazil (1978).

Eric J. Hobsbawm, Bandits, rev. ed. (1981).

Paul J. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development (1981).

Christon I. Archer, "Banditry and Revolution in New Spain, 1790–1821," in Biblioteca Americana 1, no. 2 (1982): 58-89.

Gonzálo G. Sánchez and Donny Meertens, Bandoleros, gamonales y campesinos: El caso de la Violencia en Colombia (1983).

Richard W. Slatta, ed., Bandidos: The Varieties of Latin American Banditry (1987).

Erick D. Langer, Economic Change and Rural Resistance in Southern Bolivia, 1880–1930 (1989).

Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Lords of the Mountain: Social Banditry and Peasant Protest in Cuba, 1878–1918 (1989).

Rosalie Schwartz, Lawless Liberators: Political Banditry and Cuban Independence (1989).

Richard W. Slatta, "Banditry as Political Participation in Latin America," in Criminal Justice History: An International Annual 11 (1990): 171-187.

Gilbert M. Joseph, "On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant Resistance," in Latin American Research Review 25, no. 3 (1990): 7-53.

Additional Bibliography

Balboa Navarro, Imilcy. La protesta rural en Cuba: Resistencia cotidiana, bandolerismo y revolución 1878–1902. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2003.

Gorriti, Juana Manuela. Dreams and Realities: Selected Fiction of Juana Manuela Gorriti. Translated by Sergio Waisman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Solares Robles, Laura. Bandidos somos y en el camino andamos: Bandidaje, caminos y administración de justicia en el siglo XIX, 1821–1855: El caso de Michoacán. Morelia, Mexico: Instituto Michoacano de Cultura; Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luís Mora, 1999.

Zilberg, Elana. "Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador)." American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (September 2004): 759-779.

Richard W. Slatta

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture