Alexander & Tognato - 2018 - The Civil Sphere in Latin America

The Civil Sphere
in Latin America
Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander
and Carlo Tognato
The Civil Sphere in Latin America
Social thinkers have criticized Latin American development as incom-

plete, backward, and antimodern. This volume demonstrates that,
while often deeply compromised and fragmented, Latin American civil
spheres have remained resilient, institutionally and culturally, generat-
ing new oppositional movements, independent journalism, rebellious
intellectuals, electoral power, and critical political parties. In widely
different arenas, dissidents have employed the coruscating language of
the civil sphere to pollute their oppressors in the name of justice. In the
1970s and 1980s, political thinkers heralded the resurrection of Latin
American civil society, envisioning a new world of freedom and stabi-
lity. Corruption, inequality, racism, and exclusion become pressing and
urgent “social problems,” not despite the promises of democracy, but
because of them. The premise of this volume is that Latin American civil
spheres are powerful, even as they are compromised, creating challenges
to anticivil culture and institutions that trigger social reform. It is the
first of three volumes that place civil sphere theory in a global context.
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at

Yale, is the author of twenty books and editor of twenty-five more. He is
one of the creators of contemporary cultural sociology, founder and
director of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, and coeditor of
The American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
Carlo Tognato is Associate Professor of Sociology at the National
University of Colombia, Bogota. He is the author of Central Bank
Independence: Cultural Codes and Symbolic Performances (2012) and
editor of Cultural Agents Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus
(2017).
The Civil Sphere in Latin America
Edited by
JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER
Yale University
CARLO TOGNATO
National University of Colombia, Bogota
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108426831
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© Cambridge University Press 2018
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
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First published 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Alexander, Jeffrey C., 1947– editor. | Tognato, Carlo, editor.
title: The civil sphere in Latin America / edited by Jeffrey Alexander, Carlo Tognato.
description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press,
2018. | Includes bibliographical references.
identifiers: lccn 2017053773 | isbn 9781108426831 (hardback)
subjects: lcsh: Civil society – Latin America. | Democracy – Latin America. | Latin
America – Social conditions – 1945–1982. | Latin America – Social conditions – 1982–
classification: lcc jl966 .c588 2018 | ddc 306.2098–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053773
isbn 978-1-108-42683-1 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
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accurate or appropriate.
To our children, their children, and our students
Let us continue to strive together for a more inclusive, democratic, and
peaceful future for us all.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Contents
List of Figure and Tables page ix

Notes on the Contributors x
Preface and Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: For Democracy in Latin America 1

Jeffrey C. Alexander and Carlo Tognato
part i scandals and civil indignation 17

1 The Civil Sphere in Mexico: Between Democracy
and Authoritarianism 19
Nelson Arteaga Botello and Javier Arzuaga Magnoni
2 Shaping Solidarity in Argentina: The Power of the Civil
Sphere in Repairing Violence against Women 39
María Luengo
3 Civil Indignation in Chile: Recent Collusion Scandals in the
Retail Industry 66
María Angélica Thumala Olave
part ii militancy, civility, and polarization 93
4 La Joven Cuba: Confrontation, Conciliation, and the Quest
for the Civil through Blogging 95
Liliana Martínez Pérez
5 ¿La Clase Media en Positivo?: The Civil and Uncivil Uses of
“the Middle Class” in Venezuela, 1958–2016 118
Celso M. Villegas
6 The Civil Life of the University: Enacting Dissent and
Resistance on a Colombian Campus 149
Carlo Tognato
vii
viii Contents
part iii law, order, and solidarity 177

7 Police Officers in Contradiction: Civility and Anticivility in the
São Paulo State Military Police 179
Mayumi Shimizu
8 Citizenship and the Established Civil Sphere in Provincial Mexico 206
Trevor Stack
part iv commentary and conclusion 229
9 Commentary: Is Civil Society Dangerous for Democracy?
New Directions for Civil Sphere Theory in Latin America 231
Isabel Jijón
Conclusion: Democracy and the Civil Sphere in Latin America 240
Peter Kivisto and Giuseppe Sciortino
Index 255
Figure and Tables
figure
2.1 Elements of cultural performance applied to the Argentinian
movement against gender violence (adapted from
Alexander 2006b) page 50
tables
5.1 Various Opinions of Self-Identified Middle-Class Respondents
in Venezuela 127
5.2 The Bolivarian Revolutionary Code 130
5.3 Friends and Enemies in the Chavista Imaginary, post-2002 135
5.4 The Cultural Structure of Middle-Class Politics 141
ix
Notes on the Contributors
Jeffrey C. Alexander is Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale

University and the founder and codirector of Yale’s Center for Cultural
Sociology. Among his recent writings are The Drama of Social Life (2017),
The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Economy, Technology, Culture (edited
with Elizabeth Butler Breese and María Luengo, Cambridge University Press,
2016), Obama Power (with Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, 2014), The Dark Side
of Modernity (2013), Trauma: A Social Theory (2012), and The Civil Sphere
(2006).
Nelson Arteaga Botello is Research Professor of Sociology at the Latin
American Faculty of Social Sciences (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias
Sociales, FLACSO), Mexico, and Researcher within the Mexican National
Research System (Level III). His research interests focus on surveillance,
violence, and culture. His publications include “Surveillance Footage and
Space Segregation in Mexico City,” International Sociology 30 (2015):
619–636, “The Landscape of Meaning, a Metaphor in Process,” Sociologicky
Casopis (2015) 51 (3): 493–499, and “Latinoamérica y el Apocalipsis: íconos
visuales en Blade Runner y Elysium,” Liminar (2015) 13 (2): 13–26.
Javier Arzuaga Magnoni is a researcher at the Center for Research and
Advanced Studies (CIPAP) within the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences
of the UAEM (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México). He is also
a researcher within the Mexican National Research System. His work
examines political and electoral behavior, political culture, political parties,
and electoral systems in Mexico. He is the author of numerous books, book
chapters, and articles on these and other related topics. His most recent
publications include (all with Nelson Arteaga Botello) “Between Liturgy and
Counter-Performance: The Dispute over the Zócalo of Mexico City during the
Teacher Mobilization of 2013,” Intersticios Sociales (2017) 13: 1–34,
x
Notes on the Contributors xi
“Sociologies of Violence: Structures, Subjects, Interactions and Symbolic

Action,” FLACSO (2017), “Republican Liturgy and Counter-Performances:
Protests and Challenges at the Presidential Investiture 2012 in Mexico,”
RMCPyS (2017) 229: 149–180, and “Iconology of a Presidential Candidate:
The Latest Report by Peña Nieto as Governor,” Nueva Antropología (2016) 84:
117–141.
Isabel Jijón is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Yale
University and a Junior Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. Her
work examines globalization, culture, and morality. In her dissertation, she
compares the meanings of child labor in Bolivia and Ecuador, analyzing how
global norms shape the local practice of child labor. She has also written about
the globalization of collective memory, the globalization of sport, and theories
of translation.
Peter Kivisto received his PhD from the New School for Social Research in
1982. He is currently the Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought
at Augustana College and Visiting Professor and Research Fellow at the
University of Trento. He is also Head of the Research Laboratory on
Transnationalism and Migration Processes at St. Petersburg State University.
His research focuses on immigration, social integration, and civil society. His
publications also include numerous works in the sociology of religion and on
citizenship. His most recent books include National Identity in an Age of
Migration (2017), Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation: Thinking through
The Civil Sphere (edited with Giuseppe Sciortino, 2015), and Religion and
Immigration: Migrant Faiths in North America and Western Europe (2014).
María Luengo is Associate Professor of Journalism at Universidad Carlos III de
Madrid, where she teaches and conducts research in the areas of media theory
and journalism. Her work interprets developments at the nexus of social trends
and movements, gender, migration, and journalistic culture and practice. She
has published widely in the fields of journalism and media studies. She has
coedited The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Culture,
Professional Codes, Digital Future with Jeffrey C. Alexander and Elizabeth
Butler Breese (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and coauthored Periodismo
Social with Juana Gallego (2014). Her research has appeared in Journalism,
Journalism Studies, Fudan Journal of the Humanities & Social Sciences,
Communication & Society, and Revista Española de Investigaciones
Sociológicas, among others.
Liliana Martínez Pérez is Research Professor at the Latin American Faculty of
Social Sciences (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales,
FLACSO), México. Her research focuses on cultural policy, the relations
between intellectuals and politicians, and the sociocultural processes
associated with South-South migration, as well as epistemological and
methodological problems with sociocultural research. She has authored Los
xii Notes on the Contributors
hijos de Saturno. Intelectuales y revolución en Cuba (2006), edited Cubanos

en México: Orígenes, tipologías y trayectorias migratorias actuales (2016) and
coedited La experiencia como hecho social: Ensayos de sociología cultural
(2016) and El helicoide de la investigación: Metodología en tesis de ciencias
sociales (2012, 2013).
Giuseppe Sciortino teaches sociology at the University of Trento, Italy. His
interests include social theory, cultural sociology, and migration studies.
Among his publications are Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation (2015) with
Peter Kivisto, Great Minds. Encounters with Social Theory (2011) with
Gianfranco Poggi, “A European Sociology of Migration? Not Yet, Not
Quite” in the Routledge Handbook of European Sociology (2014), and
“Immigration” in the Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics (2015).
Mayumi Shimizu holds a PhD in sociology from the University of São Paulo
(2015), Brazil. She is currently a lecturer at Chiba University, Japan. Her
research interests include cultural sociology, policing, and public security,
Brazilian area studies, and public policy. In her PhD dissertation entitled Ser
policial militar: construindo o bem e o mal na atividade diária policial, she
explores how the self-definition of police officers in São Paulo relates to their
policing and daily interaction. She is also the author of journal articles
published in Japanese, including “Community Policing in the City of São
Paulo” in Latin America Report from the Institute of Developing Economies;
and “Conflict between Democracy and Professionalism: Introduction of
Community Policing in the State of São Paulo,” in Annals of Latin American
Studies from the Japan Association for Latin American Studies.
Trevor Stack is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Spanish and Latin
American Studies and Director of the Centre of Citizenship, Civil Society and
Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen. His research interests include
citizenship, civil society, activism, and political community. He is the author
of Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship (2012) and the
lead editor of Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (2015).
Currently he is leading a team of researchers on a project entitled “Activism in
regions of violence and institutional fragility” in the Mexican state of
Michoacán.
María Angélica Thumala Olave is Lecturer in Global Sociology at the
University of Edinburgh and Visiting Lecturer at the Instituto de Sociología at
the Catholic University of Chile. She is a cultural sociologist and her research
focuses on cultural change in Latin America, religion, elites, and the sociology
of reading and writing. Her publications include Wealth and Piety.
The Catholicism of Chile’s Business Elite (Riqueza y piedad: El catolicismo de
la elite económica chilena, Santiago: Debate, 2007), “The Richness of Ordinary
Life: Religious Justification among Chile’s Business Elite,” Religion, 40 (1):
14–26, and “The Aristocracy of the Will: A Critique of Pierre Bourdieu with
Notes on the Contributors xiii
Illustrations from Chile,” Social Compass 59 (1): 52–68. Her latest publication
is “Reading Matters: Towards a Cultural Sociology of Reading” (forthcoming,
American Journal of Cultural Sociology).
Carlo Tognato is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology
and Director of the Center for Social Studies at the National University of
Colombia, Bogota. He is also Director of the Centro Nicanor Restrepo
Santamaría para la Reconstrucción Civil and Faculty Fellow at the Center for
Cultural Sociology at Yale University. For over a decade, he has worked on
cultural economic sociology. More recently, his research has concentrated on
the topic of civil reconstruction in postconflict societies. He has published
a book on the influence of culture in central banking (Central Bank
Independence: Cultural Codes and Symbolic Performance, 2012) and has
edited another on the influence of culture in urban policy (Cultural Agency
Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus, 2017).
Celso M. Villegas is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kenyon College. His
research interests include Latin America and Southeast Asia, civil society, and
the political economy of development. He is the author of “Revolution ‘from
the Middle’: Historical Events, Narrative, and the Making of the Middle Class
in the Contemporary Developing World” in Political Power and Social
Theory (2010), coauthor of “Making Narratives of Revolution: Middle-Class
Identity and the Language of Middle Class Identity in the Philippines and South
Korea, 1970s–1987” in Critical Asian Studies (2013), and he is preparing
a book manuscript, Social Origins of Distinction and Democracy: The Civil
Sphere and the Middle Class in the Philippines and Latin America.
Preface and Acknowledgments
This project grew out of two decades of collaboration between the editors, an
intellectual relationship that began in a graduate seminar in cultural sociology
at UCLA, percolated at the University of Konstanz, and crystallized over
extended visits at Yale. Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology was the petri dish
within which these latter meetings were nourished. Editors and contributors to
The Civil Sphere in Latin America met for two intensive days of presentation
and discussion at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center in June 2016. We were
able to exchange frank responses and to generate a real spirit of intellectual
cooperation. The editors wish to express our gratitude to the organizations that
made this face-to-face meeting possible: The Macmillan Center for
International and Area Studies at Yale and the Corporación Visionarios por
Colombia. Special thanks go to Henry Murraín, Executive Director at
Corpovisionarios, who engaged Tognato in passionate discussion about the
intellectual vision and theory that underpins this book.
Anne-Marie Champagne, a Yale doctoral student, has been an invaluable
assistant throughout this process. Nadine Amalfi, Administrator of Yale’s
Center for Cultural Sociology, organized the June 2016 meetings in every
detail. We thank Bernadette Jaworsky, Associate Professor and Director of
The Center for the Cultural Sociology of Migration at Masaryk University,
for her skillful editing of the final manuscript.
Alexander’s commitment to learning about and learning from Latin America
was generated over the course of many years of extended stays in Mexico as well
as in Brazil, and by his work with doctoral students from the region. Tognato’s
interest began with his move to Bogota in 2002, which marked the beginning of
many years of practical and intellectual engagement in Colombia and most
recently in the academic milieus of the peace process.
During Fall 2015, in the months after Alexander and Tognato began
planning for the present volume, Tognato laid out the institutional vision for
a school of civil society that would take upon itself the mission of training civil
xv
xvi Preface and Acknowledgments
sphere leaders throughout Latin America. He was soon joined by Nelson

Arteaga Botello, professor of sociology and director of research at FLACSO
Mexico, and Jorge Giraldo Ramírez, dean of Humanities at Universidad EAFIT
in Medellín and Member of the History Commission on the Conflict and its
Victims, which the Colombian Government and the FARC established on the
occasion of the beginning of peace talks. Together, these scholars have nurtured
their shared vision, and Alexander has been part of this conversation.
In December 2015, Alexander, Tognato, Arteaga Botello, Giraldo, and
Murraín participated in the VII International Research Seminar that Tognato
organized in Bogota on “Civil Society in Post-Conflict Colombia” with the
Center for Social Studies at the National University of Colombia, which he
then directed, and with Corpovisionarios por Colombia, a civil society
organization whose mission was to give continuity to the initiatives on civil
culture that Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogota, had carried out during
his two terms in 1995–1998 and 2001–2004.
The present volume is the first in a series devoted to “de-provincializing” civil
sphere theory. It will be followed by The Civil Sphere in East Asia, Breaching
the Civil Order: Radicalism and the Civil Sphere and The Nordic Civil Sphere.
Alexander wrote more than a decade ago that the civil sphere is a project. So is
civil sphere theory.
Introduction
For Democracy in Latin America
Jeffrey C. Alexander and Carlo Tognato
The civil sphere is a distinctively democratic field in modern societies, one that
sustains universalizing cultural aspirations and critically interpretive
organizational structures vis-à-vis such noncivil spheres as the economy,
religion, science, primordial associations, and states. Unlike the latter, more
hierarchical and particularistic domains, the civil sphere defines itself in terms of
solidarity, the brotherly and sisterly feeling of being connected with every other
person in the collectivity. Those who people the civil sphere are idealized as
autonomous individuals that experience compelling obligations to one another.
The civil sphere is driven by a powerful discourse of liberty and solidarity,
but it is more than a social language. The culture of the civil sphere is
institutionalized by organizations that connect its interpretive categories to
specific events in time and space. Sustained by utopian meanings, the civil
sphere is also a complex set of communicative and regulative institutions.
The ideal and material interests of independent mass media trigger
a continuous flow of judgments about the civil or anticivil status of actions on
the ground, in the here and now. The same complex ménage of interests, ideal
and material, also bring the idealized criteria of civil spheres to bear in more
regulative and coercive ways, from the imperious demands of office to the rigors
of voting and the finality of state-backed law.
The moral requirements of self-governance stipulate such civil capacities as
rationality, autonomy, honesty, openness, cooperation, criticism, and equality.
Inspired by millennia of social and cultural movements that have narrated such
capacities in diverse ways, the members of civil spheres consider them sacred
and ennobling. Because meaning is always relational, however, such sacred
qualities are always paired with their antagonistic opposites, opposing
meanings that constitute the absence of civil capacity. Qualities such as
irrational, dependent, deceitful, secretive, antagonistic, passive, and
hierarchical are considered polluted and degrading. When ideal civil spheres
become real, when they are instantiated in time and place and come up against
the extraordinary cultural and institutional frictions of noncivil institutions,
1
2 Jeffrey C. Alexander and Carlo Tognato
fateful compromises are made. Classes, races, genders, sexualities, ethnicities,

religions, and regions – in the course of democratizing history, each of these
categories has become the signified for pejorative anticivil signifiers. Real civil
spheres are as much about exclusion as inclusion, about keeping those who are
deemed polluted, and thus dangerously anticivil, outside the pure social
categories that compose the “real” civil community.
While these contradictions fragment real existing civil societies,
compromising their civil spheres, they do not entirely eliminate their
aspirations. Ethics of independent journalism and judicial independence,
norms of altruism and moralities of social justice, stubborn commitments to
electoral process and enfranchisement, ideals about office obligations – these
democratic elements survive to one degree or another, even in dominated civil
spheres whose independence vis-à-vis states, markets, and religious authorities
has been suppressed. The utopian ideals of democratic solidarity haunt every
modern society.
Social movements emerge out of the tension between real and ideal civil
spheres. Such mobilizations launch appeals to an idealized civil sphere, hoping
to shift social problems from their initial location inside noncivil spheres, where
they are initially generated, to a position where they can be evaluated according
to the more solidaristic and democratic perspectives of the civil sphere as such;
instead of being an issue that concerns only a part of society, social problems
may then become a matter of grave concern to the social whole. If social
movements are successful, they initiate processes of civil repair that
strengthen real existing civil spheres, providing recognition for once-polluted
groups; distributing material resources more broadly and fairly; expanding the
franchise; reforming office to make it less susceptible to corruption; broadening
access to and application of the rule of law. If social movements are not
successful, efforts at the civil repair of social strain fail, in which case anticivil
categorizations may come to be more widely applied. Once-incorporated
groups can be excluded, long-dominated groups more deeply stigmatized,
suffering and violence may increase, and physical extermination may become
possible.
When the nations that compose Latin America became independent from
Spain and Portugal in the early nineteenth century, they viewed themselves as
part of the vanguard of international liberalism, rejecting monarchy,
aristocracy, and slavery, building representative governments that rested on
popular sovereignty, citizenship, representative government, and the rule of law
(Larrain 2000:74–75; Arana 2013). Many other observers shared this view as
well, not only in the old world but the new. Despite, but also because of, three
centuries of colonial penetration, which included counter-Reformation
mentalities and patrimonial organization, these progressive new nations had
deep roots in European modernity (Forment 2003; Domingues 2008, 2009;
Larrain 2000:43–91), the world-historical break with “traditional” culture and
social organization that reached back to early humanism and, long before that,
to the cultural and social revolutions of the Axial Age (Eisenstadt 1982; Bellah
2011; Alexander 2013). The new Latin American elites consciously modeled
themselves on the Enlightenment legacies and democratic revolutions of the late
eighteenth century (Lynch 1973:20ff; Lynch 1985:42–46, 106–107; Arana
2013).
Already two centuries ago, Latin America had put into place the discourse,
institutions, and aspirations that sustain civil spheres. Independence was
achieved by a continent wide, anticolonial social movement that had rebelled
against the distance between ideals of civil equality and real conditions of
political, social, and cultural degradation. With the victory of this immense
social movement, the new nations constituted themselves, in some significant
part, as civil solidarities whose members were citizens who possessed individual
rights and assumed respect; whose cultural aspirations were universal and
rational; whose communicative and regulative institutions – newspapers,
associations, courts, and franchise – were energized; and whose public
opinion was powerful even when it did not, via voting, formally reign
(Bushnell 1985:110ff, 121ff; Safford 1985; Forment 2003:64–67, 192–200,
208–215; Larrain 2000:73).
Spanish colonization had been particularly disabling, however, and the two
decades of anticolonial war particularly brutal and polarizing. The new nations
were less than their founders had hoped, and soon bred disappointment (Lynch
1973:334–347; Arana 2013:103, 142–143, 151, 176, 223, 342, 463–464).
As real Latin American history unfolded over the next two centuries, the civil
spheres in these proud new nations became instantiated in time and place,
compromising with noncivil spheres that hemmed them in, both inside their
national territories and vis-à-vis overbearing external powers without. There
were fissures and reversals and extended periods of authoritarian control but
also moments of reintegration and democratic triumph. It was a time of uneven
and combined development, as Leon Trotsky said of Russian history, of
asynchronicity, as Gino Germani (Germani 1981:147–156) said of Latin
American modernization tout court.
Throughout Latin America’s history, social thinkers in Europe and North
America have heaped upon the continent pejorative descriptions. Its societies
have been labeled incomplete, backward, anti-modern, traditional, and
fragmented. Disparaging descriptions of the once colonized other have
provided opportunities for smug self-satisfaction (e.g., Huntington 1998) or
hand-wringing self-castigation (e.g., Paz 1961; Veliz 1994; cf. Mascareño and
Chernilo 2009), but in either case, they have been fundamentally misleading,
themselves shockingly incomplete. Back and forth movements have marked the
life and times of every civil sphere, South and North, East and West. Nascent
civil spheres in North America and Europe experienced similar challenges as
those in Latin America, and the same antidemocratic compromise formations
ensued. In the United States, slavery was not only practiced but civilly justified
for centuries, indigenous peoples decimated, nonwhites disenfranchised.
In Europe and the United States, the majority of those who occupied national
territories – most conspicuously women and propertyless workers – were
judged not to possess civil capacities, and deprived of legal, political, and
social rights as a result. In the nineteenth century, no continental European
nation was able to sustain democratic government. In the twentieth century,
European civil spheres were shattered by class warfare, anti-Semitism, and
murderous totalitarian dictatorship.
In Latin America, over the course of the nineteenth century, the noncivil
institutions and value spheres that surrounded civil spheres deeply
compromised them. Creole elites employed the binary discourse of civil
society to pollute and exclude vast segments of national populations.
Indigenous peoples became indebted “free labor” on feudal-like estates,
mestizos emerged as a middling stratum without power. The continent’s
founding dreams of civil solidarity were mocked, its contradictions hollowing
Latin American civil spheres out from within. Oligarchy became the rule,
democracy the exception.
These conditions shifted with industrialization, whose contradictions
generated urban social movements in the early and middle twentieth
century. Promising to realize civil sphere ideals, populist regimes came to
power, via elections, coups, and revolutions; they made efforts to
incorporate workers and sometimes landless peasants, distributing goods
and recognition. But moves to make good on the promissory notes of the
civil sphere often produced authoritarian governments that undermined
liberty. Populism was energized and channeled by charismatic demagogues
and by political parties that packaged civil repair in top-down and elitist
forms.
In this back and forth movement, Latin American civil spheres were
sometimes rejuvenated, at other times deeply compromised and subordinated,
yet they also remained resilient, institutionally and culturally, generating new
oppositional movements, independent journalism, rebellious intellectuals,
electoral demands, and critical political parties. Indeed, the problems of
development that pockmarked Latin America – lagging economies, racial and
ethnic and class stratification, religious strife – were invariably filtered through
the cultural aspirations and institutional patterns of civil spheres. They were
interpreted as civil deficits, condemned as office corruption, as schisms
undermining social solidarity, as deceitful journalism, as political coercion, as
self-interested ideologies threatening the universalistic promises of colonial
liberation. Victims became indignant dissidents, employing the coruscating
language of the civil sphere to pollute oppressors in the name of justice.
The early and middle decades of the twentieth century alternated between
more democratic and more authoritarian regimes. Progressive developments
often referenced European and North American civil ideals and carrier groups –
liberals, socialists, abolitionists, suffragettes; repressive turns were often aided
and abetted by the United States, whose intelligence agencies and militaries
sought to project what they viewed as the nation’s economic and geopolitical
interests.
In the period that extended from the 1950s to the 1970s, Latin America
experienced what amounted to an antidemocratic restoration, energized by
anticivil forces within and sometimes aided by US forces without. But,
democratic aspirations were scarcely suppressed; critical discourse, the
energies of civil carrier groups, and the contours of civil institutions were
sustained. When the economic life of these authoritarian regimes faltered, as
in Chile, when ruling military regimes were humiliated by former colonial
powers, as in Argentina, the problems of development that seemed endemic to
Latin America – poverty, violence, defeat, corruption, repression – were once
again conceptualized as deficits of democracy. The pendulum began to swing
back. Democracies were reestablished; national civil spheres were
reinvigorated; communicative and regulative institutions became more critical
and independent (Hagopian and Mainwaring 2005).
Describing these new developments as part of the third wave of democratic
reconstruction (Mainwaring and Hagopian 2005), political thinkers heralded
heralded “the resurrection of civil society” (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986:48),
rehabilitating a term that harkened back to the beginning of modern democratic
times. This was entirely understandable, but it would eventually prove a fateful
intellectual mistake.
“Civil society,” as social fact and intellectual idea, had emerged in the course of
early modern struggles against kingship, flourishing during the political struggles
of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. Civil society was
a fuzzy, “umbrella” concept (Alexander 2006:23–36), encompassing virtually
every group, movement, and institution that was not the state – associations,
economic enterprises, universities, professions, churches, and religious sects. Such
a broad-brush concept effectively crystallized the centuries-long political
movement against hereditary, aristocratic authoritarianism. The concept
suffered severe intellectual and practical problems, however, once other pressing
social problems came into being. With the rise of industrial capitalism, the “social
question” pushed the issue of political democracy to the side. It seemed big states
were needed to save the day, whether socialist, conservative, fascist, or welfare-
democratic. The social power of political democracy seemed puny and ineffective
to many intellectuals and citizens of the world, whether left, center, or right. Civil
society became polluted as a synonym for the institutions that rested on private
property and supported the anticivil bourgeoisie.
After democratic governments were put in place, the umbrella approach to
civil society became conceptually useless; it was conflicts and strains between
spheres that became most relevant, not tensions between state and nonstate.
The instrumental rationality of market economies, the deferential hierarchy of
religions, the patriarchy of families, the dominant racialism of clubs and
associations – the very nonstate forces that had been celebrated as civil in the
early struggle for political democracy were now increasingly challenged by
a sphere whose institutions, culture, and associations aspired to a broader social

justice. Democracy as a governmental form had been achieved, but the giant
problem of democratizing democracy (Touraine 1997:180–181) – of
expanding, repairing, and strengthening real civil spheres – remained. From
the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, “civil society” disappeared
from the language of social theory.
When the older concept of civil society was retrieved during the democratic
recrudescence in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1980s (e.g., Diamond
1999:22–23), it recalled those earlier political struggles, the first wave of
struggle against authoritarian states. After the new democratic regimes were
established, however, the relevance of “civil society” seemed, once again, to
abate. The political thinkers who had retrieved the venerable concept of “civil
society” believed that, once democratic political structures were put into place,
the problems and upheavals that had roiled Latin American societies would
disappear (cf., Yovanovich and Rice 2017:9–10). There was optimism that the
postauthoritarian procedures of “democratic consolidation” would inaugurate
a time of social peace, cooperation, and civil repair (Holmes 2009).
What happened, instead, was that Latin American social conflict actually
increased. Long festering social problems, suppressed or hidden by
authoritarian regimes, were exposed by the newly revived communicative and
regulative institutions of the civil sphere – by critical journalists, oppositional
intellectuals, crusading associations, and leftist political parties. Yes, civil
society in the older sense had been established, but poverty, corruption, ethnic
and racial exclusion, patriarchy, and the distance between social classes seemed
to expand. In the face of these problems and disappointments, Latin American
thinkers struggled to find new social languages, from neo-Marxism and
dependency to postcolonialism, postmodernism, gender, and race. Evocations
of triumphant civil society have dwindled, and references to the concept now
often pollute via qualification and equivocation, criticizing contemporary civil
society as illiberal, dependent, subordinate, deficient, disjunctive (Brysk 2000;
Hawkins and Hansen 2006; Arias and Goldstein 2010a; Mallén and Encinas
2013; Mascareño and Chernilo 2009 cf., Kurlantzick 2013).
Claiming that “democratic deficits within civil society jeopardize its ability to
perform its proper functions,” Brysk (2000) draws the seemingly logical
conclusion that “a strong civil society . . .. may not necessarily be a democratic
one,” a sentiment that has been widely echoed (e.g., Hagopian 2005; Perez
2009; Oxhorn 2017). The hope that Latin America can provide social justice
while sustaining democracy is sharply questioned. Decolonial thinkers
(Mignolo 1995, 2005) ask whether the very idea of democracy is simply
a Western deception. Arias and Goldstein (2010b) want to replace the
“democracy paradigm” with the concept of “violent pluralism.” Violence
should not be viewed, they argue, as “an indicator of the distance a state has
fallen from the (implicitly Western) democratic ideal,” suggesting, instead, that
violence is “critical to . . . the maintenance of democratic states.” The thesis of
violent pluralism, now widely cited, represents, not only a deflating moral
evaluation, but a misreading of the social dialectic of contemporary
democracy (cf., Sanchez 2011; Taylor 2011).
The premise of this volume is that this broad and disparaging intellectual
move should be resisted. Once again, Latin American democracy is being
disparaged even as the problems of Latin American social development are
being interpreted through the prism of the civil sphere. Corruption,
inequality, racism, and exclusion become pressing and urgent “social
problems,” not despite the promises of democracy, but because of them.
The early modern understanding of civil society must be jettisoned.
We need to move from the umbrella idea of “everything outside the state”
to the more analytically differentiated notion of a civil sphere, a field of
culture and institutions in tension with other, noncivil spheres. It is because
such a democratizing social sphere actually has social traction that
contemporary Latin American problems are measured and understood, not
only by social scientists but by social actors themselves, as departures from
and disruptions to democratic aspirations. It is because of their failure to
embody the utopian promises of the civil sphere that corruptions of office,
economic inequality, failures of multicultural recognition, ruptures in the
rule of law, outbreaks of violence, and the intimidation and cooptation of
journalism are condemned.
The ambition of this volume is to demonstrate that Latin American civil
spheres are powerful, even as they are compromised. We enlarge the manner in
which democracy is theorized, conceptualizing democracy not only as
a governmental form but as a way of life (Dewey 1966 [1916]; Touraine 1997:
185–187). Certainly, the democratic utopian ideals of Latin American civil
spheres are far from being realized; yet, they have been institutionalized in
significant ways, creating the kinds of tension with anticivil culture and
institutions that triggers social reform.
Nurtured by centuries of modernity, colonial and post, the spirit and the
institutions of Latin American civil spheres are very much in place, even as – like
their counterparts in North America, Europe, and Asia – they have only
partially been realized in organizational and material ways. Latin American
civil spheres have been historically compromised by the anticivil force of their
colonial founding; by the territorial distortions of their postcolonial,
geopolitical place; by the functional tensions of economics, religion, ethnicity,
and power that divide civil from noncivil spheres. It is these tensions between
civil aspirations and anticivil realities, between ideal and real civil societies, that
our contributors trace.
The aspirations of this volume, however, go beyond making use of Civil
Sphere Theory (CST) to underscore the continuing relevance, not only in
practice but in theory, of Latin America’s democratic culture and institutions.
We believe that, in light of the Latin American experience, we can advance and
revise CST itself in ways that will equip us better to tackle some of the most
pressing issues of our time. Our premise is that theorizing the civil sphere in
Latin America as an empirical arena of struggle, critique, and self-
understanding is precisely what is necessary if theorizing about contemporary
modernity, and the civil sphere more specifically, is to develop and advance.
Citizens across Europe and the United States have only recently awakened to
the long-term effects that the unbridled forces of global capitalism have had, not
only on the economic fabric of their own societies, but also on their own
democracies (de Souza Santos 2005). Civil solidarity is threatened, not only
from the economic, but also from the racial, ethnic, and gender boundaries of
the European and US civil spheres: the privatization of public education, health,
and social security; the deepening of social segregation; the multiplication of
gated communities; the tendency for state authorities to apply double standards
in the enforcement of laws among their citizens; the widening asymmetry of
power in contractual relations between citizens and corporate actors,
particularly since the privatization of many public services; the growing
ability of corporations to elude accountability and control; the economic
precariousness, status anxiety, and emotional fear experienced by large
segments of the citizenry exposed to the economic dislocations of
globalization and the seismic aftershocks of the social revolutions of the last
fifty years. These often-traumatizing divisions and dislocations have made the
members of North American and European civil spheres more willing to
compromise democratic standards in exchange for greater security and have
laid out the groundwork for a worrying return of populism, authoritarianism,
and extreme polarization on the political and social scene.
Political entrepreneurs have reappeared on the public stage, pitching the
virtues of the common people against the vices, equivocations, and
manipulations of privileged elites. “Facts” have started to lose their appeal
and traction among large segments of society, with “feelings” taking their
place as the authoritative source that can tap straight into the deep-seated
wisdom of the average citizen. The gradual displacement in public discourse
of facts by feelings has started to weaken the ground upon which democracies
have traditionally anchored their public policies. Populists have called for
“alternative” facts to back up their resentful and scapegoating emotional
beliefs. A public policy that relies on alternative facts, however, cannot stand
alone. It necessarily calls for the mediation of charismatic leaders who by virtue
of their deep and direct connection with the mass of the “common people” can
channel popular wisdom into public policy. As inconvenient gaps open up
between social experience and the alternative reality that accommodates the
beliefs of these putatively common people, average citizens have become
increasingly prone to grant further leeway to charismatic leaders for the
purpose of bringing reality and beliefs back into line. The civil control of
political and economic power slides toward more relaxed accommodation;
office gives way to personalism; and loyalty to the leader threatens to
overwhelm criticism and accountability.
The creeping of populism and authoritarianism into the public life of well-
established democracies, sometimes merely incipient, at other times much more
blatant, has emerged after decades of progressive social transformation. Civil
spheres had extended significantly as citizens confronted uncomfortable facts,
collectively searched for solutions, and envisioned new courses of collective
action. Solidarity extended, new multicultural models of incorporation
developed, and the deliberative function of public spheres strengthened.
The backlash against these achievements has threatened to turn the public
from a civil drama into a stage for the performance of loyalty and resentment.
Civil spheres are spiraling downward into dangerous polarization. Normative
standards in public discourse that insist on rationality, reasonableness, calm,
self-control, trustworthiness, transparency, good faith, and accountability have
undergone a worrying process of devaluation in the eyes of large segments of the
public. The authenticity of such standards has been increasingly questioned,
regarded as obstacles to the prompt devolution of power to the common people
as well as a spoke in the wheels of their charismatic leaders. Demagogues
fabricate enemies among the press – “fake media” – demonize opposition
parties and civic associations, and cast doubt on the ethical impersonality of
office, sometimes targeting the very force of the law as well as judicial
independence.
These clouds looming on the horizon of European and US democracies have
been for many decades an integral part of the landscape of Latin American
societies. Confronting CST with democratic life in Latin America may,
therefore, provide a unique opportunity to tool it up and meet the intellectual
and political challenges that lie ahead for all of us in current times.
When populism and authoritarianism advance, civil understandings of
legitimacy come under pressure from alternative, antidemocratic conceptions
of motives, social relations, and political institutions. In these times, a fine-
grained understanding of the competitive dynamics between civil, noncivil, and
anticivil becomes particularly critical. This book opens up a timely window
onto such phenomena of discursive competition. In their chapter on the
Mexican presidency, for example, Nelson Arteaga and Javier Arzuaga track
the mobilization of patrimonial discourse vis-à-vis civil discourse in the 2014
scandal that exposed president Enrique Peña Nieto and his wife to charges of
influence peddling and conflict of interests. Celso Villegas, in turn, brings us to
Venezuela to account for the process of discursive competition between civil
forces and the militant revolutionary camps over the definition of middle class
during and before the Chávez regime. The competitive tension between militant
revolutionary and civil discourses also constitutes a central point of interest in
Liliana Martínez chapter, where she tracks the diminution of Cuba’s civil sphere
and the counterforce generated by the blog La Joven Cuba, which over the past
decade has played an important role in opening the Cuban public sphere.
Finally, Carlo Tognato takes stock, in his own chapter, of the tensions
between civil, militant revolutionary, and patrimonial discourses that in 2016
shaped a public controversy in Colombia, when the National University in

Bogota gave a prestigious academic award to a former faculty member who
had been jailed for collaboration with the country’s largest insurgency.
It is also important to acknowledge, however, that contemporary Latin
America civil discourse, as well as the communicative and regulative
institutions of Latin American civil spheres, have often levered significant,
democratizing civil repair. Maria Luengo reconstructs how Argentine women
organized an intensive and disruptive public mobilization in their 2015 struggle
against “femicide,” illuminating how the movement against macho patriarchy
built bridges across political polarization. Angelica Thumala’s chapter
investigates the series of public controversies that broke out in 2009 and in
2015 over market manipulation and corporate collusion in Chile,
demonstrating how civil authorities evoked universalizing language and
exerted civil control across economic boundaries. Arteaga and Arzuaga reveal
the paradox that civil reform emerged in response to the anticivil resources at
disposal of the Mexican presidency. Martínez explores how the militant
revolutionary discourse is stretched in a civil direction by new kinds of
communicative institutions.
In addressing the tensions between civil and noncivil spheres, empirical
investigations into boundary relations are necessary. So far, civil sphere
theorists have tended to focus broadly on structural and functional effects
that strengthen or weaken civil boundaries. Thumala and Tognato go beyond
that in their respective chapters, analytically reconstructing the messy empirical
details of actually existing boundary relations, demonstrating how perceptions
of destructive intrusions emerge right alongside ideas about facilitating inputs;
both develop new ideas about “interstitial institutions” as mediating between
civil sphere and economies and universities.
Theorizing about civil and noncivil boundary relations must conceptualize
the regulative mechanisms by which the civil sphere enforces social order legally
and materially. In her chapter, Mayumi Shimizu demonstrates that this task
centrally involves policing, upon which democratic societies place
contradictory demands. Sitting at the border between civil sphere and state,
police not only control the means of violence; they must also continually project
normative justifications for applying such force to those whom they have
evaluated as anticivil threats.
Analysts in North American and European democracies have linked the
unleashing of populism and authoritarianism to the thinning of their middle
classes. In the 1950s and 1960s, modernization theorists suggested a direct
relation between democracy and a healthy middle class. Their thesis soon
came under attack, and the experience of Latin American societies,
particularly since the 1960s, has demonstrated time and again that the
relation between the class and democracy is hardly straightforward. While
CST has provided powerful insights into racial, ethnic, gender, and religious
inequalities, however, it has barely addressed the question of class. Villegas’
chapter significantly fills this gap, exploring the dynamics of the middle class in
Venezuela. Building on the work of such Marxist cultural historians as
E. P. Thompson and later work on the social construction of class, Villegas
shows that what actors understand by middle class is extraordinarily variable,
that these constructions utilize the binary discourse of society, and that they are
filtered through the communicative and regulative institutions of the civil
sphere.
We suggested earlier that extreme polarization is becoming a worrisome part
of social life in many established democratic societies and that in Latin
American democracies it has constituted a regular feature of their societal
landscape. Civil Sphere Theory, however, has tended to neglect the effects of
radical polarization on the functioning of the civil sphere. In his chapter on civil
controversy in a Colombian university campus, Tognato illuminates the
dramatic effect that polarization has on the pragmatics of the civil sphere and
how it can undermine the very idea of impartiality and create fertile ground for
anticivil actions and logics. Luengo demonstrates that the civil scandal that
exploded femicide in Argentina conceptualized it as a violation of human rights,
and that the ability to do so depended on overcoming the polarization that had
come to associate human rights discourse with “Kirchnerism” and the left.
In order to understand the realities and the limits of populism and
polarization, civil sphere scholars need to dive straight into the everyday life
of civil communities, setting CST in a more ethnographic, “anthropological”
mode. Trevor Stack does exactly this in his ethnographic field account of civil
sphere dynamics in a small Mexican town. Despite festering democratic deficits
at the national level, Stack finds that a powerfully shared identity of citizenship
and powerfully felt sentiments of solidarity, or sociedad, permeate the lived
experience of local life. Despite their distrust of the legal process, Mexicans in
this urban community engaged in active civil association and created public
performances that effectively challenged government authority.
We are convinced that the passage of CST through Latin America vindicates
the utopian and aspirational nature of the civil in a new and possibly much more
powerful way. We seek to do more than decolonize the condescendence by
which Northern scholars have often approached democratic life outside the
United States and Europe. To push back on populism, authoritarianism, and on
the paralysis of civil life that results from extreme polarization, we need to
conjure up far larger moral energies and tap into a much deeper reservoir of
democratic hope. The Latin American experience has something profound to
tell us in that respect.
Faced with the enormous challenges that democratic life encounters in Latin
American societies, with the frustrating pace at which the circle of social
inclusion expands within them, often all too slow and all too late, and faced
with the endemic practice of violence at all levels and in all corners of social life,
analysts outside and within Latin America have occasionally yielded to the
temptation of giving in to impatience and despair, naturalizing the negation of
the civil as if it were a distinctive mark of Latin American democracy.

Sometimes, they have gone even further, conceptualizing the negation of the
civil as a dignified dimension of Latin America’s democratic identity. We cannot
support such intellectual moves, though we understand them. The retreat from
hope and utopia does grave injustice to the extraordinary examples of political
imagination that have repeatedly sprung from Latin American societies, which
have reminded us, again and again, that the civil sphere, both as a reality and as
utopia, is alive and vibrant across the region, even in the face of the most
exacting circumstances.
In the early 1990s Bogota was the most dangerous city in Latin America
(Sommer 2017), its citizens fleeing public space to retreat into their homes
(Martin-Barbero 2017). When Antanas Mockus took office as Bogota’s
mayor, in 1995, he refused to take such public aggression as a natural fact of
democratic life, denouncing it, instead, as an unacceptable state of incivility that
a more democratic politics could confront. His administration proceeded to
organize highly publicized, “performative” interventions into the everyday life
of the city. In one striking example, the mayor’s office distributed among
Bogotanos thousands of cards featuring a thumb-up or a thumb-down,
suggesting they deploy the cards to publicly display admiration or disapproval
for the behavior of their fellow-citizens – without resort to aggression or
violence. Such interventions did, in fact, have performative effect (Gilbert and
Davila 2002; Dundjerovic and Navarro Bateman 2006). Bogota citizens began
showing more respect for public space, more discipline in traffic, and less
aggression in urban interactions. This pedagogic exercise in democracy
allowed mundane tasks of living together to be transformed, however briefly,
into experiences of collective self-reflection, reigniting public deliberation, and
renewing civic identity (Narvaez-Goldstein 2002–2003; Nogueira de Oliveira
2009; Pasotti 2009).
The Mockus experience is just one among many examples of civil creativity
and strenuous tenacity that Latin American democracies have to offer. This
book is an invitation to delve into democratic life in this region, and to seize
through it the potential for a Latin American moment, not only in civil sphere
theory, but also in democratic life.
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part i
SCANDALS AND CIVIL INDIGNATION

1
The Civil Sphere in Mexico

Between Democracy and Authoritarianism
Nelson Arteaga Botello and Javier Arzuaga Magnoni
introduction
For more than seventy years, political life in Mexico was structured around the
authoritarian political regime of the hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI). This situation allowed a wide range of corporatist, patrimonial
authorities to emerge which, over time, led to the consolidation of political
elites, unions, and businesses. Such an authoritarian regime tapped into
symbolic power for the purpose of sacralizing authority, hierarchy, and
order through ritual and civic drama. In this sense, the hegemony
established by postrevolutionary governments was both institutional and
cultural, and relied on a coded discourse that dismissed all forms of dissent
as opposition to the project of civil repair that had inspired and legitimized the
Mexican Revolution. Such symbolic power, as Balandier (1994) suggests,
resulted in a dramatic perception among Mexicans of the problem of order
and shaped their political and civil practices. Although the party guaranteed
institutionality through time, the president served as the gravitational axis
consolidating the political order. He both embodied the centralization of
political power and worked as the source of symbolic meaning in national
policy.
The Mexican democratic transition led to a series of institutional changes in
the regulation of access to power by opening up political competition to
political parties and citizen organizations.1 Paradoxically, in the transition,
many of the authoritarian structures of the hegemonic and patrimonial party
regime were maintained. In fact, it could be said that the transition was more
a process of political liberalization than a process of democratization (Cansino
2000) that implemented new legal regulations for political party competition,
which were incomprehensible to the majority of Mexicans. This process
allowed forms of sacralization, and ultimately of legitimation, of patrimonial
power to remain virtually untouched.
19
20 Nelson Arteaga Botello and Javier Arzuaga Magnoni
Certainly, in Mexico, free and competitive elections, independent

newspapers, and intellectuals who lead informed criticism of the government
support the operation of a civil sphere. Nonetheless, the cult of the sacrality, of
the presidency, and of the patrimonial power remains unscathed and reaches
beyond the sacrality of the office in a liberal democracy. In Mexico, the
president is the symbol that articulates and unites the country’s political life.
Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court of Justice carries this symbolic load.
Therefore, there is a certain taboo surrounding the presidency that prevents the
tainting of its sacredness. The fact that in Mexico, for example, no
impeachment of the president is possible says a lot about the institutional and
symbolic safeguards built around this figure for the purpose of guaranteeing the
continuity of the nation’s political order embodied by the presidency.
This chapter focuses on the case of an alleged conflict of interest involving the
current president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, his wife, the mass media, and
various construction companies over the acquisition of a white luxury house by
the presidential family in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of Mexico
City. The scandal broke out due to an independent journalistic investigation
and triggered a controversy, known as “the White House scandal,” which
achieved wide media coverage. Through the media, several actors within the
civil and political spheres engaged in a drama in four acts.
In the first act, the president’s wife, Angélica Rivera, showed off her new
house in a socialite magazine, thereby leading a group of journalists to develop
an investigation into the origins of the house. This investigation revealed the
trafficking of influence and a conflict of interest between the company that built
the house and the presidential couple.
In the second act, the publication of this investigation resulted in
a confrontation in part along patrimonial lines. Some defended the actions of
the president and his wife as legitimate and within the bounds of the noncivil
conception of institutions that traditionally applied to Mexican politics. Others,
instead, criticized them for not adhering to the traditions of the Mexican
patrimonial order. More concretely, the couple’s conduct was deemed
illegitimate not because of its content, but because of its form. Other
observers, however, questioned it by tapping into the civil discourse of
democracy and pointing to the anticivil character of that conduct.
In the third act of the scandal, Angélica Rivera took center stage through
a video, broadcast nationally, in which she explained how she obtained the
White House. From a patrimonial standpoint, the video managed to build
consensus over the legitimate and legal nature of the actions carried out by
the president and his wife. From a civil perspective, though, it triggered the
impression that the couple acted improperly.
In the final act, the president appeared a little more than a month after the
publication of the White House investigation and announced that he would
push for a series of institutional reforms to deter the trafficking of influence and
conflicts of interest among federal officials. Members of the patrimonial camp
The Civil Sphere in Mexico 21
hailed the president’s decision, whereas members of the civil camp dismissed the
reforms as an instance of mere political cosmetics and called, instead, upon the
president to use his power to push the reforms much deeper and dismantle
certain patrimonial practices that underpinned institutional power in Mexico.
The drama brings into focus a conflict between two different horizons of
legitimacy of power, which could contribute to complexify Civil Sphere Theory
(CST) both empirically and theoretically. As Alexander (2015:173) has noted,
in contexts with partial civil spheres and authoritarian regimes, competing
interests may fail to emerge as democratic institutions often because conflict
between purity and impurity is structured differently from traditional civil
discourse. In Mexico, disorder was never understood as a mismatch in the
democratic system, but rather as the suspension of social order itself. Long
tumultuous periods of Mexican history during the nineteenth century and the
first quarter of the twentieth century ended in authoritarian displays of power,
which, in turn, reflected the fratricidal and particularly violent character of
Mexican politics. In this sense, between 1936 and 2000, the postrevolutionary
presidential figure constituted a central mechanism of the Mexican political
order and served as an essential “noncivil” input that allowed proper
functioning of civil society, thereby emerging not as a destructive intruder, but
rather as a guarantor.
As one may expect, though, democratic progress in Mexico has produced
new tensions in relation to the figure of the president. In this chapter, we show
that the controversy over the White House scandal confronted two competing
discourses. One side featured those who aligned the president’s conduct with
the traditional exercise of patrimonial power. Within this camp, some noted
that the president had not respected the patrimonial tradition’s own
representational order and demanded that the president initiate a repair
process to restore the symbolic strength of the presidency. This position,
which viewed the presidency in noncivil terms, clashed with that of other
observers who from a civil perspective considered that the fight against
corruption justified the risk of a possible fracture of the symbolic epicenter of
national policy, should the president be found guilty. As Mexican institutional
rules impeded an investigation of the president, the confrontation between the
noncivil/patrimonialist camp and the civil/democratic camp led civil advocates
to suggest that the president should use the powers conferred to him by the
patrimonial regime to bring about the reforms that might limit those powers.
In other words, they ended up urging the president to use his power to end
patrimonialism. In the end, though, the president used state institutions to avoid
the charges, and government resources were spent to force the journalists who
had started the investigation out of their jobs.
This chapter is a case study that enables us to account for the efforts made by
the civil sphere’s communicative institutions (specifically by the liberal media in
the country) in order to activate the regulatory institution of the presidency.
This case is particularly compelling to analyze, inasmuch as it allows us to look
at how a position that still shows noncivil traits (meaning that it works by
responding to reasons of a patrimonial political order) ends up giving in to the
pressure of the civil camp’s criticism by prompting a number of actions that tend
to regulate it. It shows the need that the president had in that moment to
establish reforms, proposals, and commissions in order to widen the
mechanisms of transparency and accountability, even if the latter were at first
designed to exonerate him.
democratic and patrimonial codes

To interpret the White House scandal in the light of CST, one must account for
the “world of values and institutions that generates the capacity for social
criticism and democratic integration at the same time” (Alexander 2006:4).
Specifically, in the case of Mexico, one must address how democratic and
patrimonial codes confront each other. Competition and coexistence between
civil and noncivil discourses characterize the political experience of various
Latin American countries. As Baiocchi (2006) shows in the case of Brazil,
democratic discourse confronts a corporate discourse, which understands
dependence, tutelage, and clientelism to be positive relationships between
political power and citizens. For his part, Tognato (2011) suggests that in
Colombia, democratic discourse competes against the discourse of the
hacienda (i.e., large farm), which positively values harmonic relationships
between the patrón and his subordinate peón.
For Baiocchi (2006), corporate discourse in Brazil introduces a cultural logic
of rights and privileges based on codes in which the suitability of relationships,
ties, and collective well-being are weighted over individual well-being and
individualism. The relationships and ties built from within the world of work
define the relationships of social insertion, particularly through unions and
professional associations. It is through these entities that rights are assigned
and distributed. “Those who did not belong to regulated professions became
a type of precitizen, and the rights of the citizen became the rights of the
profession” (Baiocchi 2006:292). The corporate code establishes a holistic
and hierarchical vision of society in which relationships based on dependency
and the tutelage of hierarchical entities are positively valued, both of which
generate specific rights. On the other hand, idleness, universal equality, the
individuality and autonomy of people and groups, and the privileges of
minorities are considered to be negative traits in the corporate code.
For the case of Colombia, Tognato (2011) affirms that the hacienda
discourse defines the manner in which the conception of agency, social
relations, and political institutions is oriented. In this discourse, both action
and relationships are interpreted in terms of the code of the patrón, or master,
and the subordinate peon and of the code of the bandit. The patrón presents
himself as the protector, the moral authority, the person who assumes the
responsibility of caring for his workers, a señor who governs his domain in
which all may be invited as his guests. He is also a cultured, civilized, and
orderly man who treats others with respect and consideration. The peón is
presented as an actor who subordinates himself to the wisdom of the patrón.
Therefore, he is an obedient, modest, humble, and generous follower who
listens attentively to the words of the patrón. The peón is also a man who
recognizes and accepts his subordinate place in society. As Tognato (2011)
suggests, on the negative end of the patrón/peón spectrum we find the bandit.
The bandit is a peón who has decided to rebel against the organic and
harmonious structure of society and the authority of the patrón. Therefore, he
is characterized as a barbarian, a savage, an ignorant, disloyal, and disrespectful
person who lacks any type of moral values.
Mexican history before and after the Mexican revolution in 1910, in turn,
shows the formation of a patrimonial power derived from the presence of
institutions and political leadership with broad autonomy for negotiation,
and that made the bureaucracy see state management as an instrument for its
personal use (Falcón 2015:590). This allowed political leaders to carry out
certain acts of corruption, provided them with legal immunity, and allowed
them to use their power in an authoritarian and discretionary fashion. It also
allowed the cultivation of patronage relationships. However, none of the above
implied an absence of norms. Following Weber (1975:825–830), the
patrimonialist regime in Mexico works on principles based on tradition
within a legal order characterized by a complex fabric of laws, a highly
differentiated bureaucratic system, and specialized political leaders.
Simultaneously, it favors large degrees of autonomy. Therefore, political
leaders recognize that there is a legal framework that they cannot violate. And
yet they assume that the institutional design itself, with its multiple gaps,
promotes the existence of a space of freedom in which they can do what they
want within a sphere of complete arbitrariness that favors their interests.
Nonetheless, the patrimonial rule can discredit itself in the eyes of the
governed if the political leader does not recognize the legal and customary
limits of his discretionary rule, thereby damaging his honor and integrity and
hence, contaminating the position that he occupies. When a political leader
cannot curb his passions or desires and loses his sense of limits as far as his
discretionary action is concerned, then, he will come across as incapable of
governing or, even worse, as lacking a sense of the political order. Thus, in
a patrimonial regime, unrestrained behavior is negatively valued compared to
self-control and sobriety. An excessive or even open display of social
relationships is seen as polluted in contrast to low-profile, reserved, and
inconspicuous ones. Finally, the inability to distinguish between legal and
customary norms is dismissed while respect for their difference is positively
valued. In the case of Mexico, the president of the Republic is the key political
figure that condenses the patrimonial power of the political system and
symbolically embodies what is indisputably the political center of Mexican
politics (Meyer 1976:243).
Patrimonial discourse lost part of its legitimacy toward the end of the
twentieth century as civil discourse gained terrain and affirmed the value of
the rule of law in democratic life over arbitrary political conduct. In 2000, the
National Action Party (PAN) toppled the PRI from the presidency. In the years
of the PAN administration, though, various governance problems, as well as
a poor track record on security, significantly wore down the presidency. As in
Mexico, criticism against the effectiveness of the president is seen as questioning
the viability of national unity. Calls for a return to the earlier power of the
presidency became increasingly insistent.
In the 2012 presidential election, the PRI’s platform promised a restoration
of the mythical and sacred aura of the presidency that had characterized it over
many decades. In the first two years of his presidency, Peña Nieto managed to
reach a series of agreements with the unions, the political parties, the media, and
business leader associations, thereby mimicking a traditional practice of the PRI
in the mid-twentieth century and projecting the image of a return through
decisive actions to the centrality of presidential power. The White House
scandal, though, revealed that such a return also came with the old
patrimonial exercise of power by the presidency.
In the White House case, President Peña Nieto managed to hold his position on
both civil and patrimonial grounds by appealing to both the polluted attributes of
civil discourse and the sacred attributes of patrimonial discourse. To elaborate
this process, we will focus on the classifications, judgments, and categorizations
by the participants in the debate that appeared in five leading national
newspapers: El Universal, La Jornada, Excelsior, Milenio, and Reforma.2
Following the methodological proposal of Alexander and Mast (2011), we
observe the media’s construction of binary narratives used to classify and typify
motives, social relations, and institutions, structuring a moral space that
distinguishes between good and bad as well as between pure and impure.
As far as civil discourse is concerned, free and autonomous action is
contrasted with dependent and manipulative action. Open, critical, and honest
social relations are contrasted with opaque, discretional, and calculative
relations. Finally, rule-bound, inclusive, and impersonal institutions are
contrasted with discretional, exclusionary, and personalistic institutions. As far
as patrimonialist discourse is concerned, self-control, self-restraint, and sobriety,
are positively valued, whereas action steered by desire and passion is seen as
polluted. Social relations must be discrete, reserved, and low-profile rather than
indiscrete, excessive, and public. Finally, institutions that are regulated by
customary norms are positively valued with respect to institutions that are
governed by the personality and arbitrariness of the person in power.
background
When the White House scandal broke out, Peña Nieto’s authoritarian profile
had already been a target of criticism. Since his campaign, Peña Nieto was
directly challenged in different scenarios for favoring the use of force, the
centralization of power, and the restoration of traditional modes of political
negotiation in the pursuit of order and economic growth. As he won the election
with 38 percent of the votes in the midst of great polarization, conflict, and
criticism, he engaged in a series of rituals and state performances for the purpose
of restoring the link between the presidential figure, national identity, and the
mythical formation of the Mexican political community as a postrevolutionary
regime. Until shortly before the completion of his first two years in office, Peña
Nieto managed to establish the PRI’s return to power as the “Mexican
Moment.” In particular, owing to the dramatization of the pact that the
president orchestrated among all political parties, a pact that promoted
structural reforms in finance, energy, education, and telecommunications, he
managed to convey that the party overcame its old ideological reservations that
hindered the modernization of the country – “We are changing Mexico” – and
yet could restore the presidency’s earlier aura.3
Although critics of the president, including the more radical, lost much of
their presence and influence in the public sphere, they were still looking for
opportunities to contaminate the president and his “Mexican Moment.”
Known for her critical stance against government authorities, particularly
against Peña Nieto since the time he was governor of the State of Mexico,
journalist Carmen Aristegui and her special investigation team managed to
command the attention of public opinion on the president’s family’s
multimillion-dollar mansion, which was not included in their financial
statement and could not be accounted for based exclusively on the president’s
salary as well as on the family’s savings and gains from private transactions.4
Even more importantly, the house had been built by the Higa Group, a major
large infrastructure contractor in the State of Mexico during Peña Nieto’s
governorship of that state.5 A branch of the Higa Group also leased its
aircraft to transport Peña Nieto during the 2012 presidential campaign, and
through its subsidiary, Constructora Teya, the Group also featured as the lone
bidder (and winner) in the construction of a railway that would link Mexico
City to Queretaro, one of the most important public infrastructure projects
launched by the federal government in recent times.6
After the publication of the White House report, political and social elites,
journalists, and civil society groups competed to provide a “master narrative”
of the affair in an effort at controlling the story’s direction and interpretation
and ultimately at influencing its possible effects (Wagner-Pacifici 1986). Such
agents took moral stances with respect to the alleged infringement of the
normative order (Jacobson and Löfmarck 2008) that ensued from the
acquisition of the White House on the part of the president and his wife. One
cluster of them (Mast 2006) structured those positions into a struggle between
a sacred democratic code and a profane antidemocratic one. Another “cluster of
agents,” on the other hand, structured the debate as a conflict between the
positive and the negative codes of patrimonialism.
Carmen Aristegui’s group of journalists managed to contaminate the

president and his wife by suggesting that the acquisition of the house in
question resulted from an exchange of favors between them and the owner of
Higa. As the journalists insisted, in a democratic order, the president should
control his own desire for money and perks. Politics should be open, reliable,
and honorable, and the presidency should not be used for personal and
particularistic gains, thereby infringing upon the rules and regulations that
govern the office of the president.
Some observers regarded the journalists who broke the case as an example of
critical, open, and independent journalism committed to unveiling the true
workings of power. Others, instead, saw them as coconspirators together
with a network of political groups and unions that sought to harm the
president, his family, and the presidency in order to halt the reforms
promoted by the president and, ultimately, to destabilize the country as a whole.
The White House scandal escalated into a salient issue, not only in print
media, which is traditionally more critical of the system, but also, and
especially, across domestic and international media networks. Government-
linked media, particularly Televisa and TV Azteca, which monopolize
Mexican television, did not report the news until a few days after it broke,
when the first lady referred to the White House purchase during a newscast on
the country’s most important TV network.7 She insisted that the house was hers
and that she had signed the deal without her husband’s intervention. On that
occasion, she denied any conflict of interest in the acquisition of the house,
arguing that she knew Higa’s owner long before she got involved with her
husband.
Control of the means of symbolic production (Alexander 2003) was
central to the presidential couple’s narrative, which interpreted the White
House story as an attempt on the part of politicians, business owners, and
unions to extract benefits from the president. On November 28, 21 days since
Aristegui’s report was published, the president addressed the problem of
public insecurity and made a series of announcements. He would support
the National Anticorruption System and the Constitutional Regulatory
Transparency Reform Law, which, at that time, were under discussion in
Congress. He would put in place more agile mechanisms to denounce
corruption and would commit to strengthen open government in the federal
public administration by developing an information system within the Public
Administration Ministry that would grant suppliers and contractors open
access to all contracts with the federal government. By virtue of this
announcement, the president ended the discussion over the White House.
the fractured image

In the first weeks following its outbreak, the White House scandal triggered
a debate between competing patrimonialist and democratic interpretations of
the president’s conduct. The former focused on his inability to exercise the self-
control and sobriety expected from a president within a patrimonial order, and
to meet the required standards in public ethics as he placed his personal
interest above public interest (Rojas 2014; García L. 2014). It is worth
noting that the accusation from the patrimonialist camp that the president
lacked ethics actually left the president with some legitimate wiggle room to
use his position for personal gain. Carmen Aristegui (2014), who led the
investigation on the White House, for example, pointed out that it was
somewhat “natural” and “acceptable” for a president to use his power for
personal enrichment. What was out of line, however, was that such conduct
occurred at the beginning of his term and not at the end or after he left office, as
it used to be the case with PRI presidents in previous administrations. Hence,
a significant number of conservative opinion leaders from conservative
newspapers, such as Excelsior and Milenio, demanded that the president
clarify to competent authorities how he had acquired the house and that he
apologize to the public for his mistake (Zuckermann 2014a; Puig 2014a;
Segura 2014; Reyes 2014).
Unlike the expectation from the patrimonialist camp that the president could
repair his breach of customary norms by merely issuing an apology, critics from
the civil camp noted that the president would have to break with the tradition of
corruption that had characterized PRI rule (Krauze 2014; Bravo 2014).
According to them, his resignation would not be sufficient to fix the reality of
Mexican politics (D’Artigues 2014). Rather, it would just be a symbolic patch
for the problem of corruption and would leave the country’s political system
practically intact (Azuela 2014a). Corruption is not only “the oil that moves the
machine and the gears of the political system; in Mexico, corruption is the
machine and oil” (Pardinas 2014a). A commentator from the liberal newspaper
Reforma noted that Mexicans live with the “learned helplessness” that
politicians in government steal and will never go to jail, and that the political
groups backing the president will always see corruption as inherent to the
exercise of power (Ramos 2014a). In short, the patrimonial order must be left
behind and a new civil order must be established based on democratic principles
and values, and particularly, one that is open to scrutiny and accountability.
The National Action Party (PAN), the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD),
the Work Party (PT), and the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA)
came together in solidarity with the liberal media and demanded that the
president answer the allegations made by the investigative team led by
journalist Carmen Aristegui. An important number of nongovernmental
organizations that were especially active on the front of accountability reform,
also joined in. In addition, charges of corruption against the presidential couple
echoed in the slogans used by demonstrators that at the time were mobilizing
over the disappearance of forty-three students from the rural training school of
Ayotzinapa, who had been earlier kidnapped by members of a criminal
organization and of the police force.
Faced with these objections, some columnists of conservative newspapers

such as El Universal, El Milenio, and Excelsior came out in defense of the
president and his wife. Aristegui’s report, they remarked, was funded and
promoted by specific economic and political interests and should therefore be
dismissed. In particular, some argued that the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim
was behind it, using Aristegui to pressure the federal government to award him
a television network (Aleman 2014). Others accused the influential former
president Carlos Salinas de Gortari of orchestrating the plot as leverage to
secure for his group the political and economic benefits agreed upon with
Peña Nieto during the presidential campaign (Ruiz 2014). Another columnist
claimed that former Mexico City mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, funded Aristegui’s
investigation (García S. 2014a; 2014b). Finally, others argued that the White
House story had been fed by those affected by the president’s reforms who were
now seeking revenge (Zuckermann 2014b; Cárdenas 2014a).
reconstructing the image

On the night of November 20, Televisa and TV Azteca broadcast a video in
which Angélica Rivera explained her acquisition of the White House. Rivera
disclosed all the details of the sale, the sums, the percentages, the dates of
payments, and her personal income. She pointed out that the contract
established that she would pay for the mansion over a period of nine years
and insisted that after twenty-five years in an artistic career, she had earned
enough money to buy the White House. Rivera stressed that she had nothing to
hide, because she had always behaved honorably. However, to protect herself as
well as her children’s and husband’s integrity, she would sell the rights to the
house, because she did not “want the house to become a pretext for offending
and slandering” her family.
Within the patrimonial camp, some columnists from the conservative
newspapers El Universal and Milenio described the first lady’s discourse as
proof of the presidential couple’s ethical integrity. Her message projected
transparency, set a good example for other public officials (Berruga 2014),
and had to be applauded for clarifying the misunderstandings over her home
(Gómez 2014). Her explanation also showed that the scandal had been
fabricated by actors interested in destabilizing the government and in
cornering the president into resigning. In addition, they celebrated that Rivera
had decided to cancel the White House sale contract. They acknowledged that
the presidential couple managed to appear sober and self-restrained and
concluded that Rivera’s decision proved that it was unnecessary to formally
investigate the presidential couple’s conduct.8 A commentator noted:
“Mrs. Rivera herself should demand now from politicians, as well as from
contractors, suppliers and union leaders who hide their fortunes to follow her
steps, for they know their fortunes are ill-gotten. The first lady has the
opportunity to trigger a Rivera effect” (Berruga 2014:9).
Conservative newspapers emphasized that the president’s wife used her

experience as an actress to deploy an effective performance (Carrillo 2014).
She acted in a “brave, strong, and bold manner, like her character [in the soap
opera] La Gaviota,” as she dismissed any conflict of interest (Cárdenas 2014b).
And by projecting fortitude, character, and confidence, she gave the impression
that her arguments were solid and that she was telling the truth.
Moreover, Angélica Rivera had simply benefited from a relationship. Who in
Mexico refrains from using one’s own relationships for personal gain
(Sefchovich 2014)? Mexicans understand that this is commonly accepted even
when it comes at the expense of the public good and that the trafficking of
influence and cronyism are widespread and normalized practices. It would
therefore be hypocritical and ill-intentioned to stigmatize the presidential
couple for that.
Critics from the civil camp constructed an alternative narrative based both
on the content of Angélica Rivera’s message and on the image she projected
in the course of her TV performance. If the president’s wife ultimately
decided to transfer the house as proof of the purity of her intentions, they
noted, doing so proved that she was actually hiding something.
As a columnist for the liberal journal Reforma put it, “instead of helping
them project an image of transparency, this gesture ends up harming her and
her husband” (Sarmiento 2014:7). In addition, observers stressed that her
broadcast intervention included too much distracting information, was in
part contradictory, and ultimately gave away that the transaction over the
White House involved a conflict of interest (García S. 2014c). According to
political scientist Denise Dresser (2014a:7), the first lady’s histrionic video
only aggravated the situation with her outraged, upset, and condescending
tone and by failing to understand that the moment she helped herself with
a single peso of public money, she became subject to legitimate scrutiny,
even if she was not a “public servant.” Furthermore, she eluded the conflict
of interest at the heart of the matter. She failed to inform the public about
how she had met Mr. Hinojosa, owner of the Higa construction company,
and she ignored the fact that he had won multiple public bids while her
husband held the office of governor and then of president.
As far as Rivera’s TV performance was concerned, conservative, liberal, and
leftist media columnists from the civil camp remarked that it was bad, forced,
and false (Castellanos 2014; Jiménez 2014), even sloppy, far below the bar set in
her soap operas (Ibarra 2014; Rangel 2014; Fernández 2014). Her tone of voice
and face came across as upset, angry, irritated. She gave into her outrage for
having to address the issue in spite of not being obliged to do so and in spite of
her superior status. She even kept scolding the audience for being suspicious of
her conduct (Villoro 2014a). Besides, the mise-en-scène of her TV appearance
did not help either as the decorations were unrealistically poor and hence
inauthentic (Hernández 2014; Puig 2014b). As a columnist from the left-wing
journal La Jornada put it, there was
overacting as well as unnecessary rudeness on the part of Mrs. Rivera Peña, who virtually
scolded those who rightfully questioned her . . . A poorly handled performance, her tone
and demeanor were loaded with tense reproach and the script appealed more to emo-
tions than reason as it laid emphasis on the “anger” felt by a mother and wife that was
targeted by the slandering over her flashy enrichment few years earlier (Azuela 2014b:5).
By failing at her performance, Angélica Rivera ultimately grounded the
perception within public opinion that she was telling a lie (Newell 2014).
In the end, to regular observers from the civil camp, she exhibited many
of the attributes within the antidemocratic code of civil discourse. She
came across as irrational, selfish, controlled by her passions, with
a distorted view of reality and pretty much allergic to the very idea of
accountability.
Critics from the civil camp also noted that both the president and his wife were
mere cogs in a more complex patrimonial institutional machine. As Jacqueline
Peschard (2014), former president of the Federal Institute for Access to
Information, put it, the president cannot reflect in his conduct the spirit of an
ideal republic and neither can members of Congress. As a consequence,
subjecting the couple to a special investigative commission would inevitably
result in a dead end as politicians, irrespective of their ideological and party
affiliation, would not dare undermine the patrimonial regime that favored them
(Esquivel 2014a; Zuckermann 2014c, 2014d).
As the president is the symbol that keeps together the patrimonial system,
some political analysts considered that only he could dismantle patrimonialism
by reshuffling his cabinet and pushing for broad political reforms that would
yield greater transparency in the exercise of power (Campos 2014). Quite
paradoxically, they saw an opportunity for the strengthening of democratic
institutions by leveraging the power of the symbolic center of the Mexican
patrimonial system and by preserving that aura of sacredness that turns the
executive, as Balandier (1994) suggests, into the gravitational axis of the
Mexican political order. Columnists of the leftist newspaper La Jornada,
however, questioned this thesis and advocated for massive popular protest
for the purpose of forcing the president to resign and bringing about true
radical change within Mexican politics (Almeyra 2014; Toledo 2014;
Ackerman 2014).
the commitment to oblivion

On November 28, 8 days after the television broadcast of Angélica Rivera’s video
and 21 days after Aristegui broke her investigation, the president announced his
support for the creation of a National Anticorruption System and
a Constitutional Regulatory Transparency Reform Law in order to set clearer
mechanisms to denounce corruption and to make public-contract bidding
processes more transparent in an effort to deter future conflicts of interest.
As he did not refer to the White House affair and hence omitted any link between
those measures and the accusations directed at him and his wife, he preempted
their framing as a response to demands for civil repair and squarely nested them,
instead, within the horizon of patrimonial politics.
His firmest advocates from the noncivil camp actually used those measures to
terminate the White House scandal. Such measures, they pointed out, would
create adequate institutional mechanisms to channel all suspicions about
corruption or conflicts of interest. Instead of using journalistic investigation as
a weapon of political pressure, they challenged, the president’s critics should
rather file criminal charges against Enrique Peña and Angelica Rivera through
the new anticorruption mechanisms, which would end up proving that the
scandal was just an act of malice, which only sought to halt the reforms
launched by the President during his tenure.
Observers from the civil camp, on their part, read Peña Nieto’s policy moves
as a cue to the restoration of traditional patrimonialist practices in vogue
during the old PRI’s hegemony (Esquivel 2014b; Ramos 2014b) and
despaired about the prospect of the government regenerating itself (Kraus
2014). In line with former Mexican presidents, they pointed out, Peña Nieto
did not account for his actions, did not accept any criticism, and simply
reaffirmed the principle of the untouchability of the Mexican presidency
(García L. 2014; Molina 2014; Aristegui 2014). Furthermore, they
recognized that, even if a special prosecutor against corruption were to be
created on the basis of Peña Nieto’s proposal, the president would never be
investigated (Dresser 2014b). Congress, in turn, would never open an
investigation into the president’s conduct and, if it did, the president would
end up being exonerated, making it clear that “in Mexico, politics is to make
money” (Pardinas 2014c; Pardinas 2014d).
Critics within the civil camp also highlighted that a process of
impeachment of the president was impossible, because there was no legal
framework for it in Mexico. Even if Congress could try the President, this
would weaken the office of the presidency and its institutional fragility would
result in political chaos (Zuckermann 2014e; Zuckermann 2014f). One could
only hope that the president would promote viable anticorruption policies, so
as to rebuild the public trust in him (Maerker 2014; Barranco 2014; Villoro
2014b). Thereby, it was demanded of the president, from the civil camp, to
carry out the necessary changes to undermine the basis of the patrimonial
system itself, of which he was the main engine. With this positioning, the civil
camp somehow ended up indicating that the presidential figure should be
considered the epicenter that not only allows the preservation of political and
social order in the country, but that also ensures any possibility for change.
Therefore, although it is recognized from the civilian field that it is not
possible for the government to change endogenously, it paradoxically ends
up accepting that change is only possible if the president has the will to lead
the democratic transformation.
conclusion
The media investigation that ignited the White House scandal opened a field of
symbolic dispute over the meaning and interpretation of the affair in the
Mexican public sphere. Observers from the civil/democratic camp regarded
the real estate transaction conducted by the president and his wife as
contaminating the most relevant political figure of the country’s institutional
structure. Analysts in the noncivil patrimonialist camp, on the other hand,
regarded it as a violation of traditional norms of the Mexican patrimonial
system. In short, the president’s actions came across as objectionable from
both perspectives. And yet, for a section of the patrimonialist camp, the White
House investigation was driven by particularistic political interests that sought
to weaken the president’s legitimacy and bring about political instability by
creating a climate of suspicion around him and his family. Also, they believed
that the president enjoyed some wiggle room as far as the use of his office for
personal gain was concerned.
Particularly after the president’s wife appeared on television to explain her
real estate transaction with the objective of relieving the president of any
responsibility, observers from the noncivil camp insisted that the first lady had
made apparent the ill-intentioned nature of the accusations against her and her
husband, which turned a private matter into a political scandal for the purpose
of destabilizing the country.9 On the other hand, civil criticism pointed to the
president’s anticivil conduct, to the negative impact of the presidency’s
contamination on Mexico’s democratic transition, and warned against
a restoration of the earlier patrimonial practices that were so typical of the
old PRI administrations. These criticisms sought to emphasize that the
democratic transition could not be consolidated with a person who did not
guarantee the civil character of the office. To guarantee the purification of the
office, they considered that Peña Nieto should recognize his error publicly.
In addition, he had to promote institutional reforms to prevent this type of
behavior from being repeated in the future.
Because an actual impeachment process does not exist in Mexico, civil critics
also advocated for the staging of a ritual of self-criticism on the part of the
president for the purpose of cleansing his office. In the end, however, Peña Nieto
did not take that route, which further convinced them that the dismantling of
the patrimonial regime could not be achieved without the support of the
president. As historian Enrique Krauze (1996) would put it, all social,
economic, and political forces in Mexico have traditionally gravitated around
the president, just like the planets around the sun. Thus, any attempt at political
transformation in the history of the country always avoided altering the
gravitational pull of the “president-sun.”
Now, as Alexander (2003) and Mast (2012) have shown, regulation of the
office of the president is not a process achieved in a single blow. The White
House scandal triggered protests and a wave of media criticism, which in turn
generated a collective response against the president and forced Peña Nieto to
support regulatory and institutional reforms sanctioning possible conflicts of
interest in politics at all levels. For some critics, these reforms were inauthentic
and a post hoc effort to restore legitimacy to his government. For other analysts,
though, they constituted a first step toward limiting the enormous symbolic
power and tools held by the president.
Regardless of these interpretations, the scandal can also be viewed as
a testimony to the continuing, perhaps growing, power of the civil sphere in
Mexico. The debate, after all, resulted in the creation of institutions that enforce
greater transparency and accountability of government authorities, even
though the debate ultimately reinforced to a certain extent the symbolic
power of the Mexican patrimonial regime that was embodied by the figure of
the president. As Alexander (2010) notes, if there is a tendency in differentiated
societies to develop deep antidemocratic cults around the executive, this will
create a tension between the civil sphere and the state that often ends up
favoring presidents or prime ministers when addressing cases of corruption.
The president will then elude resignation, depending on his ability to cast the
allegations of corruption as inauthentic (Mast 2012; Alexander 2003). In the
Mexican case, the noncivil cult of the presidency shielded it by characterizing
criticism against it as an attack on the symbolic center of political life in Mexico.
In conclusion, the office of the Mexican presidency works not only as
a regulatory institution of the civil sphere, but also as a pivot of the Mexican
patrimonialist order. Thus, the actions of the president are bound to be
interpreted and judged both from the patrimonialist and the civil camps,
which may compete against each other to gain control over their direction
and their effects.
notes
1. The democratic transition began in 1977, with the Federal Law of Political
Organizations and Electoral Processes created by the federal government. This law
allowed, among other things, the constitutionalization of political parties, the
broadening of the Chamber of Deputies, a new formula for proportional
representation, and party access to official time slots on radio and television and to
other political participation mechanisms. The democratic transition ended with the
electoral reform of 1996/97 (Cansino 2000; Woldenberg 2012). That’s why the
election of 2000 was experienced as a process of political alternation rather than
a process of transition to a democracy.
2. It should be noted that each of the newspapers analyzed, perhaps with the exception
of La Jornada, has a pool of opinion columnists with different profiles who do not
hold the same perspective. These columnists represent a spectrum of conservative,
liberal, and leftist perspectives. This diversity makes it possible to find different
political opinions in one newspaper, making it difficult (with a few exceptions) to
identify a single political tendency per newspaper. Nonetheless, examining the
editorial line that defines the news presentation and the newspaper’s position
regarding public opinion, we can observe that Excelsior, El Universal, and the
Milenio are on the right or middle-right end of the political spectrum, whereas
Reforma is located at the center and La Jornada on the left end of the spectrum.
3. “Move to Mexico” was the institutional motto of the early years of the presidency of
Peña Nieto. This slogan sought to emphasize the character of his government
reformer.
4. The information appeared in the May 31 issue of Hola! Magazine (Lizárraga et al.
2015:25–26).
5. The report by the team of Special Investigations of the First Issue of MVS News,
entitled “The White House Peña Nieto,” was originally published on the Aristegui
News website on November 9, 2014.
6. On Monday, November 3, 2014, it was announced that a consortium led by the
China Railway Construction Corp, Ltd. had won the bid to build the first high-speed
train (TAV) in Mexico, which would link the Federal District to Queretaro.
The consortium was the only entity that had participated in the bid, a project with
a value of $3.75 billion. It was also announced that the consortium was also
composed of Prodemex, the GIA Group, Constructora TEYA, the China South
Rolling Stock Corporation, and Infrastructure GHP Mexicana. On November 5,
however, President Peña Nieto ordered the competition to be nullified as a failure and
ordered that a new invitation to bid be launched. The bidding process for the train
had been questioned because of the refusal of the government to extend the deadline
for interested companies. The presidential decision was accompanied by a trip of the
highest level to China to explain the reasons for the decision and to cover the expenses
incurred by China Railway. On January 30, 2015, the finance minister announced the
definitive suspension of the project for budgetary reasons. Between the decision and
what followed, the story on the White House that linked the President of the Republic
to the Higa Group had appeared.
7. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdJ06CLjjxE. Because it sought to give the issue the
appearance of a private matter, she could not speak in her capacity as first lady and on
national television to publicize their version of the facts.
8. Nonetheless, it is necessary to note that within noncivil discourse, there are those who
argue that if their declaration had been sincere, it was necessary to settle the debate by
displaying greater remorse and donating the house to a charitable foundation
(Pardinas 2014b).
9. That is what journalists thought about John F. Kennedy’s many love affairs during
the 1960s, a line between public and private that has clearly shifted in the United
States with the Clinton and Monica Lewinsky affair.
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2
Shaping Solidarity in Argentina

The Power of the Civil Sphere in Repairing Violence
against Women
María Luengo
introduction: cultural generalization

in a polarized society
On June 3, 2015, a spectacular shockwave of civil solidarity swept across
Argentina. Rallying around the slogan #NiUnaMenos (“#NotOneLess”),
hundreds of thousands of people protested against gender violence and
demanded institutional commitments to stopping the murder of women in the
country. The #NotOneLess movement was initiated on May 11, just three
weeks before the march took place, by Marcela Ojeda, a female radio
journalist who let out a cry of despair via Twitter. A new case of shocking
gender violence had just been committed in Argentina. Chiara Páez, a pregnant
14-year-old, had been brutally killed and buried in the backyard of her
boyfriend’s family home in the town of Rufino, northeast of Buenos Aires.
“They’re killing us,” reads Marcela Ojeda’s tweet that, echoed promptly by
a small group of women journalists and other intellectuals and writers, sparked
off a national and international debate in the media.
Media reports framed the murder as one more “femicide” in the context of
the significant number of recent killings of women in Argentina because of their
gender. By framing the killing as “femicide” (and the response to it as “against
femicide”), the media echoed the term used by the group that initiated the
movement in order to overcome patriarchal expressions such as “crimes of
passion.” They were willing to relate the brutal isolated killings to violence of
a structural nature and with a global reach, as well as to make political
demands. In this fashion, #NiUnaMenos activists consciously associated the
word “femicide” with human (women’s) rights. I will demonstrate that by
doing so, perhaps on a less conscious level, they channeled the human rights
discourse that has been an essential part of Argentina’s recent democratic
history. The power of the civil discourse on human rights emerged in response
39
40 María Luengo
to “genocide,” the term used in Argentina to reference the mass murders

committed under the military dictatorship. The movement against femicide
succeeded to a great extent because of its connection with civil discourse.
Violence against women is a widespread problem across Latin America, but
this was the first time that Latin American civil society reacted on a mass
level against sexual crimes and with such a significant impact on public
debate. The #NiUnaMenos movement managed to reconceptualize macho
perpetrators and individual crimes as threats to Argentina’s collective life.
This in turn pushed regulatory institutions and offices to take urgent action
within an ongoing cultural and institutional process of civil repair.
Why and how did a civic resignification of gender crimes and perpetrators
occur, and how did it relate to the binary codes of civil and uncivil male-female
relations in the particular context of Argentina’s society? To what extent has
that resignification been operative and resulted in new cultural understandings
of gender relations in Argentine society and in institutional actions against
gender violence in the country?
By looking at the contemporary movement against femicide in Argentina,
I intend to contribute to Jeffrey C. Alexander’s Civil Sphere Theory (CST) in the
following ways. Firstly, in a similar vein to Arteaga and Arzuaga’s examination
of political scandals in Mexico in this volume, the case that I study in this
chapter reveals that an instance of outrage whose impetus comes from the
civil sphere constitutes a process that involved a chain of actors. As I will
demonstrate, although the #NiUnaMenos movement entailed an impressive
forging of civil solidarity preceded by a phase of crisis creation, it was the
product of activists’ planning, and its momentum and ongoing presence were
sustained by the media. The #NiUnaMenos public outcry spread largely from
Buenos Aires to more than a hundred cities in Argentina, and it reached Mexico,
Chile, and Uruguay. This public performance of protest and solidarity was
globally echoed by leading media outlets in the United States and Europe.
In the following 12 months, similar protests against gender violence were
replicated in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru, all of which had
a significant impact on public debate in their respective societies.
Secondly, through examining the #NiUnaMenos movement, I will advance
an additional argument related to the civil sphere: the process leading to the
creation of a crisis and then civil solidarity requires transversal bonds between
groups who hold divergent beliefs and are ideologically divided on other social
or political issues in order to produce consensus between them (Alexander
1984). In the case of Argentina, the creation of the crisis over femicide
depended on otherwise-opposed groups’ capacity to take the view that their
stance on women’s rights – and in particular, their right to not be subjected to
gender violence – was consistent with a vision of a society unified by a shared
antimacho understanding of civil life. To put the point in broader terms, in spite
of the existence of significant ideological and/or social antagonism within
a society, a civil sphere can exist if citizens feel that they form a cohesive
Shaping Solidarity in Argentina 41
collective created out of a broad front of solidarity that is defined substantively

and based on shared acceptance of a civil code rather than on more visceral
factors such as nationalism, race, religion, or sex. The crisis in question must
involve an issue that goes from being one that affects only part of society (in this
case abused women) to one that concerns the whole, and it must also make the
transition from a noncivil sphere (in this case, domesticity, gender, and sex) into
the civil sphere.
Finally, I will shed light on an aspect of the civil sphere that is specific to the
Argentine case, namely the phenomenon of discourse on human rights in the
country having become polarized and somewhat degraded in recent years owing
to Kirchnerism’s monopolization and instrumentalization of it, which caused it
to disappear from many sectors of Argentine society. The #NiUnaMenos
movement managed to a certain degree to reverse this trend. It created
a unified discourse on the civil rights of women that cut through opposing
discourses on human rights in the country at a time when the third term of
Kirchner’s populist left-wing government was coming to an end and the victory
of Mauricio Macri and his center-right Republican Proposal in
the November 2015 presidential elections was imminent. In the previous
decade, President Néstor Kirchner had established close links with human
rights organizations, and in particular, with Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,
a group established in 1977 to demand information on its members’ children
who disappeared during the 1976–83 military dictatorship. Through powerful
symbolic acts such as the dedication ceremony for the Museum of Memory at
the former Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy – the most notorious
detention site of the era of military rule – in 2004, President Kirchner brought
together many social organizations under the banner of populist ideals.
Kirchnerism’s human rights credentials were contested by its critics, who
accused the president of populist policies that served to sustain his
authoritarian power and corporate enrichment. Human rights organizations
were viewed with suspicion as they entered Kirchnerism’s political domain,
where they received rewards and privileges prior to becoming caught up in
scandals related to the circle of corruption generated by subsidies, such as the
accusations of misuse of public funds made against Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’s
former legal adviser in 2011.
I will show that the polarization that had split discourse on human rights was
something that the #NiUnaMenos movement was very conscious
about avoiding. Interviews with main organizers of the march in Buenos Aires
reveal that the movement moved from a Kirchnerism-induced fragmentation of
human rights discourse to a regeneralization of it, such that human rights could
function, once again, as an overarching consensual discourse. Taking the
protection of women’s rights (under the label “femicide”) as a master frame
(Cannata 2016), the movement had the ability to encompass a broad spectrum
of institutions, political parties, and social movements, integrating different
political ideologies in a larger frame unit of the public discourse. Interestingly,
42 María Luengo
the generalizing civil discourse on femicide also required leaving more targeted
approaches to conservative/patriarchal and progressive/feminist audiences to
one side. Interviews with actors and media organizations from the more
conservative end of the political spectrum suggest that their indignation over
femicide was neither simply nor primarily triggered by specific patriarchal issues
or narratives (Cannata 2016) – “the protection of the weaker sex from
violence,” for example – that would have placed them in opposition to the
feminist activists who also participated in the march. Nor did the discourse of
feminist militants appeal directly to gender issues that more conservative actors
might have been opposed to. That said, there were in fact no strong or relevant
conservative voices in the national public sphere when the march took place.1
The real potential sticking point – and the problem of social polarization –
would not have been the creation of a dividing line between a conservative right
and a progressive left, but rather the creation of one between a progovernment
collective and an opposition one. That is, the #NiUnaMenos movement could
have become a question of being for or against the government of Cristina
Kirchner. But in the event, no such division manifested itself. A march focused
on economic insecurity had been the typical form of criticism that had
previously been directed at the government. However, Kirchnerism did not
interpret the #NiUnaMenos march as such. Instead, it saw it as being about
a civil concern and a shared problem. By the same token, although government
opponents could have understood the march as a government campaign whose
cause was in itself a good one, they could have also felt that they should not
support it with any enthusiasm. The march was neither governmental nor
oppositional. The femicide outrage overcame such political barriers and
become a cause for everybody. Once the church supported a demonstration
initiated by prochoice advocates and feminists,2 there were no conservative
voices that could challenge the oneness of the march.
democratic power and destructive polarization of human

rights discourse in argentina
The impact and implications of the civil discourse against femicide and the
demand for justice cannot be apprehended – for example, with regard to the
way in which these managed to gain ground in the civil sphere against current
competing discourses on human rights in the country – without taking into
account the broader national human rights narrative that developed in the
country after the 1976–83 dictatorship. What allowed the outraged unity
against femicide was the unusual power of human rights discourse in
Argentina. Human rights discourse – one concrete version of the discourse of
civil society (Alexander 2006) – was the central discourse in the emergence of
democracy in postdictatorship Argentina. It allowed the Mothers of Plaza
de Mayo movement to develop a nonpartisan critique of the military
government that could not be easily challenged. The claim that they made was
that all human lives are valuable and deserving of respect, regardless of the
individual’s particular ideological or political affiliation. As the Argentine
historian Luis Alberto Romero (2012:269) puts it, human rights associations
that precipitated the fall of the military dictatorship in 1983 “imposed an ethical
dimension on all political practice, as well as a sense of commitment to and
a valuing of society’s basic agreements above partisan affiliations in the context
of previous experiences – something truly original.”
According to Romero (2012), human rights discourse in Argentina began to
become more radicalized from the early years of the new democratic
government, when the most extreme voices within human rights
organizations objected to judgments of military officials and guerrillas on an
equal basis. They called for more severe punishments for military officials and
were became progressively more sympathetic to members of the guerrilla
organizations. This section aims to show that a radicalization of human rights
discourse was accompanied, in turn, by Argentine democracy’s turn toward an
authoritarian nature, in particular under the Kirchners’ administrations from
2003, when Néstor Kirchner took office.
The initial narrative on human rights started with the crucially important
Mothers of Plaza de Mayo movement during the 1976–83 dictatorship. This
Argentine mothers’ association provided powerful symbols and representations
for human rights activists, and these played an essential role in bringing military
government to an end in 1983 and in establishing a constitutional democracy.
By the end of the third term of the Kirchners’ administration in 2015, the civil
discourse narrative had progressively fragmented, and human rights advocates
and organizations had been tainted by anticivil codes in terms of how they
were – and still are – perceived by a section of Argentine public opinion. Their
critics accused them of sectarianism and radicalization, and also of being
dependent on political power. A closer analysis of the relationship between
Kirchnerism and human rights organizations will allow the immediate context
of political confrontation and polarization in which the #NiUnaMenos
movement emerged to be revealed.
The Merging of Democratic Ideals and Human Rights

The weekly marches initiated by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in 1977, which
would continue throughout the period of state terrorism and its aftermath,
represent the crossroads of the clashing views that currently divide human
rights advocates and their critics. Actions and actors for human rights were
powerfully symbolized for the first time in the history of Argentina through the
mothers’ walks and their right to know about the fate of their children who were
victims of the clandestine human rights crimes of the military dictatorship.
In the middle of fierce repression, a group of mothers of “disappeared”
44 María Luengo
people – the euphemistic description given to victims of state terrorism – began

to meet every week in the Plaza de Mayo. They marched with their heads
covered by white handkerchiefs, calling for the return of their children. Their
testimony combined a deep feeling of pain with moral principles that the
military government could not question or categorize as subversion.
The Mothers attacked the core of the repressive discourse itself and began to
shake up society’s indifference. Gradually, as victims of the repression
themselves, they became the reference point of an ever-wider movement of
human rights associations that were creating a public discussion strengthened
from the outside by the press, governments, and civil society organizations.
In this initial narrative, defenders of human rights not only championed the
cause of the victims and the demand for justice but became one of the main
causes of democratic restoration. The military government was increasingly
excluded from the international community due to the country’s diplomatic
isolation and its negative image, which was intensified by the global spread of
the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’s claims regarding the violation of human rights.
Leaders of the military dictatorship were also rejected by Argentine society,
which was mobilized by new voices, most of which belonged to human rights
associations. The great March for Civility (“Marcha de la Civilidad”)
on December 16, 1982, police repression, the growing memberships of the
different political parties, and the powerful eruption of social protests were
followed by democratic elections in 1983. Raúl Alfonsín, who had been among
the strongest human rights activists and who had harshly criticized the military
regime, became president, embodying the civil ideals that established the new
phase of democratic government.
The high point of this narrative, in which human rights and civil ideals
blended, was the trial and conviction of the junta of military leaders in late
1985, shortly after President Alfonsín took office. The justice system dismissed
any justification for the atrocities committed; military power was subjected to
civilian law. This situation was unprecedented, and in that sense, it was an
exemplary verdict and a remarkable foundation for the rule of law that was
intended to be established by democracy. The fight for human rights thus
legitimized the new democratic government, reinforcing liberty, plurality, and
the law.
The Polarization of Human Rights Discourse

From the trial of the Juntas of military leaders in late 1985, the discourse on
human rights became increasingly fragmented, and it polarized based on
divergent causes, ideologies, and political forces. The so-called Impunity Laws
(“Leyes de impunidad”) such as the Law of Due Obedience (“Ley de
Obediencia debida”), which was approved in 1987 during the Alfonsín
government, and President Menem’s pardons (“Indultos de Menem”) during
his presidency between 1989 and 1999, which benefited officials involved in
war crimes, triggered criticism, and created a division between violence

perpetrated by state terrorism and that legitimized by the guerrillas’ ideals.
Human rights discourse fragmented between victims’ families, democratic
activists, and people who sympathized with the guerrillas. In the 1990s, the
effect of the significant opposition to Carlo Menem widened the divisions
within a complex human rights collective with differing voices and positions.
Diana Cohen Agrest, a philosopher and a founder of Justice Works, an
Argentine civil organization dedicated to eradicating impunity and promoting
real justice for victims of violence, argued in an interview with Diario Uno
newspaper (November 6, 2015) that “there is a factional agenda on human
rights.” In her view, since the advent of democracy in 1983, the concept of the
victim has been constrained to what is referred to as “institutional violence,” as
a result of which political and judicial leaders have only recognized those who
have been subjected to state terrorism as victims. She observed that
since the advent of democracy, Argentina has always lived in a similar way to the rivalry
between River and Boca, the famous football teams. Such a schism has extended to other
spheres of private and public life. It has also extended to victims. For forty years there
have been good victims (the idealistic disappeared young people) and silenced victims (all
of the victims of many of these young idealists – disappeared or otherwise – who gained
generous privileges and have occupied positions of power).
Under the Kirchner administration (2003–15), the term human rights
maintained its main original signifiers: the symbols, images, and stories of
state terrorism and its traumatic aftermath. However, it began to acquire
a particular and narrow sense that confined the cause of human rights and its
advocates to a particular set of signifieds. In 2003, President Néstor Kirchner
reopened the process of trials for crimes against humanity that Alfonsín and
Menem had closed, and he established close ties with the Mothers and
Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo as well as with organizations that had their
origins in the unemployed movement. He progressively included the defense of
human rights within his political agenda through symbolic ceremonies and
gestures such as the withdrawal of paintings of former military leaders from
the Military School in 2004. The linking of human rights to Kirchnerist
ideology led to a rejection of emblematic human rights organizations such as
the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo by some liberal
antigovernment sections.
In parallel to the establishing of Kirchnerism, the 2002 economic crisis led to
an intense mobilization of civil codes, which were activated through a wide
range of social forums (Feijóo 2001; Gordillo 2010). The combination of
economic crisis, poverty, and social problems constituted a cultural grid in
which a new awareness of human rights was raised through social movements
and citizens’ collective activities aimed at solving specific needs. These social
actions were to some degree suffocated by the consequences of the crisis and the
return to material interests and concerns that it provoked, but they have
46 María Luengo
recently reemerged in the midst of structural social problems such as poverty

and personal insecurity. The role of human rights organizations was noted once
more – though their activities were more modest and were embedded within
political activism and ideologies – in the 2002 crisis when groups that operated
across neighborhoods attempted to address social problems through direct
democracy. Left-wing parties joined these popular assemblies. Militancy
reached its peak in the march of March 24, 2002, the public holiday that
commemorates the 1976 coup. The event brought a new sense to the demand
for human rights, since the death of two well-known activists from the
“picketing” movement (piqueteros) linked the human rights agenda to the
issues of social protest, justice, corruption, power abuse, and impunity.
Recently, President Mauricio Macri’s first visit to the former Higher School
of Mechanics of the Navy, which took place in February 2016, triggered harsh
criticism among human rights activists and representatives of the Left and
Kirchnerism. In an opinion piece entitled “A Sectarian Voice Has Taken Over
Human Rights” and published by Los Andes on March 8, 2016, Luis Romero
wrote:
“Here in the (former) Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy, if you were not in the
Northern Column of the Montoneros, you are nobody.” I remembered this ironic,
hyperbolic phrase – I do not know who said it – when I read the indignant reactions
provoked by President Macri’s visit to the school’s former headquarters, which today
houses different institutions that are subsidized by the state and support the cause of
human rights. It was not the president who was there but the enemy [italics added].
The School of Mechanics of the Navy, commonly known as Esma (Escuela
Superior de Mecánica de la Armada), was the most emblematic illegal detention
center of the last military dictatorship (Hodges 1991). During the government of
Néstor Kirchner, the center was assigned to various human rights organizations.
Since then, Esma has been run by three actors: the national government, the city
government of Buenos Aires, and human rights organizations. The complex
includes the National Memory Archive, the Ministry of Education’s TV
channel Canal Encuentro, and other organizations run by human rights
activists, some of whom fought in the armed organizations in the seventies.
The Northern Column was one of the five columns of the Montonero army
that operated in the capital and the province of Buenos Aires (Gillespie 1982;
Moyano 1995). For former Montoneros militants, their membership in the
column represents their enrollment in the leading elite of the armed
organization. Critical voices consider this privilege to have led to favoritism
when institutional charges and responsibilities have been handed out, especially
during the Kirchner administration.
The controversy surrounding Macri’s visit to Esma represents just one of the
recent events that have provided the basis for discursive battles over the cause of
human rights in the country. On November 23, 2015, one day after Mauricio
Macri won the elections, La Nación published a controversial editorial entitled
“No More Revenge,” which stated that “the election of a new government is an
opportune moment to put an end to the lies about the 1970s and the ongoing
human rights violations” (La Nación, November 23, 2015). The article
outraged a large section of politicians and human rights advocates. Journalists
at La Nación rejected the editorial and published a statement of their own on
the same day, repudiating the text’s call for the release of repressors tried for
crimes against humanity. The journalists characterized the statements made by
the newspaper as antidemocratic and linked a continuation of the trials to
democracy and justice.
against femicide: the civil reframing of human rights

In this section, I explain how the social movement against femicide brought
human rights into a new narrative frame in the context of social and political
fragmentation that would be accentuated by the November 2015 presidential
elections. The campaigners successfully performed the role of “civil translators”
(Alexander 2006a). They managed to transfer crimes and perpetrators into the
public space in a large-scale and impressive fashion that feminist associations
had until that point failed to achieve, and they framed these individuals and
their violent acts as destructive intrusions into the Argentine civil sphere.
The #NiUnaMenos movement unfolded over three weeks, starting with the
murder of 14-year-old Chiara Páez and the immediate denunciation by
journalist Marcela Ojeda via Twitter on May 11, 2015 and culminating in
the June 3 mass march in Buenos Aires and many other cities in Argentina.
The post on Twitter followed a movement that had taken shape from March
that year. Under the slogan #NiUnaMenos, a reading marathon organized by
feminist activists at the National Library in Buenos Aires aimed to raise
awareness of killings of women and involved several victims’ relatives.
The event was held on the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of a young
woman named Florencia Penacchi, and it coincided with the killing of 19-year-
old Daiana Garcia that same week. In May, the journalists’ call through the
media was intended to take a different direction in making femicide publicly
visible and denouncing it. In what follows, I will focus my analysis on the media
coverage on the March 3 demonstration to explore the ways in which public
outrage was framed. I will then examine the content of twenty-two interviews
with the organizers of the march. The interviews record opinions and personal
experiences of the weeks before and during the march.
Method and Data

I used semiotic and narrative analysis in order to identify the main coding,
plots, settings, and characters through which the message against gender
violence was conceptualized and represented symbolically within a new civil
frame of human rights so that the message was seconded by the wider public.
48 María Luengo
I collected around 150 media articles from the Dow Jones Factiva database.
These texts encompassed the news stories, features, and editorials published
during June 2015 by a variety of national and international news media
outlets, a month that coincided with the peak of media reporting on the
march of June 3. The articles contained the term Ni Una Menos and other key
words.3 Among other media sources, the sample included texts by: news
agencies such as France Press, Associated Press, and Reuters; leading national
daily newspapers such as Britain’s Guardian, the United States’ New York
Times, Argentina’s La Nación, and Spain’s El País; and international TV
channels such as CNN.
In order to explore the Argentine news outlets in greater depth, I consulted the
digital archives of the daily newspapers Clarín and La Nación, whose editorials
(particularly those of Clarín) were strongly critical of the Kirchner administration
and for whose target audience the very term human rights has negative
connotations.4 I selected all the news stories, features, and editorials on the
demonstration published in June (around one hundred pieces from La Nación
and thirty pieces from Clarín), and I did the same for two newspapers that
sympathized with the Kirchner government’s policy, namely Tiempo Argentino
and Página/12. In a less systematic way, I also examined the general national
discourse on human rights in relation to recent controversial events, such as: the
first visit of President Mauricio Macri to the former Higher School of Mechanics
of the Navy, which has become the Space for Memory and Human Rights; the
publication of and response to a provocative editorial on human rights by the
newspaper La Nación on November 23, 2015 (i.e., one day after Macri’s
victory); and the presence of Barack Obama in Argentina on March 24, 2016,
when the fortieth anniversary of the country’s 1976 coup took place.
My exploration of media articles is complemented by an analysis of
interviews with the twenty-two journalists, women’s rights advocates, and
intellectuals who organized the march in Buenos Aires. The interviews were
conducted between July and September 2015 by Paula Rodríguez, an
Argentine journalist and the codirector and cofounder of the School of
Specialized Journalism in Art, Culture, and Performances (known as TEA
Arte in Spanish), who published part of the content of these interviews in the
book Ni Una Menos (2015). The book chronicles the events surrounding the
march through around fifty first-person accounts by victims, activists,
journalists, feminist associations, NGO representatives, and administrative
and legal officials who belong to the movement or who mobilized in response
to the journalists’ call to protest. I contacted Paula Rodríguez, who promptly
and generously sent me the audio and transcripts of twenty-two respondents.
I therefore had access to the full content of the interviews, and as a result
I was able to examine directly interviewees’ recounting of the facts and
reconstruct and interpret the narrative behind the different stories.
Whereas the material from media outlets described above allows a broad,
objective approach to the general discourse on #NiUnaMenos, the interviews,
which were provided by a journalist close to the group of activists who planned
the show of public outrage against femicide, offer insights into the more
subjective and personal perspectives of key individuals involved in organizing
the movement. One might think that this data could be skewed on the basis that
its sources are parties involved in the movement. The twenty-two interviewees
supported the march, as did the majority of the public and the political and
media elites. As mentioned before, there were few critical minority voices.
Nevertheless, the respondents represent a wide section of the Argentine
political, ideological, and media spectrum and hold strongly divergent
political views. They include journalists working at the pro-Kirchnerist
Página/12 and the anti-Kirchnerist La Nación and Clarín, as well as
Kirchnerist activists and opponents. The political scenario in which the march
took place was characterized (and still is) by a sharp division between the ruling
party and the opposition coalition; no debates occurred outside of this split.
Among the #NiUnaMenos activists, there were people strongly identified with
Kirchner – for example, Pía López, who at that time was a member of Carta
Abierta (Open Letter), an association of intellectuals who supported
Kirchnerism; Marta Dillon, a well-known journalist and feminist as well as
the editor of Las Doce, a magazine supplement of Pagina/12, which aligned
itself with the ruling party during the Kirchners’ administrations; and Florence
Minici, a Kirchnerist activist. The interviewees also include people like
Florencia Etcheves, a journalist affiliated with Canal 13 TV, which is closely
identified with the government opposition, and Mercedes Funes, the editor of
a news magazine who is now the spokesperson for the new government’s
minister of culture. Other #NiUnaMenos members interviewed were
politically independent and did not necessarily represent the media
organizations that they worked for. However, their opinions tended to be
closer to Kircherism; as is the case with regard to Daniel Rivera, Carolina
Marcucci, and Vanina Escales (who defined herself as an anarchist). Hinde
Pomeraniec and Ingrid Beck were among the anti-Kirchnerist interviewees
who did not support Macri’s government either. My intention is to show that,
despite this divergence, the differing views and stories converge in a wider,
public narrative on human rights and Argentina’s civil society.
In Basics of Qualitative Research (1990), Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin
propose the interpretative level of paradigm or model in order to relate
“in vivo” codes (categories used in texts to present and evaluate events) to
one another and to bring them face to face with the conditions that gave rise to
such coding, the context in which it appeared, the strategies (actions/
interactions) through which it occurred, and its consequences. Alexander’s
“cultural performance” model for social action (see Figure 2.1) enabled me to
delineate and interpret the main codes, narratives, and facts for this case study
from a civil-sphere and cultural-sociological perspective. I follow the basic
elements of this cultural performance model of deep codes and foreground
scripts, actors, and audiences to present my findings. Furthermore,
Background representations
(codes / narratives)
“HUMAN RIGHTS”
Civil codes Anti-civil codes
Solidarity Antagonism
Pluralism Partisanship
Inclusion Exclusion
Consensus Disagreement
Oneness Excision
Scripts
“WOMAN RIGHTS” Human rights as
Democratic Authoritarian bulwark against
Equal Hierarchical partisanship Actor(s)
Open Secretive From victims Text NOT ONE LESS Audience
Autonomous Oppressive to autonomous movement
citizen women
Journalists
Feminist activists
Intellectuals
Artists
figure 2.1 Elements of cultural performance applied to the Argentinian movement against gender violence (adapted from Alexander
2006b)
Alexander’s (2015:187) model brings meaning structures, texts, and narratives

into factual action and vice versa, and as a result it helps in highlighting the dual
“discursive” and “performative” nature of social movements and illuminating
it through a case study. I illustrate empirically how civil solidarity crystallized in
the general context of the massive demonstration of June 3, 2015, doing so in
a way that set aside particular ideological agendas. I will look at the kinds of
rhetoric – symbols, images, narratives, and so forth – that the #NiUnaMenos
movement deployed to successfully perform civil solidarity across the whole of
Argentina’s public space. I show that, even in a context of macho culture, and
despite social and political fragmentation, the civil sphere in Argentina, whose
binary discourse is deeply institutionalized in society’s collective consciousness,
is a powerful democratic resource for a process of civil repair in response to
gender violence and its consequences.
Putting Human Rights into Civil Codes: Solidarity, Inclusion, Pluralism

In most of the international and national news reporting on the demonstration,
Argentine society as a whole appears as the main character in the headlines,
performing the role of safeguarding human rights: “Not One Less:
The Unanimous Outcry of Thousands of Argentines,” read El Cronista
(June 4, 2015). El País reported that “Argentina Campaigns” (June 4, 2015).
The Guardian (Pomeraniec 2015) told its readers on June 8 that “it is a noble
cause. It’s something much more basic. It is a human right.” The Associated
Press produced a press release (June 4, 2015) that read, “In an Argentina
polarized by the October general elections, the call brought together . . .
politicians from all sides, artists, intellectuals, social activists, and, above all,
ordinary women, overwhelmed by the daily headlines about women who had
been murdered, in most cases by their partners.” El País reported on the march
in the same manner: “Argentina is experiencing a time of great political turmoil
and division in the middle of the electoral campaign. However, the mobilization
of #NotOneLess has been so great that all candidates have backed this group’s
demands.” The Argentine daily La Nación (Massa 2015) described on June 4
how “the demonstration managed to unite clashing flags under one slogan:
shouting down femicide and changing a culture of violence. [It was] an
encounter where people from all social classes, creeds, and ideologies
visualized #NotOneLess.” And BBC Mundo (June 3, 2015) reported on “the
Argentine outrage that has transcended borders.”
News outlets from both anti- and pro-Kirchnerist wings of the media
reported on the June 3 march by framing it in broad terms of solidarity and
collective action performed by the whole Argentine population. The anti-
Kirchnerist newspaper Clarín (June 7, 2015) embraced this coding, which
encompassed government institutions such as the Secretariat for Human
Rights of the Ministry of Justice and the National Counsel for Women, to
report on the achievements and positive repercussions of the march. Clarín
52 María Luengo
journalist Mariana Iglesias, who covered the event, described her perception of
the facts, attributing a leading role to Argentina’s civil society, activists,
journalists, and citizens while relegating politicians to the background:
Everything lasted an hour, and at the end nobody moved. They stood there, crowded
together. This overwhelming presence said, “Enough!”. . . The event began at five. There
were no politicians involved in it. Or rather, there were, but they were unable to get into
the foreground because they were not allowed to do so. Only relatives of the victims –
and no one else – were allowed to be at the front.
In contrast to the oppositional discourse on human rights that had
characterized the editorial line of La Nación, most of its articles on the
#NotOneLess movement reflected on “citizen action” and the “vitality of civil
society” (June 4, 2015). The following quotation from an opinion piece by
Carolina Arenes considers the facts based on a civil concern of inclusiveness and
plurality:
As I write, the square is getting full. Almost all my friends are somewhere in the crowd.
I see one of them on the screen. And the friends of my friends. Many teachers and school
principals with their students, with their colleagues. And many, many people from
different neighborhoods and jobs, and from diverse backgrounds. Many men also:
a great achievement.
Yesterday there were flags of all colors, from the Left, the Frente para la Victoria, Pro,
the UCR, and the unions. Few recent demonstrations have allowed such a convergence,
and we should take note. Because it does us good, and because it is true.
The Public Coding of Private Gender Violence: Macho Perpetrators

as Anticivil Actors
The eruption of criticism of femicide increased moral concerns about
unpunished crimes and psychological identification with victims of gender-
based violence. Recent singular cases of brutal murders of women were
framed as having been the result of the uncivilized, threatening forces
characteristic of “macho” perpetrators. As one of the women’s rights activists
behind the demonstration pointed out in a New York Times article (June 15,
2015), “The cause is our country’s macho culture.”
In an interview with Radio Nacional (June 3, 2015), Dora Barrancos,
a historian and sociologist who is director of social sciences at the National
Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET), stated,
“The triumph of patriarchy is best viewed from the fact that women
themselves accept that patriarchy. Violent action legitimizes even more violent
actions.” Barrancos linked the fight against domestic violence to the Argentine
women’s movement and women’s self-awareness within democracy. For
Barrancos, the powerful contribution of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to the
democratic restoration of 1983 produced a renewed Argentine feminist
consciousness after the dictatorial regime. In the new democratic society,
sexual hierarchy and authoritarian male-female relations should be excluded

from the rule of law.
According to TV presenter Florencia Etcheves (interview 7), “This march
was not only a consequence of increasing violence against women but the result
of a struggle that women began long ago.” Private violence, together with
public and political recognition of women, became a central issue of the new
feminist agenda that the #NiUnaMenos movement projected en masse to the
public as a goal.
Media discourses on the events symbolically reflect the shift from individual,
private, and marginal scenarios to the collective, open, central scenarios of
public life by emphasizing the way in which the same harrowing murders of
women that previously had been committed in intimate spheres were now
taking place in the public sphere. One of the women journalists who
organized the rally wrote in the British newspaper the Guardian on June 8
(Pomeraniec 2015) that “where once these gender crimes . . . were likely to be
committed in domestic settings, in many recent cases they have made a leap into
the public sphere – into coffee shops and classrooms. ‘Macho’ gender violence
has taken on perverse new forms and entered new spaces in Argentina.”
Opinion pieces commenting on the meaning of the June 3 demonstration
transfer democratic demands for equality, autonomy, and openness to the fight
against gender violence, and they juxtapose these qualities with the
counterdemocratic codes of the macho perpetrators, whose actions are
portrayed as hierarchical, authoritarian, and secretive (as most instances of
these crimes are committed in private and intimate scenarios). In this vein,
a Página 12 article (June 2, 2015) reads, “as young people and teenagers gain
their independence, these men intend to send an exemplary and chastening
message: they will keep control and will not give it up so easily.” In an
interview with the Mexican feminist Marcela Lagarde (Página 12, June 21,
2015), the newspaper highlighted the detrimental effects of male-female
relations based on “love mythologies” that imply being “held captive” and
“women’s repression.”
Aggressors are coded in the discourse produced as “selfish” individuals who
seek to control and “isolate” women. And women are accused of complying
with relations in which macho males invade women’s spaces and humiliate and
degrade them and constrain their independence. In discussing the traumatic
experience of the killing of his mother, the journalist Luis Bremer criticized the
macho culture behind the killing of women and highlighted the anticivil forces
that characterize the killers:
What a shame it is, for you as a son, about your old lady being killed, and not having had
strength within a cultural framework where what is given priority or is applauded is
physical strength and not intelligence, and bravado and not negotiation. This is the
cultural framework that we are in: one in which the man who has the most muscle, who
imposes his power, who empowers himself over the rights of others, has the most
approval (interview 21).
54 María Luengo
Cultural Scripts (I): Human Rights as a Bulwark against Partisan Intrusions

Reflecting on how the warning bells against femicide were sounding with
increasing loudness across different sectors of society, Hinde Pomeraniec,
a journalist, editor, and columnist at La Nación and a member of the
#NotOneLess movement observed,
If I am proud of one thing, it is to have cooperated in setting up such a powerful and
diverse team . . . There was a need to express an opinion on the subject, which in my view
combined with another need, namely uniting once more over a single cause of human
rights, in which you can have many differences with the person by your side, but not over
this issue. I think that there are many people who have been used in the past to getting out
and demonstrating but who haven’t done it for a long time: people who had always felt
like answering the call over human rights issues and who at some point began to feel that
this had become the property of one political sector (interview 11).
In her general introductory account of the events, journalist Paula Rodríguez
relates the #NotOneLess movement to human rights in the same nonfactional
way when she states that “#NiUnaMenos is not someone’s property, attribute,
or creation, but an a posteriori synthesis of what was a unique social moment”
(Rodríguez 2015). Radio Nacional journalist and #NotOneLess member
Florencia Alcaraz (interview 6) frames gender violence within this broad sense
of “human rights”:
I think that human rights – that is, explaining that the violation of the rights of
women is a violation of human rights – are a wise approach to the issue. This
approach is also good for getting more people to join it and not only people who
have already been persuaded.
Similarly, journalist Marcela Ojeda (interview 13) expresses the motives that
led her to begin the movement. She differentiates these from hardline activism
and partisanship-based motives:
I think it was like . . . I do not know whether to say magic may seem naïve . . . Because ours
is not a feminist cause either. Mine is not a feminist militancy or a neomilitancy. It is
a particular fact that touched me and encouraged me to say: “Let’s take the street.”
How? In a political, nonpartisan way.
Mercedes Funes, a #NotOneLess member who is a journalist and the editor
of Gente magazine (interview 17), gives an account of the divergent ideologies
within the core of the movement that shows that plural views converged in
a single cause:
At a time of political division that was so great that it was referred to as a “rift,” there
were people from TN, Barcelona magazine, Página/12, Perfil, and Editorial Atlántica
working together. Beyond the fact that this diversity did not necessarily correspond to
the editorial line of the media outlet that each person worked in, it contributed a great
deal for us. The broadness of this base with regard to the media outlets that we worked
for, the diversity of thought that this showed – and that was moreover shown on
Twitter – enriched us. And I think that value, our social capital and careers, and every-
one’s contacts, greatly influenced and gave more power to the call.
The organizers’ accounts of the protest reveal that opposing political groups
competing in the election race attempted to instrumentalize the cause of
women’s rights and the protest’s popularity. “Why did the politicians come to
find us before we went looking for them? Because they saw that something was
going on and that people were beginning to take pictures of it,” observes
Marina Abiuso, a journalist at El Trece TV (interview 15).
Communication consultant Ana Correa (interview 2) expresses the
organizers’ desire to prevent the campaign’s becoming colored by the
ideologies of official or opposition sectors:
In recent years, almost all marches had been tinged in this way. To me it seemed like
a really interesting challenge to see what we could do so that it did not fall into the hands
of an extreme sector that would appropriate it and destroy it, deepening the rift, which is
what can happen with these things. For those of us who are concerned as citizens, the
subject of rifts is a permanent and unwanted one.
Correa explains that the government joined the campaign six days
before the march. In keeping with the discourse of other organizers, she
recounts the internal debate on whether or not government officials should
be asked to cooperate. When questioned about the accusation of being
a Kirchnerist protest, she observes that Kirchnerism waited until the
last minute to join the protest: “They took a reserved stance, monitoring
what others were doing and what we were doing, and we took advantage
of the situation.”
Cultural Scripts (II): From Isolated Victims to Autonomous

and Equal Women Citizens
Instead of emphasizing the pain and the suffering of victims, interviewees assert
their quest to put forward a message that emphasizes the autonomy, equality,
and dignity of women. Journalist, producer, and #NotOneLess member
Agustina Paz Frontera (interview 1) comments on the impact on her of one
young female demonstrator’s claim that “I don’t want to be brave, I want to be
free”:
I had not been an activist in any organization but my very close friends had. There
was an organization in Neuquén. At first, we had a vision of feminism that was very
biased and very tied to the question of the victim: feminism conceived as defense of
the victim. There was nothing positive, no joyful power, in being a woman. It took
several years to reverse that and to build a critical perspective and an identity, and to
address the issue of being a woman, of the feminine, from a positive viewpoint, and
from one of expanding freedoms and of the power of living . . . [The idea of “I don’t
want to be brave, I want to be free”] seems very clever to me because it is not about
being brave to go out or about women having to learn to defend themselves and act
56 María Luengo
as if they were not female. “I want to be free” means going beyond death. They are
killing, and women should be able to live fully.
A message of women’s freedom is also evident in the conceptualization of the
female body that many interviewees address when talking about the atrocious
crimes that triggered the protest against femicide:
Femicide is an act of violence that works as a call to order: it punishes what it designates
as rebellion through the woman’s body . . . Women have more economic and social
independence, and there is a more violent response from those who cannot have control.
Many of these crimes happen when the woman leaves, or says no, or is able to file
a complaint. (Interview with María Pía López, a sociologist, researcher, director of the
Book Museum, and #NotOneLess member)
Página/12 journalist Marta Dillón, one of initiators of the movement, shares
similar concerns with other interviewees who link “catcall” culture (piropo)
both to harassment and to civil rejection boosted by a new awareness of
women’s independence and power. She narrates different stories and their
meanings that spread through civil forums and that #NotOneLess integrated
into a consistent message:
In the months leading up to June 3, there were two counterdiscourses by very young
women that circulated and really went viral. One was by Axia, a young woman aged
twenty, that was shared as a video on Facebook. It talked about how she was harassed
at the door of her house, how she fought back with pepper spray, and how she
demanded at the prosecutor’s office to file a complaint. She spoke of a rape
culture . . . Axia’s story tells us about the experience of many young women who
identified with being fed up with catcalls, which seem normal to previous
generations . . . Axia raised two issues for discussion: first, that this is harassment,
that there is a rape culture, and that this type of violence speaks of other much more
serious kinds; and the other issue was resistance.
Discussing the terms used to conceptualize the feminist message during the
#NotOneLess campaign by its activists, Marta Dillón argues that adopting the
expression “machismo violence” instead of “gender violence” or “domestic
violence” was crucial in communicating the movement’s message to women and
wider society. She argues that “machismo,” a word that had hitherto been used
ironically to make jokes and that had a counterpart in an archetype of the
“resentful” woman, now refers to symbols of “repression” and relations that
identify “a way of being in the world.” The term was crucially located within
the narrative used by campaigners and echoed by the public. As journalist Ingrid
Beck states,
The word that was wisely chosen in the campaign was “machismo.” It was a great
decision. It was a campaign against gender violence and not a powerless reaction to
femicides. This was the theme: explaining that what happens is machismo, that femicide
was the most tragic, visible, and irreparable point of a chain – sometimes a very invisible
one – of violence. That was the debate generated; that was the conversation that took
place at home (interview 12).
Text: The Dramatic Effectiveness of Narrating Civil Demands

We suggested that it had to be a story. For this reason, the document is divided into
two parts: the first tells a story and the second summarizes the demand. It had to
tell the story of acts of violence and how they were linked with each other. Not
everyone internalizes things, and not everyone connects certain issues in the same
way. The point was to construct an argument, and not just to read the demands.
And that argument had to have a narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an
end. For me, this was really great. The discussions we had were very interesting.
(Interview 22 with Ximena Espeche, a teacher, researcher, and member of the
#NotOneLess movement)
The text that was read in public achieved a high level of dramatic
effectiveness. In it, the authors presented the deaths of individual women as
part of a collective story of femicide, the cause of which was machismo.
The cases of murdered women were framed as being a human rights problem
that affected all of society: “In many femicides children were also killed as part
of the punishment projected on the women and their own ability to give life,”
reads one of the statements. The rights of “some people” are the rights of “all
society,” and preserving the life and the decisions of women expands freedom to
all. The declaration encourages a forging of new forms of collective strategies to
“spin the fabric of ‘common life’ more and more.” The text refers to “social and
cultural violence” legitimized by “public discourses” that must be reversed into
discourses of civil solidarity and commitment. Women victims are not “alone”
but embedded into webs of affection and mutual support; and “private
violence” has to be discussed within the sphere of politics.
This narrative included an affirmation of saying no to “social mandates” of
repression as a “response from the whole of civil society.” The request featured
legal demands such as the implementation of the Law of Complete Protection
for Women of 2009, as well as severe criticism of the judicial system’s
contributing to the impunity of aggressors and the vulnerability of victims,
and its failure to guarantee effective measures to combat gender violence.
It also appealed to the media to reshape the public discourse of victims’
culpability, inequality, and domination.
New Media, Mass Images, and the Role of Celebrities

The interviewees present Twitter not just as a means of civil mobilization – “There
I wrote that tweet and quickly an exchange began,” says journalist Marcela
Ojeda – but as an expression of plural, open, and trustful communication.
Ojeda describes how “it was transparent and spontaneous. It is all written and
clear for all to see on Twitter.” As journalist Mercedes Funes states,
Ten of us have in common that we use Twitter quite a lot and know how to interact on it.
We hadn’t ever seen each other, except two or three who worked together. I did not
58 María Luengo
personally know any of them. They were Twitter friendships that quickly became some-
thing else. Those of us who reacted to Marcela’s tweet were a very heterogeneous group
in some respects and very similar in others, and we started to work on this almost en
masse. We were able to reach an agreement, and once we had divided up the tasks, we
were able to have confidence in what the others were doing.
Through Twitter and Facebook, journalists caused the feminist activists’
message to go viral and spread the #NotOneLess campaign to newspapers,
TV and radio channels, blogs, news sites, and so forth. A sensationalized story-
type of gender violence that had been exploited by mass media on many
occasions – namely the case of 14-year-old Chiara Paez, who was found
buried in the garden of her 16-year-old boyfriend’s house and who was a few
weeks pregnant at the time of her death – became via new media the campaign
slogan for mobilization against a machismo culture. Writer Florencia Minici
(interview 8) observes that “in this area, the work that my colleagues have been
doing on Twitter is great, because they are always showing how to
communicate effectively. There are some very interesting gaps to be bridged in
terms of how to communicate.” A new media form, Twitter, therefore emerged
as an effective alternative to traditional mass media and the form in which the
latter usually covers gender violence resulting from similar “macho” cultural
patterns.
Nevertheless, at some point during the campaign, the mass media were also
courted and enlisted as allies by activists and journalists. The following
quotations show the internal debate among the organizers of the protest in
Buenos Aires about whether or not to engage with TV host Marcelo Tinelli,
who has been criticized for commodifying the female body, and other
celebrities:
At one meeting, someone said: “Let’s not retweet Tinelli.” Why not? He’s the most
successful person in the TV industry. Loads of people heard the word femicide for the
first time because Tinelli mentioned it. (Marcela Ojeda, journalist)
When some celebrities started coming out, like Tinelli did with the [#NiUnaMenos] sign,
some people felt stung. It seemed to me that the fact that people who have a part in
popular culture were involved in the call was useful. That these people felt compelled to
be involved seemed to be a signal of how massive the subject was becoming . . . And the
appearance of some famous and popular figures allowed people to question their
practices. Social networking is like that. It isn’t the case that because Tinelli holds up
a sign everyone is going to think that he is contributing to the fight. It seems to me that
nothing is so clear cut and that people have the ability to discern and to question what
they see. (Florencia Abate, writer and researcher at CONICET)
In their interviews, the organizers interpret the presence of celebrities in
terms of wider civil engagement and plurality. #NotOneLess member Ximena
Espeche explains that the presence of Tinelli “caused a stir” because the way in
which he has acted on television was not consistent with the message of
#NotOneLess. However, as Espeche argues,
Out in the public square, you are disputing the public voice. Tinelli has a lot of power
within that public voice, so whatever he does will have an influence in one sense. If you
are going to dispute that sense, you may win or lose. In this case, I think that it went well
for us. It went well because there was lots of content and there were many grassroots
people saying things about it that no one had a monopoly over. For me, that was what
was interesting. But for many analysts, it is very difficult to understand the noises that the
crowd is making.
Mise-en-Scène: The Plaza

Only three weeks after the news of Chiara Paez’s murder and the tweet sent out
by Marcela Ojeda in response to it, the physical scenario for #NiUnaMenos was
set for June 3 at Congress Square, the location of Argentina’s National Congress.
Interviewees link this scenario to the power of “a common action” that managed
to integrate “the most heterogeneous elements of Argentine political life”
(interview with María Pía López). María Pía López links the public arena for
debate to the cohesion and unity of “the plaza” and distinguishes it from other
historical physical spaces that would not allow such an alignment of viewpoints:
“In my view, if we had just been people who are closer to Kirchnerism, everything
would have just happened in the Plaza de Tribunales.”
The organizers link this symbolic center to other plazas around Argentina.
Congress Square represents the center at which the public outcry emanating
from plazas in different cities and villages, and particularly those located in the
interior of the country, converged. In her interview, radio journalist Marcela
Ojeda asks, “When did I start to attach a bit more importance to what was
happening? When we started to see what was happening inside the country. For
me, #NiUnaMenos was an implosion. It came from inside.”
At Congress Square, the text was read by celebrities rather than by feminist
activists. Gente magazine journalist Mercedes Funes points out that “we talked
a lot about who were going to be the spokespeople . . . What needed to be
accomplished was to transcend [feminism] and to connect with people’s
discourse. There’s a much more subtle power in that.” Before the event
started, TV Todo Noticias journalist Florencia Etcheves explains, the
organizers had to clear the main stage of political slogans mixed with
#NotOneLess signs: “The stage was for the five points, the information on the
144 phone line, and #NiUnaMenos. Beyond the stage, there was the whole
square for whatever you like. No one can say that we had let people put up the
flags of this or that party.” Near the stage was an area where families of victims
of gender violence stood during the performance.
conclusion: the civil repair of invisible “macho” violence

The #NotOneLess movement succeeded in bringing about a process that
Alexander (2006a:231) has described as translating “a problem in a particular
60 María Luengo
sphere [the domestic, intimate sphere in this case]” into “a problem in society as
such.” Journalists, activists, and other organizers of the June 3 march were able
to trigger a reaction from an audience – which comprised officials, political
parties, legal representatives, civil actors, citizens, and so forth – by reframing
femicide and perpetrators in a newer and broader sense of human rights. From
a broader discourse of solidarity, pluralism, and inclusion, violent acts against
women were assessed not just as isolated women’s rights violations but as
uncivil forces against Argentina’s civil society at large. These violent acts
amount to threats to the democratic values of equality, openness, and
independence. Their perpetrators embody counterdemocratic codes that stand
in opposition to these values. Their brutal actions were decoded as being the last
link in a chain of an oppressive, authoritarian, and hidden “macho” culture.
Armed with these civil ideals, #NotOneLess campaigners quickly and widely
spread their discourse through the media, forestalling coexisting opposing
narratives on human rights in a virulent atmosphere of political confrontation
between pro- and anti-Kirchnerist currents that was created by the electoral
campaigning and between prolife and prochoice currents. Most of the
#NotOneLess supporters interviewed describe how widespread protest came
about through a framing of their fight against femicide in terms of a common
defense of human rights, of a unanimous common agreement within society as
a whole that cut across different political ideologies, and of a demand for
women’s rights without exclusions. This cultural grid was used as one of the
main scripts for the campaign and the actual performance in the symbolic center
of Congress Square, where demonstrations against femicide and in civil defense
of human rights were protected from manipulation for partisan ends.
Shortly after the unprecedented and massive participation in the march, the
National Council of Women reported that the national phone line for reporting
cases of gender violence had experienced a ninefold increase in the average daily
volume of calls that it received. A process of collective trauma and civil repair
was set in motion. Argentina’s Supreme Court announced the creation of
a national registry of femicides – no official statistics of such crimes had
existed up until that point – and the local legislature of the city of Buenos
Aires unanimously passed a law against gender violence. As mentioned in the
introductory section, the mass protest in Argentina was replicated one year
after, on June 3, 2016, in Brazil, and then again two months later, on August 13,
2016, in Peru. Further research on the connections between the three cases, as
well as on public outrages in other Latin American countries, will allow
a consideration of the extent to which the success of the movement against
gender violence has helped to initiate social change based on a shift in the core
civil and anticivil codes of male-female relations that are deeply established in
Latin American culture.
Media articles and interviewees’ responses related to the #NiUnaMenos
movement reflect a resignification of “machismo” in Argentina. A hermeneutic
reconstruction of the new signifieds reveals that what might first have been
considered socially accepted was widely presented as an antidemocratic threat to

Argentina’s collective life. A “macho” culture confined to male-female relations
that was even seen as a matter for comedy and joking became an expression of
authoritarian, hierarchical, oppressive, anticivil social relations. Macho
perpetrators became “selfish” individuals who attempted to control women’s
autonomy through their use physical strength, and their female victims became
bravely independent and free women rather than women who were weak and
dependent.
This change of meaning was connected to an overarching human rights
discourse. The interviewees directly emphasize the importance of linking their
claims to the defense of women’s rights. In their discussion of and varying
perspectives on the feminist claims contained within the #NiUnaMenos
movement’s demands, the organizers of the movement show how, to some
degree, women made the transition from “women” to “human” over the
course of the summer of 2015 in Argentina. According to the feminist
activists interviewed, this civil reconstruction of gender and the rise of
feminism began decades earlier as a critical element of the postdictatorship
context. It was a women’s movement – The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo – that
championed the cause of human rights within a democratic state.
The interviewees also clearly asserted that #NiUnaMenos’s identifying traits
of feminism and a critique of machismo were to be liberated from the political
ties of Kirchnerism and left-wing ideologies.
In November 2015, Argentina’s government shifted toward the center-right
after twelve years of Kirchnerism. The change would have been unthinkable
a few months earlier at the time when the #NotOneLess march took place and
polls predicted victory for the Left’s candidate. On November 25, the Day for
the Elimination of Violence against Women was marked through new
#NotOneLess rallies, and the Ministry of Social Development of the city of
Buenos Aires published statistics on psychological, physical, and sexual
violence in the capital for the first time. The immutability of the #NotOneLess
movement during a period of political change might emphasize that it was
a manifestation of solidarity and civil demands for women’s rights led by
Argentina’s civil society.
Nevertheless, the present ideological struggle for human rights continues.
In March, the Kirchnerist newspaper Página/12 reported on the criticism from
human rights organizations that was sparked by the presence of Barack Obama
in Argentina on March 24, 2016, forty years after the 1976 coup. The report
echoed criticism levelled by Estela de Carlotto, president of Grandmothers of
Plaza de Mayo, and Nora Cortiñas, representative of Mothers of the Plaza
de Mayo. “It [the Obama visit] is a mistake that is also offensive,” Cortiñas
commented in an article on February 20. The anti-Kirchnerist media outlets
celebrated Obama’s presence as a historical “180-degree turn” on the human
rights policies of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner (Clarín, March 23, 2016). Clarín
applauded Obama’s tentative visit to Esma in its opinion pieces and
62 María Luengo
disapproved of the negative reactions of human rights representatives, which, it

suggested, were the product of “numb stories that draw from a fictional past”
(Clarín, March 10, 2016).
In a Clarín opinion article (March 26, 2016), the journalist Alfredo Leuco
stated that there is an urgent need for “honored,” “prestigious” leaders and
benchmarks in “shaping new human rights bodies for new times in Argentina.”
His comments on the fortieth anniversary of the 1976 coup and on Obama’s
visit to Cuba and Argentina can be seen as reflecting the displacement of human
rights organizations to the side of antidemocratic codes from the perspective of
anti-Kirchnerist and anti-Left parties and ideologies. The article referred to the
“extraordinary and courageous” role played by the Mothers and
Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo for speaking out in favor of “freedom in the
broadest sense of the word” and against “authoritarianism.” Furthermore, it
emphasized the ideological plurality of associations such as the Center for Legal
and Social Studies (known as CELS in Spanish). However, Leuco also argued
that “time went by and twelve years of the Kirchnerist state’s bullying gave them
a partisan dimension, emptying them of plural and ecumenical content and, in
some cases, sinking them into the foul swamp of corruption.” Through making
serious accusations of partisanship, membership in a privileged minority, and
corruption, Leuco attached a complete different meaning to the traditional
symbols and emblematic leaders of human rights organizations:
The most pathetic and painful case is that of Hebe de Bonafini. Having been a universal
symbol of the peaceful fight to bring back the disappeared alive and to punish the guilty
parties, she was debased by Néstor and Cristina’s money, and sadly in the end her white
handkerchief was stained by Sergio Schoklender’s scams and the embezzlement that all
of us at the Universidad de las Madres [an educational institution established by Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo] have had to pay for . . . Hebe placed herself under Cristina’s
hierarchy.
The reaction to Obama’s visit less than a year after the march against sexual
violence thus shows that the pro-Kirchner/Macri axis of polarization over
human rights still continues. For the case of Brazil’s civil sphere, Baiocchi
(2006) has studied the coexistence of two “opposing” codes, one “corporate”
and one “liberal,” that are locked in a continuous struggle to symbolically exert
their dominance in a society in which democracy is less strongly established.
Similarly, Tognato (2011) has explored competition among opposing political
discourses in Colombia’s public sphere. The political culture of confrontation in
Argentina has been widely documented, particularly with regard to the
intensifying ideological opposition to the Kirchners’ “authoritarian”
legitimizing discourse, in which opposition parties and other social opponents
were stigmatized as “they,” “individualistic,” “ruling class,” “business-driven
interests,” “sections,” and “enemies of the people” (Romero 2013; Elizalde,
Fernádez, and Riorda 2011; Fernández 2011). I have drawn on these
confronting views within Argentina’s public sphere in order to bring to the
forefront a broader, common narrative of struggle for civil solidarity and justice
wherein antagonist, democratic, and counterdemocratic codes, relations, and
institutions are embedded and achieve their full meaning within the civil sphere
(Alexander 2006a). The recent movement against femicide might be viewed as
an exception within the general context of the ongoing controversy about
human rights in Argentina. However, it also offers important insights into the
power of civil discourse and the way in which it manages to gain ground against
established competing political forces. The #NiUnaMenos movement
demonstrates that, by framing individual gender cases as “femicide” and
appealing to an idealization of the human rights of the Argentine community
as a whole, the civil discourse and public outcry against gender violence
overcame the polarized and antagonistic discourses on human rights that
characterize contemporary public life in Argentina. The femicide outrage itself
was the necessary key in producing an underlying consensus. The case examined
here suggests that left-right polarization can be challenged or at least bracketed
by explosions in the civil sphere that highlight what people on both sides of the
divide agree to be anticivil crimes.
notes
1. At this point, it might be pertinent to ask who the conservative actors are in the
current political scenario in Argentina. Conservative voices are confined to: Peronist
unionists, who were (and still are) a minority within Peronism in 2015 when the
march took place; the Catholic right (certain bishops and faith groups), who are also
a minority lacking in social legitimacy; and other small right-wing elite groups.
In conclusion, one can say that “conservatives,” in the moral sense of the term, are
not representative in the Argentine public arena. Politicians who might appear to be
on the right from a foreign perspective are actually liberal when it comes to moral
issues. Thus, for example, the center-right President Mauricio Macri was the first
politician to support gay marriage. The political and media class does not feature
a US-type right. Such a political culture is not on the discussion agenda in Argentina:
one of the effects of the dictatorship was that such a connection might remain in
particular sectors but lack political representation.
2. Barcelona magazine editor Ingrid Beck, one of the #NiUnaMenos advocates, whose
interview will be used later for empirical examination, agreed to publish a satirical
picture of Jorge Bergolio when he was elected pope, which was considered mockery
by the global Catholic media.
3. A single key word search for articles containing all of the terms Ni Una Menos,
gender violence, and femicide within the Factiva database returned 281 documents in
the last year (from May 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016). The majority of the texts (147)
were published in June 2015, the month in which the march took place.
4. Although Buenos Aires’s newspapers cover a broad political and ideological
spectrum, they hold two main stances on Kirchnerism, the governments of which
existed in a state of public conflict with the largest private media groups but at the
same time were closely aligned with smaller media organizations. On one side of this
divide there is a group of pro-Kirchnerist papers that includes the titles of the Spolski
64 María Luengo
group (El Argentino, Tiempo Argentino, and Miradas al Sur) and Crónica and
Página/12, while on the other side a set of titles that includes Clarín, La Razón,
Perfil, and La Nación strongly attacked the policies of the Kirchner governments
(Becerra, Marino, and Mastrini 2012).
references
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Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2006b. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual
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que saltó de Argentina al resto de América Latina.” June 3. Retrieved December 15,
2017 (www.bbc.com/mundo/video_fotos/2015/06/150602_niunamenos_protesta_ar
gentina_gtg).
Cannata, Juan Pablo. 2016. “Escándalos, discurso público y agendas sensibles
emergentes,” Presented at the ALICE 5th Conference, July 28–30, Buenos Aires,
Argentina.
El Cronista. 2015. “#NiUnaMenos, el grito unánime de miles de argentinos en todo el
país.” June 4. Retrieved December 15, 2017 (www.cronista.com/economiapolitica/
NiUnaMenos-el-grito-unanime-de-miles-de-argentinos-en-todo-el-pais-20150604-
0060.html).
Elizalde, Luciano, Damián Fernández Pedemonte, and Mario Riorda. 2011. La gestión
del disenso: La comunicación gubernamental en problemas. Buenos Aires: La Crujía
Ediciones.
El País. 2015. “Argentina se moviliza contra los asesinatos machistas.” June 4.
Retrieved December 15, 2017 (elpais.com/internacional/2016/10/19/argentina/
1476905030_430567.html).
Feijóo, María del Carmen. 2001. Nuevo país, nueva pobreza, Buenos Aires: Fondo de
Cultura Económica.
Gillespie, Richard. 1982. Soldiers of Perón – Argentina’s Montoneros. Oxford, UK:
Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press.
Gordillo, Mónica. 2010. Piquetes y cacerolas: El “argentinazo” de 2001. Buenos Aires:
Sudamericana.
Hodges, Donald C. 1991. Argentina’s “Dirty War”: An Intellectual Biography. Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press.
La Nación. 2015. “No más venganza.” November 23. Retrieved December 15, 2017
(www.lanacion.com.ar/1847930-no-mas-venganza).
Massa, Fernando. 2015. “En defensa de la mujer, un clamor recorrió el país:
#NiUnaMenos.” La Nación, June 4. Retrieved December 15, 2017 (www.lanacion
.com.ar/1798662-en-defensa-de-la-mujer-un-clamor-recorrio-el-pais-niunamenos).
Moyano, Maria Jose. 1995. Argentina’s Lost Patrol: Armed Struggle, 1969–1979. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Pomeraniec, Hinde. 2015. “How Argentina rose up against the murder of women.”
The Guardian, June 8. Retrieved December 15, 2017 (www.theguardian.com
/lifeandstyle/2015/jun/08/argentina-murder-women-gender-violence-protest).
Rodríguez, Paula. 2015. Ni Una Menos. Buenos Aires: Planeta.
Romero, Luis Alberto. 2012. Breve historia contemporánea de la Argentina. Buenos
Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
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Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores.
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Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. London: SAGE.
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Collective Suffering, edited by Ron Eyerman, Jeffrey C. Alexander, and Elizabeth
Butler Breese. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, pp.191–212.
3
Civil Indignation in Chile

Recent Collusion Scandals in the Retail Industry
María Angélica Thumala Olave
introduction
The contradictions inherent in the relationship between democracy and
capitalism have marked Chile’s recent history. Waves of indignation over
corruption and inequality have swept across the country’s civil sphere, most
markedly since the early 2000s. The discontent cuts across social and political
divisions and is stimulated by the belief that the economic and political realms,
incarnated through each realm’s elites, feed each other in a vicious,
exclusionary, circle. In the midst of the scandals involving economic behavior
discussed in this chapter, Chileans have angrily spoken of “the business-state
mafia.” They have used the term to refer to the perceived relationships of
cooperation and mutual protection between politicians and businesspeople.
Collusion among economic actors, while taking place within the
circumscribed field of the market, is seen as a sign of the incompetence,
acquiescence, or direct collaboration of politicians and the state. From this
perspective, the mutual support between corrupt members of the economic
and political elites leaves little room for the mediation of the civil sphere and
scant possibilities for democratic justice.
Jeffrey Alexander’s The Civil Sphere (2006) (TCS) challenges the notion that
democracy and capitalism are perfectly complementary. According to Civil
Sphere Theory (CST), democracy and capitalism may, in fact, be necessary for
each other and constitute mutually “facilitating inputs” (Alexander 2006:206).
For example, consumption and production in industrial societies have given
large numbers of people the chance to express their individuality and autonomy
and to develop forms of solidarity and trust that facilitate their participation in
the civil sphere. At the same time, these economies generate serious obstacles for
the project of the civil sphere by creating deep and persistent social and
economic inequalities, poverty, and unemployment (Alexander 2006:206).
The relationship between democracy and capitalism is one of inherent tension
66
Civil Indignation in Chile 67
rather than full complementarity. Because of this tension and appealing to the
discourse of the civil sphere, those affected by the kinds of economic
misbehavior discussed here can seek and obtain changes and reparation. They
can puncture, if not destroy, the exclusionary circle formed by anticivil actors in
the market and the state.
This chapter applies CST to the empirical examination of two scandals in the
retail industry in Chile and the civil reactions to them. The scandals involve the
collusion among pharmacy chains and among tissue paper manufacturers to
increase the retail prices of medications and tissue paper products. The analysis
demonstrates how these scandals bring to light the structural tensions between
democracy and capitalism and what civil actors and institutions can do about
the injustices that become most apparent in such moments. In the language of
CST, the analysis explores what opportunities present themselves for “civil
repair,” the capacity of oppressed groups “to advance claims to power and
respect justified by their membership—no matter how partially realized—in the
civil sphere” (Kivisto and Sciortino 2015:9; Alexander 2006:208).
The approach adopted is sympathetic to Alexander’s emphasis on culture
vis-à-vis power and self-interest for the study of sociocultural change (e.g.
Thumala 2013, 2012, 2010; Thumala et al. 2011). The analysis makes three
main contributions. Firstly, it advances CST by exploring the boundary
relationship between market society and the civil sphere, a relationship that is
conceptualized but not empirically studied in TCS. The concept of “interstitial
institution” is offered to further understand this relationship and constitutes
a development of CST. The second contribution concerns the applicability of
CST beyond the United States. One of the starting points of this study is the
acknowledgment that the binaries in CST constitute a “historically contingent
final vocabulary” (Rorty in Alexander 2006:56), informed by the liberal ethos
and specific history of the American civil sphere. The chapter shows that CST’s
binary codes for relationships, motives, and institutions do apply in Chile.
At the same time, Chile’s civil sphere displays features that are specific to the
country. It exhibits universalistic features while mobilizing historically specific,
sociocultural content. Thirdly, the chapter offers a theoretical challenge to one
influential conception of culture in Chile and Latin America. In their critique of
“Northern” social science’s limitations for understanding contemporary Latin
America, Cousiño and Valenzuela (1994) have argued for the inclusion of
sociability and culture as a third integration mechanism when studying
complex, differentiated societies. To the two predominant models
(institutional integration of the rational and reflexive kind, and systemic
integration) should be added a third, the experiential dimension of persons
involved in interactions of the type typical of the family, love, commensality,
and religion, which are prereflexive and based on copresence and reciprocity
(Cousiño and Valenzuela 1994:178). The three models of social integration that
they identify – presence (culture), conscience (institutions), and communications
(system) – are seen as having their own logic but operating simultaneously in
68 María Angélica Thumala Olave
complex societies. Based on this framework, they understand phenomena such as

Latin American populism as the transfer of the model of personal relations of
a signorial/patrimonial kind, typical of the hacienda, to the public sphere in
urbanized, large-scale societies in the figure of the paternalist and charismatic
politician.
Unlike the approaches that Cousiño and Valenzuela critique as one-
dimensional and reductionist, CST seeks to move beyond classic
Enlightenment and functional/structural understandings of civil life and pays
special attention to shared moral ties and cultural codes (Alexander 2006:
45–47). In this sense, CST is apt for the study of democratic life in a society
where institutional and systemic integration coexist with cultural integration.
Insofar as cultural communication operates through binary codes, CST is an
appropriate framework for the study of Chile’s civil sphere when the latter is
understood from a cultural perspective and studied through the observation of
norms, codes, and narrative structures. This could be seen as a methodological
match.
Substantively, there is also an important degree of overlap between CST’s
and Chile’s historically developed codes; after all, Chile’s republican tradition
shares many features with the French tradition. At the same time, Chile’s civil
sphere and its citizens’ commitments and “habits of the heart,” the content of
the cultural structure, displays some specific codes and motives peculiar to Chile
and to Latin America. Among these are the cultural predispositions informed by
Catholic Caritas and personalism, the latter especially identified by Cousiño
and Valenzuela as a key feature of the local culture. But this is where the analysis
offered here departs from theirs. Challenging their more narrow definition of
culture, generally, and of Chile’s culture in particular, the argument offered is
that the specific elements of this culture are not only characteristic of face-to-
face interaction in the realms of family and religion. Instead, these features
circulate across all institutions and systems and inform a solidaristic, shared
sense of civil behavior that, in turn, triggers the scandals discussed and leads to
civil repair. Indeed, against Cousiño and Valenzuela’s conceptualization of
culture as primordially particularistic, the analysis shows that Chilean culture
has universalizing and critical elements. This is not to deny the importance of
personalism or the codes specific to Chile but rather to highlight their
generalized operation across the three social integration mechanisms.
Rather than abstract, CST’s universalism is “anchored” in people’s
“everyday life worlds” (Alexander 2006:49). The cases discussed embody
clashes between the justifications of Chilean capitalism by reference to
competition, economic growth, equality of opportunities, and individual well-
being (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) on one hand, and citizens’ everyday
experiences of inequality and injustice, on the other. Several aspects testify to
the discontent generated by these clashes. Protests in Chile have increased since
2000 – both in number of participants and events – normally without links to
political parties or other formal organizations, mostly displaying particular
interest agendas (Somma 2015; PNUD 2015) and relying heavily on digital and
social media (Valenzuela et al. 2012; Somma and Bargsted 2015).1 The nature
of these mobilizations and the growth of the not-for profit sector (Irarrá zaval et.
al. 2006) are significant in the context of an elitist and technocratic model of
democracy (Delamaza et al. 2012; Escobar 2010; Silva 2006; Subirats 2005), an
“authoritarian political culture” (e.g. Bengoa 1996; Gongora 2003; Salazar
2006); and the absence of a “reading culture” (Griswold 2005) and of
a plural and sufficiently autonomous media system.2 The growth in levels of
education and income over the last decades as well as the consolidation of the
democratic regime have increased citizens’ expectations, sense of entitlement,
and dissatisfaction. The “master frame” (Snow et al. 1986) in which protests are
taking place include problems such as economic inequality, the negative impact
of markets on the environment and society, and the abuse of the population by
the powerful (Somma y Medel 2015).
The discussion is based on the analysis of a sample of press articles, opinion
pieces and comments by the public (in the press and other open-access digital
platforms), as well as opinion polls. For the pharmacy chain scandal, the period
covered includes March through December 2009. A search of the national press
was conducted using the database “Access Latin America,” available through
the University of Edinburgh library. For Chile, the database covers all published
material in two sources, the right-wing newspaper El Mercurio and the UPI
Chilean Spanish News Service. Searches for the terms “colusión farmacias” and
“protestas farmacias” yielded 340 articles. A sample of fifty articles was chosen
that contained descriptions of the legal process, comments by key actors, and
reactions by the general public with explicit references to discussions of value
(e.g. judgements about ideals and goods exercised, threatened, or damaged).
To this sample were added the results of Google searches using the same terms
to cover other online sources not included in the “Access Latin America”
database: for example, El Mostrador (a left of center online newspaper), La
Tercera, La Nacion, The Clinic (a satirical left of center political publication),
YouTube, national radio, and regional newspapers. An additional thirty articles
were sampled from these sources using the same criteria. The period covered for
case of the tissue paper scandal includes October 2015 through May 2016.
Searches in the “Access Latin America” database for terms “colusión confort,”3
“cartel confort,” and “CMPC” (one of the companies involved in the collusion
scandal) yielded 267 articles, out of which 40 were selected following the same
criteria mentioned above. A further twenty articles from online sources not
covered by the database were added. Comments in social media are included
when processed or covered by the press, except for YouTube. The data analysis
proceeded in two stages. The general CST categories of regulative and
communicative institutions and civic action and discourse were used first to
classify the articles/pieces. In a second stage, codes for motives, relationships,
and institutions were identified, including those that match the ones proposed in
CST and those specific to Chile’s civil sphere.
working concepts: a brief (and selective) introduction

to civil sphere theory
The civil sphere is an autonomous, differentiated, social sphere of solidarity
sustained by the belief in the existence and significance of a common
membership (Alexander 2006:4). “Although always experienced in specific,
situational, institutional practices and social performances, it is nevertheless
rooted in deep, and often unacknowledged, cultural structures” (Kivisto and
Sciortino 2015:16). The cultural structure of the civil sphere is semiotic and is
organized around the distinction pure/polluted, which is used by actors to
describe those they deem worthy of membership in a political community and
those who they deem unworthy. The binary discourse occurs at three levels:
motives, relationships, and institutions. The codes for civil and anticivil
motives include active/passive, autonomous/dependent, rational/irrational.
The codes for relationships include open/secretive, trusting/suspicious, and
altruistic/greedy. Finally, the codes for institutions include rule regulated/
arbitrary, inclusive/exclusive, and equality/hierarchy (Alexander 2006:
56–59). The language of pollution and purity and the codes listed above are
mobilized in civil society to justify the inclusion and exclusion of self and
others in the political community. In addition to a cultural structure, the civil
sphere is also made up of communicative and regulative institutions that
mediate between the discourse of the civil sphere and the pragmatic
considerations of daily life. The mass media, polling agencies, and voluntary
associations are communicative institutions. Elective offices and the courts are
regulative institutions (Kivisto and Sciortino 2015).
The civil sphere is distinct from the economy, the polity, religion, and the
family but the concerns and interests of each of these noncivil spheres can be
translated into civil discourse by reference to the significance of the issue to
common membership. Successful social movements have carried out this
translation with the aim of civil repair. There are three ideal-typical ways in
which the boundaries between the civil and uncivil spheres are conceptualized
and conceived historically: “in terms of facilitating input, destructive intrusion,
and civil repair” (Alexander 2006:205). As mentioned earlier, the relationship
between markets and civil society can involve all three. This chapter
demonstrates that the boundary relationship between the market and civil
society in Chile has been characterized by destructive intrusion as well as by
civil repair.
the background: a wave of indignation that illuminates

the civil sphere
The two cases discussed below are part of a long series of scandals that have
stirred public discussion and civic mobilization over the past years. These have
involved price-fixing and other illegal practices in the industries of essential
commodities and services, such as department store credit cards, bus tickets, and
the chicken meat sold by large supermarket chains. In addition to these cases,
there have been other serious breaches in the financial and political sectors, some
of them involving use of insider information and illegal financing of political
campaigns across political parties.4 In the religious sphere, clerical abuse scandals
have severely impacted upon the reputation and credibility of a Catholic Church
that was widely respected for its defense of human rights during the military
dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–89). The staunch defense and financial
backing of the abusers by business and political figures has muddied the waters
even further. Chile represents itself and is recognized as having comparatively low
levels of corruption (Transparency International 2014). Furthermore, the
narrative that the marriage between democracy and a market economy leads to
the good life has been successful overall. In this context, the breaking of the
cultural codes of free competition and of the moral use of religious and political
power produces indignation. The scandals in the retail and financial industry, in
particular, fuel a growing malaise about the market economy, the so-called
“model” and the social inequality it has bred, and contribute to already low
levels of trust in all institutions (Segovia 2015; Segovia and Gamboa 2012) and
private businesses in particular (Cadem/Horizontal/UAI 2015; Flores
y Rodríguez 2013; Ossandon and Tironi 2013; SOFOFA/Cadem 2016).
In addition to questions about the strength of Chile’s democratic institutions,
the moral character of politicians and business leaders appears seriously polluted.
A review of reactions by the public as presented by the media over the years
include references to “shamelessness,” “theft,” “monopolies,” and “mafias” that
operate “against the people”; a sticky web of “abuse” that cannot be easily
dismantled in the face of conspiratorial power. The discourses that codify the
events produced in the context of these structures of feeling are, therefore,
especially suited for an examination of the various civic ideals Chileans adhere to.
The collusion scandals analyzed here broke as a result of a regulative action
by Chile’s competitive practices regulator, which was then communicated by
the press and that, in turn, lead to citizens’ commentary and actions, including
calls for consumer boycotts, street protests, and damage to stores, as well as
a dip in public trust in institutions. The following sections elaborate the key
events for each scandal in chronological order and as they developed at each of
three levels – regulatory, communicative, and civic. The question of how the
coding of events and the reactions to them have led to civil repair is addressed in
the conclusion.
case 1: collusion among pharmacy chains

In April 2009, it was revealed that Chile’s competitive practices regulator
(Fiscalía Nacional Económica, FNE) had filed against three of the country’s
largest pharmacy chains Farmacias Ahumada (FASA), Cruz Verde, and
Salcobrand (which between them controlled 90 percent of the market) for
colluding to fix the prices of 222 medicines. The collusion resulted in price

increases of up to 300 percent for medications, including those for serious
chronic conditions such as epilepsy and diabetes. The collusion took place in
the midst of an artificial “price war” between the chains. In addition to the
fixing of prices, the exploitative working conditions of pharmacy employees
became salient. Given their low wages and the fact that their final salaries
depend on each individual’s sales, salespersons were incentivized to lead
customers to purchase the most expensive version of drugs by offering them
first or lying about available stock.
Legal Actions: Citizens’ Demands and the Role of the FNE

The two main sets of legal actions put forward in response to the scandal have
been taken by public prosecutors and the government’s consumer protection
agency. At first sight, this would confirm the idea that Chile’s civil sphere is
weak and its citizens passive and reliant on the state. However, although they
have not always been the main drivers, it is crucial that citizen and consumer
organizations have joined in the suits and been instrumental in communicating
about the scandals and calling for civic actions, such as boycotts and street
protests. In other words, some civil associations have been active rather than
passive. But perhaps more importantly, from the point of view of CST, the fact
that legal actions have preceded media reporting and civil actions can be seen as
reflecting the relative weakness of Chile’s communicative institutions (the press
and civil associations) rather than the weakness of the civil sphere as a whole,
which also contains regulative institutions, such as the FNE. Of course, the
existence of legal responses in themselves do not point to the existence of a civil
discourse. Corporatist/patrimonial/hacienda type of legal/political systems
based on noncivil legitimation logics also have their own legal regulations.
The argument of this chapter is that, unlike what has been observed for the
cases of Brazil (Baiocchi 2006) or Colombia (Tognato 2011), these scandals and
their various responses emerge clearly within Chile’s civil sphere and its
discursive structures. The discourse that sustains the regulatory actions and
their social and political legitimacy fits squarely within the country’s liberal and
republican traditions.
A brief examination of the role of the media is required before considering
the regulatory responses to the scandals. The media face limitations when it
comes to the investigation of economic misconduct. Although several other
scandals, notably political ones, have been broken by the press and television
following independent investigations based on public data transparency laws
and open sources, the research into often complex economic malpractice is too
costly for the media to undertake.5 The costs include not only those directly
incurred in the monitoring of the behavior of pricing structures, for example,
but also from the potential loss of advertising revenue from affected
companies.6 A further limitation to proactive reporting of economic
misconduct is posed by the legal restrictions on access to information in ongoing

cases. Having said that, some television programs had been reporting on various
consumer issues on the basis of the information provided by the national
consumer protection agency, Servicio Nacional del Consumidor (SERNAC),
since the mid-2000s so that when these particular scandals broke, there had
already been some public discussion of the treatment of consumers by
companies (E. Rozas; P. Desormeaux; C. Villavicencio 2016, personal
communications, 2016).
One key regulatory institution whose work the media have supported is
SERNAC. The mission of SERNAC is to educate the public about their
consumer rights and to mediate in conflicts between consumers and providers.
SERNAC has been a major source of information for the reporting of consumer
issues during the 2000s and continues to be. However, the more powerful FNE
has gained increasing visibility in light of the collusion cases.
The mission of the FNE as a “specialized public body” is “to defend and
advocate for competition,” “acting on behalf of public interest, safeguarding
consumer welfare by preventing agents with significant market power, either
individually or jointly, from limiting economic freedom” (fne.gob.cl). The FNE
is a regulatory institution of the civil sphere, even if it is located inside the state.
It is an “interstitial institution”; a border-crossing, regulatory institution
located in three spheres: the state, the market, and the civil sphere (see also
Tognato in this volume).
The FNE as an interstitial institution is a state agency aiming to regulate
markets following the civil objective of “taming” Chilean capitalism for the
benefit of the whole of society. The FNE’s mandate and actions have been
legitimized by and helped to strengthen Chile’s civil sphere by initiating the
repair of the damages caused by the collusion cases.
Soon after the FNE filed their suit against the pharmacies with the Free
Competition Court (Tribunal de la Libre Competencia, TLC) in April 2009,
the TLC reached an extrajudicial agreement with one of the chains, FASA.
FASA had admitted in March to the collusion and agreed to compensate
customers in exchange for an end to prosecution. On March 30, in response
to the admission by FASA, a group of consumers, social organizations, and
members of parliament brought a lawsuit for collusion against the three
pharmacy chains (La Nacion 2009a). FASA failed to compensate customers
and Santiago’s Appeal Court fined them for close to US$1 million. The other
chains, Salcobrand and Cruz Verde, were fined for collusion in 2012 for the
maximum amount allowed by law, US$19 million. The chains appealed to the
Supreme Court but their appeal was rejected unanimously.
In a language that would become central to the debate among business
people, politicians, and citizens sympathetic towards the market economy, the
decision by the Supreme Court judges described collusion as “one of the most
serious violations of free competition.” This, of course, goes against one of the
key justificatory elements of Chile’s market economy. Importantly, the judges
also argued that in this case “economic interest was placed above human
dignity, the life and health of persons” (El Mostrador 2012). This latter
violation has been highlighted by all actors. The discourse is formulated in the
language of rights and not of the personal dependency and reciprocity proper to
a corporatist universe of relationships (Baiocchi 2006; Tognato 2011).
The most adamant critics have been those opposing the consequences of
privatization, weak unions and workers’ rights, and the limited capacities of
the state to ensure compliance with labor and consumer laws. One important
issue for these critics is that the executives behind the collusion should have
faced prison sentences. For this to happen, however, the charges would have to
be formulated not only as infractions to free competition law but also as
a violation of criminal law. To address this, free competition law was
reformed. The modifications approved on August 30, 2016, increase the fines,
introduce penal sanctions, and give the FNE further powers, including that of
overseeing mergers (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional 2016).
The second main set of legal actions includes the class-action lawsuit against
the three chains brought in 2013 by SERNAC. This ongoing lawsuit, which
seeks to obtain compensation for customers affected by the purchase of a list of
206 medications, was deemed admissible by Santiago’s Appeal Court.
SERNAC sees the decision by the court as a major breakthrough as “it is the
first time in our country that a class action asking for compensation for damages
incurred by anticompetitive behavior is admitted” (SERNAC 2013). In addition
to the class action for collusion, SERNAC has been monitoring compliance with
consumer rights law. In 2016 alone, the agency had filed complaints against
thirty-nine pharmacies belonging to the chains involved in the initial scandal
and a few others for breaking consumers’ rights law, including failures to
display accurate information regarding prices or excessive charges. SERNAC
backed the modification to consumer law, recently approved by Parliament
(October 24, 2017), that gives the agency powers beyond filing complaints,
including auditing and applying sanctions. The project also includes increasing
fines. A review of the law by the Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional)
is under way and business unions have taken the opportunity to voice their
concerns that SERNAC’s new faculties threaten the separation of the powers of
the state. Many fear that the decision by the Court will include removing from
the new law SERNAC’s faculty to sanction companies, a decision that would
represent a setback in the process of empowering consumers (El Mercurio,
2017a).
What these legal actions and their discursive legitimation shows is that unlike
what has been observed in Brazil (Baiocchi 2006) there is no tension within
Chile’s civil sphere between competing corporatist and liberal codes. While at
the level of personal interactions the patrimonial, personalist culture based on
favors has not disappeared, the codes mobilized in these scandals, crucially
formulated in the language of consumer rights and citizenship, are
overwhelmingly about claims for the rule of law to be applied to every
Chilean citizen regardless of power or social position. Chileans no longer expect

the powerful to concede them privileges or entitlements, which they know are
already theirs.
Street Protests: Greed Trumps Respect for Human Life

News of the collusion led to calls for consumer boycotts in social media as well
as to street protests, and damages to stores (La Nación 2009b). At the end
of March 2009, a series of protests took place outside and sometimes inside the
pharmacies in various cities across the country. The press labeled these events as
“citizens’ protests” (protestas ciudadanas) and “citizens’ fury” (furia
ciudadana), their rationality and the need for their restriction dependent on
the level of violence incurred.
In keeping with a tradition that sees order as the supreme political value
(Stuven 1997; Pinto 2008; Araujo and Beyer 2013), commentaries focused on
the need to avoid vandalism and keep civic order (see Arteaga Botello in this
volume for a similar valuation of order in the case of Mexico). Belief in the
legitimacy of limiting protest in order to preserve the normal running of
everyday life is strong. Even when the public strongly supports the cause
behind a protest, they equally strongly oppose disruptions and violence
(Cadem 2016). Yet, government representatives were sympathetic to the
motives of the protesters in the pharmacy case. While calling for them to
avoid violence and consider the safety of the workers inside the shops, the
Interior Minister of the time, Patricio Rosende (of the left of center Partido
por la Democracia, PPD) avoided polluting these actions by reference to
irrationality or excitability. He was quoted as saying that the government
understood that people were “upset.” Rosende joined the protesters in
framing the company leaders’ motives and their relations with consumers as
anticivic. In his view, “What has happened here is not only unacceptable but
also shameful, how a group of businesspeople do not stop at anything in their
attempts to rob [esquilmar] consumers. The profit motive demonstrated by
these businesspeople is to be feared [de temer]” (Cooperativa.cl 2009).
The references to theft, however, do not belong to the bandit code in
operation in Colombia, whereby the rebellious bandit breaks away from the
natural order of the dyad patrón/peon and its dependence and reciprocity
(Tognato 2011). What is invoked here is not the disruption of a harmonious
organic social order but Chile’s civil discourse, which pollutes the breach of
trust and signals its dangers to social coexistence.
Do these sympathetic reactions by politicians, which legitimize the public’s
anger, mean that the elites have overcome long-standing fears of “the masses”
and a historical commitment to social order? This seems unlikely. What is more
likely is that the risk of severe social unrest in Chile is not deemed high enough
by those in power and that their sympathy is partly instrumental, a populist
move to ingratiate themselves with a public fed up with the barrage of scandals.
Besides, whenever the protests involved violence, the police intervened. At the
same time, a more interesting and complementary interpretation is that there is
also genuine sympathy. The scandals revolve around the generalized (albeit
varied) experience of consumption. This makes the particular demands of
those interacting in the market much easier to relate to at an experiential level
than other causes such as, for example, the plight of the indigenous peoples of
Chile, and much easier to translate into the solidaristic terms of the discourse of
the civil sphere. This idea is taken up again in the conclusions; but there is
a further, even more essentially solidaristic element that adds urgency and
legitimacy to the protesters’ anger and that helps understand the politicians’
public displays of empathy. The collusion among pharmacies threatens the
physical integrity of consumers.
The narratives deployed by participants in the protests did not concern the
threat to free competition that so worried the business community and that
populated the editorials and letters to El Mercurio, but instead revolved around
the sacredness of human life and its violation by greed. The term that
summarized the transgression and that has been a recurring trope in all
subsequent scandals in the country is simply “abuse” (of power and
privilege). In their conspiracy to fix prices for larger profits, the leaders of
these chains have shown their disregard for Chileans’ physical integrity,
especially among the poor. In Coyhaique, in the south of the country, the
voluntary association Citizens Defense (Agrupación Defensor Ciudadano de
Aysen), together with political candidates for the region, produced a written
declaration stating that they would not tolerate that companies “play with
people’s lives.” In order to end the abuse, they demanded that the prices of
medications go down and that customers be compensated in order to “repair
the damage caused” (El Divisadero 2009). In Santiago, the capital, the National
Union of Municipal Workers (Confederación Nacional de Funcionarios
Municipales de la Salud, Confusam) protested, demanding exemplary actions
against the chains and announcing that they would join the legal actions against
the companies. The union rejected the “illegal profiting at the expense of the
poorest in Chile and most importantly, the fact that they have put patients’ lives
at risk. Unable to purchase essential medication to control their diseases they
could suffer negative consequences, including death” (La Nacion 2009b).
These reactions could be seen as invoking the breach of the expectation of
protection/loyalty considered proper in the patrón/peón relationship. However,
the increase in the awareness of rights among the population and its rejection of
hierarchical forms of interaction (Araujo 2013) make this interpretation
problematic. What is being invoked here is rather the solidaristic logic of
Chile’s civil sphere. At a street protest organized by a union of health
professionals in Santiago (Federación Nacional de Trabajadores Profesionales
Universitarios de los Servicios de Salud, Fenpruss), protesters presented access
to medication as a common good by chanting “no to the chains, no to
corruption, medications are a good of the nation” (¡no a las cadenas!, ¡no a la
corrupción!, ¡el medicamento es un bien de la nación!). An egalitarian claim was

visible when those speaking at the rally demanded that the owners of the chains
“show their faces” to the citizens (“que den la cara”) instead of reaching a deal
within closed doors at the Free Competition Tribunal (TLC); they wanted them
to go to prison “as is the practice in other countries,” as well as real oversight to
ensure that they are following the law rather than just doing it “on paper”
(“fiscalización de verdad no en papel”) (Fenprusstv 2009). These demands are
based on the belief that all Chileans, regardless of their power, should receive
equal treatment before the law.
Press and Public Opinion: Evil Actions by Business

and the Government’s Failure to Protect the People
From the point of view of the civil sphere, the collusion of the pharmacy chains
represents mounting evidence of exclusion and power imbalances that the
government and the elites are not willing or not able to resolve and that the
citizens have only a limited capacity to address. As one young YouTuber
lamented on April 16, 2009, the government did nothing to investigate and
stop the collusion about which there had been accusations in the past (indeed, in
the mid-1990s, pharmacies were investigated for similar charges).
Collusion is one of the most vile and cowardly acts that can be perpetrated against the
Chilean people. It is despicable that people are accumulating wealth on the basis of the
misery of those who must spend beyond their means to buy their medication . . . [W]e
cannot allow this to continue to happen and must not forgive the pharmacies that did
this. We must stop buying from them and turn to neighborhood pharmacies . . . [W]e
must tell the government that the Chilean people will not tolerate being humiliated
anymore (Libera la vena contra las farmacias coludidas 2009).
The theme of evil conduct by the pharmacies is even more strongly expressed by
well-known journalist Tomas Mosciatti in CNN Chile in 2011. In a review of
the process two years on, he described the collusion as “a perversion that has no
name.” In his view, “This is perverse; we are talking about people’s health here.
Pensioners with low pensions, workers with low wages who were subject to this
dictatorship of the pharmacies . . . a perversion that has no name” (cesarpcman
2011).
Also important in the theme of abuse is a sense of arbitrariness and injustice
in the functioning of democratic institutions, including the judicial system.
The suspicion that the investigation of the pharmacy executives’ behavior
would go unpunished or would be punished lightly is a recurring source of
indignation. Mosciatti refers to the size of the fines facing the pharmacies as
a “deficit in the law.” The greater power of business to behave in an anticivil
manner, even if legal, emerges over and over in the comments about the fines in
the press and social media. The fines were deemed scandalously low vis-à-vis the
profits made, which were estimated at around US$67 million (Emol 2012) or
between 2.8 and 4 percent of total sales in each year the prices were fixed (FNE
2009). According to the reactions on Twitter reported by the newspaper La
Nacion, the fact that the fines are low in comparison to the “multimillion
profits” obtained by the companies adds to the fact that “the owners don’t go
to prison” and that as result colluding is “perfect business for the business-state
mafia,” because “they pay the fine, pass it on to customers and then rub their
hands in joy” (La Nacion 2012).
The indignation has resulted in a decrease in the levels of trust in business,
evident even in the recent survey commissioned by the business trade union
Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (SOFOFA). According to this study, trust in
pharmacies is among the lowest, located below casinos and just above
tobacco companies (SOFOFA/CADEM 2016).
The Not-So-Popular Farmacias Populares

The calls in social media to boycott the large pharmacy chains and buy from
local drugstores instead, such as the one cited in the previous section, were
followed by the creation of “popular pharmacies” (farmacias populares).
These, however, were not grassroots developments of the cooperative type
but conceived by a politician and backed by the government’s health
infrastructure. Daniel Jadue (of the Communist Party), the mayor of Recoleta,
a lower-income comuna (municipal administrative subunit) in the capital, set up
the first “pharmacy of the people” in 2015 as a response to the fact that “health
and medications are still a business” and to reclaim “the right to health” (Jadue
2016). The popular pharmacy provides medications at significantly lower prices
by purchasing directly from pharmaceutical companies and the government
(Molina 2015). Several other comunas followed and in May of 2016, the
Association of Popular Pharmacies (Asociación Chilena de Farmacias
Populares) was created, grouping together 80 comunas. Jadue is the
Association’s president but the opposition mayor of Puente Alto (a low-
middle income comuna), Germán Codina (of the right-wing party Renovación
Nacional), has also joined and called fellow opposition members to do the same
“for the benefit of the population in order to start building a fairer country for
all” (Emol 2016). On the other hand, an editorial in El Mercurio about the
initial claims of lower prices said that the medications may actually turn out to
be more expensive, but that mayors will not admit this during an election year.
Following its well-known editorial line, the main message of the piece is that
what is needed is more deregulation and to allow supermarkets to sell over-the-
counter medications as is common practice “in the majority of developed
countries.” It is well known, the piece concludes, that “increased competition
favors the operation of markets” and by implication favors consumers (El
Mercurio, May 3, 2016). This approach seeks to pollute the initiative as
irrational, populist, and ineffective. And in this case, critics might well be
right. However, what is important for our purposes is the fact that the appeal
of the farmacias populares is also based on their association with justice and
inclusion. Although their creation may be a cynical move, their existence stands
on a civil scaffolding. Their creation is legitimized by reference to the needs and
rights to health of all citizens. The poor’s plight in this respect is that of all
Chileans. The fact that these farmacias are not the work of civil associations but
of an elected official does not diminish the strength of the civil discourse that has
supported their creation and use. So, when free marketeers argue against them
in El Mercurio, their claims can be polluted as lacking in solidarity and civility
or as simply anticivil. Some of the readers’ online comments to the editorial
cited above and to another editorial published more recently reject the defense
of a free market for medications in terms of abuse, theft, shamelessness, and
unlimited greed (El Mercurio 2017b).
case 2: “the toilet paper cartel”

In October 2015, the FNE confirmed that two forestry companies had colluded
for more than a decade to control the prices of toilet paper and other tissue
paper products. Between the years 2000 and at least December of 2011, the
Chilean forestry company Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones,
(CMPC) and PISA, a subsidiary of Swedish-owned SCA, the largest players in
the market, coordinated to control prices. According to the FNE, this is “one of
the biggest collusion cases ever uncovered in the country” (Bíobío Chile 2015).
Together, the two companies hold about 90 percent of the tissue paper market
share (which also includes kitchen towels, facial tissues, and napkins) and their
combined annual sales amount to approximately US$400 million. Prices
increased by 34 percent (in the case of toilet paper) and 27 percent (in the case
of paper napkins) above the Consumer Price Index average of 22.4 percent
during the period under investigation (Emol 2015a). The FNE asked Chile’s
antitrust court (Tribunal de la Libre Competencia, TDLC) to fine SCA
US$15.5 million. CMPC would not be fined in exchange for having admitted
to anticompetitive conduct in March.
This particular scandal had a special impact upon the business sector because
at its center was Eliodoro Matte Larraín, former President of CMPC, whose
family controls the company. Matte is one of Chile’s wealthiest and most
influential businesspeople. The history of the Matte family and its various
branches, including the Alessandri, is connected to Chile’s history in
numerous ways, through politics, business, and education. The family’s
history illustrates the close links between political, economic, and social
power that prevailed in Chilean society particularly strongly until the 1960s
(Stabili 2003). Alongside his lineage and business success, part of Matte’s social
standing derives from the creation and financing of the prestigious think tank
Centro de Estudios Publicos CEP, a strong advocate of a free-market economy.
The revelations of anticompetitive practices in CMPC clashed loudly with his
reputation as a champion of fair competition and corporate social
responsibility. Although he has defended himself, the damage to his reputation

and that of the entire business sector is serious. In an interview with El
Mercurio, Matte apologized “not only to the business community but
especially to consumers and collaborators” (El Mercurio November 1, 2015).
However, he claimed ignorance of the scheme and said he was deeply hurt by
the deceit and betrayal of his long-term and close subordinates and
collaborators. Moreover, he set himself and his company apart by pointing
out they carried out an internal investigation, fired those responsible, and then,
self-reported the collusion to the FNE, although the FNE claims their
investigation was prior to and the trigger for the company’s inquiry.
The business trade union Sociedad de Fomento Fabril SOFOFA suspended the
company and Matte resigned from his roles as President of CEP in December of
2015 and of CMPC in March 2016.
Within the justificatory ideology of the market, for example free and fair
competition, the self-interested and rational consumer, there are many
elements that complement or coincide with civil sphere discourse. What is
significant about Matte’s situation is that the scandal did not only destroy
his civil reputation but also his economic authority. He was expected to enact
the values of freedom and independence, which are shared both by the market
economy and the civil sphere. Hence, the impact of the revelations that
implicated his company and his person was substantial. Even in a business
world that tends to be hard-nosed and pragmatic, the desecration of Matte’s
figure was truly shocking.
Legal Actions: Matte’s Civic Move and the Growing Protagonism

of the Citizens
In order to avoid further legal actions against the company and as part of
Matte’s attempt to distinguish himself and his company from the rest, CMPC
participated in a collective mediation with the government’s consumer
protection agency SERNAC and consumer associations Conadecus
(Corporación Nacional de Consumidores y Usuarios) and Odecu
(Organización de Consumidores y Usuarios de Chile). The mediation
determined the amount (US$150 million) and mechanisms for compensation
of customers (each consumer over eighteen years old would receive cash
directly). Conadecus’s lawyer, Mario Bravo, highlighted the novelty and
significance of this negotiation: “It is the first time that consumer associations
discuss compensation with a company” (El Mercurio May 31, 2016).
The agreement reached in 2017 was described as “the most important deal in
the history of free competition cases” by SERNAC’s director Ernesto Muñoz
(SERNAC 2017). Since the other company involved in the case, SCA, refused to
participate, in April 2016 SERNAC filed a class-action lawsuit against them
(SERNAC 2016). As with the pharmacy case, activists and the public have
raised concerns that the fines are not high enough to dissuade the retailers
from continuing with their practices as well as disappointment that they will not
face prison sentences.
Some conservative lawyers framed the executive’s proposed reforms of
competition law and the citizens’ demands for making collusion a crime
punishable by prison as inefficient, hysterical, ignorant, and fueled by
irresponsible populism (El Mercurio May 31, 2015; El Mercurio June 27,
2015). Other lawyers claimed the objection to making collusion a crime simply
“seeks to differentiate between common crime and white-collar crime” to benefit
those who commit the latter and who are normally more powerful (El Mercurio
May 23, 2016). The fact that there are at present opposing views circulating in
the press and social media signals the potential for change in the historically deep
mistrust and exclusion among Chile’s elite of the “popular sectors” (sectores
populares), justified on account of their lack of basic civic virtues and their
“barbarism” (Bengoa 1996; Moulian 2006; Pinto 2011; Salazar 2006; Araujo
and Beyer 2013). For the purposes of determining entitlement to speak in the
public sphere, the “popular sectors” can be seen to include not only the poorest
but also the lay or nonexpert citizens who are today making their views heard
using social media and social movements. Companies are being forced to listen or
appear to be listening to consumers’ civic concerns, as is evident in the growing
importance of corporate social responsibility (Thumala 2013; Ossandon and
Tironi 2013) and recent interest in the notion of “civic brands” (marcas
ciudadanas). From the latter perspective, the right response to the growth of an
educated middle class and the crisis of trust in power is the end of the “vertical
relationship” between brands and their consumer/citizens (Cadem 2016).
Consumer Boycotts as Symbolic Actions

Calls for a boycott of the CMPC and SCA brands of toilet paper were successful
in October as consumers switched to the few brands not involved in the scandal
(Emol 2015b). This particular action would then lead to a more general boycott
of supermarkets after a new case of collusion involving supermarkets broke out
in December (El Ciudadano 2016).7
In January 2016, consumer and citizen associations (including a newly
created Citizens Front Against Collusion, Conadecus, and the movement Aquí
la Gente) called for boycotts of the supermarkets across the country using the
hashtag #SupermercadosVacios. According to the representative of the
organization Aquí la Gente “citizens are mobilizing; consumers are fed up of
so much abuse.” In the words of the President of Conadecus, “It is a true
rebellion against the abuse and lack of ethics. The lack of principles among
businesspeople does not surprise us anymore and the power of consumers who
unite can be disastrous for them” (ADN Radio January 1, 2016). On January 10
and 31 and February 28 of 2016, the press and social media displayed images of
empty supermarkets and comments by consumers who in very calm ways
discussed the boycott as the “exercise of citizenship,” as a way of showing
that “we will not be pushed over” and a way of “raising awareness” and
possibly making supermarkets sell at “reasonable prices.” Some pointed out
the boycott was “an action effective at a symbolic level; important because
citizens are having their voice heard and are taking a stance against injustice”
even though “the financial loss to the supermarkets will not be too significant”
(El Ciudadano 2016). Yet, a financial newspaper reported that according to
figures provided by the industry, sales had gone down on the day of the boycott
of 31 of January between 5 and 10 percent (Diario Financiero 2016).
Public Opinion: Mistrust and Ridicule

The tissue paper scandal contributed to further increase public mistrust of
business. A public opinion poll conducted in early November 2015 showed
that 90 percent of consumers believed large private companies take advantage
of consumers (in Spanish abusan) and that this is a regular practice (89 percent).
Half of them boycotted the tissue paper brands involved in the scandal (Cadem/
Horizontal/UAI 2015). The ideas that members of the different elites are
conspiring against ordinary Chileans and that this is chipping away at the
legitimacy of traditionally hierarchical social relations is nicely expressed in
a commercial by mobile phone company Wom. The ad, which appeared a few
months after the tissue paper scandal broke, mocks Eliodoro Matte and
Fernando Karadima, a well-known Catholic priest accused of sexual abuse,
whose legal defense Matte and his family are thought to have partly financed.
Playing with the Spanish word for toilet, the ad calls the businessman Inodoro
Matte and shows both men sitting in what at first appears to be a confessionary
but turns out to be public toilets, sharing a roll of toilet paper (El Mostrador
2016). The ad is significant because it performs a civil critique of the abuse of
power. Previously reverent broadcasters and ad agencies can now easily mock
and humiliate Matte and Karadima, both as individuals and as representatives
of the powerful institutions of the Church and business, by drawing on and
further legitimating civil widespread indignation. The ad is significant also
because it enacts the idea of the collaboration and intimate relationship
between members of two different elites that are seen as one and the same and
especially threatening to democratic justice.
Farmers’ Markets and Consumer Cooperatives: Market Initiatives

with Civic Consequences
A series of initiatives by consumers and small producers have sought to gain
autonomy vis-à-vis large retail companies. Organizations like “Let’s Buy
Together” (Juntos compremos), Huellas Verdes, Kulko, and La Canasta
Peñalolén purchase collectively to secure lower prices or allow small
producers to sell directly to consumers. Their motivations include the need for
fairness, anger at the increase in and fixing of prices by supermarkets and the
mistreatment of providers, as well as a commitment to organic and sustainable

production and a healthier lifestyle. These projects see themselves as
alternatives to the abuse, to “fool a system that has made a fool of everyone.”
The cooperative Juntos compremos, in particular, say in their promotional
video “we practice rebellious consumption” for fairer and more sustainable
consumption (Almacén Cooperativo Juntos Compremos 2016).
Insofar as these actions are meant to facilitate access to goods by rational
consumers seeking lower prices and better quality, they must be seen as coming
from within the market. They are not civil associations in the sense of having
aims outside themselves and a communicative intent (Alexander 2006:98–99)
although they could become civil associations. However, the fact that these
initiatives are situated within the market should not obscure the fact that they
are based on a market ethic; a discourse of fairness and sustainability (the latter
currently framed as profitable and not just impacting on brand reputation).
The ethical discourse around production, distribution, and consumption that
sustains many of these cooperatives is parallel and complementary to the civil
sphere discourse. At the same time, these initiatives also mobilize the civil codes
of altruism, equality, solidarity, openness, and trust and can be seen as
protocivil movements. The boundary exchanges between the market and the
civil sphere have involved destructive intrusions, but these intrusions have
triggered interactions and social forms such as those within cooperatives of
consumers and consumer associations (e.g. sociability, knowledge exchange,
political engagement) that have positive outcomes because they enlarge the civil
sphere; they produce a “more ample civil life” (Alexander 2006:206).
conclusion
“Corruption and inequality permeate real civil societies, but their continuous
exposure, and the scandals they give rise to, testify to the structured insistence
that there must be a better, a more civil social world” (Alexander 2006:189).
This chapter has described the ways in which citizens and institutions in Chile
have responded to scandals in the retail industry. The narratives show serious
concerns about destructive intrusions into the civil sphere by economic actors
who conspire to take advantage of consumers’ lack of information and
relatively less power and to exclude them from the debates on account of their
ignorance or irrationality. The use of polluting language, protests, boycotts,
consumer organizations, and legal actions are a signal of two main
commitments: (1) to the country’s democratic institutions (the government
and judicial system’s regulatory capacities) and (2) to the ideals of free
competition, justice, the dignity of human life, and the right to protest, even
when restricted by the value of social order. The responses also show a growing
sense of empowerment among individuals willing to organize around single
issues outside the system of institutional politics. All this resonates with
observations of a growing sense of entitlement and expectations about
inclusion in the civil sphere and a demand for more egalitarian relationships in
Chile’s society (PNUD 2004; Araujo 2013).
The framing of the events discussed in this chapter displays many of the codes
of CST (e.g. rationality, openness, solidarity, the rule of law). Do these events
constitute civil repair of the destructive intrusion of the market? Let us
recapitulate on the main responses to the scandals. The colluding companies
have been named and shamed; they have been forced to pay fines and
unprecedented compensation to consumers; the emblematic CMPC has
agreed to negotiate directly with consumers, again, something without
precedent in the country; companies have been faced with consumer boycotts,
which have had both a financial and a (larger) reputational impact; consumers
have organized to achieve alternative forms of production and consumption;
the government has reformed competition law; and businesses have been forced
to pay more attention to the public’s views. All these instances taken as a whole
constitute civil repair.
The repair has taken symbolic and material form, sometimes
simultaneously. At the material or structural level, the sanctions and
changes in competition law are aimed at keeping the practice of collusion
from actually happening again. Consumer organizations and cooperatives,
while still a minority, have the potential to alter the ways the market for
certain goods operate and to sustain further demands for better application
of consumer law. At the symbolic level, the naming and shaming of
companies, the widely publicized boycotts, the payment of fines, the venting
of anger in the media, and the very fact that these companies are being
investigated and found in breach by state institutions, all publicly and loudly
perform the collective, civil rejection of the anticivil behavior of market actors;
especially of emblematic actors like Matte, who, as a business leader with
a reputation built upon commitment to a “market society ethic,” acted against
the expectations set by his own normative civic and economic codes. His was
a double infraction. The critiques of market behavior displayed in the
collusion cases do not only come from outside the economic sphere but also
from within.
The analysis of these cases shows that the boundary relations between
the market and civil society can display a shift from destructive intrusion to
civil repair and that in that process, “interstitial institutions” such as the
FNE are key. The FNE, located in the state as well as in the market and
civil society, has been crucial in acting on behalf of the state to defend the
market values of free competition and fairness as well as the civil ideals of
freedom and autonomy.
At the same time, those who are critical of the limitations of the legal
processes against the colluding companies and their representatives, including
the option of extrajudicial agreements that lead to more lenient punishments;
who question the transparency of the negotiations between those accused and
the Tribunal of Free Competition; and who dismiss the fines as ludicrously low,
are right to be skeptical. Motivated by the goal of profitability, companies will

find new and better ways to improve their market position and concentrate
resources by, for example, developing oligarchic pricing structures through
sometimes secretive and highly aggressive (if not illegal) strategies. These
strategies will not always be identified, prosecuted, or punished. Furthermore,
given that those who have been protesting in Chile recently are more likely to be
the better educated (Castillo et al. 2015) the problem of exclusion from citizen
involvement and knowledge exchange remains. The civil sphere is a project and
its instantiations imperfect.
And yet the market-critical responses discussed here are distinctly not class
protests or, even less, examples of identity politics. Because everyone is
a consumer of one kind or another, those behind the mobilizations and
actions against the pharmacies and tissue paper producers have had much less
trouble establishing a solidaristic response among the public (than have, for
example, those demanding recognition of the rights of LGBTQ citizens or the
Mapuche people in the south of the country). Identification with the status of
“abused consumer” requires no translation. The ease of identification produced
by these cases has permitted the expression of a more general and multifaceted
dissatisfaction with the country’s democracy and economic model. That some
consumers have more resources than others and are, therefore, clearly more
affected by the fixing of prices than the rest is a fact that every consumer can
relate to and actually contributes to the success of the anticollusion discourse.
In other words, civil repair may be easier to achieve when motivated by anticivil
economic behavior.
In addition to the generalizability of the experience of the “abused
consumer,” there is also the fact that the civil code itself is highly
generalized, which may indicate advances in, if not the recovery of, the
country’s democratic ethos after the dictatorship (1973–89). Despite the
strongly capitalist nature of Chile’s economy, the symbolic structure of the
civil sphere (including e.g. the binaries critical/deferential, truthful/deceitful)
appears to be markedly autonomous from the discourse of the market (e.g.
self-interest, competition, hierarchy) and from powerful economic elites and
institutions. A generalized civil discourse can be easily and effectively applied
to the behavior of economic actors who have non-civil interests. Their actions
can be publicly communicated as not simply noncivil (the goal of any business
is to make money) but as anticivil, destructive, and unjust (making money
through illegal, anticompetitive means).
Finally, the analysis shows that CST codes are not exclusive to the political
tradition and social and cultural life of the United States. The morally charged
discourses that follow the revelations of collusion in Chile are organized
around the binary oppositions at the core of CST between greed and
altruism, secrecy and openness, deceit and truthfulness, hierarchy and
equality, rationality and irrationality (Alexander 2006:57–59). The belief in
the shared membership that sustains the civil sphere’s discourse, interactions,
and institutions is also present in Chile. At the same time, the cases discussed
seem to point to the operation of codes and motives specific to Chile (and
perhaps also to other countries in Latin America). It is possible that the
recurring expressions of concern for the impact of collusion practices upon
the most vulnerable (the poor and the sick) are based on the generalizable
Catholic virtue of Caritas, which transcends particularistic loyalties and
serves to universalize the duty and will to love others in a large scale,
complex society. Further research is needed in order to understand the
different ways in which the civil sphere is instantiated in Protestant and
Catholic societies. Examining how codes inspired by Caritas travel across
institutions requires widening the definition of culture beyond the realm of
the family and religion (Cousiño and Valenzuela 1994). The present analysis
has used such a wider definition of culture and demonstrates that the
subjective experience and cultural meanings of abuse in the realm of
consumption mobilize the civil institutions and codes of fairness and
equality in Chile’s civil sphere.
notes
1. According to a recent market research study, 95% of the population own a mobile
phone, 71% have access to the internet at home, and 65% own a personal computer.
In terms of social media use, 82% use WhatsApp, 76% use Facebook, and 30% use
Twitter (Cadem 2016).
2. A recent investigation of the ownership of regional newspapers and radio stations
shows that a number of these outlets are the property of local authorities and elected
officials. This indicates that the concentration of media ownership occurs beyond the
well-known ownership of national networks or papers by large economic groups
(Castillo, Peña, and Romero 2016).
3. Although originally the name of a popular brand, “confort” is now used as a generic
name to refer to all toilet paper.
4. Three important cases include: CAVAL, involving the son of President Michelle
Bachelet, accused of using her influence to secure a loan for a real estate business
deal; PENTA, a tax fraud case related to the financing of election campaigns; and
SOQUIMICH, about invoices linking unsupported payments to finance politicians
using public money.
5. The information in this paragraph is based on personal communications with Eliana
Rozas, Professor of Journalism at the Faculty of Communications of the Catholic
University of Chile, Paulette Desormeaux, also Professor of Journalism at the
Catholic University of Chile, and Claudio Villavicencio, who specialises in
investigative journalism (October 19–21, 2016).
6. Desormeaux is less persuaded by the argument about the threat of a reduction in
advertising revenue and thinks that instead, the problem is one of access to
information and the capacity to investigate in collusion cases.
7. The new case involved the producers of chicken Agrosuper, Ariztía, and Don Pollo
and large supermarket chains Cencosud (Jumbo, Santa Isabel), Walmart (Líder,
Ekono), and SMU (Unimarc, Supermercados del Sur).
references
ADN Radio. 2016. “Consumidores realizan nueva protesta contra supermercados
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part ii
MILITANCY, CIVILITY, AND POLARIZATION

4
La Joven Cuba
Confrontation, Conciliation, and the Quest for the Civil
through Blogging
Liliana Martínez Pérez
introduction: weaving civility from a noncivil discourse

For more than one hundred years, Cubans waged a political and armed
struggle over the formation of a sovereign nation-state, culminating in the
Cuban Revolution and resulting in the establishment of an authoritarian
militant regime that maintained relative legitimacy and stability for over
five decades.
Since the mid-1980s, a gradual shift in the Cuban civil environment has
occurred as a consequence of deep political and ideological changes in the
international and domestic arenas. To understand change in the Cuban civil
sphere, it is necessary to bring into focus which social actors can promote and
legitimize civil discourse and civil norms supporting discussion, criticism,
conciliation and the repair of inequalities, censorship, and social exclusion
and how they can do so in an environment that is structured by a symbolic
discourse and a set of institutions that are militant-authoritarian and basically
noncivil.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the Cuban
revolutionary code contributed both to dignify the Cuban civil sphere and to
reduce it, to put it down, and to tear it apart. This chapter will focus on one
specific phenomenon, a blog called La Joven Cuba, which emerged from within
the island.1 The blog was capable of effectively using its position to criticize and
resignify that code. La Joven Cuba managed to confront the exclusionary
consequences of its noncivil dimensions. At the same time, it succeeded in
emphasizing the elements within that code that promote tolerance,
participation, and inclusion based on the human condition rather than on the
ideological adscriptions of Cubans. In the end, the blog persuaded both its
potential followers and its adversaries, who included leading figures of the
Cuban regime, that the time was ripe for a normative shift in Cuba towards
a more democratic and plural society and a stronger civil realm.
95
96 Liliana Martínez Pérez
In the following sections, I will start by introducing Alexander’s civil sphere

theory (CST) with an eye to putting into evidence its use and limitations within
the context of a markedly noncivil social process such as a radical social
revolution. I will then address the noncivil and civil features of the Cuban
revolutionary discourse between the early 1960s and the late 1980s as well as
the main changes that followed in the early 1990s as a result of the crisis of
international socialism. After that, I will present the digital blog La Joven Cuba
(Young Cuba; LJC; www.jovencuba.com) and zoom into two critical junctures
at the early stages of its institutional life for the purpose of illustrating how the
blog strived to deploy a civil discourse, how it sought to maintain relative
autonomy vis-à-vis its political and institutional allies, and what difficulties it
ran into as it sought to leave behind the noncivil militant revolutionary
discourse. In the final section, I will discuss to what extent it may be possible
to construct a civil framework from a noncivil discourse, such as in the case of
La Joven Cuba, addressing some challenges that the new generation of Cuban
politicians and the Cuban civil sphere are facing today.
the civil sphere and radical revolutionary movements

According to Alexander (2006:4), societies are not only governed or moved by
power and self-interest alone, but also by solidarity, a set of “feelings for others
whom we do not know, but whom we respect out of principle, not experience,
because of our putative commitment to a common secular faith.” Such
solidarity has a universalist character, serves as a mobilizing ideal in
democratic societies (Alexander 2006, 2015), and is articulated in a space, the
civil sphere, that is structured by a binary symbolic code, which in turn orients
people’s motives, social relations, and institutions towards social critique and
democratic integration. In this civil space, social groups with different postures
and values confront one another (Alexander 2006:4).
The civil sphere coexists with noncivil spheres, such as the state, the
economy, religion, science, the family, and the community. While the latter
may contribute to maintain a plural order, they are also responsible for the
fragmentation of the universalist solidarity pursued within the civil sphere.
Social movements, however, may come in and help bring reconciliation and
civil repair by linking particular injustices with the general well-being of society,
very much like “accordions that inflate and deflate civil contradictions,
instruments that supply the melodies, in major and minor keys” (Alexander
2006:7). Their success at that, Alexander points out, is much less a matter of
rational perceptions and material resources that they may succeed in mobilizing
to that purpose than of their capacity for symbolic communication.
After a detailed critique of the classic perspective on the great revolutions of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Alexander points out that CST
may provide some useful lenses to make sense of radical social movements.
Their strength, after all, does not depend per se on the demands for
La Joven Cuba: Confrontation and Conciliation 97
redistribution of material resources, on the most efficient use of means, on the

availability of networks, and on their organization or on their mobilization
against state power, but rather on their emergence “in the midst of . . . the
partially realized structures and codes of civil societies, social systems in
which civil solidarity was fragmented and institutional independence from
noncivil spheres was crippled in systematic ways” (Alexander 2006:228).
Nevertheless, if CST is to make sense of radical social movements whose
discourse may support authoritarian regulative institutions and celebrate
violence, exclusion and to the extreme, the disappearance of the Other, all of
which is deeply noncivil, then CST should strive to account for the way such
movements may move away under certain conditions from noncivil discourse
and push in direction of civil reconciliation and broader solidarity. The Cuban
case is quite suggestive in this respect.
the cuban revolutionary discourse and the militant

society
The evolution of the Cuban revolutionary movement closely reflects the core
tenets of Alexander’s understanding of social movements in his civil sphere
theory. This movement began as a challenge to the military dictatorship
imposed by Fulgencio Batista (March 10, 1952), sought to restore republican
democratic life, and strived to repair social injustices throughout the island.
On July 26, 1953, at the trial for the attack Fidel Castro carried out as the
head of a hundred combatants against two military barracks and two
governmental buildings, Castro engaged in a self-defense strategy that become
the first public statement of the movement’s aspirations as well as its platform
for social transformation. It also served as a programmatic document entitled
History Shall Absolve Me. Castro clearly recognized the symbolic importance of
disseminating it in his communications to the people in charge of its first edition:
At least one hundred thousand copies should be distributed within four months . . . [I]t
must reach all journalists, all law firms, all medical practices as well as all teachers’ and
professional associations . . . [R]ight now, propaganda is vital; without propaganda,
there are no mass movements and without mass movements, no revolution is
possible . . . Our mission now . . . is not to organize revolutionary cells . . . Our immediate
task is to mobilize public opinion in our favor (Castro 1993:16–17).
In the document, Castro advocated the repair of social injustices by

introducing new legislation (Castro 1993:55–58) and referred to the Cuban
people as the main actor and beneficiary of revolutionary action, stressing their
patriotic spirit and willingness to self-sacrifice rather than class, race, gender, or
religion (Castro 1993:53). He insisted on the right to rebel against despotism
and tyranny, noting that it “is a universally acknowledged principle and our
1940 Constitution expressly contemplates it . . . it is a premise without which
any democratic collectivity would be unconceivable” (Castro 1993:95–96). He
also drew inspiration from José Martí’s moral universalism as well as from his
faith in the future: “A true man does not care about which side will yield him
a better life, but rather on which side his duty lies; and that is . . . the only
practical man whose dream today will become law tomorrow” (Castro
1993:66)2 Castro saw Martí as the “intellectual author” of his revolutionary
movement, which started on the centennial of Martí’s birth.
By 1959, Castro’s revolutionary social movement had put together an army
and a vast support network in Cuban cities, which yielded him the ultimate
victory. As he set his revolutionary social project in motion against the
backdrop of the Cold War and the last wave of decolonization and national
liberation in the so-called Third World, his revolutionary discourse opened up
to encompass the defense of the Cuban revolution as a struggle for
independence and for the sovereignty of the fatherland.3 Also, it envisaged
expanding the revolution by encouraging and supporting other revolutionary
movements abroad (Faligot 2013; Gleijeses 2002, 2013; Ramírez y Morales
2014).
In the heat of that combative juncture, an interlaced double spiral of
binary symbolic codes came to structure motives, social relations, and
institutions in Cuban society and ended up shaping the island’s civil
sphere over several decades. The axis consisting of the revolutionary/
counterrevolutionary symbolic codes defined the present, the here and
now, in a violent, exclusionary, and substantially noncivil way, while the
axis made up by the socialism-communism/capitalism-imperialism codes
patterned a transcendental, utopian hope for a future fair and inclusive
society that would make civil solidarity possible.
Study, Work, Rifle! We Will Triumph!

True revolutionaries were expected, if necessary, to gloriously die for the
patriotic ideals and the radical transformation policies of the revolutionary
movement and to passionately defend them at a discursive and at a physical
level against the many internal and external enemies of the revolution and of
national sovereignty.
Their commitment instigated bravery and heroism, engendered high self-
esteem, and motivated a high degree of activism, which was usually channeled
into social mobilizations against the adversaries of the revolution as well as into
military training with the Revolutionary National Militias (MNR, by its
Spanish initials), which were later transformed into the Territorial Troupe
Militias (MTT, by its Spanish initials) or with the Rebel Army, later
transformed into the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR, by its Spanish
initials). Participation in social mobilizations allowed Cubans to show their
loyalty to the revolutionary project. At the same time, it legitimized the
annihilation, exclusion, or punishment of counterrevolutionaries, variably
referred as “sellouts” (vendepatrias), “traitors,” “mercenaries,” “worms,”
and “scum,” as well as nonrevolutionaries, who included the “blandengues”

(softies), the “effeminate” (homosexuals), the “pepillos” (fans of Anglo- and
North American fashion or music), the “hippies,” and the “apathic.” Along
with the motto “The Streets Belong to Revolutionaries,” mobilizations turned
public space into a realm of exclusion rather than recognition and
reconciliation.
On the less belligerent and more thoughtful end of the double spiral of binary
codes that structured the Cuban revolutionary order, militant discourse called
on a revolutionary duty to austerity, honor, and altruism along the path to
transformation of the social relations of exploitation, self-centeredness, and
consumerism within capitalism into a communist society that would finally
yield equality and well-being for all. Unlike the distinctively noncivil urge to
defend and promote the Revolution in the present, this forward-looking
aspirational discourse spurred Cubans to form themselves as individuals and
as a society for the purpose of fully emancipating themselves, thereby achieving
both their freedom and greater solidarity.
The most outstanding conceptualization of such an educational process
along the pathway to a communist future in Cuba was laid out by Ernesto
“Che” Guevara in El Socialismo y el Hombre en Cuba (Socialism and Man in
Cuba) (Guevara 1967). The greatest social accomplishment of such a process,
he believed, would be the formation of “a new man,” an ideal human being,
whose purity, untainted by capitalist productive and commercial relations,
would enable him to build a future society in which individuals would be fully
aware “of their social being”; a society that “would lead [each individual] to his
full realization as a human creature, having gotten rid of the chains of
alienation,” a society in which each human being would finally free oneself
from “the compulsion to physically sell oneself as merchandise,” thereby
transforming work into a voluntary act of “spiritual recreation” in which
“the realm of need” would be overcome “[to enter] the realm of freedom”
(Guevara 1967:26, 28, 36, 43). Such aspiration for the “new man” and a fair
and free society is apparent in the salute that school children all across Cuba
give to the national flag as they stand in ranks with the hand raised in front of
their forehead: “Pioneers for Communism! / We will be like Che!”
To attain the civil attributes of rectitude and moral generosity, revolutionaries
were expected to take on such altruistic tasks as teaching, doing voluntary work,
accepting moral rather than financial incentives for work, and actively taking part
in social campaigns within their revolutionary society. They would need to know,
study, and understand the ideas and policies underpinning socialism and
communism, their history and doctrines, and under certain conditions, they
would have to engage in self-criticism as well as in criticism of the mistakes,
deviations, and failures experienced along the path to socialism.
Such pedagogic interpellation opened up an arena for intellectual debate over
the inconsistencies and fractures that would arise from the tension between the
social present and the future. Although such debate occasionally allowed for
civil recognition and repair, it was generally meant to help perfect the formation
and practice of revolutionaries, to refine their arguments in support of a future
society of “new men,” and to meet the defensive and offensive needs of the
Revolution and its authorities, which in Guevara’s words were legitimized by
the need for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” built “not only on top of the
defeated class, but also individually, on top of the victorious class” (Guevara
1967:24).
The Militant Society4

Such symbolic patterning of Cuban society articulated a militant authoritarian
order that did not promote isolation, atomization, or social delinking
(Khosrokhavar 2015), but rather called for courage, mobilization, and strong
collective discipline in defense of a besieged fortress that had to withstand the
assaults coming from the outside by leveraging the strong military training, the
patriotic spirit, and the willingness to self-sacrifice/self-immolation of its
citizens as well as by drawing on their unshakable will to remain united and
loyal to the Revolution’s founding leaders.
The abnegation, courage, and total commitment of the leaders and early
participants in the Revolution gave them prestige, endowed them with
charisma, and later, turned them into sacred figures. Revolutionary authorities
could hence expect obedience and subordination on the part of the members of
their militant society. They could legitimately exercise censorship, exclude from
the political scene any movements with moderate ideologies or with ideologies
that countered the socialist/communist project, and ultimately restrict legitimate
political organizations to the point of allowing on the political stage only the
Union of Young Communists (UJC, by its Spanish initials, 1962) and the
Communist Party of Cuba (PCC, by its Spanish initials, 1965), which the 1976
Constitution recognized as the governing entity of the Cuban state, government,
and society.
Within the militant society, social demands were channeled to government
authorities through a system of representation called Popular Power with
a merely consultative role. As a joke goes in Cuba, the system is “popular, but
has no power.”
The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR, by its Spanish
initials, 1960), on the other hand, made up a core institution of Cuban militant
society. Such neighborhood organizations brought together all citizens older
than 14 within their respective areas. They monitored and denounced
counterrevolutionary behavior on the part of any of their members, certified
their participation as well as their revolutionary commitment, established
a space to disseminate and discuss face-to-face government guidelines,
standards, and policies as well as to celebrate revolutionary triumphs.
The militant society also featured sectorial organizations that respectively
represented the interests of peasants, women, students, journalists, writers, and
artists. Their role was to implement the government’s sectorial policies, and
channel the demands on the part of their members to government authorities.
Even the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC, by its Spanish initials, 1961),
which regulated labor relations, served as a mere information channel between
workers and the leadership of state enterprises, which have made up the bulk of
the Cuban productive sector since the so-called Revolutionary Offensive in
1968.
The mass media – radio, TV, cinema, newspapers, magazines, and publishing
houses – also occupied a position of subordination to the authorities of the
militant society and merely functioned as their echo chambers.
Militant (Self-)Censorship
The coercive, stigmatizing, and exclusionary way by which revolutionary
authorities dealt with difference, social autonomy, questioning, and criticism
reached its peak between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies. First, Cuban
authorities forced homosexuals, religious believers, the followers of North
American culture, and the undecided (blandengues) into the Military Units in
Support of Production (UMAP, by its Spanish initials, 1965–1968). Then,
between 1971 and 1976, remembered as “the gray five-year period,”
intellectuals, writers, and artists were tried in public or behind closed doors.
Some of them opposed the Revolution, while others had been strongly
committed to it (Fornet 2013; Heras and Navarro 2008; Martínez 2006;
Martínez 2008).
In 1980, stigmatization came to focus on the Cubans who left the port of
Mariel heading to the United States. The “marielitos,” whom official discourse
labelled as “scum,” were verbally and physically abused in public.
In all such cases, the regime’s leaders, as well as its political and cultural
officials, could uphold ideological dogmatism and demobilize all attempts at
civil repair and reconciliation by resorting to stigmatization, censorship, and the
suppression of debate, by exploiting omission, silence, self-criticism, ostracism,
and militant indifference or acceptance of punishments within their own
society, and by capitalizing on migration from Cuba of potentially
troublesome segments of its society.
Over several decades, the authoritarian order built on militant revolutionary
discourse managed to not only successfully silence or ban all criticism seeking to
question its tenets, but to be quite persuasive and, ultimately, legitimate.
the crisis of revolutionary symbolic discourse

and of cuban socialism
In the mid-1980s, the Cuban government reacted to Mikhail Gorbachev’s
political and economic reforms in the USSR, the so-called Perestroika
(restructuring) and Glasnost (transparency), by calling for a “process of
rectification of the mistakes and negative tendencies” within the Cuban

economy that ensued after Cuba’s alignment with the socialist camp. At the
same time, Cuban authorities emphasized a number of core narratives within
Cuban revolutionary and socialist discourse. More concretely, they insisted on
the fact that capitalism meant injustice, immorality, and environmental
unsustainability; that communists’ duty was to fight, because “only the
coward and the demoralized surrender”; and that in Cuba, “Revolution,
socialism, and national independence” were “indissolubly linked” (Castro
1989).
The disappearance of the USSR and the socialist bloc in the early 1990s
triggered a severe socioeconomic crisis in the island, to which the authorities
referred as the “special period at a time of peace.” Even so, between the end of
the 1990s and the mid-2000s, Fidel Castro was still in a position to wage
a “battle of ideas” on a variety of fronts touching upon the present and future
of Cuban society as well as the world economic and social order.5
When, in 2006, Fidel Castro stepped down due to his health, Raúl Castro
took over and initiated a process known as the “updating of the Cuban
economic and social model” (PCC 2011).6 The time had come to address the
consequences of the disintegration of the socialist bloc as well as the challenges
Cubans had to face during the “special period.” This, in turn, called for
a revision of one of the axes of Cuban militant discourse, which had to do
with the socialism-communism/capitalism-imperialism codes.
As Raúl Castro put it, in pursuit of social justice, the Revolution carried out
its mission with excessive paternalism, idealism, and egalitarianism, which
ended up rooting among broad segments of Cuban society a series of socialist
concepts that turned out to be wrong and unsustainable. Now, the “updating of
the Cuban economic and social model” called for their revision, which would
not imply a return “to the capitalistic and neocolonial past that the Revolution
overthrew,” to “free market” or to the “concentration of property.” Rather, it
would entail full compliance with planning and a “change in mentality” both
among the regime’s officials and across Cuban society, more generally (Castro
2010). For the purpose of such a return to honesty, to work ethics, and to social
discipline, in turn, Raúl Castro did not appeal to the well-known motives
patterned by the revolutionary discourse of the Guevarist “new man.”
Rather, and more basically, it drew from the Christian commandment “Thou
shalt not bear false witness,” as well as from the practical wisdom of the original
peoples of the Americas, which demands “not to lie, not to steal, not to be lazy”
(Castro 2010).
The “updating” also touched upon two fronts of the authoritarian militant
regime: (1) the idea that individuals are subordinate to the state and the
government, and that the state and the government are subordinate to the
Communist Party and (2) the need to publicly expose and criticize the
deficiencies, the irregularities, and the unlawfulness within the system, as well
as to freely debate the options facing the present and future of Cuba. More
concretely, “updating” on such fronts ended up translating into legalizing

commercial exchanges between individuals and promoting self-employment
by legally protecting it and removing all social stigmas attached to the
individuals. It entailed limiting the functions of the Communist Party and
delinking it from government. And it implied fighting against secrecy
(secretismo), “triumphalism,” and censorship, by which the regime had
traditionally exercised its control over the mass media (Castro 2010).
Change, on the other hand, would not impinge on some core narratives of the
revolutionary regime, such as the defense against “the aggressive and unfair
policy of the US government towards the island,” the unshakeable support for
the “sister nations of Latin America” and, quite importantly, the idea that
single-party rule was indispensable to maintain the country’s sovereignty.
In the First National Conference of the Cuban Communist Party in
late January 2012, Raúl Castro insisted on the “besieged” condition of Cuba,
and pointed out that giving up the single-party rule would be like “legalizing the
party or parties of imperialism on our national territory” and would entail
“sacrificing the strategic weapon of Cuban unity that has made it possible to
realize the dreams of independence and social justice.” He recognized, on the
other hand, that a legitimate one-party system was to come hand-in-hand with
the promotion of criticism and respect for the diversity of opinions within Cuba:
As we chose . . . along with Marti, the one-party option, what we need to do is to promote
the greatest democracy within our society . . . to respectfully accept discrepancies as
something natural, to include the mass media . . . which must engage responsibly with
the utmost respect for the truth . . . always acting objectively and without any unneces-
sary secrecy (Castro 2012).
By grounding the principle of “democratic unity” in the patriotic discourse of

Marti and Fidel Castro and by opening up to criticism, debate, and social
participation, Raúl Castro maintained the supremacy of political-ideological
interests in the public sphere, and retained the capability for political officials
and bureaucrats to support, or censor, any project that might seek to back social
demands for civil repair.
la joven cuba: a revolution in the digital militant order

The Cuban government recognized that the internet provided a key stage for its
“battle of ideas” both within the island and abroad. On the other hand, various
social sectors saw it as a valuable means to stage criticism and voice civil
demands. Since the early 2000s, innumerable websites came to light with links
to the government and the productive sector. As time passed, though, they were
progressively joined by a vast range of digital blogs that were initiated not only
by media professionals, but also by individuals or groups that were not
necessarily linked with professional or institutional domains. Most of the
latter were self-funded and narrowly focused on rather specialized topics,
such as the supply and demand of goods and services, as well as the everyday
experiences of the people involved in them. Blogs with a social or political focus,
on the other hand, were less common, and generally relied on connections with
public entities, traditional media or nongovernmental domestic or foreign
organizations for the purpose of guaranteeing their sustainability.
Within the island, three types of websites addressed political or social issues.
Some engaged in the defense of the Cuban Revolution in line with the
government’s media policy. Others opposed governmental policies and were
supported by foreign nongovernmental agencies and media. And a third group
consisted of blogs that laid out the perspective of their “author” on a variety of
social problems and policies.
To this third group belonged a blog called La Joven Cuba, which made its
public debut on April 2, 2010 with the pseudonym Tatu (2010a). At that time, it
did not offer much information about its identity or motivations beyond a short
description that for almost seven years supplemented the blog’s name, “a blog
by university youth with opinions on Cuban reality,” as well as a brief
paragraph in a tab labeled “Antonio Guiteras”:
This blog is written a few meters from the Morrillo, where Antonio Guiteras died. Its
creators identify themselves with the figure of this young combatant, both because of his
revolutionary-anti-imperialist-socialist character and because he was misunderstood by
some in the revolutionary movement of his époque. We shall be loyal to the ideals of this
young man, who was fully committed to his time (LJC 2010).7
The blog initially meant to provide space for the “exchange of opinions with
other young people . . . about their everyday life at the university . . . about
sports . . . or any other topic regarding Cuban reality” (Tatu 2010b). In the
end, however, it turned into a “mechanism for political participation” (LJC
2015a). To make sense of its transformation into a social actor capable of
providing a stage for debate and sociopolitical mobilization, it is useful to
address the lengthy process by which its creators came to define its identity,
motivations, and goals. It is worth referring to the organizational changes that
the blog underwent. And it is important to account for its relationship with its
audience as well as with Cuban governmental and political authorities.
Half a year after its first entry, the founders of the blog began to reveal
themselves. They were four professors of the University of Matanzas “Camilo
Cienfuegos” (UMCC), the first three being active members of the Union of
Young Communists (UJC) and the fourth being a militant of the Cuban
Communist Party (PCC). They were Osmany Sánchez Roque/“Tatu” (1984),
professor of ecology and society with a bachelor’s degree in geography; Roberto
González Peralo/“The Disciple” (1981), professor of accounting with a B.A. in
finance and accounting; Harold Cárdenas Lema/“Guiteras” (1985), professor
of history of philosophy until mid-2014, doctoral candidate in philosophical
thought with a master’s degree in philosophy and a bachelor’s degree in
sociocultural studies; and Eduardo Torres Alpízar/“Edu” (1964), professor of
mechanical engineering for over two decades with a doctorate, a master’s, and
a bachelor’s degree in that discipline. Torres ended up severing his ties with the
blog in mid-2011.
By December 14, 2016, 1,975 entries were published: 694 (35.2 percent)
were written by LJC’s founders (Osmany: 264; Harold: 235; Roberto: 132;
Eduardo: 63). The rest were signed by 460 individuals, organizations, or
institutions and were quite varied in content. One-third consisted of total or
partial reproductions of entries published in other digital media. Over
95 percent of the entries drew a total of 205,642 comments. The authors of
the comments varied between 365 and 827 per year. More than two-thirds of
the comments, though, were written by a small fraction of authors that ranged
between fifteen and twenty-five nicknames, the majority of whom lived outside
the island, mainly in the United States, Canada, Spain, Russia, and other Latin
American and Caribbean countries. Among the hundreds of occasional
commentators, many stated that they lived in Cuba.
The openness, permissiveness, inclusiveness, and conciliatory tone prevalent
in the blog, even in the face of belligerent comments, later crystallized into
a policy of moderation and an ethical code that is quite rare within the Cuban
blogosphere. As time passed, the blog emerged as a space that not only allowed
debate and free expression of a plurality of political-ideological postures. It also
opened up the stage for opinions that openly opposed the Revolution and its
discourse.
According to its creators, the blog had two main goals: to “defend the
revolution abroad,” especially within the space of the internet, thereby
mimicking one of the priorities set by Fidel Castro’s “battle of ideas,” and
“to debate internal issues, no matter how thorny they may be,” thereby
aligning with the call for criticism and “change in mentality” under the
umbrella of the process of “updating of the Cuban economic and social
model.” Such a dual commitment signaled both a militant alignment on
the part of the blog with Cuban revolutionary discourse, patriotic and
critical at the same time, and its open and conciliatory posture, which was
reflected by the collective and plural makeup of the team of founders of the
blog, by their availability to provide a stage for proposals that appeared in
government-linked websites as well as in personal blogs, and by their
determination to allow and debate all sorts of opinions and comments on
their blog’s entries.
Their entries, in turn, included both defenses of the Revolution and critiques
of the Cuban political, economic, and social reality. On the former account, for
example, their authors sought to prove the direct or indirect financing of the
political “dissidence” on the island by US foundations and Western European
organizations, or the alignment of Cuban opposition figures with foreign
interests. They denounced individuals and associations whom they deemed to
be “terrorist” on the ground of their direct involvement in violent activities
against Cuban society, its government, and its leaders. And finally, they
debunked the Manichaean representations that international media propagated

with regard to Cuban social and political reality.
On the other hand, the critiques of the Cuban political, economic, and social
reality targeted doctrinaire historical accounts that turned revolutionary figures
into myths; the practices of censorship, stigmatization, intolerance, and
exclusion that Cuban political and cultural officials promoted or carried out
during the so-called “gray five-year period”; policy restrictions on migration
and the systematic devaluation of Cuban emigrants within official discourse;
and the process of change of the economic and social model that the Cuban
government promoted as well as its consequences on the everyday life in Cuba,
on political participation, and on the building of socialism within the island.
la joven cuba: setting militancy on a civil course

All along the institutional life of LJC, its team of bloggers engaged in
a broad range of debates that ended up stretching the two symbolic axes
of the Cuban revolutionary discourse and tested the limits imposed on
discourse by the militant authoritarian regime. Here, I will examine two
such instances, and focus on the tensions produced by the blog’s
administrators and their collaborators as they attempted to stretch militant
discourse in a civil direction. By delving into these two examples, I will be
able to account for the discursive routes those bloggers took for the purpose
of opening militancy up to greater tolerance for ideological diversity as well
as to autonomous critique and participation, thereby progressively shifting
from the revolutionary/counterrevolutionary to the socialism-communism/
capitalism-imperialism axis. At the same time, I will be able to bring into
focus their escapes into irony and mockery as well as their self-censoring
retractions, which ultimately cued their failure at making it to a firmly civil
ground.
Defending the Revolution: Confrontation, Civil Reconciliation,

and Militant Irony
Most of LJC’s posts seeking to discredit Cuban “dissidents” have tapped into
the revolutionary/counterrevolutionary axis of Cuban militant discourse,
shifting from an initial stigmatizing and verbally aggressive stance to a more
tolerant one that strived for civil reconciliation.
During the first two years, Osmany/Tatu and Eduardo, in particular, were
very active on this topic, and tapped into the entire patriotic and bellicose
arsenal that revolutionary discourse put at their disposal. In the following
exchange, Eduardo responds to a comment on an entry by “Baro,” where
“Baro” reflects on the support for Yoani Sánchez, a well-known critic of the
Cuban regime, and her Generación Y blog on the part of foreign media that are
critical of the Cuban revolution (Baro 2010):
Roger – April 14, 2010: what will you do and what will those do who mistreat and abuse
a people that only demands respect for its civil rights when the Castros will flee and leave
you with your hands stained in blood [?]
Edu – April 16, 2010: Roger, Yankee tanks will be the ones to blow up into the air if
they ever think of coming to Cuba . . . [T]he only ones with their hands stained in blood
are the imperialists, you lackey. And do not say the Castros; here we call them Fidel and
Raúl and we follow them because a single hair of theirs is filled with more morality and
sense of shame than all of you sons of a b . . . [bitch] imperialists of this world. . . And if
you are one of those who receive money from the Empire, tighten your a . . . [ass], get
onto a boat, and go to the Yuma [8] . . . Oh, about Yoani . . . it is well-known that she is
a jinetera [9] . . . who now lives off Yankee money (Comments in Baro 2010).
This exchange shows some of the typical repertoire used by the most
“hardened” radical members of LJC as well as by their adversaries. A few
days later, however, Osmany/Tatu and Baro drew on more moderate and
conciliatory, and yet patriotic, language for the purpose of responding to
Roger’s accusation that they were “filled with hatred” and preferred
“dictators to listening to their own youth that calls for reforms.” Tatu and
Baro dismissed Roger’s moral charges, but also exonerated him from
responsibility blaming, instead, his lack of knowledge or his exposure to
counterrevolutionary disinformation:
Tatu – April 19, 2010: Without a doubt, Roger is one of those ignorant [people] who do
not get Cuban reality, a mercenary like yoani will never be respected by the people.
Baro – April 20, 2010: Roger, it is obvious that your thoughts are totally influenced
by the mainstream press . . . [M]y soul is f[r]ee from hatred but, as Martí once said:
“Love . . . for the Fatherland . . . is the invincible hatred for its oppressor” and Americans
have been oppressing this people . . . since 1960, when . . . they established a genocidal
blockade . . . you are not my enemy . . . But even if you were my enemy, I say again, as
Martí once did . . . “And for the cruel man who tears my heart out that makes me live,
I grow neither thistles [sic] nor worms [sic], but a white rose” (Comments in Baro 2010).
The “mercenary” label that Tatu attached to Yoani, and that he

systematically applied to “dissidents” and to all members of the Cuban
opposition, cued an effort on his part at stretching revolutionary/
counterrevolutionary discourse into a civil direction. Unlike Eduardo, Tatu
refrained from stigmatizing or demeaning his adversaries by using such
epithets as “worm,” “lackey,” or “jinetera.” Furthermore, he implicitly
recognized that they are rational individuals, just like anyone else, who
understandably respond to strategic incentives, and pursue their own
private interests. Eduardo’s hard-core revolutionary discourse, on the other
hand, did not allow such conversion of the “enemy” into a mere wage-earner/
mercenary nor would it ever conceive the possibility of tolerating, or even
persuading, the “enemy.” In his view, only “merciless” confrontation would
be admissible.
While Baro cites Martí’s patriotic verses in a rather oblique and erroneous
manner and seasons them with his pedagogic tone,10 he makes apparent the
tension inherent in his attempt at maintaining a militant attitude towards the

Other, while seeking to accept and respect the Other’s differing opinion based
on the recognition of the Other as a human being.11
Such distancing on the part of LJC from a stubbornly violent
revolutionary discourse ultimately triggered Eduardo’s departure from it
for the purpose of launching his own personal blog (Eduardo 2011a,
2011b). Initially, Eduardo appears to deny that his decision is grounded
in any ideological, intellectual, or personal disagreement with the other
members of LJC:
Tatu and I share the idea that . . . we must multiply until . . . La Joven Cuba becomes the
mother blog of a set of webpages that will defend the Revolution and push back against
the offensive within blogosphere by the mercenaries “from within Cuba” at the Yankees’
service12 (Eduardo 2011b).
Nonetheless, in the entry’s comment section, Eduardo hints at a generational as
well as at an ideological motive for his decision:
Edu – April 3, 2011: I believe the time has come to give more space to the young
people who defend the Cuban revolutionary project from within this blog . . . they
are better prepared for the changes that are coming. I don’t think that I am a rigid
or un-dialectic guy, but I am a child of my generation and . . . nobody can truly
expect that a man that has been a Communist since childhood can think of
anything else but an intransigent defense of socialism (Comment in Eduardo
2011b).
LJC’s younger founders and collaborators clearly abandoned Eduardo’s
belligerent and aggressive tone in an effort at actualizing Cuban militant
discourse by shifting emphasis away from the axis of revolutionary/
counterrevolutionary codes, a shift that allowed for greater wiggle room,
opening up the possibility for conciliation and tolerance for political and
ideological diversity. Instead of crystallizing into a more civil discourse,
though, their attempt drifted into a series of discursive escapades into
mocking irony that fell short of a civil standard.
For example, on various occasions, Osmany/Tatu referred to the members
of the Cuban opposition as mercenaries or wage earners. His critics responded
in their comments by demanding respect as well as the acknowledgement of
the dissidents’ demands. At that point, Osmany/Tatu often appeals to irony
(“I really enjoy them”), thereby implicitly challenging the authenticity of their
demands. In Tatu’s eyes, after all, they could not be genuine, because they
were being paid by foreign interests. They were, “in truth, hypocrites.”
The problem with Tatu’s ironic defense, however, is that it falls short of
reasonableness, and hence of the civil, to the extent that he accuses his
adversaries of being paid for what they say but completely sidesteps the
question whether the criticisms of his adversaries might actually have some
ground.
Criticism of the Revolution: Civil Demand, Censorship,

and Militant Self-Censorship
In the course of its institutional life, LJC increasingly addressed the problems
afflicting the everyday life of Cubans. Its members explicitly criticized the
deficiencies, omissions, censorship, and authoritarianism inherent in the
regime’s governmental and bureaucratic practices. And they persisted in
maintaining and in defending open and free debate in their own blog. This
tested not only their capacity for tolerance, respect, and recognition of all
opinions, including those that openly attacked the Cuban revolutionary and
socialist project. It also tested the willingness on the part of local and national
political authorities to tolerate or censor a social project that by the day was
becoming increasingly demanding.
Between April 2011 and July 2012, LJC experienced a dramatic acceleration
in the debates it hosted to the point that 42.4 percent (87,209) of all comments
published during the almost seven years of its institutional life appeared over
this period. During those months, LJC published 454 entries. Those denouncing
or mocking the Cuban dissidence attracted the largest audience. Further entries
dealing with national policies and events also drew some good deal of
discussion.
One issue, however, turned out to be “the straw that broke the camel’s
back” as far as Cuban authorities’ tolerance for LJC was concerned, and it
had to do with the criticism they allowed on their blog for the bureaucratic
excesses, the secrecy, and the verticalism of Cuban authorities. As a result,
LJC’s administrators lost access to their blog between the end
of September 2012 and April 2013. The removal of one specific entry
from the blog reveals the fact that LJC was actually the target of
censorship, and that it was punished for crossing a red line of the Cuban
militant authoritarian order. It also brings to the surface the discursive
rigidities social actors confront as they seek to stretch militant discourse in
a more civil direction, tilting the balance away from the revolutionary/
counterrevolutionary symbolic codes to the socialism-communism
/capitalism-imperialism axis.
On May 28, 2012 Roberto González Peralo published a text titled “Los
incumplimientos a lo acordado en la Conferencia del PCC” (“Breaching the
agreed at the CCP Conference”), which sparked 261 comments by June 3
according to Ted Henken’s13 El Yuma blog (2009), as well as according to
the Observatorio Crítico Cubano (Cuban Critical Observatory) (2009), two
websites that “rescued” the post, and reproduced it on July 8 (see González
2012; Henken 2012).14
The text severely criticized the secrecy by which Cuban bureaucrats and
officials had dealt with the broadening of internet coverage in the island based
on a prior agreement with the Venezuelan government. It openly expressed his
mistrust for the Revolution’s top leaders. And it complained about the useless
consultation processes that Cuban authorities had run for the purpose of
“updating” the Cuban economic and social model:
1. I am distrustful of my country’s top leadership because they have not demanded
compliance with what had been agreed (and suspicion corrodes the mind).
2. If no timely, objective, systematic and transparent information is given regarding
this affair, I will think that those who run this country do not care what the Cuban people
think.
3. The time and effort that the Cuban people put into the economic guidelines and
goals at the PCC’s Conference were a waste (italics in the original, González 2012).
To legitimize his points, Roberto González Peralo drew from Raúl Castro’s call
at the first PCC’s National Conference for “a push in our society, making it
more civil and more democratic.” Such civil demand on his part for
transparency and accountability on the part of the Cuban authorities, though,
turned out to clearly encroach on the duty of submission that the Cuban
authoritarian order expects from its own militants according to its
revolutionary/counterrevolutionary symbolic codes. In other words, he
crossed one of the red lines within the island’s militant discourse.
The 102 comments that appeared in the “rescued” document bring into vivid
focus the high symbolic stakes in voicing mistrust for revolutionary authorities
within that order. Some called out the political naïveté of the blog’s creators vis-
à-vis the Cuban regime. Even more dangerously, though, others remarked that
González Peralo’s criticism, anger, and mistrust would be politically more
effective within a multiparty system in Cuba, and hence urged the blog’s
administrators to mobilize and demand an answer from their state authorities.
In the only reply to these comments on the part of a member of LJC team,
Osmany/Tatu reaffirms the legitimacy of revolutionary criticism as long as it
maintains its underlying trust in socialism and at the same time, he takes his
usual appeals to irony by caricaturizing the authoritarian exaggerations that
certain national political organizations attribute to Cuban authorities’
supposed responses to dangerous expressions such as González Peralo’s:
tatu | may 28, 2012: CienfuegueroLibre: Let me start by telling you that I will immedi-
ately call for a meeting of the UJC to expel Roberto; in addition, the firing squad and the
stick are already awaiting him; this time I will be finishing him off once and for all: this
should teach him [a lesson]. There [you are]! Satisfied? Gabriel del Pino: even when two
people apparently say the same thing, there is a clear difference between a mercenary and
a revolutionary. Roberto criticizes from a revolutionary position . . . he says he mistrusts
the leaders, not the system (comment in González 2012).
Critical comments, though, continued to pile up. About a month later, LJC
came to a breaking point. As its administrators put it at the time, “for many
reasons, it is very difficult for us to maintain a blog as complex as La Joven
Cuba. We will take a break. We hope to be able to continue in the future” (LJC
2012a). Immediately, a first comment inquired: “July 6, 2012: What happened
to you? Have the guys with the scissors finally been able to finish you off?”
An avalanche of subsequent interventions forced the LJC administrators to

clarify three days later their communiqué, deny any act of censorship, and
announce that the interruption would last only till August:
They have mentioned an article that has “gone off the air” [alluding to Roberto’s text]; its
very author took it offline some days ago, because he was not completely happy with it and
he was already writing a reply to his own text. We are no great admirers of the apologies
from the past decades; in contrast, we do support the generation of controversies and
criticism of the content on LJC, even when they are our own. Anyway, we will put it back
online to clear any doubts on the part of conspiracy theorists (LJC 2012b).
González Peralo’s text, however, was not put back online in LJC. Worse than
that, barely three weeks after that LJC’s administrators were back online, they
lost direct access to their blog. In his “scream” on September 24, Osmany/Tatu
denounced a “cyberattack” against the blog, as he referred to a couple of
anonymous entries titled “Test3 a cc” and “Test6” that appeared on the blog:
Tatu, on September 26, 2012: IT WAS NOT US WHO PUBLISHED THOSE TWO
“TESTS.” SOMEBODY HAS TAKEN TIME AND EFFORT TO SABOTAGE
THE BLOG. WE HOPE THAT HE IS SATISFIED WITH HIS WORK. WE ARE
RUNNING INTO MANY DIFFICULTIES THESE DAYS AS WE ARE UPDATING
THE BLOG. GREETINGS (LJC 2012c).
The situation triggered an avalanche of reactions and comments. Both inside

and outside Cuba, on the internet and in other public arenas, people demanded
the full restitution of access to the blog for its administrators and its readers
within their university. In addition, many of them denounced the authoritarian
practices of censorship on the part of the regime’s officials and bureaucrats.
The blog’s administrators could also count on the solidarity of Cuban Vice-
President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who interceded in their favor, and René González
Sehwerert, one of the five Cuban intelligence officers imprisoned in the United
States, who was released under parole in October 2012 and returned to Cuba
in May 2013 as a national hero. Seven months later LJC finally made it back.
At that point, LJC’s administrators showed caution and self-restraint. They
did not ask for any public explanation with regard to the “sabotage” of their
blog nor did they call for the punishment of those responsible for it. They merely
addressed the intellectual and moral damages that censorship had caused and,
as good militants, they simply concluded that on that occasion they had been
“collateral victims” and that their return online indicated the triumph of
“common sense” among government officials and politicians. In this way,
they drew upon the Guevarian background narrative about the formative
process that revolutionaries must undergo in order to create a society of “new
men.” Once again, the balance within militant discourse shifts away from the
axis of revolutionary/counterrevolutionary codes.
Later on, they uploaded two photographic entries featuring them with Díaz-
Canel and González Sehwerert, respectively. The first photo exhibited a couple
of paintings of Fidel and Raúl Castro on the background with a short caption:
“Common sense” (LJC 2013a). The second one, labelled as “René González:
a genuine voice from our people,” included in the caption the fragment of
a letter sent by González one year earlier to a blogger event organized by LJC
at the University of Matanzas “Camilo Cienfuegos” (LJC 2013b). The photos
projected respect and support on the part of two important figures of the Cuban
regime for the young LJC administrators and their critical work. As Cárdenas
Lema put it, “our editorial line has not changed a bit; we publish the photo for
the sake of transparency and to signal that there are no strings attached to this
epilogue; it couldn’t be any other way” (Comments in LJC 2013a).
At the same time, the photos brought some iconic closure to the rift between
LJC and the regime that was produced by González Peralo’s declaration of
mistrust for Cuban authorities and by their subsequent crackdown on the blog.
Such closure was also apparent in a response by Harold to a reader, who
enquired as to whether those responsible for that instance of censorship had
been identified and punished: “What is important is to learn from the mistakes
made during this skirmish, so that they don’t happen again; we are not
interested in victimhood, nor in demanding blood from those who made
a mistake; we are interested in continuing to blog: that is our goal”
(Comments in LJC 2013a).
In the end, the Cuban regime succeeded in stopping the civil mobilization in
response to its freezing of LJC. It addressed the rift caused by its act of
censorship, and showed tolerance, while LJC’s administrators reaffirmed their
militancy as well as their commitment to autonomy and criticism.
Some years later, Harold published in LJC two entries that provided further
insights into this case. The first explained how René González helped the blog’s
administrators by uploading during the “blockade” LJC’s entries from the
United States (Cárdenas 2014), and the second briefly explained how Cuban
officials and bureaucrats ended up punishing Roberto González Peralo for
his May 2012 text. “In a matter of days,” Harold revealed, he was expelled
from the UJC and they tried to fire him from his university (Cárdenas 2017).
This second entry indicates an increasingly explicit effort on the part of LJC
to defend and exercise free expression or, as LJC administrators put it, to “be
revolutionary without asking for permission.” This line of thought and practice
gained them a number of polemic exchanges with relevant figures within the
Cuban governmental blogosphere (LJC 2015a, 2015b) and makes manifest
a front of growing tension within the Cuban militant authoritarian order.
final considerations: the difficult weaving of a civil

revolution
As Alexander (2006) points out, successful social movements actively
engage with public opinion in the civil sphere as they seek to deploy
convincing civil translations of their own demands. The Cuban

revolutionary movement did exactly that in the mid-twentieth century in
the heat of its battle to bring civil repair to Cuba. Such striving for civil
repair did not fade away even later on, when Cuban revolutionaries
established a militant authoritarian order within the island. Since the
Revolution, after all, a variety of social actors within Cuba has never
forgone the aspiration to meet civil demands, even within the horizon of
a militant culture.
Stretching militant discourse in a civil direction is nothing trivial. It can
actually be a rather hazardous, precarious, and evasive task. Most
importantly, though, it demands the deployment of some skillful agency on
the part of social actors that can see the wiggle room opening up within a given
social structure, manage to exploit contingent windows of opportunity within
it, and are capable of persuading others of the authenticity of their quest to the
point of bringing them onboard.
In the case of Cuba, the crisis of international socialism in the 1990s
destabilized the stage upon which Cuban revolutionary discourse was
performed. Its anchoring in the patriotic defense of the country’s
sovereignty, however, managed to shield it for another fifteen years from
social critique as well as from the pressures produced by a mounting wave of
civil demands.
Since the mid-2000s, various social actors began to stretch the limits of
the authoritarian order within the island in an effort to accommodate those
demands. The blog La Joven Cuba appeared to do just that, as it sought to
stretch Cuban militant discourse for the purpose of making it more open,
more tolerant, and more inclusive. As the blog’s administrators went about
adding thickness and strength to the civil facet of their institutional
venture, however, they also repeatedly undermined it by retreating into
irony or mockery as well as into militant silence and self-censorship. Such
ambivalence bears witness not only to the enduring social traction of
revolutionary discourse within Cuban society, but also to the shadow of
desacralization of political life that still looms at the horizon of any
attempt to go civil may still entail for a younger generation of Cubans
who still regard the departure from the revolutionary model of society as
a step into dangerously profane turf.
The process of normalization in the relations between United States and
Cuba and the unavoidable generational change within the Cuban government
that should come with it may well trigger some transitory reinvigoration of the
Cuban revolutionary discourse, at least over the medium term. The cultural
experience, however, that in recent times some sectors of the young political
generation have gone through – LJC’s administrators provide a clear example of
that – has already woven yet another layer of the fabric that comprises the
upcoming Cuban civil sphere.
notes
1. Due to the widespread and deeply ingrained nationalistic feelings that Cubans have
developed as a consequence of their own history over the past century, it is quite
common for internal social actors with links to foreigners to be dismissed and lose
their legitimacy, regardless of whether the latter are taken to be “friends” or
“enemies” of the Cuban government and society.
2. José Martí, Speech, Hardman Hall, Nueva York, October 10, 1890.
3. After the revolutionary triumph, Cubans were attacked from within (1960–1965,
“Battle against the Bandits” in the mountains at the center of the country) as well as
from the outside (1961, Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs; 1962, October Crisis/Missile
Crisis). They were victims of acts of air and sea piracy. Their embassies were
targeted. On October 6, 1976, a Cuban civil airliner was blasted with 73
passengers onboard, and on July 12 and September 4, 1997 a dozen bomb
explosions rocked several hotels in Havana, leaving Cuban citizens and foreign
tourists injured and one dead.
4. This notion seeks to underline the specificity of a social order that has been
legitimized by a predominantly noncivil discourse instead of a civil utopian
discourse that might have engendered an alternative “militant civil sphere.”
The theoretical and analytical implications of this point demand a detailed
examination that will be left for a future occasion.
5. The main axes of the “battle of ideas” were: (a) the national and international
campaign for the release of five Cuban counterintelligence agents who had been
uncovered, tried, and jailed in the United States in September 1998; (b) the battle
to end the economic and commercial blockage/embargo that the United States
had imposed upon Cuba since 1960; (c) the struggle against the consequences of
the world crisis and environmental deterioration; (d) the struggle for world
peace; and (e) the development of education and a comprehensive culture for
the Cuban people.
6. The shape and mechanisms adopted to promote this “updating” under the militant
authoritarian model included a programmatic document – Lineamientos de la
política económica y social del Partido y la Revolución (Guidelines for the
economic and social policy of the Party and the Revolution). This was prepared
by the Cuban Communist Party’s Commission for Economic Policy, which
consisted of eleven groups of experts. The document was then presented to,
discussed, and broadened within various agencies of the militant society. Finally,
it was approved by the VI Congress of the Cuban Communist Party on April 18,
2011 as a plan whose policies and guidelines would be achieved in the following
years and evaluated by future congresses of the Cuban Communist Party.
7. In February 2017, LJC’s administrators drastically changed the blog’s design and
relocated its contents under new tabs. They also replaced their motto with
“Socialism and Revolution.”
8. “Yuma” refers to the United States as well as people born in the United States.
9. “Jinetera,” which literally means “horse-rider,” is a derogatory reference in Cuba to
women who have sex with foreigners visiting the country or who marry them for the
purpose of obtaining a government permit to emigrate.
10. The former quote by Baro echoes the following original verses by Martí: “Love for
the Fatherland, mother / Is not the ridiculous love for the land/Nor for the grass that
our feet tread upon / It is the unquenchable hatred for those who oppress it/It is the
unending rancor for those who would attack it.” See José Martí, “Abdala,” La
Patria Libre, Cuba, January 23, 1869. The latter quote by Baro points to another set
of verses by Martí: “I grow a white rose / both in July and in January / for the sincere
friend / who lends me his open hand / And for the cruel man who rips out the heart
that makes me live / I do not grow thistles nor nettles: / but I grow a white rose.” See
José Martí, “XXXIX,” Versos Sencillos, New York, 1891.
11. The symbolic strength of this reference is apparent from the fact that it even surfaced
in President Obama’s speech in Havana: “Cultivo una rosa blanca. In his most
famous poem, Jose Martí made this offering of friendship and peace to both his
friend and his enemy. Today, as the President of the United States of America, I offer
the Cuban people el saludo de paz” (Obama 2016).
12. This quote by Eduardo is directed as an accusation both to the Cuban “dissidence”
that blogs from within the Island – i.e., Yoani Sánchez – as well as to foreigners
living in Cuba who are critical of the Cuban revolutionary regime, such as the
Uruguayan journalist Fernando Ravsberg, author of the blog “Letters from Cuba.”
13. Professor at Baruch College, City University of New York. In 2011, he traveled to
Cuba and interviewed several bloggers, including LJC’s founders (González 2011).
In 2013, he served as host and interpreter for Yoani Sánchez during her trip to the
United States.
14. The Observatorio Crítico Cubano is a digital platform that published between 2011
and 2014 a series of weekly compendia of outstanding texts and discussions that
took place in the island’s cyberspace.
references
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2006. The Civil Sphere. New York: Oxford University Press.
Giuseppe Sciortino. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 172–189.
Baro. 2010. Yoani Sánchez: “la heroína de los medios de información
anticubanos.” La Joven Cuba, April 14. Retrieved July 14, 2017. https://
jovencuba.com/2010/04/14/yoanis-sanchez-%E2%80%9Cla-heroina-de-los-
medios-de-informacion-anticubanos%E2%80%9D/.
Cárdenas Lema, Harold. 2014. “El héroe que salvó un blog.” La Joven Cuba,
September 12. Retrieved July 14, 2017. https://jovencuba.com/2014/09/12/el-heroe-
que-salvo-un-blog/.
Cárdenas Lema, Harold. 2017. “Fantasmas de tiempos pasados.” La Joven Cuba.
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de-tiempos-pasados/.
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Castro, Raúl. 2012. Discurso 29 de enero de 2012. Havana: Consejo de Estado.
Eduardo. 2011a. “Rompiendo el hielo.” El blog de Edu, June 2. Retrieved July 25, 2017.
https://edumatanzas.blogspot.mx/2011_06_02_archive.html.
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et Hô Chi Minh préparaient la révolution mondiále (1964–1968). Paris: Éditions La
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/2011/04/29/encuentro-de-la-joven-cuba-con-ted-henkenel-yuma/.
González Peralo, Roberto. 2012. “Los incumplimientos a lo acordado en la Conferencia
del PCC.” Observatorio Crítico Cubano, July 8. Retrieved July 25, 2017. https://
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conferencia-del-pcc/.
Guevara, Che. 1967. El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba. Havana: Ediciones Políticas.
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revolucionario: Memoria y reflexión. Havana: Centro Teórico-Cultural Criterios.
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and Giuseppe Sciortino. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 142–172.
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jovencuba.com/antonio-guiteras/.
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July 14, 2017. https://jovencuba.com/2012/07/06/la-joven-cuba-se-toma-un-descanso/.
La Joven Cuba (LJC). 2012b. “Aquí estamos y estaremos,” July 9. Retrieved July 14
2017. https://jovencuba.com/2012/07/09/aqui-estamos-y-estaremos–2/.
La Joven Cuba (LJC). 2012c. “test6,” September 24. Retrieved July 14, 2017. https://
jovencuba.com/2012/09/24/test6/.
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5
¿La Clase Media en Positivo?

The Civil and Uncivil Uses of “the Middle Class” in
Venezuela, 1958–2016
Celso M. Villegas
introduction
For nearly two decades, Venezuela has been polarized between supporters of
former president Húgo Chávez Frias’ Bolivarian Revolution and political
parties and social movements opposed to el proceso – the transition to
“Socialism of the Twenty-First Century.” The tenor of Venezuelan politics
has changed from a stable “partyarchy” (Coppedge 1994) dominated by
corporatist political parties to a “grey zone” regime (Myers and McCoy
2003) that since Chávez’s death and the election of his successor Nicolás
Maduro, now teeters on the edge of social, political, and economic collapse.
In some ways, the current situation is not new. In 1989, massive protests in
response to neoliberal reforms resulted in violence, military repression, and the
accelerated decline of Venezuelan partyarchy. In 2002, massive middle-class
protests failed to remove Chávez from power, emboldening Chávez and leaving
the opposition in a weakened position. However, beginning in 2014 and
continuing through the end of 2017, a series of protests powered by deep
middle-class discontent with the economic, political, and security situation
have called for Maduro’s ouster. This prompted serious concern from the
Organization of American States (OAS) that the country may be incapable of
peacefully exiting this crisis.1
In what ways can civil sphere theory (CST) contribute to our understanding
of the Venezuelan crisis, and in what ways can the Venezuelan crisis help to
better attenuate CST to empirical realities? This chapter argues that the lack of
a collective, civil representation of the middle class has exacerbated political and
social polarization in Venezuela. That is, the tenor of the ongoing debate about
the role of the middle class in contemporary Venezuelan democracy has created
a series of “authenticity problems” (esp. Alexander 2011:86–88) for how anti-
Chávez and pro-Chávez forces attempt to build support for their political
118
¿La Clase Media en Positivo? 119
projects through and against notions of middle-class support and ultimately

exacerbate attempts at reconciling each other’s visions of civil solidarity.
The ambiguous qualities of middle-class civil discourse in Venezuela are the
product of sediments left in the wake of two major reconfigurations of the civil
sphere in the twentieth century: the Punto Fijo period (1958–98) and the
Chávez-initiated Bolivarian Republic (1998–present). The middle class of
puntofijismo was at once its central font of political legitimacy, while at the
same time it represented the economic and political excesses of the period.
The middle class of the Bolivarian Republic is recognized by both chavista
and antichavista forces as a key political constituency, but because of
competing classificatory codes and the failure of the 2002 coup against
Chávez, both sides have deployed their ideas of middle-class support in ways
to render their opponents uncivil on the one hand, and antirevolutionary on the
other. In other words, because of the competing features of civil and chavista
revolutionary codes, deploying la clase media for the sake of civil inclusion and
repair is considered inherently untrustworthy and inauthentic. In recent years,
the antichavista opposition has focused on defining the middle class as the
primary victim of the economic policies of the late Chávez and current
Maduro governments. While at the time of this writing a new civil language
of class has emerged, it remains to be seen if this new civil discourse can forestall
a political and economic collapse exacerbated by the polarizing tendencies of
existing middle-class language.
the civil sphere and the middle class

Though much attention has been paid to the codes of the civil sphere and
movements that deploy civil power (e.g. Alexander 2013; Baiocchi 2006; Lo
and Fan 2010), the role of social class in the civil sphere needs further
explanation. Though “contemporary societies are not simply class societies”
(Alexander 2007:14), class remains an important feature of social stratification
and a framework by which to understand the social world. To be specific, what
is the relationship between the middle class and the civil sphere? This question is
of particular import for the study of Latin American democracies, given the rise
of massive middle-class protests against corruption, populism, and “the
masses” alike, arguing for extraordinary action – impeachment, resignation,
etc. – to remove sitting presidents.
In this sense, the middle class in CST terms may simply be fulfilling what it
was predicted to do by Modernization Theory more than half a century ago –
be a sufficient condition for democracy (e.g. Lipset 1959). In his Political
Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (1958),
John J. Johnson provided the seminal argument for the role of the middle
class in Latin America for the Modernization perspective. While his “middle
sectors” – white-collar government employees, captains of commerce and
industry, and “professional men, teachers, and high-level government
120 Celso M. Villegas
bureaucrats” (Johnson 1958:ix) – “do not fulfill the central condition of

a class [as] their members have no common background of experience”
(Johnson 1958:3), they demonstrated a “continuity of common interests”
(Johnson 1958:5) that thrust them into influential political roles. The crux
of Johnson’ argument lay in his comparative-historical analysis of Uruguay,
Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil – five nations which “set the pattern of
tomorrow for the present feudally held Dominican Republics, the socially
retarded Paraguays, the poverty stricken Haitis, and the strife-torn
Venezuelas” (1958:viii). “[Acutely made] aware of the backwardness of
their homelands” vis-à-vis Western Europe and the United States (Johnson
1958:42), middle-sector groups assiduously pushed for educational reform,
legal rationalization, and political liberalism – all in opposition to the
neofeudal Hispanic cultures of their respective nations. However, just three
years after he wrote Political Change, Johnson was convinced that the middle
sectors were not fulfilling their destined role as modernizers in Latin America,
falling to the “blandishments of both communism and fidelismo . . . They will
need help on a much large scale than responsible elements among them
previous have dared to advocate” (1961:29). This dark insinuation presaged
US support of military governments through the 1960s and 1970s. For
a generation of Latin Americanists, not only were the authoritarian regimes
of that period a clear empirical indication that Modernization Theory should
be rejected, but also that its “carrier class” might not be a worthwhile subject
of study (see Parker 1998:ix, 240; Owensby 1999:6).2
In contrast, in The Civil Sphere, Alexander presents an alternative
explanation for the emergence of class politics in democratic societies (2006:
34–35; 62). Though “there is no inherent relationship between failure to
achieve distinction in the economic realm and failure to sustain expectations
in civil society,” Alexander writes,
The material asymmetry inherent in economic life becomes translated into projections
about civil competence and incompetence. Inside of this translated social language, it
becomes much more difficult for actors without economic achievement or wealth to
communicate effectively in the civil sphere, to receive full respect from its regulatory
institutions, and to interact with other, more economically advantaged people in a fully
civil way. (Alexander 2006:207)
Here, social movements serve the purpose of translating the lived experiences of
class actors into civil terms, formulating ways in which their civil competence
can be broadcast through communicative institutions – mass media, public
polling, and associational life – and their civil power projected through
regulative institutions – voting, parties, office, and law (Alexander 2006:
207–208; 229–234). While different types of work, consumption practices,
property ownership, and educational credentials could all be associated with
differing degrees of civil competence, the interpenetrative and refracting nature
of the civil sphere with other spheres (e.g. the economy) and with
counterpublics (e.g. excluded class communities) suggest that the reference

point for the political articulation of class interests – that is, class formation –
is not the economy and economic change per se, but rather the civil sphere.
Ideal-typically, classes are drawn towards the civil sphere to access civil power,
and effective class-articulated movements frame their lived experiences in the
language of civil competence.
If the civil sphere is the reference point for class formation, then the
democratic qualities of the middle class – interpreted as a function of
economic development by Modernization theorists – are components of its
collective representation produced through the development of actually
existing civil spheres. As Khosrokhavar writes about the Arab Spring, “the
notions of a would-be middle class and a subjective civil society point to the
fact that societies with an inappropriate economic structure can still be ready
for democracy even though the ‘objective’ economic ingredients are missing, or
at best, inadequate” (2012:82). For example, preexisting notions of dignity and
justice embedded in Arab culture compelled the “would-be middle class” to
protest against undemocratic rule (Khosrokhavar 2012:64–71). The would-be
middle class “[became] conscious of its own strength and aware of its ability to
invent a new type of social action, at least in the Muslim world” (Khosrokhavar
2012:81), and “achieving recognition and actively constituting a civil sphere
became part and parcel of their new identity as a new society” (Khosrokhavar
2012:82). Class formation produces depictions of the middle class that are
relatively independent from an “objective” economic position, and thus, CST
suggests the opposite of existing arguments about middle class preferences for
democracy: the stronger the civil sphere, the stronger the tendency for the
collective representation of the middle class to be on the side of civil,
democratic agents.
The strength of the civil sphere and the consequent cultural meaning of the
middle class are empirical questions. CST further distinguishes itself from
Modernization Theory because it emphasizes how historical, functional, and
spatial sedimentations (Alexander 2006:196–204) affect the way
representations of the middle class are constructed and refined through the
civil sphere’s communicative institutions. Narrative representations in
scholarly, popular, and governmental languages link the middle class to
development and democracy as “measures” of the progress of a nation
towards modernity. Underlying these narratives are coded claims about the
civil competence of the middle class (Alexander and Smith 1993:156–157).
Studying the middle class through survey instruments in scholarly studies,
government census calculations, and public opinion polling links projects for
development to their usage as indicators of potentially civil (or uncivil)
constituencies, calling governments to act on behalf of these new “fact-totems”
(Alexander 2006:85–91; see also de Santos 2009). Broad discussion in the mass
media (Alexander 2006:75–80) about the important events in which the middle
class is seen to play a part serves to construct its civic representation across
reading publics and generate a “public narrative” of its past, present, and future
(see Somers 1992:604). Finally, civil associations of a middle-class character, “if
they are intertwined with the full range of communicative and regulative
institutions and the cultural codes” (Alexander 2006:103) can construct civil
collective identities in which class is a relevant and valuable means of
identification, or they may separate middle-class neighborhoods and
movements from slums, barrios, and potential allies (Alexander 2006:
196–199). Ultimately, civil power may be claimed through and against notions
of middle-class civil competence. Harnessed by populist, antipopulist,
corporatist, and liberal forces alike, the middle class is more than a simple
representation of economic interests embodied in group identity and certainly
not reducible to a perennial bulwark for democracy. That said, a civil middle
class offers an avenue to repair civil spheres in the face of economic
contradictions.
This chapter utilizes a combination of secondary and archival sources to
capture the formation of the middle class in public opinion, factual media, and
associational life, as well as its use in party politics. It combines archival sources
from the Biblioteca Nacional de Venezuela, an exhaustive search for references
to la clase media in the two major dailies, El Nacional and El Universal from
1995 to 2016, as well as more recent online sources such as the chavista online
portal Aporrea. These sources were supplemented by additional periodical
materials produced around important events, especially the 2002 coup
attempt, federal and regional elections, and the economic and political crisis of
2014–16.
the middle class during puntofijismo

Named after a power-sharing agreement signed in 1958, the Punto Fijo period
(1958–98) saw a representation of the middle class that anchored the period’s
political stability and booming oil economy. By the late 1970s, however, the
Punto Fijo system became incapable of dealing with growing social
polarization, with the middle class representing the deep functional
contradictions between the economy and civil solidarity.
For much of its history prior to 1958, Venezuela had either been subject to
the competing interests of would-be caudillos, semidemocratic regimes, and
military dictatorships. However, with the development of the oil industry in
1908, a concomitant bureaucratization and rationalization of the state and
economy produced a growth in educated managerial, technical, and service
workers (Karl 1987:70; Buxton 2000:9). In stark contrast to Johnson’s
prediction that these middle sectors would temper Venezuela’s political
strife, the death of longtime dictator Juan Vicente Gomez in 1935 ushered in
a period of intense popular mobilization among leftist and left-leaning
organizations. By 1945, Acción Democrática (AD) – then a radical party led
by student activists – had come to dominate the bulk of Venezuela’s unions
(Collier and Collier 2002:257–262; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992:192). A three-

year radical regime lasting from 1945 to 1948 saw the rule of AD at the head of
a populist alliance of workers, students, and peasants, which took power by
military coup. However, AD antagonized its moderate and conservative
opponents and excluded its military allies from policy making (Collier and
Collier 2002:270; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992:192). A coup in 1948 led by
General Marcos Pérez Jiménez ended the AD’s trienio. Pérez Jiménez would
rule as the head of a government junta and then as president until 1958,
exiling AD leaders, and courting support from the United States as an
anticommunist strongman.
The Pérez Jiménez dictatorship taught AD leaders that naked domination
would be insufficient for rule, regardless of the size and diversity of their social
support; a sustainable democracy would have to be built not on class
antagonism, but democratic agonism. Time in exile moderated AD cadres,
especially the party’s intellectual leader, Romulo Betancourt. In late 1957 and
early 1958, AD, the Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente
(COPEI) and the Union Republicana Democratica (URD) began crafting
a series of political agreements to share power in the event of a democratic
opening. Following the end of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship in 1958, these
agreements would form the basis of Venezuelan partidocracia. As Martz puts it,
the Pact of Punto Fijo was built on a “general desire for moderation and
tolerance” and “cooperation in defense of the democratic system”
(1966:104). In CST terms, AD had to assure its allies it would respect their
political interests, reflecting the logic of democratic agonism necessary in
functional civil spheres (Alexander 2006:124). Crisp elaborates: “a great deal
of effort was put into winning the allegiance of a wide variety of actors . . .
including . . . the minimum government program [specifying intervention in the
economy], the Pact of Owner-Worker Conciliation [establishing peak
bargaining], agreements with the armed forces, and the Law of Ecclesiastical
Patronage, all indicated the desire to guarantee the existence and basic interest
of powerful minorities” (Crisp 1996:35). In sum, these deals established the
basis for puntofijismo’s key regulative institutions – parties, elections, law, and
office – projecting “solidarity commitments from civil sphere to the state”
(Alexander 2006:124).
Discursively, puntofijismo was undergirded by policlasismo (lit.
polyclassism). Innovated by Rómulo Betancourt prior to the AD trienio
(Soteldo 2000), policlasismo imagined a collective nationalist project in which
all social sectors – especially subordinate ones – could harness the power of the
state and the oil economy for political and economic modernization. Underlying
this nationalist and developmental narrative was a hybridized binary coding
(Baiocchi 2006), marrying the civil code affirmed through the Pact of Punto Fijo
with additional dimensions regarding the nationalist project: (1) social unity
versus social conflict, (2) a preference for political stability over destabilizing
forces, (3) national self-determination versus foreign domination, and (4) an
ideal politics as racially and economically equalizing versus relying on racial and
class cleavages. As Lacabana puts it, “subordinate sectors also gained their
incorporation into the political system and the state as part of the dominant
sectors’ construction of hegemony in a social environment in which
predominated a polyclass imaginary: Venezuela as a country of consensus,
without social or racial discrimination” (2006:326).
While the intent of these institutional and discursive innovations was to secure
democracy, they effectively demobilized dissenting groups (McCoy and Smith
1999:122; Schuyler 1996: 20). With political power centralized in the AD-COPEI
coalition, and driven to seek out subordinate groups to incorporate into the
polyclass nation, puntofijismo became less a multisectoral radical project and
more of a narrow assimilationist one (Alexander 2006: 425–457). Dense power
elite networks at the very top linked parties, bureaucrats, and the labor
aristocracy while rigid corporatist ties extended to subordinate classes (see
Ellner 1989; Ray 1969). Eventually, AD and COPEI became programmatically
indistinguishable, serving as vehicles for elites to access state rents in the form of
upper level bureaucratic jobs and/or positions in the party hierarchy. Indeed,
multiple authors have written on the seamy side of Venezuela’s Punto Fijo
democracy, which for all its offerings of political stability and social peace,
provided such peace by denying the existence of social conflict (esp. Coronil
and Skurski 1991).
In this context, the middle class was a contradiction: it was seen – and saw
itself – as the primary beneficiary and key constituent of a purportedly polyclass
project. As the central regulatory institutions of the Punto Fijo civil sphere, AD
and COPEI linked the moral quality of state-led development to positive
representations of the middle class. In a polyclass imaginary where
subordinate sectors struggle in concert for national self-determination, the
middle class appeared as an ally. For example, AD declared to party members
in 1961 that “[AD] . . . represents several social classes, but not all, only three
exploited popular classes, those affected by identical problems and tied together
by a common purpose. The three most energetic and conscious classes thus join
together in a[n] historic task: the workers, the peasants, and the middle class”
(Martz 1966: 369). Here, the AD imbued the middle class with positive
polyclass traits – having a unified perspective as the workers and peasants,
and aligned against the interests of those classes implied to be working against
the Punto Fijo project. In the matter of implementing that project, both AD and
COPEI governments through the 1960 and 1970s understood that a strong
technical class would be necessary to people the oil-revenue fueled state
apparatus (Roberts 2003:46–47). For example, in 1972, the 4th National
Congress of COPEI and Independent Social Christian Professionals and
Technicians declared, “it is necessary that the professional, the technician,
and the scientist, with the passion of a creator . . . but with a maestro’s
mastery, undertake the fundamental work of the development of Venezuela”
(1972:31). Here the technician and their work is held to be almost sublime,
tasked with perfecting the state developmental project. Thus, the middle class
was to be found as a pivotal component to the social unity and economic
progress of the country. Both parties acknowledged the necessary positive role
of the middle class in a polyclass developmental imaginary.
In the communicative institutions, the middle class would also be closely
associated with the state, its bureaucracy, and party-led democracy. In 1973,
the vast majority of Venezuelans considered themselves to be middle class –
57.3 percent, according to the VENEVOTE survey (Baloyra 1977:56; Baloyra
and Martz 1979:15).3 Indicating the space between material conditions and
cultural representations, the authors of the survey found this percentage to be
abnormally high: “this [self-defined] middle class is either too heterogenous, too
incongruent with the socioeconomic stratification of the country, or both”
(1979:15). The political attitudes of this self-identifying middle class tended to
support the role of bureaucrats in government and the effectiveness of the
current political party leadership: “[S]tudents, the middle class, and
professional people form a relatively stable cluster . . . they believe the
bureaucracy to be capable, think government would not improve without
politicians, are most likely to vote null in elections, and have a greater sense
of political efficacy” (Baloyra 1977:58).
Lionized in politics and popular identity, the middle class’s status-seeking
and consumption were remembered in more ambiguous tones. In the late 1960s,
the Venezuelan government pegged the dollar-bolivar exchange rate at 1:4.30.
This artificially high rate of exchange helped to define an era of decadence
encapsulated in the phrase “ta’barato, dame dos” (It’s so cheap, give me two).
In part, this ethos suggested that achieving a higher class status in Venezuela
meant being able to purchase at will. Marquez recalls this period:
A collective dream of unlimited wealth and modernization emerged; for many
Venezuelans in all strata of society, the notion of progress involved the chance to travel
at least as far as Miami, which became a mecca of consumerism . . . We laughed about
ourselves, the “ta’baratos,” people from the lower middle to upper classes who went
crazy in Miami’s malls repeating, “It’s so cheap, give me two.” (Marquez 2004:
198–199)
This “collective dream” contains both a sense of agency and protagonism,
mirroring the political potential of the middle class, but it also contains the
possibility of succumbing to excess – of going “crazy” in the striving for status.
In a polyclass imaginary, middle-class decadence opposed unified goals and
economic equality as it separated the middle class from its allies; from a civil
imaginary, decadence could be seen as uncivil, representing a loss of self-control.
In both, status-seeking rendered the middle class as a civil impurity.
These examples demonstrate an interpenetration of economic and political
spheres with the civil to produce a middle-class inflected version of
a communicative-regulatory spiral. Political and communicative institutions
reinforced a strong collective representation of the middle class. Civil and
polyclass codes intersected on this point: the moral quality of Venezuelan

democracy and development was anchored in a middle class that was a self-
confident, economically ascendant, and politically pivotal agent. At the same
time, the obverse side of that sense of agency was its potential lack of self-
restraint and material crassness. This fused the representation of the middle class
and puntofijismo: confidence in the middle class was at once a representation of
confidence in the Punto Fijo development and political project. As a representation
of both the sublime and excessive in puntofijismo, the ta’barato middle class
undermined the sincerity of political and economic equality.
the end of puntofijismo and the decline of the middle class

As economic boom turned to bust, so too ended the collective representation of
the middle class as a politically and economically central agent. It is worth
outlining the basic features of Venezuela’s economic downturn as the moral
valuation of these shifts again were expressed in collective sentiments about the
middle class. Despite the miniboom in oil prices between 1978 and 1981, the
threat of a major currency crisis precipitated a currency devaluation. “With
devaluation, the economic bubble was pricked” (Hellinger 1991:127), and “by
1985, real GDP was 25 percent lower than it had been just seven years earlier”
(Naim 1993:24). “People believed the problem, if any, lay on the spending side
and not in the size and composition of public revenues” (Naim 1993:38). Thus,
throughout the 1980s, economic policy revolved around postponing and
denying the debt crisis. While growth increased again in 1988, the rest of the
1980s was largely an economic disaster. By 1989, “the poverty rate increased
from 42 to 62 percent of the population, while those living in extreme poverty
more than doubled, from 14 to 30 percent” (Roberts 2003:59).
A turn to neoliberal reform to resolve these economic problems would
prove to be tragic and brutal. After a fractious internal election in which
the AD revealed signs of significant disunity (Ellner 1989:102–104),
former AD president Carlos Andres Pérez won the presidency as an
independent in 1988 with 52.91 percent of the national vote (Karl
1997:175). Pérez agreed to a neoliberal shock package in an attempt to
“sincerar (to make sincere or truthful) the economy” (Coronil and Skurski
1991:296). On February 27, 1989, bus and van drivers in Caracas, the capital
and largest city, protested against a doubling of gas prices. Riots soon broke
out throughout the rest of the country (Hellinger 1991:192–193). Pérez called
a State of Emergency and ordered the military to squelch the riots (Karl
1997:180). “By the time the violence ended on March 5,” Hellinger writes,
“no one could doubt the ferocity of the official response” (1991:193).
Conservative estimates put the death toll at 287, but some NGOs and
foreign press estimates say more than one thousand people had died (Ellner
1989:105; Hellinger 1991:193; McCoy and Smith 1999:133). The caracazo as
it would come to be known, accelerated what was a slow decline of
puntofijismo into a rapid descent, marking the old system as incapable of

acting morally in the midst of crisis.
The caracazo, the economic downturn of the 1980s and 1990s, and the
history of a middle-class “golden age” all added to the collective
representation of an economically and socially insecure middle class in the
1990s. Surveys projected the deep concern that a tangible decline in the
middle class could be felt. According to the results of a 1995 study published
in the news magazine Primicia, the relative size of the middle class had shrunk
from 14% in 1982 to 13% in 1990 and 11% in 1995, while the total percentage
of people living in “relative” and “critical” poverty was 81.58% (Pimentel
1997:33). The piece links this decline in the size of the middle class with
potential political uncertainty: “The situation of the middle class is seen as the
most worrisome expression of this general impoverishment . . . which since
1995 has affected the population much more than the rise in poverty”
(Pimentel 1997:34). “Will it be the primary factor in the next electoral
campaign?” (Pimentel 1997:34). What is telling here is that the rise in
poverty, while important, is less of a concern than the condition of the middle
class. These sentiments are revealed even more tellingly in self-identification
statistics: in 1996, only 29% of Venezuelans considered themselves middle class
versus working class, down from a high of 63% in 1983 and 55% in 1993 (see
Table 5.1). Though the concern with decline demonstrates a belief in the
fundamental importance of the class for the stability of the Punto Fijo system,
measuring out the decline produced deep anxiety over the health of the political
system as a whole.
The “measurable” shrinking of the middle class, its ta’barato past, and its
close association with puntofijismo contributed to a public narrative in the
press that the once culturally and politically dominant middle class had lost its
role as protagonist in Venezuela’s modernization story. Opinion and news
analyses harped on the ironies of the rise and fall of the middle class. As an
table 5.1 Various Opinions of Self-Identified Middle-Class Respondents in

Venezuela
Percentage 1973 1983 1993 1996 2000
Respondents Identifying 59 63 55 29 65
as Middle Class vs.
Working Class
Family Economic 19 45 43 – –
Situation Worse
Than One Year Ago
Willing to Protest – – 19 – 47
Source: Heath 2009

op-ed in El Nacional 1995 puts it, “The 21st century does not seem to bring
good news for the middle class.” After noting the cultural changes brought
about by allowing women to work in the office and the factory, it argues that
“the reign of the individual over the collective” has acted as the “deadly
venom” for spreading middle-class values. “The middle class as we knew
it,” it concludes, “seems to have its days numbered” (Antillano 1995). A few
years later, an El Nacional editorial humorously observed that “the United
Nations, Green Space [sic], and other animal rights movements have classified
the Venezuelan middle class as a species in danger of extinction, together with
the Orinoco caiman” (Calatrava 1997). Both these narratives of middle class
rise and decline follow the logic of the polyclass binary. That “individual”
attitudes came to reign over “collective” ones demonstrates this separation:
what was a class operating in service of the Punto Fijo project had instead
sought its own way, and thus, undermined itself and the regime which had
birthed it.
That said, between the caracazo and Chávez’s election, political discourse
and claim-making began to change, beginning to reposition the middle class
as a key actor in a burgeoning, independent civil sphere. First, the 1990s saw
the rise of the language of “civil society” in Venezuelan political discourse.
Salamanca notes that “before the 1970s the notion of civil society was not an
important element of political discourse in Venezuela” (2004:94). This
would change as political activity found spaces outside the parties and the
state: “a visitor arriving in Venezuela in the early 1990s after an absence of
several decades would have difficulty recognizing the prevailing political
discourse. New and hitherto unknown terms provide reference points for
‘legitimate’ politics . . . There are calls for openness and ‘transparency’ in
politics and administration. One hears constant reference to ‘civil society,’
a phrase unknown ten years ago” (Crisp, Levine, and Rey 1995:151). Second,
civil associations developed rapidly in middle-class neighborhoods away
from the old AD-COPEI networks. Lopez Maya notes that middle-class
protest began to emerge around NIMBY issues, especially security (1999),
and neighborhood associations [asociaciones de vecinos] became “the
pioneer in new civil society activity” (Salamanca 2004:100). Self-identified
middle-class people became more willing to take to the streets – 47% were
willing to take part in a protest in 2000, up from 19% seven years prior
(Table 5.1). “Civil society” would grow slowly during the 1990s, but
alongside the media, “became sui generis political actors seeking to
influence and direct the public administration, even while not directly
competing for power” (Salamanca 2004:93). What these developments
suggest is that the emergent civil sphere provided the potential to purify the
collective representation of the middle class, creating the conditions for
political self-efficacy and self-identification once again.
the rise of chávez and the revolutionary countercode

At the same time that the communicative features of an independent civil sphere
began to emerge at the end of the Punto Fijo period, chavismo and its
institutional and discursive features would overtake it, leaving an indelible
mark on the pattern of middle-class formation. Chávez’s rise to power makes
sense in the context of the contradictions of puntofijismo, the caracazo, and
increasing social inequality. In 1992, led by then-Lt. Col. Hugo Chávez, junior
officers in the Venezuelan army launched two unsuccessful coup attempts
against Pérez with the intent to assassinate him and assume the presidency.
The February 4 and November 27 coups were eventually put down by forces
loyal to Pérez and their leaders put in jail (Levine 2002:264; Norden 1996:78).
The coups had support from all social strata (McCoy and Smith 1999:135), and
when Chávez gave a speech after his arrest, he apologized to the Venezuelan
people for failing on their behalf – something unheard of in Venezuelan politics
up until that time.
Chávez was at first a dark horse candidate during the 1998 elections, but he
built up significant support among those dissatisfied with the old system to win
with 56 percent of the popular vote – most notably, the middle class. According to
Buxton, “at no point was a class based strategy devised that focused solely on the
numerically dominant poor,” and his performances varied: “When touring the
shantytowns or los barrios, Chávez commonly wore his military uniform, used
colloquial terms in fiery anti-party speeches, promised improved distribution and
sought direct contact with the people. Alternatively, when meeting with the
private sector or addressing predominantly middle-class audiences, the tone
was moderated, private sector interests recognized and the military uniform
exchanged for a suit and tie” (2000: 27). This dual performance during his
campaign demonstrated Chávez’s deft deployment of a populist countercode
(see Table 5.2; cf. Gauna 2016), but also a capability to present his candidacy
as a civil one. This performative strategy paid off: “Chávez . . . received broad
electoral support – not just from the marginalized sectors, but also from parts of
the middle class and business leaders” (McCoy 1999:76).
While literature attributes growing polarization and middle-class opposition
to chavismo to Chávez as a figure (e.g. Hawkins 2003), Chávez’s rhetoric
(Zuquete 2008) or socioeconomic polarization (Roberts 2003) in CST terms,
Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution was a revolution in solidarity: a transformation
of the existing regulatory, communicative, and discursive structures. Certainly,
there are deep intertextual connections between puntofijismo’s statism, class
solidarity, and nationalism and chavismo’s representation of Chávez himself as
the state, the claimed reduction in distance between el pueblo and political
institutions, and its anti-neoliberal and anti-US sentiments. However,
chavismo offered a contrast to puntofijimo’s stable, conflict-free society:
[T]he counterdiscourse is in opposition to the concept of “the public” promoted by
Punto Fijo democracy: a pacific society, free of class and racial conflict, in which political
table 5.2 The Bolivarian Revolutionary Code
Valued Traits Devalued Traits
Motives Revolucionaria Fascista

Revolutionary Fascist
Despertada/Consciente Dormida/Inconsciente
Awakened/Conscious Asleep/Unconscious
Relationships Amor del Pueblo/Nativa Apátrida/Extranjera
Love of Country/Native Stateless/Foreigner
Lucha de Clases Antagonista Negación del Conflicto de Clases
Antagonistic Class Struggle Denial of Class Conflict
Institutions Solidaria Capitalista
Solidary Capitalist
del Pueblo/Marginalizada Oligarca/Privilegiada
of the people/marginalized oligarchic/privileged
From Spanakos (2011), others
concerns were mediated by two relatively centrist political parties and a redistributive
state . . . In contrast, the counterdiscourse of Bolivarianism highlights class conflict,
repression of the Other, oligarchization, and the subordination of domestic needs to
the whims of international agents. The majority that was purposely ignored and
repressed by the elite has now “awakened” and is unwilling to go back to its barrios.
(Spanakos 2011; see Table 5.2)
Chávez sought to change how the law, parties, and elections served to project
the solidarity commitments of puntofijismo as those of a narrow few. As soon as
he was elected, Chávez followed through on his promise to call a Constituent
Assembly to write a new constitution. As legal wrangling by AD and COPEI to
stop the Assembly vote failed, Chávez collected even more popular support for
the plan (McCoy 1999:73). Assured of a comfortable majority, Chávez
proposed and passed 350 new articles (Corrales 2000:41). Chavista
supporters would carry around pocket-sized copies of this new constitution,
demonstrating the projection of el pueblo’s solidarity commitments via law
onto the state.
Chávez next targeted the relationship between the state and organized labor
and business interests, labeling both as deeply corrupt remnants of the Punto
Fijo regime. Chávez sought to weaken the Worker’s Confederation of
Venezuela (CTV, Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela), the country’s
main labor union, long connected to AD and to the state. Chávez succeeded in
eliminating the union subsidies that the CTV had managed to keep through
1980s (Ellner 2001:22), but failed to remove its top leaders in a 2000
referendum (Ellner 2003:172). Long understood as the main representative of
the business elite in Venezuela, the Federation of Chambers of Commerce

(FEDECAMARAS, Federación de Cámaras y Asociaciones de Comercio
y Producción de Venezuela) was Chávez’s next target. Chávez got caught in
an escalating war of words and policies with FEDECAMARAS in 2001,
pushing through 49 laws without their consultation (Ortiz 2004:79, 88–89),
precipitating a call for a national strike by FEDECAMARAS in December of
2001, which led directly into Chávez’s firing of opposition executives in the
state oil company, PDVSA on April 6, 2002 – the catalyzing moment for the 11-
A protests.
a failed revolution “from the middle” and a contested

class narrative
Both CTV and FEDECAMARAS found common cause to oppose Chávez’s
restructuring of the state and agreed to call a general strike on April 9.
The next day, both groups agreed to extend the strike, and on April 11 (the
eponymous 11-A), around one million protesters marched in streets of Caracas.
Shot were fired into the crowds by unknown assailants, killing 19 people, and
a faction of the military arrested Chávez after he refused to resign. Installed by
this splinter group of the military, FEDECAMARAS president Pedro Carmona
assumed the presidency and dissolved both Congress and the Supreme Court.
Media coverage, which had been vociferous up till Chávez’s absence, grew silent
with Carmona’s antidemocratic moves. Carmona lost military and labor
support when they saw him abrogate democratic guarantees. As Carmona’s
government crumbled, thousands of pro-Chávez demonstrators filled the
streets – many from the barrio slums surrounding the city – calling for
Chávez’s return. In the face of counterdemonstrations and military defections,
Carmona abdicated and Chávez returned to the presidency. The exact details of
11-A are a matter of debate between chavista and antichavista forces, especially
whether or not the events amounted to a coup, whether or not Chávez
voluntarily left office, and which protesters caused violence. The ambiguities
of 11-A make it difficult for either side to make a claim that their actions during
that time were fully democratic or even simply nonviolent.
In regard to middle-class formation, evidence shows that there was an
incipient ascendant middle-class narrative – one that lauded the middle class
as a civil historical actor in its own right – as protests against Chávez picked
up in early 2002 until April 12 when Chávez returned to the presidential
palace. The middle class appeared in the pages of El Nacional in early 2002
as an ascendant, civil democratic force. For example, according to interviews
in El Nacional, “A good part of the middle class decided to go out to the
streets. It left the comfort of their homes and apartments, abandoned the
comfort of their circumscribed family lives, the kids, school, the shopping
mall, the car, work, cable TV, and they launched themselves into public
space” (Lacurcia 2002). This year of prior protest helped to “produce in
sectors of the middle class a strong feeling of power and confidence, of being
in the majority” (Lacurcia 2002). The middle class in this account leaves
behind its quotidian and consumerist life to protest, transforming itself from
being inwardly oriented to externally oriented. This leaving behind of its
circumscribed material life empowers and justifies its civil political action.
Like dirt traversing the boundary from profane to sacred (Douglas 2002
[1966]), the movement from impure consumers to ascetic protesters
empowers the actor and threatens the order of things. This new ascetically
transformed civil action emerged from exclusionary discourse by Chávez:
That exclusionary discourse has led the middle class to harbor “the democratic creed,”
and to unfurl banners about a series of beliefs about democracy that had never before
interested the middle class because it had not been excluded as it is today. The democratic
creed claims that we are all equal before the law, that power should not be used
capriciously and arbitrarily, that it must conform to the rules of democratic play and
that it is limited, that the groups have the right to dissent and to challenge the
Government’s decisions, that authority is temporary and has an end, and that if a ruler
goes too far in the powers that the people have entrusted to him, that people have the
right and the duty to oppose it[.] (Lacurcia 2002)
Here, the claim is that in response to exclusion from the Chávez regime, the
middle class couches its political action using a civil horizon: equality over
hierarchy, rule of law over arbitrary power, and that violating those
distinctions justifies political action as a duty. Another thread focused on the
education and rationality of the middle class as a key dimension of its
willingness to take the streets. For example, trying to make sense of reports of
middle-class protests, one author writes, “as [we] have seen in countless other
articles published in this newspaper [El Nacional], the intelligent middle class,
the hundreds of men and women whose standard of living has permitted us to
make use of the benefits of the comprehension of this environment” (Tortolero
2002). In all these examples, the protests served to reinvigorate a collective
representation of the middle class as a political agent, capable of acting in civic
ways as an educated rational collectivity and as a moral majority.
However, the failure of 11-A to fully dislodge Chávez from power prevented
the development of a fully civic and ascendant middle-class narrative because
without a “victory,” there was no class-advancing event to plot. This ambiguity
set the stage for pro-Chávez forces to challenge anti-Chávez accounts of 11-A,
especially in regard to the role of class conflict. In the immediate aftermath of
11-A, the government established a fact-finding commission to produce a report
on the events of 11-A. In their testimony for the commission, pro-Chávez forces
were quick to call the protests part of a conspiracy to effect a coup. Claims of
conspiracy and coup-plotting to undermine the rule of law follow the logic of
the civil code, but the revolutionary code attaches meaning to class conflict,
rendering good and evil based on perceived class membership. According to
Cannon, chavistas explicitly called the protesters “middle class” to counter
protesters’ claims that they were part of a multisectoral “civil society” (2004:
298). As Chávez’s defense minister Jose Vicente Rangel put it: “Here they
deliberately and calculatingly pushed through a conspiracy in which economic
sectors, social sectors of the middle class were used, which then induced sectors
of the Armed Forces to act on the dawn of the 11th [of April]” (Rangel, as cited
in Rodriguez 2002:38). Again, while these characterizations are logical via the
civil code, the government report of the events states that “[an] elementary error
of those involved in the coup was to try to identify themselves as ‘civil society’
when in effect they were part caraqueno society and the middle class”
(Asamblea Nacional, as cited in Cannon 2004:298). In other words, the
official government narrative followed closely the revolutionary code,
emphasizing the centrality of class conflict, and the conservative and
antirevolutionary character of the protesters simply by naming them “middle
class.” In an unsigned opinion piece in El Nacional in May of 2002 entitled
“Prohibido Olvidar” (Never Forget), the author sarcastically reproduces the
sentiments of anti-Chávez journalist Francisco Bautista: “We are not afraid.
The middle and professional classes are not scared by announcements that they
[the poor] will come down from the hills if Chávez leaves [office]; nor by saying
that the chavistas are waiting for us armed in Miraflores [the presidential
palace], will stop us from fighting . . . not even the ghost of the circulos
[bolivarianos] haunting us will be able to get us to leave” (“Prohibido
Olvidar” 2002). Here, the author seeks to reinforce to the public that the 11-
A protesters were not civic-minded democrats, but rather that they were
explicitly engaged in a polarizing class conflict, “proving” that their class-
based interests were oriented against the poor and marginalized who
supported Chávez.
In stark contrast, anti-Chávez participants, pundits, and scholars denied the
class-based dimension of the 11-A protest. The absence of class language and
the elevation of “civil society” as the catchall moniker for the protesters
indicates an intention on the part of the anti-Chávez forces to deny class
polarization had fomented the coup. As Cannon points out, they preferred to
call their protests the product of “civil society” (2004; see also Hernandez
2004). Framing the protests as such would, in CST terms, align their interests
with a civil-solidaristic public. For example, former director of PDVSA
Guaicaipuro Lameda argued that “civil society . . . which in the last year had
been growing in size, had a single motivation: petition the Government to
change direction” (Lameda, as cited in Rodriguez 2002:42). For the
opposition, Chávez’s rhetoric only reinforced middle-class fears about the
country being run by the uneducated and emotional: “the image is projected
of a pueblo being easily manipulated and incapable of thinking rationally”
(Cannon 2004:45). Thus, deploying civil society language followed closely the
binary logic of civil society, and served to offer a purifying counterargument to
chavista claims that economic interests were the foundational motivation for
the protests.
However, when chavista and antichavista storytellers tried to come to grips

with the role of the middle class in Venezuelan history in light of 11-A, they
converged on narratives that described a feckless, oblivious, and politically
immature middle class, though from different discursive directions.
Underlying this narrative convergence, however, were familiar binary
distinctions about the value consistency of the middle class, analogous to
a civil rational/irrational distinction in the civil sphere. As a chavista-
sympathizing letter to the editor read in 2003:
[The] middle class lacks a sense of political culture, perhaps for remaining for decades in
constant apathy before national reality. Such apathy translates into the risk of political
freefall for the middle class because they support any discourse against Chávez, without
analyzing from whom it came, or what greater damage it can do to the country . . .
The middle class in political freefall has to wake up in the face of opposition political
discourses, to analyze which deserve validation and support and which do not.
(Gonzáles 2003)
In this paragraph, the middle class acts uncritically and irrationally, without
a moral and cultural mooring to help it judge good politics from bad. Implicit is
that the revolutionary code would be a superior meaning-making framework:
apathy (apatía) here is homologous with unconscious (inconsciente). A civilly
oriented opinion writer wrote prior to the 2004 recall referendum (which
Chávez won): “In a word: the Venezuelan middle class has been insensitive to
social problems, as if those problems were never going to affect it. And, in doing
so it has spawned its own antagonist: the Chávez regime” (Dessiato 2004).
What should the middle class do? “The Venezuelan middle class has to reflect
on itself in order to become the mediation between [political] poles” (Dessiato
2004). Here, the author renders the middle class as self-centered and only aware
of its civic duty as democracy’s carrier class when it loses its own privileges.
Because it did not act decisively in the past against inequality, it created the
social conditions that led to Chávez, and thus, the very necessity of a recall
referendum in the first place. Its purpose, however, is not to ally with
revolutionary forces, but rather it should organize itself to become a political
mediator.
With both sides divided over who can be called middle class and to what
degree, its political potential, and what role it should play, the result was
a narrative of middle-class politics that rendered it a tainted actor in the eyes
of both revolutionary and civil codes. Without a clear-cut victory for
democratic forces during 11-A, the collective representation of the middle
class could not sustain claims of civic purity.
the authenticity problem for a chavista middle class

The period after 2002 saw an intensification of the Bolivarian revolutionary
project. Chávez grew bolder in his public policy in the wake of 11-A – his series
table 5.3 Friends and Enemies in the Chavista Imaginary, post-2002
El Pueblo – The People Los Escuálidos – The Squalid Ones
Clases Populares (Popular Classes) Clases Capitalistas (Capitalist Classes)

los pobres, el proletariado, incluso la clase la burguesía, la clase media (the
media positiva (the poor, the proletariat, bourgeoisie, the middle class)
including the positive middle class)
Organizaciones Comunales (Communal Organizaciones Exclusivas (Exclusive
Organizations) Organizations)
Círculos Bolivarianos, consejos comunales e.g. asociaciones de vecinos (neighborhood
(Bolivarian Circles, community councils) associations)
Medios de Comunicación Revolucionarias Falsimedia (The False or Fake Media) – e.g.
(Revolutionary Media) – e.g. Telesur, Venevision, Dollartoday,
Aporrea etc. Maduradas, etc.
Organizaciones de la Economía Solidaria Organizaciones Capitalistas (Capitalist
(Solidary Economic Organizations) Organizations)
e.g. sindicatos revolucionarias FEDECAMARARAS, La Polar, etc.
(revolutionary unions)
Gran Polo Patriótico (Great Patriotic Pole) Coordinador Demócratica/Mesa de
Unidad Democrática (Democratic
Coordinator/Democratic Unity
Roundtable)
PSUV, MVR, PPT, etc. AD/COPEI, PJ, VP, UNT, etc.
From García-Guadilla (2006:149–150), and other sources
of Bolivarian Missions starting in 2003 aimed at alleviating poverty, and

brought basic foodstuffs, healthcare, and education to poor neighborhoods.
Chávez restructured community-level popular organizations to encourage
direct political engagement, emphasizing it along with the new redistributive
misiones and popular organizations such as circulos bolivarianos and
community councils (see Ramírez 2006:127–129). After the 2006 presidential
elections, Chávez consolidated sympathetic left-leaning parties into the Partido
Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV). Chávez blamed media outlets
(falsimedia) for promoting the 2002 coup, and rescinded the broadcast license
of television network RCTV in 2007, while simultaneously promoting state-run
network Telesur. In the post 11-A chavista imaginary, these new regulatory and
communicative transformations were opposed to similar ones that were built
around supporting the oligarchic opposition, dubbed los esquálidos (the squalid
ones) (see Table 5.3). Indeed, public opinion surveys in 2002–03 reinforce this
polarized context: “the Venezuelan middle and upper classes view the typical
poor person as a criminal and characterize his organizations as violent” while
chavistas tends to see themselves as “the people” and “sovereign” and the
middle and upper classes as “corrupt,” “exploitative,” and “oligarchs”

(García-Guadilla 2006:150).
However, the placement of the middle class with the oligarchy did not fit with
a purportedly inclusive social project that included all subordinate classes. Such
a vision of el pueblo had to deal with the internal contradiction of middle-class
support for the Chávez regime. This presented an authenticity problem: Could
a solidaristic vision of the revolution contain forces which had been
systematically labeled as anti-revolutionary in the wake of 11-A? On the other
hand, left-leaning middle-class activists sympathetic to the Bolivarian process
sought a more pronounced role in the larger movement, but on terms that
reflected what they saw as their unique class perspective, creating an internal
authenticity problem: Would chavistas accept self-styled middle-class people as
revolutionaries?
These problems were exacerbated by the structure of the revolutionary code:
it allowed for dismissive challenges to the inherent democratic capacity of the
“fascist” middle class by leaning on the failure of the 11-A protests. Still, civil
coding appears in chavista attacks on the middle class. For example, writing in
Aporrea, one author describes interacting with her middle-class anti-Chávez
neighbors and rants that “for a chavista, it is torture to live in a neighborhood
full of that stupid and alienated middle class . . . [they are] fascist and full of
hatred, racism and contempt, [they are] unconscious and gossipy, shabby and
consumerist” (Mujica 2010). The fascist/revolutionary and unconscious/
conscious distinction is present here, marking them negatively within the
revolutionary code. The author writes later that “they insist that socialism
and Chávez are to blame for everything that happens on our planet . . .
If the Mayans end up being right and in 2012 the Earth kicks us out, I do not
doubt that the stupid and alienated middle class, instead of trying to take
shelter, will dedicate itself to shouting and insulting until they’re hoarse that
‘the prophesy is Chávez’s fault’” (Mujica 2010). Here, she sees her neighbors
acting irrationally – an uncivil quality – blaming all bad news on Chávez simply
from their opposition to him, to the extent to which they may not see their own
demise. In other words, in both revolutionary and civil terms, these middle-class
neighbors are not worth saving.
Similarly, in a piece titled “Why the Self-Styled Middle Class Hates Chávez
and Maduro,” the authors offer a strict Marxist analysis, concluding that the
middle class “is the most déclassé, the most backwards, with fascist tendencies,
being very exclusive, resentful, irrational, and feeling bad for itself” (Araque
Pino 2014). While commentaries like these resemble similar representations of
an uncivil middle that is self-centered and closed-minded, when combined with
the revolutionary code, these commentaries reduce Chávez’s middle-class
opponents to implacable foes – not only are they uncivil, but they are also
fascist and backwards, that is, not revolutionary. This amplifies the internal and
external authenticity problem of chavismo posed by having and seeking middle-
class support for el proceso.
The middle class in the chavista rank-and-file have expressed difficulty

dealing with both antichavistas and their own partisans as well, requiring
intricate performances of class. In a piece titled “Middle Chavismo is
Clandestine because Intolerance is Full Chola [Pedal-to-the-Metal],”4 chavista
journalist Clodovaldo Hernández writes, “many Chavez sympathizers hide
their political preferences to the point where they can pass as adversaries to
the Bolivarian process. This way of surviving, of avoiding rejection, is not
limited to any specific individual but also encompasses their families,
including – and this is the most painful – their little sons, daughters, and
teenagers” (Hernández 2012). Where middle-class chavismo is hidden in
public, proclaiming support for the revolution to other chavistas also evokes
authenticity counterclaims. Responding to the “ultraleftist” claims of television
host Mario Silva denigrating the role of the middle class in the Revolution;
Roberto López Sánchez countered,
I spent 11 years in armed rebellion in the 70s and 80s. I worked as a textile worker in
a factory in Caracas. I was a member of the Américo Silva Guerilla Front in the east, and
then spent six years in a clandestine cell that led me to explore much of Venezuela. In all
that time, the people who sustained the revolution, almost all of them, let’s say 95%, were
middle class . . . It interests us to note that for thirty years the world socialist revolution in
Venezuela was associated with the university-educated middle class, that same middle
class that hates Mario Silva and other leaders of el proceso. (López Sánchez 2015)
Here, the familiar qualities of a civic middle class return but are used to
justify the value of the middle class to the revolution. In this representation,
revolution required the work of the university-educated, self-sacrificing
(ascetic) middle class, and that this middle class stands in sympathy with el
proceso while retaining a unique critical stance towards its leadership because
of those qualities. Independence, rational thinking, and self-sacrifice align with
being politically awakened and revolutionary – two positive qualities in the
revolutionary code. Indeed, this “civil chavista” middle class challenges
a revolutionary coding that lumps the middle class with the bourgeoisie.
Perhaps the best example of these authenticity problems is Clase Media en
Positivo (CMP), a pro-Chávez association. The forerunners to CMP emerged in
2002 in wake of 11-A. Umbrella organizations such as La Federacion de
Sociedades Civiles de Clase Media con El Proceso Bolivariano (Federation of
Middle-Class Civil Societies with the Bolivarian Process) and other explicitly
middle class pro-Chávez groups began to carry out counterprotests as the
opposition was planning a general strike in the months following 11-A in 2002.
The first CMP cells began appearing in Caracas later that year.5 By early 2003,
chapters of CMP began to open across Venezuela organized by state, with major
cities like Caracas opening multiple chapters or integrating already-existing redes
and circulos bolivarianos in middle-class neighborhoods.6 CMP events that were
advertised on Aporrea ranged from meetings and food drives to marches and
cultural events.
However, CMP would face multiple challenges to its role in the revolution
and in terms of its validity as a representation of middle-class support for
Chávez, generally rendering it an “imitation” of authentic middle-class action
(Alexander 2011:54–55). First, anti-Chávez attacks on the CMP centered on
the implausibility of a middle class supporting Chávez and on the political
aspirations of the group’s leadership. In 2014, an op-ed in El Universal
claimed that “ever since this so-called revolutionary process began, the
government has been very effective in creating parallel institutions and
pushing propaganda above reality, creating things like Clase Media en
Positivo or the Clase Media Socialisita, whose fundamental objective was and
is to generate a current of favorable opinions” for government policy in
education and development (Rojas L. 2014). CMP simply “pushed
propaganda on top of reality” because “the middle class is a travesty of what
it was, and the impact of its decline is noted directly in the country’s economy”
(Rojas L. 2014). From the perspective of the opposition’s civil code, this
suggests the CMP is making deceitful and conspiratorial claims about the
“objective” reality of middle-class decline in service of the government, in
both cases rendering the CMP to be untrustworthy. Implicitly, the “real”
middle class sees through these failed performances.
But second, CMP also met with disdain from within chavista ranks as its
official leadership appeared to be “manipulating its audience” (Alexander
2011:54). Clase Media en Positivo has been closely associated with Titina
Azuaje, former Minister of Tourism and perennial runner-up for the position
of mayor of Chacao, and Gabriela Ramírez, a former National Assembly
member and current Ombudsman. This has given CMP the perception that it
is mostly an Astroturf organization, run by the boliburguesia, a derisive term for
rent-seeking chavista bureaucrats. Internecine struggles emerged, ostensibly
oriented towards purifying the purpose of the movement. In 2006, CMP
member Reinaldo Quijada formed a splinter group, Clase Media
Revolucionaria, as a political party and supported Chávez’s election
campaign – a move that was repudiated by Azuaje and Ramírez (Aporrea.org
2006).
the last chance for the middle class?

Towards the end of his life, Chávez’s plebiscitary rule trended more
authoritarian. Chávez tamped down on opposition media, sought to remove
his own term limits, increased the role of the military in social policy, and
preferred to rule by decree despite having large majorities in the National
Assembly. Despite having a collective sentiment opposed to this centralization
of power, the opposition was only partially effective in challenging Chávez at
the polls – defeating a constitutional referendum in late 2006 and winning
regional and parliamentary elections in 2014, but losing presidential elections
in 2006, 2012, and in 2013 against Chávez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro. Part of
the weakness of the opposition is its fractious nature: contested internal debates
have produced losing presidential candidates in 2006 (Manuel Rosales) and
2012 (Henrique Capriles), but the political parties that made up the
Coordinadora Democrática and the current coalition, the Mesa de Unidad
Democrática (MUD), are at best a negative coalition.
Still, protesters have taken to the streets over the severe economic downturn,
high inflation, and an astounding amount of urban crime. In February of 2014,
the government arrested students protesting the rape of a college student in
Tachira and Merida, sparking student protests in Caracas calling for their
release and against the Maduro government’s handling of crime and the
economy. The protests drew thousands and were met with force, resulting in
the deaths of 43 opposition and progovernment protesters. Maduro and his
surrogates derided the protests as “fascist” and made reference to the 2002
failed coup, singling out Voluntad Popular leader Leopoldo López as the
instigator of the most violent protests in late February. In an elaborate and
carefully choreographed performance to demonstrate the incivility and
asymmetry of the government’s response, López turned himself into the
police, surrounded by his family and thousands of supporters to serve
a thirteen-year nine-month prison term.7
What is remarkable is that instead of condemning the middle-classness of the
protests, prominent voices sympathetic to the government have attempted to
demonstrate exceptional care when talking about the role of the middle class.
In March of 2014, Vice-President Jorge Arreaza was careful to establish that
when Maduro “has called someone ‘bourgeois,’ he’s not referring to the
millions of middle-class compatriots. He’s talking about those who
concentrate power, capital, and own the means of production, which exploits
a good part of the middle class” (la Cruz 2014). In line with the revolutionary
code, this move discursively shifts the middle class away from oligarchic classes
into the ranks of the marginalized. Carlos Hurtado of Clase Media Socialista
stated, “the middle class is the brain and the lower class the motor [of the
economy], the government has to go to the rescue of the middle sectors” (Suárez
2016). For Hurtado, “there are people who live in the barrios who consider
themselves middle class because of their income, social condition . . . they don’t
necessarily have to be professionals” (Suárez 2016). In this move, Hurtado
attempts to purify the middle class in the eyes of the revolutionary code by
shifting their spatial location away from elite urbanizaciones to the barrio
slums. If self-defined middle-class people live in slum neighborhoods, then
they should be worthy of the revolutionary government’s attention. These
statements are both careful attempts at saving face – they reposition and
redefine the middle class so that it acquires discursively revolutionary traits.
Another marked change since the 2012 elections has been deployment of the
middle class as a means by which to translate the economic crisis into civil
terms, using the middle class as a gauge to measure government’s moral
stewardship of the economy via the civil code. “When the government
proposes to fight inflation, it does it with the popular sectors in mind for the
electoral spoils it represents[,]” an op-ed by former diplomat Oscar Hernández
Bernalette in El Universal argues. “It is for those reasons that we say that the
middle class is hit harder today than ever . . . Instead of helping to overcome the
crisis and raise more Venezuelans to higher living standards, [the government]
sinks precisely those who have done the most to contribute to the development
of the country” (Hernández 2013). In this rendering, the government acts only
with an eye to its own power and beholden to electoral strategy, not civil
morality. Hernández would repeat these points in March of 2014 in the
context of the year’s protests: “It’s true that the middle class together with the
students have played an important protagonistic role in the peaceful struggles in
these last few weeks in Venezuela. It is the sector hit hardest during these years
of political and economic miscues” (Hernández 2014). Contrasted to the
declining middle-class narratives of the 1990s, these claims turn middle-class
decline into a moral measurement of Venezuela’s economic problems. Indeed,
opposition critics have conceded that the early Chávez period had increased the
size of the middle class, but that the economic crisis has increased the number of
the poor and decreased the size of the middle class, as family incomes of middle-
class segments had dropped 15% from 2014 to 2015, food prices have risen
25%, and the economy has stagnated in general (Marcano 2015). This
statistical work and debate to define the contours of middle-class suffering (or
success) is deployed to justify economic intervention, and to justify potential
political action: an ascetic, self-sacrificing middle class has purified political
motives in the civil code.
Indeed, this sense that shared suffering is equivalent in some form to the
conditions of poverty forms the basis of the opposition’s class-based appeals to
solidarity and empathy. Given a context of competing codes, the middle class is
positioned as moderating and not seeking conflict. In an interview with El
Universal, MUD general secretary Jesus “Chuo” Torrealba outlined the case
for an alliance between la clase media and los pobres:
We’re not going to make the disastrous error of counterpoising popular sectors with
middle class. First, because our middle class is a recent reality, appearing during our
democracy. This means to say that the nexus between the popular sectors and the middle
class is not only theoretical, but also consanguineous. Every middle-class family has its
father or grandfather living in a barrio. As such, the middle class are people who took
advantage of opportunities given by democracy to better their living standards. (Giusti
2014)
Here Torrealba lays out a new narrative of middle-class formation with an

underlying civil coding. Middle classes are not opposed to the poor in their
political interests because middle-class families share with the poor a history of
poverty but were given opportunities to act free from political domination. This
is a claim to asceticism and transformation via the democratic regime that this
middle class represents. In this strategy, the middle class is a civil actor oriented
towards opening those opportunities through moderation, not polarization.

Alliance aside, the statement indicates a possible reimagining of the
democratic and solidaristic potential of the middle class.
conclusion
This chapter makes two contributions to CST. Empirically it demonstrates that
in Venezuela, historical sediments and the presence of countercodes have
exacerbated civil repair, with the collective representation of the middle class
changing alongside the elaboration of the civil sphere itself. It has argued that
the 2002 protests served as a death knell to an already-eroding notion of
a democratic and stabilizing Venezuelan middle class. The consequence is that
the idea of an inclusive and democratic middle class has been unavailable or
incomprehensible for either chavista or antichavista forces until recently.
The ambiguous collective representation of the middle class provides not only
a series of authenticity problems for both sides, but also serves as a prime
example of the mutual untranslatability of the civil and revolutionary codes.
This prevents both anti- and pro-Chávez forces from developing a more
inclusive political discourse and encouraging further polarization. It is one
factor among many that increases the potential of more extra-institutional
and anti-democratic politics in the future.
What this suggests is that there may be a cultural structure of middle-class
politics in and of itself which poses different kinds of contradictory discursive
issues for the polyclass, revolutionary, and civil codes in Venezuela.
The ambiguity of the democratic potential of the middle class in Venezuela
offers a theoretical contribution to CST: collective representations of the middle
class have a semiotic structure, a binary code that contains the symbolic
potential for both a protagonist, democratic middle class and a middle class
that is an impediment towards democratic deepening (Table 5.4). Middle-class
formation is anchored around a symbolic framework that renders the class
a positive agent for the advancement of the civil sphere – “subjectivized” in
the words of Khosrokhavar, “conscious of its own strength” (2012:81) – or one
that exists “for itself,” but to the degree that it cannot be counted on to support
table 5.4 The Cultural Structure of Middle-Class Politics
Protagonist Middle Class Antagonist Middle Class
Economic Position Independent Dependent

Status Orientation Equalizing Striving
Consumption Patterns Ascetic Indulgent
Value Stability Consistent Fickle
Political Role Moderating Polarizing
for civil solidarity. Rendering the middle class as such explains why even if the
various rising and declining narratives of class in Venezuela remain structurally
similar, they offer predictive power in how future narratives may change.
Looking closely at the patterns of class language in Venezuela, five symbolic
axes appear to characterize the binary variations between protagonist and
antagonist middle classes – economic position, status orientation,
consumption patterns, value stability, and political role. As semiotic
structures, these codes are the means by which the civil sphere translates
economic and political sphere inputs into moral-civic qualities, and vice versa.
As such they are intertextually related to the binary structure of motives,
relationships, and institutions.
These binary codes have structured cultural representations of the middle
class in the following ways. Middle classes that are economically independent
can be counted on to act from a stable material base, while dependent middle
classes cannot be counted on to develop separate interests from classes with
economic leverage over them. Status-equalizing middle classes seek to spread
the benefits of the middle rank, while striving middle classes may act in ways
that protect their status position and undermine the attempts of others to climb
the social hierarchy. Ascetic middle classes make material sacrifices that purify
their political motives, while indulgent middle classes are tainted by a preference
towards profligate consumption. Stable, consistent values characterize the
middle classes that represent the steady core of democracies, while fickle
middle classes act as if they have no moral mooring. And as Aristotle argued,
a moderating middle class reigns in the political excesses of other classes, while
a middle class that polarizes exacerbates class conflict by joining in. In several
instances described above, the communicative and regulative institutions of
Venezuela’s many civil spheres have projected and reinforced these
representations in political discourse, statistical measurement, and public
narratives. The authenticity problems of chavista and anti-chavista middle
classes also reflect these distinctions, with inauthentic performances of middle-
class politics rendered as the result of economic dependency, status-striving,
indulgent consumption, fickle morals, and polarizing politics. In theory, this
cultural structure makes possible a stable democratic politics amidst the
contradictions of the economic sphere.
This middle-class code has had variable relationships with the polyclass,
revolutionary, and civil codes. The polyclass and middle-class codes were
generally compatible, but certain qualities of the middle-class code – especially
its representations of economic independence, consumption, and status – were
especially damaging to a discursive imaginary where classes were supposedly
equal partners in politics and economy. Combinations of the revolutionary code
and the middle-class code have produced a debate between assimilative or
hyphenated incorporation into el proceso – Should middle classes give up their
qualities to be part of the revolution, or can their traits be considered primordial,
but acceptable (esp. Alexander 2006:426–433)? The very name Clase Media en
Positivo suggests a hyphenated pathway, with its performative issues

demonstrating the asymmetry of conceptions about the revolutionary
competence of the middle class. Finally, though the civil code and middle-class
codes are homologous and compatible, unlike the polyclass and revolutionary
codes, the civil code does not inherently render social class as part of its binary
structure. Thus, the civil sphere requires middle-class formation to instantiate the
middle-class code. At best, this process is stalled in Venezuela, ironically set back
because of the 11-A coup, and now limited by increasingly polarized discursive
conditions.
That being said, CST suggests that a strong and independent civil sphere
can mitigate the effects of economic and political contradictions to foster
social solidarity. If the qualities of the civil sphere and its historical
contradictions inform the democratic qualities of the middle class, then it
is democracy – even incipient democracies – that makes the middle class, not
the other way around. Indeed, as in the Arab Spring, civil spheres may be
capable of creating democratic subjects from class-stratified societies.
Whether the MUD’s new middle-class coalition or the Maduro
government’s newfound middle-class sensitivity succeeds largely depends
on how effectively they can harness media, polling, and associational life
to authentically reinforce an independent, equalizing, consistent, and
moderating collective representation. Otherwise, we may see new cycles of
protest and asymmetrical response.
notes
A portion of the research here was conducted under the auspices of the Centro de
Estudios de Desarrollo, Universidad Central de Venezuela (CENDES-UCV). An early
version of this chapter was presented at the 2013 meetings of the American Sociological
Association, and subsequently Guillermo Garcia provided research assistance for this
iteration. Many thanks to Jeff Alexander, Carlo Tognato, and the commentators at the
Civil Sphere in Latin America conference, June 24–25, 2016 for their criticism and
insight.
1. OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro announced the OAS’s involvement in the
situation with the intention to undertake “the necessary diplomatic efforts to
promote the normalization of the situation and restore democratic institutions”
(OAS 2016).
2. Recent work by historians has made great strides in reigniting the study of the middle
class in Latin America (Parker and Walker, eds. 2013) and around the world (Lopez
and Weinstein, eds. 2012).
3. The question in the survey asked, “Today, much is said and written about social
classes – which social class do you belong to?” (Baloyra and Martz 1979:15, 224; my
translation from the original question in Spanish).
4. “Fullchola” is also the nickname of Juan Manuel Laguardia, a radio host and Chávez
critic.
5. Many thanks to Reinaldo Quijada for this short history of CMP.
6. The CMP branch in Carabobo argues on their website that its “fundamental
objective” is the “incorporation of the middle class into the process of social,
political, and economic change expressed in the constitution of the Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela and with it, to contribute its strength and its knowledge to
raising the level of the classes least favored” (see http://es.geocities.com
/clasemediaenpositivocarabobo/, retrieved May 31, 2007).
7. López’s family and supporters have been actively organizing support for international
pressure for his release. See www.freeleopoldo.com/, retrieved July 30, 2017.
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6
The Civil Life of the University

Enacting Dissent and Resistance on a Colombian Campus
Carlo Tognato
In The Civil Sphere, Alexander both delineated the internal structure of the civil
sphere by discussing at length its cultural logic and its institutions and addressed
its real life by delving into its concrete instantiations in time, place, and function
(Alexander 2006; Kivisto and Sciortino 2015).
Central to the understanding of “real civil societies,” and an absolutely
critical frontier for the development of civil sphere theory (CST), is the study
of the boundary relations between civil and noncivil spheres. In this book, three
chapters tackle the “boundary question” by addressing the relations between
the civil sphere and the state (Arteaga and Arzuaga), the economy (Thumala),
and love/family (Luengo). Here, I will tackle this critical issue, as well, by
focusing on the boundary relations between the civil sphere and the university
and by paying particular attention to the way motives, relations, and
institutions of the former become lodged within the latter.
The civil sphere and the university have a number of elements in common.
Some central values and practices of both, after all, appear isomorphic and
overlapping, not to mention complementary. Take, for example, the ideals of
autonomy, rationality, openness, criticism, and truthfulness. And yet, these two
spheres also feature some quite remarkable differences. Science, for example,
depends on truth criteria that are far from democratic and the university is a
ruthless, exclusive, and elitist institutional sphere that values genius and
epiphany.
Now, based on Alexander’s analysis of boundary relations between the civil
and other noncivil spheres, one might account for the facilitating inputs of the
civil sphere into the university and vice versa as well as for the forms of civil
repair that become available in the university under the influence of the civil
sphere. For example, a vibrant civil sphere can create a social climate for
openness and criticism that can only enhance the generation of new
knowledge within the university, while a strong university may provide a
knowledge base for democracy that can surely nurture its ideals of rationality,
autonomy, and trustworthiness. In addition, different forms of exclusion and
149
150 Carlo Tognato
domination within the university and within the very weaving of scientific
agendas may end up being mitigated in response to civil demands.
In this chapter, however, I will take a step further by zooming in on the
boundary exchanges between the civil sphere and the university and by reaching
directly into the thick institutional space where these two spheres actually
overlap – where such exchanges may accommodate institutional hybrids that
take up the primary functions of both spheres. In short, I will get down to where
the rubber meets the road.
Shedding light on these civil enclaves woven into the institutional fabric of
the university begs the question of what type of institutional space that might
be. I will argue that such space identifies a type of institution of the civil sphere
that CST has so far not accounted for. I am referring to formative institutions of
the civil sphere. Lodged within the university (but not only there), their job is to
produce the forms of subjectivity congenial to democracy by conjuring up the
type of knowledge and by setting up the stage for institutional rituals through
which civil discourse can be inscribed onto their participants. Furthermore, they
provide the scenarios whereby young citizens have a chance to pilot civil
practices.
In this chapter, I will look into the thicker area of overlap between the civil
sphere and the university in relation to a stinging controversy that broke out in
2016 at the Bogota campus of the National University of Colombia as well as
in national media on whether and under what conditions the university could
officially honor a former faculty member who had been fired and jailed for
collaborating with the insurgency. Such a case does not only provide a window
of observation into the overlap between the civil sphere and the university
within a societal context whereby civil discourse is still actively competing
against other political discourses for the monopoly over the definition of
legitimacy in social life. Also, it sheds light on the fact that after more than
five decades of internal armed conflict and as a consequence of the societal
polarization that ensued, civil discourse in Colombia has come to exhibit an
extraordinary performative instability. Thus, when the civil is enacted within
the public sphere, it tends to come across as inauthentic to the point that
people come to see it as noncivil in disguise. Delving into this point may
provide some useful insights into the specific challenges that the
consolidation of civil life may encounter in Colombian universities and
society at large.
the university and its civil space

Boundary relations between the civil sphere and the university may take up
different forms. Some may entail the mere provision of facilitating inputs. For
example, the very Humboldtian idea of the university as a site for “the
cultivation of the ideal of the pursuit of truth and the ordering of life around
that pursuit” (Shils 1989:302) relies on such institutional guarantees as “the
The Civil Life of the University 151
freedom to teach in accordance with one’s intellectual convictions” (Shils

1989:303), which civil ideals have contributed to anchoring.
In other cases, however, boundary relations go beyond mere exchange and
the intermeshing between the university and the civil sphere becomes
institutionally much thicker. This is the case when it comes to the issue of the
formation of citizens suited for democratic life.
Political theorists have recognized that well-functioning democracies cannot
rely exclusively on procedural-institutional mechanisms to balance self-interest.
Instead, they must ensure some level of civic virtue and public-spiritedness on the
part of their citizens (Kymlicka 2002:289). Citizens must be willing to engage in
public discourse and question authority (Kymlicka 2002:289). They must “give
reasons for their political demands, not just state preferences or make threats.”
They must be capable of persuading others with different beliefs and identities
(Kymlicka 2002:289). They must “discern and respect the rights of others, and to
moderate one’s own claims accordingly” (Kymlicka 2002:289). They must love
truth even when it controverts their own positions. And they must be prepared to
recognize errors “in the wake of greater insight” (Roche 2010:107).
Now, under certain institutional circumstances whereby the civil sphere and
the university may actually come to overlap, both the classroom and residential
life at college may turn into important sites for civic education whereby students
may develop such competences and dispositions. As Roche (2010:110–111)
points out, class discussions may come to develop among students an ethos of
generosity and intellectual hospitality as one encourages participation and the
contribution of others, a capability for fair listening, a respect for the common
value of truth, and a diplomatic ability to challenge without attacking
personally.
The level of institutionalization of such an overlapping between the civil
sphere and the university, and hence the crystallization of a formative
institution of the civil sphere, may vary across universities, across faculties
within a given university, and across levels of education – undergraduate and
graduate. At one extreme of the institutional spectrum, boundary relations
between the university and the civil sphere are kept to a minimum. In that
case, the university just produces knowledge and has no business in civic
education. In his address to the class of 2001 at the University of Chicago, for
example, John Mearsheimer makes this point: “Today, elite universities operate
on the belief that there is a clear separation between intellectual and moral
purpose, and they pursue the former while largely ignoring the latter”
(Mearsheimer 1997).
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the overlapping between the two spheres
reaches its thickest point and a formative institution of the civil sphere almost
occupies the entire institutional space of the university. This is the case of liberal
art colleges, where civic and moral education have been part and parcel of their
institutional mission and identity and hence, constitutes its primary mission. As
Shapiro (2009:74) puts it, the liberal arts college model has pursued the
152 Carlo Tognato
cultivation of “the ideal citizen.” “The essence of a liberal education,” says

Richard Levin, “is to develop the freedom to think critically and independently,
to cultivate one’s mind to its fullest potential, to liberate oneself from prejudice,
superstition, and dogma” (in Roche 2010:101–102). Liberal arts colleges
cultivate “the Socratic ability to criticize one’s own traditions and to carry on
an argument on terms of mutual respect for reason”; mold students into citizens
“of the whole world, not just some local region”; develop “the ability to
imagine what it would be like to be in the position of someone very different
from oneself” (Nussbaum 2002:289; see also Nussbaum 1998); teach students
persuasive and graceful disputation; and inspire them for the search for the
common denominator (Ferrall Jr. 2011:17–18).
Between the research university Mearsheimer talks about and the liberal arts
college, one may encounter different arrangements under which the overlapping
between the civil sphere and the university achieves variable levels of
institutional thickness. Some are less visible and tacit. Others are more
apparent. On the former side, lodged mostly within certain liberal arts, even
where universities deny the pursuit of civic and moral education as their core
functional goal, civic and moral intents manage to survive and be effective by
being internalized directly into the mechanics of knowledge-generation
processes. At that level, a persisting civil normative expectation may operate
as an implicit gatekeeper in the process of knowledge production in such a
fashion that arguments that might ground, support, or excuse racism, sexism,
discrimination, or the restriction of basic liberties may face an uphill challenge
to get out. This way, the overlapping between the university and the civil sphere
merges the civil intent with the pursuit of knowledge, thereby making them
practically inextricable.
In thriving open societies, such a molecular lodging of a civil core function
within the very fabric of knowledge generation processes becomes practically
invisible as a consequence of its becoming part of the taken-for-granted horizon
of everyday academic life. In societies where the civil sphere has fewer friends,
however, the very lodging of a civil intent within knowledge-generation
processes becomes a point of contention, and at times, even a rather
formidable accomplishment.
Now, the overlapping between the civil sphere and the university can get
thicker than this and produce institutional arrangements that end up lodging the
civil intent within the institutional fabric of the university, though not to such a
high degree as in liberal art colleges. Some arrangements, for example, affect the
pragmatics of academic interaction within the university, and hence, the way
classes unfold and public debates take place on campus. Other arrangements,
on their part, entail even higher levels of institutional thickness. This is the case,
for example, of university think tanks or special community engagement
programs whereby the primary function of knowledge generation exists on
par with a civil mission.
Once again, where societies are still far from being open, the concretion of
such thicker institutional overlaps between the civil sphere and the university
becomes a terrain for very intense contention and competition.
In this chapter, I will reveal the complexity of such processes by focusing on a
recent controversy that took place within the National University of Colombia
in Bogota. Before proceeding, though, I will address three salient dimensions of
the political-cultural background against which civil life unfolded in Colombia
since the middle of the nineteenth century, bringing into focus what appears to
be the most formidable challenge that the consolidation of the civil faces today
in Colombian society at large, and more specifically, in Colombian universities.
the civil and other deep cultural structures

of legitimacy in colombia
Over the past century and a half, the political history of Colombia has featured
two important dynamics. One pertains to the consolidation of a republican
commitment to peaceful electoral politics on the part of Colombian elites and
society, and the other with the quest for an expanding horizon of social
inclusion, solidarity, and citizenship among Colombians. Over this long
period, three different discourses – civil discourse, the discourse of the
hacienda, and later, militant revolutionary discourse – have provided the deep
cultural structures that ultimately shaped the way Colombians went about
coding legitimacy in social life.
As a result of fifty years of internal armed conflict, though, and as a
consequence of the prolonged experience of violence that came along with it,
the endemic erosion of trust relations among Colombians has ultimately
produced the remarkable performative instability that today characterizes
civil discourse in the country. Thus, under the current circumstances of
mutual distrust, deploying civil discourse in the Colombian public sphere and
sustaining its authenticity within it has become particularly difficult. In the eyes
of many Colombians, after all, the civil all too often and all too easily slips into
signifying a more palatable front for the deployment of the discourse of the
hacienda or alternatively of militant revolutionary discourse. This, in turn,
hinders the consolidation of civil life in Colombia as well as the emergence of
a formative institution of the civil sphere in its universities.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Colombia’s two political
parties, the Liberal and the Conservative, operated both as electoral and
military organizations and used military strength for the purpose of gaining
access to government (Mazzuca and Robinson 2009:287). At the turn of the
century, though, the Thousand Days War between Liberals and Conservatives
marked a watershed in that respect. The casualties and the traumatic secession
of Panama from Colombia that resulted from it induced Liberals to commit to
peaceful electoral politics (Gutiérrez Sanín, Acevedo, and Viatela 2007:8). In
154 Carlo Tognato
the 1930s, as a result of the return of Liberals to power, a series of very

progressive reforms was introduced, which fractured the liberal camp, opened
up a cleavage between its most progressive and its most pragmatic wings,
galvanized on the opposite end of the political spectrum the most extreme
fringes within the conservative elite, and paved the way to the return of
Conservatives to the presidency. That peaceful political order ultimately
broke down in 1948, when Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, leader of the most
progressive faction within the Liberal Party, was assassinated in Bogota.
Political violence broke out again and this time took a most horrific genocidal
form. An extraordinarily traumatic decade started, which is remembered as La
Violencia (“The Violence”) and resulted in the most barbaric elimination to two
hundred thousand people. In the 1950s, liberals banded together in rural areas
in response to violence and formed self-defense guerrilla groups, some of which
radicalized over that decade and progressively shifted into the communist camp.
When in 1958, liberals and conservatives decided to establish a National
Front and agreed to alternate at the presidency in an effort to reestablish a
republican commitment to peaceful electoral politics, the damage was already
done and a major crack had already opened up on that front. Very soon, the
option of waging a revolutionary war against the Colombian state would enter
the Colombian political scene and stick to it for the following half century.
By the time the National Front was constituted in 1958, some insurgents had
retrenched into autonomous communities in rural areas. One of them,
Marquetalia, declared itself an independent republic. When attacked in 1964
by the Colombian army, some rebels escaped and established the so-called
Bloque Sur (Southern Bloc), which two years later was relabeled as the
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) (Cunningham et al.
2013:478–479). In the 1960s, two further guerrilla organizations, the Ejército
de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army – ELN) and the Ejército
Popular de Liberación (EPL), were established and in 1970, another major
guerrilla group, the M-19, appeared on the scene (Florez-Morris 2007:616).
The M-19 and the EPL respectively demobilized in 1990 and 1991, while the
FARC signed a peace accord in 2016. In 2017, the Colombian government
started a round of peace negotiations with the ELN.
Apart from the struggle to consolidate a republican commitment to a
peaceful electoral process, the political history of Colombia over the past
century and a half also featured a long march toward a progressive expansion
of the horizon of inclusion in Colombian society. This process turned out to be
anything but linear. Periods of intense and accelerated progress along the path
of social reform and modernization were often met by longer periods of
pushback.
Such a dynamic confronted two radically different understandings of society.
One sought to remove the remaining vestiges of the colonial order and of its
patrimonial structures of authority and to further, instead, a conception of the
social order predicated upon contract and a more adversarial understanding of
politics. The other sought to return to a more traditional conception of society

whereby cohesion and harmony would prevail over voice and in which social
reform and inclusion would be conditional to maintaining the pillars of social,
institutional, and cultural power that had sustained the colonial order.
Liberals played a leading role throughout the process of modernization,1 but
they were also joined along that quest by the few socialists who started to
appear on the Colombian political scene since the second half of the
nineteenth century, when the works of Fourier, Saint Simón, Cabet, and
Owen were introduced into Colombia (Archila 1997).
Until the 1920s, most Colombian socialists kept close links with the liberal
camp, turned to British laborism and the German social democrats for
inspiration, and stayed away from Marxism-Leninism, which in turn
acquired its first institutional roof, when the Revolutionary Socialist Party
and the Colombian Communist Party were respectively established in 1926
and 1930. Marxist ideas, though, became influential only in the 1960s, when
they turned “paradigmatic” in Colombian public universities (Archila 1997)
and students avidly read the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Trotsky,
Che Guevara, and Camilo Torres (Beltrán Cely 2002). By then, a new
revolutionary Left had appeared on the Colombian political scene, which
insisted on the revolutionary potential of the peasantry and was determined
to bring about a new social order by waging revolutionary war against the
Colombian state.
Throughout the past century and a half, three different discourses have
provided the deep cultural structures that oriented Colombians’
understanding of legitimacy in social life: civil discourse, the discourse of the
hacienda, and militant revolutionary discourse.
Civil discourse exhibits many of the structural features Alexander (2006:53–
67) attributes to the discourse of liberty and repression that permeates the civil
sphere of the United States. It postulates that democratic actors are active,
autonomous, rational, and reasonable, while nondemocratic actors are passive,
dependent, irrational, hysterical, excitable, and passionate. It expects democratic
social relations to be open, trusting, critical, truthful, and straightforward and
nondemocratic ones to be secretive, suspicious, deferential, deceitful, and
calculative. And it takes democratic political institutions to be regulated by
rules, based on law, equality, inclusiveness, impersonality, contract, and office
and nondemocratic institutions to be arbitrary, power-oriented, and
characterized by hierarchy, exclusion, personalism, and ascription.
Even though in recent times, civil discourse has managed to orient important
institutional processes within the country, such as, for example, the new 1991
Constitution, in the everyday life of many Colombians, their conception of
agency, social relations, and political institutions has continued to be oriented
by an alternative deep cultural structure – the discourse of the hacienda (i.e.,
large farm) – that throughout the last two centuries, did not only manage to
hegemonize the meaning of social life in rural areas, but also in many urban
156 Carlo Tognato
centers, as well as across a very broad spectrum of institutional and social

settings.
The discourse of the hacienda builds on an organic understanding of society.
It elevates collective harmony to a supreme social value and sees anything that
breaches it as a bearer of chaos. As in the case of civil discourse, one could think
of the discourse of the hacienda as a system of binary oppositions that defines
what is legitimate in social life and what is not. The attributes on the positive
side make up the patron/peon code and those on the negative side identify the
bandit code (Tognato 2011).
As far as agency is concerned, the patron/peon code establishes that the patron
be civilized, cultivated, compassionate, orderly, respectful, generous, and
considerate, while the peon must match those attributes with complementary
ones – modesty, docility, humbleness, good-willingness, and reverence. On the
other hand, the bandit code defines those who reject the organic order of social
life as barbarian and ignorant. As far as social relations are concerned, the patron/
peon code grounds them in paternalism, loyalty, and charity whereas the bandit
code is based upon individualism, treason, and selfishness. Finally, political
institutions according to the patron/peon code will be based on tradition,
authority, personalism, and order, while bandits will build up institutions based
on anarchy, rebellion, impersonality, and chaos (Tognato 2011).2
By the mid-twentieth century, civil discourse and the discourse of the
hacienda faced one further competitor in the struggle for the definition of
legitimacy in social life. Like the other two discourses, militant revolutionary
discourse also provided a system of binary oppositions that laid out the
attributes of the legitimate as far as agency, social relations, and political
institutions are concerned. Such a system consists of a revolutionary code and
an antirevolutionary code.
Within the social order structured by militant revolutionary discourse,
militants celebrate the collective and dismiss the individual. They stress
submission to the cause over autonomy. They insist on sacrifice over self-
interest. They stress faith over doubt. They emphasize loyalty over criticism,
unity over fragmentation, cohesion over pluralism, utopia over reality,
communal solidarity over universalism, secrecy over openness and
transparency, and equality over liberty. They accept circumventing the law
for pragmatic purposes or in view of their final ultimate goal (vias de hecho)
over accepting and abiding to it. They favor top-down hierarchy over
adversarial democracy. They long for socialism and abhor capitalism. They
fight for the “people,” of whom they understand themselves as being the true
representatives, and oppose the bourgeoisie, which they regard as being all too
self-absorbed to be able to interpret the general interest of society. They pursue
self-determination and resist imperialism. They condone violence as an act of
generosity on the part of the militant on behalf of the oppressed in society and
dismiss a principled commitment to nonviolence as a sign of passivism, lack of
commitment, or even insensitivity to suffering and injustice.
Militant discourse structures the vision of a social order which collapses all
institutional differentiation among the spheres of social life and exposes it to the
capillary and totalizing reach by the party or the militant organization,
including intimate dimensions of private life such as family and love relations.
The party or the militant organization are infallible and provide a transcendent
anchor to the life of the militants, which in turn gives meaning to their life
(Beltrán Cely 2002:157).
Now, over the past five decades, competition among these three discourses
unfolded against the backdrop of a prolonged internal armed conflict that
profoundly shaped their deployment within the Colombian public sphere. To
understand how, it is necessary to bring into focus one crucial impact of war on
social life in Colombia.
War was not only a fundamental dimension of the everyday experience of
many Colombians, particularly in the areas of combat among the guerrillas,
Colombian security forces, and the paramilitaries. After the state unleashed an
all-out pushback against the insurgency in response to the collapse of the 1998–
2000 peace negotiations with the FARC, war also turned into a system of
cultural classification, an overarching cultural structure of extremism that
followed the friend/foe logic of war and permeated broad dimensions of social
and institutional life in Colombia. All actors, as a result, would be inexorably
attached either to the insurgent or to the counterinsurgent camps and so would
their actions, their omissions, their silences, their indifference, and their apathy.
Everyone and everything would be perceived to either intentionally or
inadvertently play into one of the two camps at war, thereby favoring one
side and damaging the other.
Such a partition of the universe of experience of Colombians was a
consequence of the remarkable opacity that characterized their involvement
in the war as well as a product of the collapse of mutual trust that followed
from it.
Over many decades of internal armed conflict, members of state security
forces, political and economic organizations, the elite, trade unions, social
organizations, university communities, professional networks, the media, and
local communities in the conflict zones were courted and seduced or pressured
and intimidated by guerrillas or paramilitaries, and ended up being involved
with them in a variety of ways. Some just turned a blind eye to their doings, said
nothing, minded their own business, and simply let them operate. Others
indirectly benefited from their presence. Some sporadically cooperated with
them for profit, while others engaged with them on a sustained basis. Some
merely sympathized with them and offered their moral support, while others
helped them logistically or politically.
The Leninist doctrine of “combination of all the forms of struggle” further
complicated this landscape. Combatants on both sides ended up covertly
penetrating the state and civil society in an effort to gain resources for their
struggle and to sabotage the actions of their enemies. This broadened the
158 Carlo Tognato
presence of war within society, enabling its logic to permeate social life in
Colombia in a much more capillary fashion.
As a result of complexity and clandestinity, the involvement of Colombians
in the war became more difficult to decipher. In the face of unimaginable
atrocities perpetrated by both camps, such troubling opacity triggered an
endemic collapse of mutual trust among people from different social,
political, and intellectual backgrounds and unleashed an accelerated process
of mutual disengagement among them. Holding the middle ground became less
and less sustainable as Colombians increasingly regarded the ambiguity
inherent in such positions as a potential cue for covert collaboration with one
of the two warring camps, or as an opportunistic attempt to keep all options
open, or as a sign of unwillingness to commit and be loyal, or worse, as an
indication of a certain readiness for betrayal. The evaporation of all middle
ground, in turn, fed into polarization, which moral panics and some degree of
paranoia ultimately contributed to stabilize.
Even more importantly, though, war affected the conditions under which
civil discourse, the discourse of the hacienda, and militant revolutionary
discourse could be effectively deployed within the Colombian public sphere.
The discourse of the hacienda came to be regarded as a relatively
straightforward cue to the counterinsurgent camp, while militant revolutionary
discourse was automatically associated with the insurgency. Civil discourse,
however, ended up mired in cultural quicksand. As a result of increasing
domestic and international normative pressures on both warring camps,
particularly over the past quarter of a century, civil discourse had been
increasingly used, sometimes merely as a more presentable discursive face, by
actors on both sides of the armed conflict. This turned it into a murky middle
ground on which counterinsurgent hawks on the conservative end of society,
militant revolutionaries, and liberals would mix. As I have noted, the installation
of the friend/foe logic of war in all spheres of social life, the collapse of mutual
trust, its replacement with a practice of mutual suspicion and ultimately
polarization eroded all middle ground in Colombian society and culture. In this
specific case, they affected the performative stability of civil discourse by
undermining its authenticity. People would often hear civil, but almost
regularly see hacienda or militant, instead.
civil and noncivil strife in colombian universities

The long march toward the consolidation of a republican commitment to
peaceful electoral politics as well as its progressive unravelling involved a
broad spectrum of social actors and institutional scenarios, and so did the
quest for a broadening horizon of solidarity and inclusion in society.
Universities and their communities played a role in all that, partly by directing
their energies toward the pursuit of reform of their own sphere and of its
relation with others, and partly by channeling their political imagination and
their capacity for action onto society. For a long time, civil discourse and the
discourse of the hacienda competed against each other to establish their own
hegemony within such settings. In confessional universities, the latter was
generally very strong, while in public universities and in private universities
leaning toward the liberal camp, civil discourse tended to be more salient.
Around the middle of the twentieth century, militant revolutionary discourse
started to powerfully shape the everyday life of public universities and
progressively legitimized (within relevant segments of their respective
communities) the use of violence as a means for political struggle, to the point
that their members often saw it either with enthusiasm or with fatalism as a
natural part of the political horizon of society. As political activism
overshadowed academic life and university campuses became the theatre of
the very practices of violence and intimidation that took place outside for the
purpose of waging the revolutionary struggle against the state, civil life
undertook within such settings a long and gradual process of retreat. In the
1990s, however, that trend came to a turning point, in part due to the new hope
that the progressive constitution of 1991 brought to Colombian politics and in
part thanks to the successful demobilization and civil reinsertion of one major
guerrilla movement, the M-19, which had exercised since the 1970s its influence
mostly in urban areas. A window of opportunity opened up for the return of the
civil to public university campuses. In the subsequent decades, public
universities received a growing number of faculty members with doctoral
degrees, who commonly strived for greater balance between the reasons of
political activism and those of academia. In 2012, the Colombian government
started a new round of peace talks with the FARC, which resulted into the 2016
peace accord. This further accelerated the return of the civil to public university
campuses.
Since the nineteenth century, the quest for a reform of Colombian
universities and of its relation with other spheres of society mostly channeled
its efforts at emancipating them from the control of the Catholic Church, and
later of the state, by demanding academic and administrative autonomy, the
respect of freedom of teaching, thought and expression in university settings,
the establishment of public, free, and hence, more inclusive higher education,
and the introduction of democracy and self-government, particularly since the
Cordoba manifesto in 1918 (Archila 2012; Soto Arango 2005).
In a country where the government and the president appointed academic
and administrative staff in public universities, at least till the early twentieth
century, where the Catholic Church had a say (particularly during the
nineteenth century) over university syllabi, where chancellors were expected
to regularly tour their classrooms to check on whether religious and social
morals were actually being upheld, where at least in some institutions
university students were supposed to turn up daily for mass (Soto Arango
2005), the quest for modernization of the Colombian university was anything
but trivial. It involved a broad repertoire of forms of struggle including strikes,
160 Carlo Tognato
marches, and protests, as well as different practices of civil disobedience against

specific university regulations (Archila 2012).
The route to active engagement of university communities with society was
long and rocky, requiring a progressive change in the way both parties
understood the role of the university. Throughout the nineteenth century,
universities mostly focused on professional training and did not necessarily
see themselves as engines of “the political, cultural and scientific
transformation of the nation” (Alberto Lleras Camargo in Melo 2008). The
institutional journey to get there featured a number of milestones that included
1. the foundation of the School of Mines in Medellín at the end of the nineteenth
century, which in turn played an important role in the emergence of Colombia’s
industrial base, 2. the broadening of legal education at the Universidad
Externado de Colombia and at the Universidad Libre to include economics
and sociology, 3. the chancellorship in 1944 of Gerardo Molina at the National
University of Colombia (the first socialist ever to occupy such a prestigious
position), and 4. the institutional vision of Alberto Lleras Camargo in relation
to the Universidad de los Andes, which was founded in 1948 and would rise to
be Colombia’s leading private university as well as the bastion of Colombia’s
technocratic ethos (Melo 2008).
The engagement of university communities, particularly of students, in
broader social and political issues took a variety of forms, from the
organization of carnivals to the writing of op-eds in newspapers, to social
mobilizations, and in the aftermath of the assassination of Gaitán in 1948, to
the occupation of the National Radio (Archila 2012). Occasionally, civic
participation turned out to be extraordinarily costly and some students lost
their lives in the course of those mobilizations, such as in 1929 and 1954.
Although in the 1920s, student participation already invoked such ideas as
“the sacred right to insurrection,” in the need to resist imperialism and the
aspiration for pan-Latin American solidarity (Archila 2012) which would later
appear in the political platforms of Colombia’s revolutionary movements, at least
till the 1950s, university students, their representatives and their organizations
mimicked the two-party system, thereby featuring a conservative bloc on one side
and a liberal one on the other, which also housed representatives from the Left.
During this phase, students still believed that engaging the state would serve their
purpose of transforming society. During the liberal presidency of Lopez
Pumarejo between 1934 and 1938, for example, two former student leaders
joined his cabinet.
The establishment at the end of the 1950s of the Colombian Students
National Union (Union Nacional de Estudiantes Colombianos) marked a
decisive shift of student organizations toward the Left (Ruiz 2002:66–81) and
the beginning of a process of radicalization that culminated in 1965 with the
adoption by the National University Federation (Federación Universitaria
Nacional– FUN) of an explicit insurrectional stance (Archila 1999, 2012).
In the 1960s, support for the armed struggle within university communities
was not widespread (Melo 1978; Giraldo Ramírez 2015), but socialist ideas
were a common currency, particularly in the human and social sciences (Forero
2006; Posada Carbó 2006). At that time, student mobilizations were still
seeking reform of Colombian universities, particularly a deepening of their
autonomy, the defense of public education, and resistance against foreign
intervention into research and educational policy (Acevedo Tarazona and
Samacá Alonso 2015). That focus yielded concrete results, such as the
introduction of cogovernment at the National University in Bogota and at the
University of Antioquia in the early 1970s and the appointment in 1974 of Luis
Carlos Pérez, the first Marxist chancellor of the National University (Melo
1978).
The absence since 1966 of national student organizations drove many
students, particularly in public universities, to join the youth branches of
leftist political organizations, many of which supported the armed struggle
(Melo 1978; Acevedo Tarazona and Samacá Alonso 2015). Their engagement
with political activism often displaced their earlier commitment to university
reform as they came to see universities to be hopelessly functional to the system
(Melo 1978). Radicalized groups also increasingly adopted antidemocratic
practices and intimidation tactics on university campuses, thereby
undermining the organs of student representation and pushing the majority of
students into apathy (Melo 1978).
The surrender of university communities to such forms of political activism,
or at least to their inevitability, paved the way to the spread of political
confessionalism on campus, which deeply eroded the fabric of academic life
and often weakened in dramatic ways the internal public spheres of many
Colombian universities. Furthermore, it fostered within those communities
new identities that helped sustain the equation between radicalism and the
armed struggle. As Beltrán Cely (2002:162) points out, political activism did
not only provide “a motive to live,” but also “a motive to die,” just like such
revolutionary heroes as Camilo Torres and Che Guevara, thereby diffusing
among university students “an ethics of sacrificial duty.” By the 1970s, the
armed struggle was taken for granted as a natural part of the political horizon of
radical university students (Melo 1978).
Justifying violence outside the university premises in the pursuit of a fairer
society soon opened the door to its practice on campus. Thus, Colombian
universities turned into yet another scenario of the war, in which revolutionary
and anarchist groups confronted the state as well as paramilitaries, recruiting
students and training them in clandestine operations (Gámez 2015). Over time,
the images of armed hooded militias parading in universities, throwing stones or
explosives at the police, destroying public property on campus, became part of
the routine landscape of many public universities and even came to iconize them
in the eyes of broad segments of Colombian society.
162 Carlo Tognato
Many decades of war had a nefarious effect on the social fabric of public
universities and dramatically eroded trust relations within their communities.
The Leninist combination of all the forms of struggle by insurgent and
counterinsurgent forces and the practices on both sides of clandestine
vigilance, control, and repression injected fear, extreme caution, and
sometimes, even paranoia into the scenarios of academic interaction, in which
scholars and students could not necessarily tell the actual identity of the people
they interacted with on campus, their agendas, or whether they might even be
unwitting agents playing on either side of the war. As a hooded militant once
told me as he approached me – just few minutes before the start of an academic
event I was organizing – for the purpose of pressuring me into modifying its
format and allowing one hooded militant in the panel on stage, “You don’t
know who I am, but I have talked to you many times in the past.” In another
event, I poked my copanelists on the Far Left for completely evading the topic of
the conversation, which was about violence on campus. One of them reacted:
“You have to understand why we are not talking about this. We cannot know
who might be sitting in the audience.”
After long years of the retreat of civil life in public universities, the decade of
the 1990s witnessed a return of the civil as reformist intellectuals sought to cut
the knot between radical thought and the armed struggle in an effort at
denaturalizing violence on university campuses. On some occasions,
students and faculty members marched against the blockades of university
buildings by militants and in defense of the right to education. On other
occasions, students organized brigades to repaint campus walls as acts of
civil disobedience against radical students and hooded militants, who
controlled them for the purpose of political communication. On some
occasions, university communities held votes to decide by majority over the
legitimate use of campus walls on the part of their members. Occasionally,
civil actions tapped into some rather imaginative performative stunts, as in the
case of Antanas Mockus during his chancellorship at the National University
in the early 1990s (Tognato 2017) or in the case of Mr. Cross-Out, a young
artist and a law student, who in 2012 satirically intervened in the political
graffiti of radical activists on the walls of the Bogota campus of the National
University. On that same campus, various public interventions and
conversations sought to catalyze between 2014 and 2016 a reflection on the
continuing presence of violent militant groups in spite of the ongoing peace
negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC (Tognato
2016a).
Now, delving into the return of the civil in Colombian universities may
provide a fruitful entry point into that thick institutional space whereby the
university and the civil sphere overlap in Colombia. And even more
importantly, it may show how the performative instability of civil discourse
within the Colombian public sphere may actually hinder the consolidation of
civil life in Colombian universities. In the next section, I will zoom in on one
such instance of return and show how in that specific case civil discourse,
militant revolutionary discourse, and the discourse of the hacienda played out.
enacting dissent and resistance at the national university

of colombia in bogota
In May 2016, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Faculty of Human
Sciences in the Bogota campus of the National University, the Dean awarded a
distinction to Miguel Angel Beltran, a former professor of sociology who at the
time was jailed for rebellion and had been fired by the Inspector General3 for
cooperating with the FARC. A controversy broke out first within the Faculty of
Human Sciences, then throughout the university, and finally, became national
news. Here, I will explore how civil discourse, militant revolutionary discourse,
and the discourse of the hacienda played out in such a controversy, and address the
peculiar performative instability that civil discourse exhibited on that occasion.
I will draw from: two public statements that the two sides of the controversy
published on the matter; the seven op-eds and one radio interview reflecting the
positions taken by the opponents to the award; two entries on the issue that
appeared in the leading Colombian weekly magazine; the nine op-eds, articles
and a radio interview that reflected the positions of the supporters of the award;
and the twenty-three email messages that circulated within the University, most
of them in the internal mail-list of the University’s three thousand faculty
members, and in a smaller fraction, in the mail-list of the 220 faculty
members and the four thousand students of the Faculty of Human Sciences.
In that controversy, I played a leading role on one side and ended up being
deeply involved in it. At the same time, my engagement was part of a series of
interventions that I carried out between 2014 and 2016 to trigger a public
conversation over the impacts of war and violence on the Bogota campus of
the National University of Colombia. I thought that such interventions would
not only enhance an understanding of the return of the civil in Colombian
public universities, but perhaps also allow me to even contribute to it. By
culturally “thickening” traditional ethnomethodological breaches, I was after
two things. First, I intended to develop an interventive cultural sociology, and
second, by displacing the site of those breaches from Garfinkel’s traditional
experimental settings to the public sphere, I meant to nest such interventive
cultural sociology straight into the realm of public sociology.
Background
On March 1, 2008, Operation Phoenix targeted a camp of the FARC on
Ecuadorian soil and Raúl Reyes, member of the Secretariat of the FARC, was
killed. A goldmine with three laptops, two hard drives, and four USBs, with
approximately eight thousand Microsoft Word files, was found on-site, which
revealed an extensive network of contacts among high-value members of the
164 Carlo Tognato
FARC as well as between them and their supporters in Colombia and abroad.
The material, whose integrity was later certified by Interpol, was shipped to the
International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in London for independent
analysis. The IISS ultimately produced a 240-page report, The FARC Files:
Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Archive of “Raúl Reyes” (Crandall
2011:236).
Some of that material referred to Jaime Cienfuegos, member of the
International Committee of the FARC and responsible for national and
international propaganda as well as for recruitment on university campuses,
whom Colombian investigators associated with Miguel Ángel Beltrán, an
associate professor of the Department of Sociology at the National University.
A few weeks after the raid, Beltrán suddenly left Bogota for a postdoc at the
UNAM on the ground of paramilitary threats against him. After nine months in
Mexico, in May 2009, he was arrested by Mexican immigration authorities and
deported on a military plane to Colombia in shackles (Anncol.eu 2015). After
two years in jail, a criminal judge acquitted him because the evidence brought
forward by Colombian prosecutors had been gathered in breach of
international law and of the bilateral agreement of judicial cooperation
between Ecuador and Colombia. In addition, the gathering of evidence did
not preserve the chain of custody, as no Colombian judicial police was at the
site of the raid (El Espectador 2013; República de Colombia 2011).
The Inspector General (IG) appealed the sentence before the Criminal Court of
Appeal and opened up a disciplinary procedure against Beltrán for breach of the
civil service code. After being released, again on the ground of paramilitary threats,
Beltrán fled to Venezuela and then to Argentina on two postdoctoral visits.
In July 2014, the IG ruled against Beltrán, ordered the Chancellor of the
National University to fire him (Procurador General de la Nación 2013), and
banned Beltrán from public office for thirteen years. This sparked a series of
mobilizations in favor of Beltrán both inside and outside the university, which
turned out to be quite divisive, even within the very Department of Sociology to
which Beltrán belonged. Some, after all, regarded Beltrán’s firing as an attack on
free thought on the part of the IG, while others considered that the evidence on
which the IG had based its legal decision did not offer sufficient ground to
conclude that he was actually delivering such an attack on freedom. In
December 2014, the Criminal Court of Appeal of Bogota condemned him to
100 months of prison. In September 2016, the Supreme Court of Justice acquitted
Beltrán based on the procedural reasons that had grounded his first acquittal in
2011. Beltrán also appealed the IG’s decision on his dismissal from the National
University before the Administrative Court of Appeal (Consejo de Estado).
Scripts of Dissent and Resistance

The debate over the Beltrán affair consisted of two legs. One of them focused on
whether Beltrán’s award was justified on strictly academic merit; the other was
on whether the procedures that led to it were academically sound. According to

its critics, when there is no consensus among scholars over the academic
accomplishments of a given nominee, the award of academic distinctions
should call for some prior public deliberation in an effort to identify common
ground for academic standards in line with national and international norms
and expectations. Beltrán’s supporters, on the opposite end, insisted that his
academic credentials fully justified the award and defended the academic nature
of the procedure that led to it. Only one scholar among them, Juan Gabriel
Gómez Albarello, broke ranks with his own camp and expressed his
“profound” agreement with the objection raised by the critics of the award in
relation to the dubious procedure that the Faculty of Human Sciences had used
on that occasion. The award, Gómez pointed out, should have resulted from a
procedure that could actually build on a consensus that would unify rather than
divide the academic community over it (Gómez Albarello 2016).
However, as the purpose of this case, and of this chapter, is not to provide a
comprehensive description of the Beltrán’s affair, but rather to bring into focus
the area of overlap between the civil sphere and the university in that specific
instance, I will exclusively focus in the remaining part of this section on the
second leg of this controversy, which involved the competition between civil
arguments for and against Beltrán’s award as well as the competition over this
matter between civil and noncivil arguments.
The opponents to Beltrán’s award unleashed the controversy with an Open
Letter signed by thirty-two faculty members of the Faculty of Human Sciences.
It was promoted by various members of the Department of Sociology and
gathered in less than a day the signatures of colleagues from sociology,
philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, geography, and linguistics.
Considering the existing pressures on campus not to come out on certain
issues that were dear to the militant understanding of the university and to
keep any dissent on the front out of the internal public sphere of the institution,
that surge of passion turned out to be rather unusual. One scholar from the
opposite front remarked that in the ten years he had worked at that institution
no one had ever dared take such a stance (Arcos-Palma 2016), while another
noted that, “if the situation were not so ruinous, I would be happy that such a
group of professors came out from their silence and overcame their fear” to
express their position (Figueroa 2016).
Critics of granting the academic distinction to Beltrán tapped into a broad set
of connected reasons. One group, which was highly salient, referred to the civil
obligations of the university and of its members, rejecting the functions that a
militant understanding of the university bestowed upon them.
To many of them, Beltrán’s award came across as a “political act” that
projected before Colombia’s public opinion, and especially in the eyes of the
university community, the idea that its members unanimously aligned with a
single political position or, as Beltrán’s supporters’ chanted, “We are all Miguel
Angel Beltrán” (Parra 2016). Even more importantly, though, it signaled to
166 Carlo Tognato
society, the state, and the university community that scholars may combine
academic work with collaboration with the insurgency and that at least for a
segment of Colombia’s public universities, their autonomy and academic
freedom could go hand-in-hand with their participation into the armed
struggle (Duncan 2016). Now, “the idealization of violence had the nefarious
consequence of naturalizing various forms of violence in the university”
(Arocha 2016) and the legitimation of the armed struggle and of political
violence on the part of an important segment of Colombian academics, in
turn, had resulted into a form of “intellectual treason” of their social mission
(Giraldo Ramírez 2016). So, according to a large segment of the critics of
Beltrán’s award, it was time to recognize that there existed an inherent civil
commitment at the core of university life that could not be honored by a
“militant” university and that in open societies, universities had a duty to act
as early detection mechanisms and last lines of defense against any advances of
totalitarian practices into social life (Tognato 2016b). In order to fulfil that civil
function, critics of Beltrán’s award claimed that it was necessary to emancipate
academia from its capture by politics. Politicians, after all, “follow their party
interests as well as their ideological dogmas and quite often they end up
sacrificing truth along the way,” which turns the university into a
confessional setting and ends up undermining its spirit (García Villegas 2016).
In their eyes, the implication by Beltrán’s supporters that the university should
be open to its colonization by party politics simply because it cannot be an ivory
tower was illogical as well as highly problematic. The point was not to set the
university free from politics. The university, instead, needed “to be a space for
qualitatively different political practices” (Duíca 2016).
In short, critics of Beltrán’s award insisted on the fact that the university
would need to honor and cultivate such civil values as autonomy, rationality,
truthfulness, and abidance to the law and reject deceit, manipulation,
irrationality grounded into faith, and the passivity inherent in the observance
of dogma.
On the opposite side, Beltrán’s supporters tapped both into militant
revolutionary discourse as well as into civil discourse. The former surfaced in
the process of repairing the militant order within the university that critics of
Beltrán’s award appeared to breach. As Garfinkel showed in his
ethnomethodological breach experiments, when actors breach the moral
order that rules of interaction constitute in their respective institutional
setting, participants in that order will react against the breach with moral
outrage and will respond by tapping into a repertoire of actions that the order
takes as legitimate responses for the purpose of its repair. In the case of the
National University, the Open Letter was guilty of publicly breaching a tacit
cultural prohibition to openly challenge what militants considered to be central
to their identities and their understanding of the institution and society, and
over which they expected to maintain relatively strict control. Over many
decades, that order had backed the expectation that no one should ever think
of challenging certain sacred revolutionary icons within the university or the

rituals by which those icons were formed and preserved without undergoing
vigorous pushback well beyond the realm of civilized critique, which would
include variable forms of intimidation, from indirectly authorizing others to
engage in symbolic and moral lynching of the breachers, to open bullying, to
character assassination, and ultimately to various sorts of direct threats. The
signatories of the Open Letter were publicly labelled as “shameful,” “envious,”
and “base” and their “Open Letter” was presented as “an anthology of
mediocrity” (Vega Cantor 2016).
Militants from the social movement milieu of the Colombian extreme Left
also joined the bashing of those whom they considered as faculty members
sitting at “their bourgeois desks” and being part of “a shameful intellectual
class” that was “coopted by the establishment” and was “only committed to
convey official thought” (Flórez Peña 2016). In their eyes, critics of Beltrán’s
award were “eurocentric and anglocentric (sic) who only value their own,” and
had been “nurtured by a handicapped and subservient form of intellectualism
that feels shame for the kind of engaged critical thought that contributes to the
building of the country, democracy and welfare” (Marcha Patriotica 2016).
Occasionally, intimidation would turn a little bit more assertive, like
threatening one signatory of the Open Letter to make his email public among
unfriendly contacts: “Your email address will only be published so that people
will f**k with your life till you’ll be eaten up by worms” (Jullian 2016a; see also
Jullian 2016b).
In short, according to Beltrán’s militant supporters, their opponents
condensed many attributes that the counterrevolutionary code within militant
discourse identified as deeply polluting. They were self-interested, bourgeois,
imperialistic, subservient to power, and were guilty of breaching the unity and
cohesiveness of a front that represented the people in its struggle against an
unjust system. Hence, they deserved the unleashing of stigmatization according
to a well-known repertoire that the revolutionary Left has repeatedly used over
many decades against counterrevolutionaries throughout the region, from
Cuba to Venezuela.
Beltrán’s supporters also tapped into civil discourse. One central civil charge
against the Open Letter was that it was unreasonable, illogical, manipulative,
and possibly irrational. It upheld the ideal of a “pure, uncontaminated
academia of the enlightened” (Demmer 2016) that was separate from politics
and appeared to hold an old positivist conception of neutral science as well as a
perception of politics as an almost immoral sphere, which led them to
completely overlook the fact that the university is immersed in politics, and
therefore it does not make any sense to say that it was captured by it (Archila
2016). At the same time, while it resisted capture of the university by politics,
according to Beltrán’s supporters, the Open Letter constituted “a true political
manifesto,” which paradoxically started by advocating for academic purism
and ended by accepting an “act of discrimination which is absolutely political”
168 Carlo Tognato
(Figueroa 2016). Refusing to “take sides with regard to the judicial proceedings
to which Beltrán has been subjected” indeed led to a politicization of academia
insofar as it turned a blind eye to the fact that “the justice system – criminal and
administrative – has served the political agenda of criminalization of opinions
that are contrary to those that are tolerated by the political and academic
establishment” (Gómez Albarello 2016). By upholding the administrative
decision of the Inspector General to fire Beltrán and ban him from public
service, critics of Beltrán’s award appeared to be irresponsibly naïve and
politically complicit. The IG’s extreme right-wing conservatism, after all, had
turned him into “one of the darkest figures in the political history of the
country,” something one could simply not be indifferent to (Arco-Palma 2016).
Civil critics within Beltrán’s camp also stressed the inherent authoritarian
and antidemocratic streak that characterized the Open Letter in its effort at
protecting “the human sciences from social movements, criticism, other forms
of thought, of the profound emerging problems of our miserable age” (Noguera
2016). According to them, along with Paulo Freire, the holders of a truly
democratic vision of academia and society stood on Beltrán’s side:
Let different visions express themselves. Let public deliberation strengthen itself. Let
pluralist visions of academia advance. Let the university and our faculty be colonized by
realism, honesty, a complex gaze and a recognition of what we are (political beings, not
angels) … as faculty members we are permeated by power relations which we can
change, reconstruct, deconstruct, transform, but never deny or make invisible. An
“open and democratic society” is a highly political society (Sierra 2016).
The Beltrán Controversy and the Performative Instability of Civil Discourse

As I earlier suggested, the experience of violence during more than fifty years of
internal war in Colombia led to an endemic erosion of trust relations within
society as well as within many institutional settings, of which the university, and
particularly the public university, is among them. The weakening, and often the
collapse, of trust relations, in turn, ended up undermining the performative
stability of civil discourse within the Colombian public sphere to the point that
it became very difficult to deploy it in a persuasive manner. In the eyes of many
Colombians, the civil often looked all too close to a more palatable front for
militant revolutionary discourse or for the discourse of the hacienda. Here, I
will seek to pin this down by showing how that performative instability came
into play in relation to one of the hottest matters of contention in Beltrán
controversy, that is, the relation between academia and politics.
As I earlier explained, critics of Beltrán’s award rejected the capture of the
university by politics, whereas Beltrán’s supporters saw academia as
intrinsically political. In their declarations, however, the former referred to
party politics, or politics with a capital P, while the latter referred to the realm
of power relations, or politics with a small p. Scholars on one side of the
controversy, though, interpreted the reference to politics by scholars on the
other side in yet another way. When one camp referred to politics with a capital
P, the other would instead suspect an intention to smuggle a reference to politics
with a small p, and vice versa. Such a stunning performative failure on either
side was a dramatic product of the performative instability that currently
plagues civil discourse in Colombia as a result of various decades of internal
armed conflict.
Many signatories of the Open Letter, who included a number of engaged
scholars and public intellectuals as well as various researchers in the fields of
cultural analysis, the social studies of science, and Foucault, were outraged by
the charge coming from Beltrán’s camp that they advocated an academia
“cleansed” by power relations or, even worse, indifferent to them. In their
eyes, that attribution did not simply constitute a strategically motivated
strawman argument. Worse than that, it gave away the inauthenticity of the
civil credentials of their opponents. To them various leading figures on Beltrán’s
side sounded both untruthful and manipulative. After all, they made an
attribution that appeared to be blatantly absurd in the light of the intellectual
trajectory of many critics of Beltrán’s award. Furthermore, they were ready to
sell that misrepresentation to unwitting audiences outside the Faculty of Human
Sciences at the National University, who might not be in a position to fact-check
it. Now, civil discourse codes untruthfulness and manipulation as cues of uncivil
conduct. In Colombia, though, due to the endemic erosion of mutual trust in
society and within university settings, the optics on the uncivil turns it extremely
ambiguous, and a failed performance of civility almost regularly slips into being
perceived as a failed performative attempt to disguise militant revolutionary
discourse under a civil cloth, particularly when civil scripts are performed by
actors who transited into the civil camp after earlier belonging to the
militant one.
Beltrán’s supporters, as well, mirrored this very same hermeneutics of
suspicion. To their leading members, it was simply inconceivable that their
opponents could possibly deny the inextricability of academia from politics
with a small p in spite of their intellectual biographies, which made them
perfectly aware of the absurdity of that posture. Hence, such inconsistency
did not only reveal to them some good deal of strategic bad faith on the part
of the critics of Beltrán’s award. In their eyes, it also indicated an inauthentic
civil commitment on their part. In fact, those critics did not only hold an
untruthful stance as they tried to deny the undeniable. In the eyes of Beltrán’s
supporters, they also engaged in subtle manipulation as they rejected the idea of
a university captured by party politics and yet tried to argue that they did not
advocate for any power-blind apolitical university. After all, they circulated
such a clarifying point only through the mail-list of the three thousand faculty
members of the National University, but did not make it explicit in their op-eds
on the controversy. In the eyes of Beltrán’s supporters, that move signaled that
their opponents were willing to receive support from that part of the Colombian
public that feels comfortable with a sanitized university that can keep its mouth
170 Carlo Tognato
shut vis-á-vis the workings of power within Colombian society, a part that is
open to restricting pluralism and to violently repressing dissent whenever it feels
they are inconvenient, a part of the Colombian public that has often been
complicit with the violence perpetrated against the Colombian Far Left
through its moral support for many barbarous acts of repression against it or
through its indifference to them. Now, since this segment of the public includes
many Colombians who regard the questioning of power as a challenge to social
harmony and as a cue to the conduct of the true bandit in line with the discourse
of the hacienda, the perceived strategic posturing of the critics of Beltrán’s
award signaled to the members of Beltrán’s camp the availability of the
former to sign a Faustian contract with a rather authoritarian component of
Colombian society, thereby calling into question the true civil credentials of
Beltrán’s critics.
Such perceptions are quite apparent in the communiqué that Beltrán’s
supporters circulated in response to the critics of Beltrán’s award. To them,
the latter were the true enemies of pluralism, while Beltrán’s supporters saw
themselves as authentic defenders of civility as they felt to be coherently
interpreting the very ideal of tolerance, to be truly committed to peacefully
working out differences, and to being open to “acts of generosity and dialogue”
in the university and in the country on the pathway to peace:
With academic curiosity, we are wondering if the main problem of public universities is
the supposed infiltration on the part of the Left that would end up polluting its academic
function. We recognize that the trajectory of the National University has been tied with
the history of our nation, and that peace and war affect it. Also, we do not deny that in
our classrooms there are people with extremist worldviews. We believe, however, that,
as long as they argue in the process of building knowledge, those views are an expression
of the pluralism that must reign in university institutions.
Even more importantly, though, the communiqué on the part of Beltrán’s
supporters sought to call into question the actual civil nature of their
adversaries by extending over them an ominous shadow of suspicion for
focusing on the “supposed infiltration of the extreme Left into the university”
while being silent in relation to paramilitaries targeting members of the
academic community. To further boost the authenticity of their charge,
Beltrán’s supporters also accused their opponents of also holding a complicit
silence on the crisis of public higher education in Colombia and of supporting
the neoliberal dismantling of Colombian public universities simply because, in
their opinion, their opponents blamed the latter for the origins of the armed
conflict.
In short, Beltrán’s supporters did much more than frame the signatories of the
Open Letter as uncivil by representing them as unreasonable, antidemocratic,
intolerant, authoritarian, and belligerent as well as against pluralism, openness,
dialogue, and peace. By lumping them with the (Catholic) Far Right, with
paramilitaries and with a neoliberalism that they regarded as fascist, they were
calling into question the authenticity of their civil credentials and indirectly
placed them within the hacienda camp, thereby implying that, in spite of their
civil face, the hacienda reflected their true nature.
Now, as I earlier pointed out, civil discourse codes untruthfulness and
manipulation as cues of uncivil conduct. But once again, the erosion of
mutual trust among Colombians placed the uncivil on an extraordinarily
slippery ground. In this specific case, a failed performance of civility ended up
being received as a failed disguise of the discourse of the hacienda under a civil
cloth.
When mutual trust falters and the good faith of others can no longer be
assumed, discourse ethics melts down. Charitable interpretation is dismissed a
priori, and ambiguity in discourse is tackled through the lenses of a
hermeneutics of suspicion. At that point, civil intercourse breaks down, and
the discourse of the hacienda as well as militant revolutionary discourse turn
into the default modes of civil discourse.
conclusion
Universities are in the business of creating new knowledge. The civil sphere, in
turn, establishes in our democratic societies an ever-expanding horizon of
solidarity and inclusion among its citizens. These two spheres engage in an
exchange at the boundary between them. Universities provide the knowledge
that enables complex open societies to solve their problems and achieve
coordination, whereas the civil sphere contributes with a social environment
that can sustain criticism and a rational, open, and transparent pursuit of
knowledge.
Sometimes boundary exchanges between the university and the civil sphere
acquire a peculiar thickness. As they overlap, an important institutional space
emerges, whereby the creation of new knowledge starts to go hand-in-hand with
the cultivation of citizens. This is the site of one formative institution of the civil
sphere, where democratic societies socialize their citizens into the core values
and practices of the latter and weave civil ideals straight into the very fabric of
knowledge, so as to establish one fundamental culture-knowledge link that
sustains social life in democratic societies.
Within such institutional space, members of university communities practice
civil discourse. This implies two things. First, they show, experiment, and learn
how to perform it in an authentic manner. And second, they show, experiment,
and learn how civil arguments are to compete against alternative conceptions of
solidarity and social relations that might be present on campus and might even
count on their own formative institutions within it.
One good way to penetrate the functioning of this overlap space between the
civil sphere and the university is by addressing public controversies that cut
across these two institutional spheres. In this chapter, I zoomed in on a public
debate over the academic distinction that the Dean of Human Sciences of the
172 Carlo Tognato
National University of Colombia awarded in May 2016 to a former faculty

member who had been fired, by the decision of the Inspector General, for aiding
and abetting the insurgency and who was at the time in jail for the crime of
rebellion. The controversy split the university, became national news, and
sparked a national conversation over the relations between public universities
and politics.
Delving into this case allowed me to address how civil discourse was
deployed by both sides in the controversy, how it competed against militant
revolutionary discourse, which over various decades had some important
traction within the National University, and finally, which specific
performative challenges civil discourse faced on that occasion.
It also allowed me to bring into focus one crucial challenge that the
consolidation of civil life in Colombia and the emergence of a formative
institution of the civil sphere in its universities currently face. Over a long
period of time, three discourses shaped the way Colombians understood
legitimacy in social life: civil discourse, the discourse of the hacienda, and
militant revolutionary discourse. Many decades of internal armed conflict led
to an endemic erosion of social trust among the participants in the Colombian
public sphere. This, in turn, was ultimately responsible for the high
performative instability of civil discourse within it and for the transformation
of the discourse of the hacienda and militant revolutionary discourse into the
default modes of failed civil discourse.
Shedding light on this phenomenon can provide useful insights into how to
support the consolidation of the civil sphere in Colombia. To stabilize the
performance of civil discourse in the Colombian public sphere, it will be
imperative to restore social trust among its participants. To do that, however,
new narratives will be necessary that can assemble people from the civil,
militant, and hacienda camps; generate scenarios of sustained interaction
among them; allow them to bring into focus their points of contact and
common grounds, however thin; inspire them to establish solidarities that cut
across their respective camps; and ultimately, set the stage for a transformation
of those solidarities from tactical to strategic. Only that can restore mutual
recognition of good faith in discourse, a return of some discourse ethics within
the Colombian public sphere, and the possibility of deploying once again
charitable interpretation in discursive exchanges among Colombians. The
restoration of such conditions, in turn, will prevent failed civil discourse from
yielding to militant revolutionary discourse and the discourse of the hacienda,
thereby maintaining argumentation firmly on a civil ground.
notes
I gratefully acknowledge the participants of the Civil Sphere in Latin America
Conference at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, New Haven, June
24–25, 2016 for their comments. I am also grateful for feedback at different stages of
elaboration of this chapter from Jeff Alexander, Jaime Arocha, Nelson Arteaga, Enrique
Chaux, Malcolm Deas, William Duíca, Gustavo Duncan, Mauricio García Villegas,
Jorge Giraldo, Juan Gabriel Gómez, Marixa Lasso, María Luengo, Henry Murraín,
Claudia Ordoñez, James Sleeper, Francisco Thoumi, Angélica Thumala, Darío Valencia
Restrepo, and Carlos Alfonso Velasquez. I bear, though, all responsibility for the content
of this paper.
1. Although liberal discourse was consistent with the ideals of modernization, it is
important to recognize that clientelism and corruption were rather widespread
practices across the political spectrum and continue to be today. This should
caution against drawing an overly straightforward correspondence between
modernization and the Colombian Liberal Party on the one hand as well as
between backwardness and the Colombian Conservative Party.
2. Future characterizations of the discourse of the hacienda will need to delve deeper
into its historical development and bring in further complexity by addressing the
influence of cacique [local leader] culture on it. See Deas (2006).
3. The Office of the Inspector General (Procurador General de la Nación) is an
independent institution within the Colombian state that investigates and sanctions
breaches of the disciplinary code by civil servants.
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la-infamia-de-la-universidad-nacional-contra-el-profesor-miguel-angel-beltran/).
part iii
LAW, ORDER, AND SOLIDARITY

7
Police Officers in Contradiction

Civility and Anticivility in the São Paulo State Military Police
Mayumi Shimizu
In this chapter, I argue that police represent a regulatory institution of the civil
sphere. The significance of studying police lies in the fact that their mission of
instantiating the civil sphere is inevitably limited by the anticivil means of
achieving it. In other words, police defend the civil sphere by excluding
anticivility through their daily policing. My first task in this chapter is to
discuss and demonstrate how this contradiction is structured by focusing on
the civility of police as a regulatory institution of the civil sphere.
Besides this contradiction within their mission, police are often subject to
civil pressures for universality. A police force, especially in new democracies
such as those in Latin America, is often depicted as an anticivil institution that
corrupts democracy. Societal demands for civil repair tend to rise in these
situations, pushing police institutions to take certain measures. My second
task is to relate these societal and institutional civil pressures to local,
everyday policing. More specifically, I aim at exploring how police officers,
given the contradiction, act in the face of civil pressures by examining the case of
the São Paulo State Military Police (Polícia Militar do Estado de São Paulo:
PMESP).
Through the discussion in this chapter, I seek to address the issues
concomitant to civil instantiation from the perspective of a civil institution.
Although my focus is on police, what I argue here will be, at least partially,
applicable to other civil institutions that might face internal contradictions and
external pressures for civil repair. The chapter will offer a useful perspective to
understand civil instantiation and its limitations from within civility.
This research was supported by the Fox International Fellowship Program at Yale University and
the Heiwa Nakajima Foundation. I would like to express my gratitude to the military police
officers and the citizens who helped me carry out my fieldwork in São Paulo, as well as to the staff
of the National Police Agency of Japan and of the Japan International Cooperation Agency, who
mediated the relationship between the police and me.
179
180 Mayumi Shimizu
police as a civil institution

All the institutions of the civil sphere, whether regulatory or communicative,
translate general civil discourse into more specific codes. Operating between
civil discourse and everyday practice (Kivisto and Sciortino 2015:18), the
institutions contribute to civil instantiation by combining civil discourse with
the palpable criteria that would enable one to identify what is civil. In other
words, they offer some ideas of how a civil person looks and behaves by
associating visible attributes and behavior with the meaning of civility. Some
institutions, such as mass media and others of the communicative kind,
disseminate their civil codes throughout society as legitimate while others
present the codes in a regulative manner, with rewards and sanctions
(Alexander 2006:70).
Among the signifiers associated with civility are the police themselves.
In a democratic society, police are expected to serve and offer security to not
only a small number of elites and the state but to all citizens in a universal
manner. They seek to fulfill this mission by enforcing the law, itself a regulatory
institution of the civil sphere, and maintaining public order according to the
universalizing ideals of the civil sphere. Instantiation of these civil ideals, as
often expressed explicitly or implicitly in the basic legal texts that justify the
very existence of the police, aims at realizing an equal society in which civil rules
and ideals crystallize and all citizens follow them. Only with this civility of their
goal are police able to maintain their social meanings. Following the
terminology of Hills (2014), I introduce the word “policeness” to refer to the
meaning of being police or, in other words, the societal expectation of “how
police should be.” Civil instantiation therefore is a civil aspect of policeness.
The link between police and civility represents one of the codes that the
institution provides for everyone, whether police or nonpolice, to use in daily
life. When one praises or even criticizes police for their performance in fulfilling
the civil mission, she expresses her moral evaluations of the provided code, not
of the very existence of such code, by referring to the civil aspect of policeness as
her ideal and comparing it with the real situations she perceives. Indeed, few
people would disagree that police should work to achieve such a civil mission
(Crank 2003:204).
On the other hand, articulating civility inevitably points to the anticivility that
the former excludes to assert its own presence (Derrida 2016). The institutions of
the civil sphere define anticivility through the same codes they provide for
defining civility. Civility and anticivility are thus two sides of the same coin.
In the process of definition, the attributes that deviate from civil signifiers are
associated with anticivility. Like its civil counterpart, anticivility appears in the
real world only through human interactions reflecting these codes; the codes
themselves do not speak. They must be referenced in order to be fully real.
It is precisely at this point that police differ from other civil institutions.
Police not only provide the codes of civility but put them into practice. Routine
Police Officers in Contradiction: Civility and Anticivility 181
policing is the means for instantiating the civil sphere in which members of the
institution, police officers, refer to the codes to perform their work on the street.
Reference to the codes evokes both civility and anticivility, which, when
instantiated, no longer come together without inflicting harm to one another.
Civil instantiation therefore imposes anticivil limitation from within.
The limitation is revealed through exploring its structure, which is made up of
civil/anticivil relations, from both substantive and formal perspectives.
The substantive perspective relates to the fact that the goal of civil
instantiation is pursued by means of anticivil classification. It is substantive
because civil instantiation is limited by specifying what it is anticivil through
police classification. Definition of anticivility in the world of practice results in
differentiation and hierarchization within anticivility.
When asked what is the social function of police, most of us immediately
recognize the idea that police deal with law violators. Following the
terminology of Sacks (1972:335–336), “catching criminals” is a “category-
bound activity” inseparably linked to the ideal category of police. To this end,
officers need to know what is “bad” in terms of the civil sphere; otherwise, they
would not know to whom they should apply laws. What officers actually do in
their everyday policing is to classify civil and anticivil to exclude the latter while
protecting the former. Police are civil in the sense that they instantiate civil
sphere as its defender and protector.
The means for achieving this goal, however, takes on an anticivil quality.
Police classification of civil and anticivil surely goes against the universalizing
ideal of the civil sphere. Civil and anticivil are a set of signifieds that relate to
each other in a hierarchical manner to form two sides of a single code.
Superiority is given to civility while anticivility naturally comes to possess
inferiority, just as the centrality of “presence” stands in relation to marginal
“absence” in the Western philosophical tradition (Derrida 2016). Drawing
upon this code in daily policing, officers look for particular signifiers or
physical attributes that locate anticivility in unknown people on the street.
Although police classification is anticivil in the sense that it aims at excluding
those identified as anticivil, the duality of the code allows police to claim their
civility, evoking simultaneously the signified on the opposite side. Police
classification, however, itself constitutes the practical, anticivil aspects of
policing.
Being a day-to-day practice, police classification has real consequences – the
exclusion of those identified as anticivil. Among such policing activities,
arresting criminals should have the strongest effect. It expels those deemed as
criminals from the civil sphere by labeling them as such. Some arrested
individuals are literally excluded from the civil society by means of detention
and imprisonment. Even for those who are not subject to incarceration or who
are released after serving the determined term, social labeling would likely have
an effect strong enough to keep them outside the civil sphere (Becker 1963;
Kitsuse 1962; Lemert 1951). Police classification is a powerful means of
182 Mayumi Shimizu
defending against anticivil individuals who would, from the civil insiders’ view,
destroy civil values.
While forceful, the anticivility of police classification is constrained by
civility in two ways. The first limitation comes from the goal of instantiating
the civil sphere; classification as a means of civil instantiation must effectively
contribute to this goal. The second civil limitation resides in classification as
a means itself; it must be carried out in conformity with legal precepts. It refers
to the procedural legality underlying the anticivil means. The anticivility of
classification must be justified at two levels – goal and means. Anticivility is thus
limited but, at the same time, enabled by civility in these two ways.
Despite being a means for realizing civility, police classification itself comes
to be transformed into an ideal goal of police in its own right. The number of 1.
arrested criminals, 2. confiscated weapons, and 3. illegal drugs, for example,
become convenient benchmarks for evaluating police performance. As these
benchmarks themselves become goals, police officers as well as nonpolice
citizens come to believe that professional police should perform their
classification as effectively and efficiently as possible. It is no longer mere
anticivility to be justified but a positive value in the noncivil, professional
sphere of policing. Effectiveness in policing has thus become another anticivil
aspect of policeness along with civil instantiation.
For more effective classification, police and its members elaborate the criteria
to be used by street-level officers for identifying anticivil people. In this process,
the meaning of anticivility comes to be more specific and internally
differentiated with respective degrees of anticivility; police organization
determines the crimes that warrant special attention; officers on the street
develop their own criteria for screening specific kinds of anticivil people (Van
Maanen 1978). As this process fills anticivility with more specific meaning, it
substantiates anticivility. Through the process, anticivility is increasingly
differentiated and hierarchized for effective police classification.
Viewed from the side of the police, such meticulous criteria for identifying
anticivility outside the institution are brought into the institution and
transformed into numerous prohibitions that set the standards for
identifying anticivility in officers’ own behavior, acting, in other words, as
a form of internal discipline. As defenders and core members of the civil
sphere, police officers are expected to be exemplary citizens who embody civil
values. Indeed, police and civil society test officers’ civility whenever officers
apply laws and civil ideals through their own interpretation of these rules vis-
à-vis specific situations. To present themselves as legitimate members of the
civil institution of police, officers seek to affirm that the anticivil criteria for
identifying anticivility are not applicable to them. Through this incessant
presentation, officers seek to convince their institution and civil society of
their civil qualities.
The criteria of anticivility in turn define civility as the residual of anticivil. For
police and its members, the substantive qualities of civility remain largely
undefined. Substantive vagueness in the civil/anticivil relation on the civil side is

complemented by the formal logic of its structure. It is formal because it
concerns the structural aspects of how civility and anticivility relate to each
other rather than their respective meanings. It limits civil instantiation mainly
through hierarchization of the civil sphere by establishing its core.
In an ideal world, police and its members stand at the center of the civil
sphere. The cultural code of the police affirms that police are the defenders of
civil sphere. When this code is brought into the real world, police institutions
come to assume moral superiority in the civil sphere. Anything related to the
police becomes a symbol of such superiority, for example, the police uniform
and organizational emblems. This symbolization of police civility is the
complementary process to the officers’ self-presentation of civility.
The cultural code and officers’ behavior reinforce each other; the gap between
the sacred ideal of police civility and the profane reality of officers’ practice
comes to be rigorously inspected and, if discovered, accused more severely. This
is surely a sign of an implicit but widespread acknowledgement of police civility.
Police violence, when revealed, appears more scandalous than murder or assault
committed by nonpolice individuals and is often treated as particularly
threatening to a democratic society. The previous literature denouncing police
violence and other moral deficiencies of police is quite right in demonstrating
that there exists a strong ideal belief in police civility, even if officers fail to live
up to the expectation in their daily work.
Although it is a necessary part of civil instantiation, identifying the core of the
civil sphere is anticivil. It hierarchizes the civil sphere by creating the center and
the periphery. Those who stand at the core claim their moral, civil superiority to
those on the periphery. From the view of the core, differences among individuals
in the periphery do not matter; they are all less civil relative to the center. What
matters is the hierarchy between the center and the periphery. If those assigned
to the periphery acknowledge the relative superiority of those at the center, civil
hierarchization is successful. The civil core needs acceptance by the periphery.
Law enforcement by police is a prime example from this formal perspective.
Enforcing the law and other legal precepts means that police officers
acknowledge and uphold the superiority of the civil ideal crystallized in these
rules. By doing so, police officers set the civil spirit at the core of the civil sphere.
Accordingly, the law, as the embodiment of civility, is hierarchically superior to
all people. This hierarchization itself, however, creates civil equality among all
individuals. The law of civility declares that every individual lives under the civil
symbol of the law; there is no distinction based on achieved social status,
ascribed qualities, or membership in a police organization. What unites these
putatively equal individuals is their common superior civility. Believing in the
common civil values embodied in the common superiority creates a sense of
mutual solidarity among all citizens. As long as one accepts her inferiority vis-à-
vis the law and claims herself as a citizen, civil instantiation is under way,
uniting all people in the equally inferior status under the law.
184 Mayumi Shimizu
Police, as civil defenders, do the same by claiming their moral superiority.

In this case, police identify themselves with the law and its foundational civility.
All others are morally inferior to police but equal among them. From the police
perspective, nonpolice are morally ambiguous in the sense that they are not
police and therefore, not as civil as police are. On the other hand, police
understand that they must respect the universal human rights of the
individuals who live inside the civil sphere. Civil instantiation by police thus
limits itself to ensuring civility only among those who accept the civil superiority
of police.
So far, I have outlined how civility and anticivility relate each other in
instantiating the civil sphere. From both substantive and formal perspectives,
I have argued that civil instantiation is contradictory because anticivil
hierarchization is indispensable for creating and maintaining civil universality.
The same contradiction inheres in the very meaning of the police, who are
expected to instantiate the civil sphere through their routine, anticivil
classification on the street. Policeness is built upon a delicate balance. A lack
of either civility or anticivility would cause a collapse of the entire meaning of
police and possibly lead to abolishment of the police system.
In addition, civility and anticivility together serve as the ideal foundation of the
organizational structure of the police. The need for effective and efficient policing
usually makes police organizations adopt a pyramidal structure, or hierarchy.
As Weber points out, monocratic organization is one of the features of the
modern hierarchical bureaucracy that has “technical superiority to over any
other form of organization” (Weber 1978:957, 973) in terms of attaining its
goal. The vertical line of this hierarchy is the result of a series of successive
determinations as to who assumes the superior status over others for functional
necessities. The orders that superiors give to their subordinates must be legal;
otherwise, the superiors’ authority cannot be justified as civil. Illegal orders
would not create a sense of solidarity among subordinates because they are
supposed to work together for the common goal of civil instantiation and not
for their superior’s self-interest. The vertical hierarchization thus creates
horizontal equality and unity of the pyramidal structure of police organization.
The civil/anticivil relation makes up a structure called hierarchy that has civility
as both its goal and its basis.
For those who live in this world of police, the boundary between civil and
anticivil is undoubtedly clear. Indeed, it must be if one’s duty is to identify
anticivility. The effort to clarify what anticivility is results in differentiation and
hierarchization within anticivil. Civility here is merely a mirror image of
hierarchized anticivility. It is perhaps ironic that police institutions claiming
their civility do not need to know the substantive meaning of what civility is as
long as they set forth clearly what anticivility is.
My intention thus far has been to demonstrate the contradiction in the ideal
foundation of police as a regulatory institution of the civil sphere. Civil
instantiation through police officers’ work ends up instantiating this ideal
contradiction. In what follows, I explore how police officers act given the
contradiction, utilizing the empirical case of São Paulo, Brazil. My focus is on
the interaction between the police facing the contradiction and the pressure
calling for a more civil police force. In the eyes of police, what is at stake is
policeness. If they are to continue with their civil mission and perform routine
policing, they are to be blamed for their unavoidable anticivility. For this
reason, the officers responsible for daily policing are confronted with
a challenging task; they must define each situation they face in civil terms and
act in a convincingly civil manner. Policing is thus made up of the incessant
attempts of officers to define local, present situations.
For this investigation, I adopt an ethnomethodological perspective. Although
police receive harsh societal criticism, they maintain policeness and actually
operate as police in democratic societies. I look closely at microlevel interactions
on the streets of São Paulo to demonstrate how officers in their everyday
policing maintain policeness and behave as police. The description of the micro-
order-making by the officers will illuminate the macroprocess in which civil
repair pressures confront the civil institutions built nonetheless on the ideal
contradiction of civil and anticivil.
policing contradiction in são paulo

In this section, I focus on the daily policing conducted by the São Paulo
State Military Police (Polícia Militar do Estado de São Paulo: PMESP).
The case of PMESP should be understood as an example from a new
democracy. Indeed, no contradiction in civil instantiation arises in
authoritarian states. Under such a political situation, police are not an
institution of the civil sphere but a coercive instrument of the state.
The anticivil classification of police is justified by the equally anticivil goal
of authoritarian states that look for political dissidents to remove them.
The political transition to democracy demands that police serve not
a handful of elites but all people in the goal of civil instantiation.
The anticivil classification no longer matches the civil goal and hence the
contradiction arises. Police institutions in a democratizing process must
learn how to balance civility and anticivility.
Yet, even in well-established democratic societies, police are often considered
anticivil due to their exclusionary function performed on the street.1 Demands
for more civil police frequently appear as civil repair pressures in new
democracies (Hinton and Newburn 2009). Police institutions, in claiming
their civility, seek to take some measures to present themselves as civil. Daily
policing on the street is directly affected by this civil pressure emanating from
their institution and from the wider society. Rank-and-file police officers are
those who actually deal with society-wide civil pressures at the local level.
In what follows, I investigate how PMESP officers in the civil/anticivil
contradiction act and seek to define the situations in the face of this civil
186 Mayumi Shimizu
pressure. I seek to demonstrate that the contradictory meanings in policeness

are parallel to societal demands, which have resulted in two distinctive styles of
policing – traditional policing and community policing. Implementing both
styles, officers maintain a balance between civility and anticivility by
constructing an ambiguous space called society and symbolically dividing the
ordinary from the extraordinary.
Societal Pressures
Brazil is one of the new democratic states whose police institutions suffer from
the emerging civil/anticivil contradiction. In Latin America, military juntas in
many countries held the reins of government in the 1960s and 1970s. Police
were the state institution frequently used under these military regimes to combat
political opponents such as communists. In the Brazilian case, the military
controlled the state for twenty-one years: it seized power in the 1964 coup,
returning to the barracks in 1985. As in other countries in the region, police
violence in Brazil was notorious and its brutality was documented in detail
(Projeto Brasil Nunca Mais 1985). Many scholarly works have also been
published on the same issue.2
Contrary to many Brazilians’ expectations, the democratic transition in
1985, followed by the promulgation of the Federal Constitution in 1988, did
not curb police violence (Belli 2004:18). Throughout the 1990s, Brazilian mass
media broadcast scandalous police violence cases. Notable examples in São
Paulo include the Massacre of Carandiru (1992) and the incident called Favela
Naval (1997),3 both of which are still referred to by PMESP officers when they
speak about human rights. It was said that many Brazilian people were afraid of
gangs as well as police, with rumors of crime and violence spreading through
their daily conversations (Caldeira 2001). Indeed, reports by human rights
organizations have denounced the cases in which officers had killed or
severely injured nonpolice individuals (Amnesty International 2005; Human
Rights Watch 2009). After nearly a quarter century since the end of the military
dictatorship, the image of police as a violent institution persisted (Hinton
2009:217). This civil concern erupted into criticism and manifestations
against police as scandals involving police officers were made public.
While the strong demands for more civil policing were heard, the calls for
more effective police were also present. After the democratic transition, the
homicide rate had increased significantly in the 1990s (Murray, Cerqueira, and
Kahn 2013). Some argued that the authoritarian regime had been successful in
containing crimes in favelas or slums with its repressive political power (Hinton
2006:102). The need for effective and efficient policing also seemed to grow in
recent years. In São Paulo, the largest Brazilian city in terms of population,
PMESP reportedly received 150 thousand telephone calls for emergency help,
prompting them to consider outsourcing its call center in order to put a greater
number of police officers on the street (Sampaio 2013).
Behind this reform lay political pressures. In fact, the outsourcing was a part
of the police reform projects proposed by Geraldo Alckmin, who throughout his
terms as the Governor of the State of São Paulo (2001–2006 and 2011–present),
consistently insisted on increasing the number of police officers on the street. He
explained that the goal of the outsourcing is to “have more and more police
officers on the street, in their preventive, ostensible, and repressive activity”
because the “police officer is extremely specialized and therefore, the more
[police officers] in the activity they are meant to implement, the better”
(Sampaio 2013). Then State Secretary of Public Security, Grella Vieira,
defended such reform by affirming that “to increase the number of the police
officers on the street will contribute to the sense of security of the people and to
the war on criminality” (saopaulo.sp.gov.br 2014).
These two demands from society seem mutually contradictory. One is the
civil demand that requires the officers to thoroughly comply with legal rules in
conducting policing. The other is the anticivil demand that calls for more
effective and efficient policing through which more and more people would be
excluded from the civil sphere. PMESP were thus put under pressure to take
measures that would meet both societal demands.
Organizational Response: Two Styles of Policing

Being the largest police institution in Latin America, PMESP have been
struggling to juggle the paradoxical societal demands that political
democratization has posed: they are now required to serve not only the state
but every citizen by effectively defending the civil sphere. In response to these
demands, PMESP have been implementing two distinctive styles of policing,
which contradict each other yet coexist, reflecting the paradox in society and in
policeness.
The two styles – traditional policing and community policing – have different
orientations in focus, principal policing modality, form of prevention, and way
of ensuring their civility. The traditional style is oriented toward emergency
response to exclude anticivil people for attaining the goal of civil instantiation.
Car patrolling is the principal policing modality, and there is a presupposition
that officers’ presence is the key to preventive measures, which represent
a secondary concern.
In contrast, community policing, introduced in response to criticism of police
violence, focuses more on prevention. Although the principal actors are the
officers who work at small establishments called police boxes, any officer
engaged in intensive interaction with nonpolice individuals is seen as engaging
in community policing. Prevention is carried out by including ambiguous
individuals on the civil side through daily interactive work so that they do not
fall into anticivility. Characterized by intensive interaction, officers seek to
justify anticivility in classification by emphasizing civility in its conformity to
legal precepts rather than its effectiveness vis-à-vis the civil goal.
188 Mayumi Shimizu
Traditional Policing
The traditional style of policing seeks to cope with societal demands by focusing
on the fight against crime. PMESP stress their policing effectiveness in settling
criminal cases and consequent exclusion of the anticivil vis-à-vis their civil goal.
As most of the incidents they respond to have already been reported by
nonpolice individuals, the officers’ responsibility is lighter in identifying
anticivil people. Prevention in this condition becomes the secondary concern.
In this policing style, PMESP reduce anticivility and, consequently, civility as
well.
In the traditional mode, PMESP try to respond to the demand for more
effective policing by strengthening their capacity for responding to
emergencies while preventing criminal incidents by patrolling.4 To these ends,
car patrolling (radiopatrulhamento) is the most basic policing modality.
PMESP’s car patrolling has a double function. In this modality, a pair of rank-
and-file officers in an automobile patrol their assigned beat for crime
prevention. They also respond to emergencies when COPOM (Centro de
Operações da Polícia Militar or the police center for managing emergency
calls) communicates an incident or the officers themselves find it. Although all
modalities are supposed to fulfill these two functions, car patrolling is
considered most advantageous in fulfilling both functions in a balanced manner.
The form of prevention in traditional policing is based largely on the mobility
and visibility of car patrolling. The idea is that the presence of officers on the
street would make potential offenders avoid the spots where they see the
officers. Indeed, the Norms for the Operational System of PMESP
(NORSOP), which provide the basic operational principles and technical
instruction for policing, state that “the most visible basis of the preventive
effect of PMESP’s policing system is the act of presence” (NORSOP 2006,
6.1.3). Presence in this sense means to make oneself visible; hence, the
expression “act of presence.” It reinforces the idea that each officer should
actively cover as many streets as possible by moving around the subarea
assigned to their company (companhia or frontline police station). Mobility
ensures visibility.
Car patrolling thus constitutes the PMESP’s traditional form of prevention.
It is compatible with the anticivil demands of exclusion already existent in the
authoritarian period. Prevention appears to be a residual part of car patrolling;
officers engage in preventive patrolling only when they are not handling
emergency incidents. It is thus a reactive mode. As Poncioni puts it, this
“professional-traditional police model” “emphasizes crime control, in
a purely reactive strategy of the police” (Poncioni 2005:591) “with a strong
appeal to ‘fight against crime’” (Poncioni 2014:508).
The consequence of traditional policing is ironic. Despite its orientation of
“fighting against crime,” it decreases anticivil classification and hence impairs
civil instantiation. As classification is conducted by nonpolice citizens, officers
themselves are not entirely responsible for identifying the anticivil. They are
instead committed to effectively and efficiently handling the reported crime for
they receive an overwhelming number of emergency calls. When they patrol
their beat for preventive purposes, they engage in classification but it is always
limited due to targeting specific kinds of crime. Company commanders often
indicate the kind of crime their subordinates should prioritize. Consequently,
anticivility in this policing style is narrowly defined. As I show below, this
institutional tendency is complicit with street-level officers’ inclinations about
what they think are serious crimes. The result is lax enforcement of civil rules.
The reduced and limited anticivility of traditional policing does not imply
that societal demand for more civility in policing has disappeared. PMESP and
the broader society stress the need for a different level of civility to justify police
anticivility. PMESP are concerned with civility relative to the goal of civil
instantiation and claim that effectiveness in policing facilitates inputs to such
civility. On the other hand, citizens worry about the civil legality in traditional
policing itself and see traditional policing as a destructive intrusion into the legal
basis that justifies it. As I have argued in the previous section, however, only
with both levels of civility is anticivility justified.
Community Policing
This criticism against the means led to introduction of a new style of policing in
the 1990s. PMESP’s community policing focuses more on street-level work to
alleviate the “police as violent and rude” notion. It aims to stimulate the
interaction between police and local communities and, eventually, to promote
the quality of life of citizens (NORSOP 2006, 6.1.1). Officers on the street seek
to build good relationships with community members to elicit their
understanding and cooperation. PMESP expect the officers to take care of
various kinds of local problems, including those of a noncriminal nature,
which are deemed relatively unimportant in traditional policing. This
orientation toward civility of frontline policing contrasts to traditional
policing and its concern with effectiveness.
Community policing centers on prevention rather than emergency response.
It coincides with the organizational policy that sees “emphasis on preventive
action” as the “basic philosophy of the [operational] system” (NORSOP 2006,
6.1.3). The form of prevention also differs from traditional policing. Officers in
the modality of community policing work at a “police box” (base comunitária
de segurança), a small establishment to which less than twenty officers are
assigned to serve local communities. As their work involves solving
community problems of various kinds, they not only enforce laws and
respond to emergencies but interact with community members to create
a better quality of life.
PMESP’s community policing experienced an important turn around 1997
when they began to pay attention to Japanese-style policing. Under this
influence, PMESP made the new modality more prevention-minded. It was in
this context that I embarked on my roughly two years of fieldwork with PMESP
190 Mayumi Shimizu
in 2008.5 My initial interest was in investigating whether PMESP would succeed

in introducing this entirely different, preventive policing and in exploring the
potential factors that would hamper it. With the help of a Japanese police
officer, who had been dispatched by National Police Agency of Japan, and the
Japan International Cooperation Agency, I was able to shadow the officers
engaging in the new preventive activities at the police boxes.
Among these activities, the ones that drew my attention were various social
projects run by officers in the police box. Officers organize their own projects to
empower socially vulnerable community members so that they will not end up
as perpetrators or victims of crime. Notable projects so far include building
a minilibrary and teaching soccer to children. Children, elderly people, the
homeless, and crime victims have become frequent target groups for these
projects. Inclusion in these activities implies inclusion of the nonpolice
individuals into the civil.
Active inclusion in the civil sphere is a notable feature of community policing.
As nonpolice individuals in general are seen as morally ambiguous from the
perspective of the police, labelling them as civil can be an innovative turn
towards the civil for police assuming their own moral superiority. This
process, however, entails active anticivil classification by street-level officers.
In daily policing, officers are required to stay alert to classify every person
around them to decide who should be included into the civil. On the other
hand, anticivil criminals should never be involved in the civil side. Accordingly,
the new style of policing promotes a form of prevention in which officers seek to
establish a clear boundary between civil and anticivil.
In this way, community policing enhances both civility and anticivility.
In contrast to the traditional policing style, which reduces both, the new style
would extend PMESP’s civility if the officers successfully draw nonpolice
individuals to the civil side. The officers on the street may claim that their way
of serving citizens is perfectly civil because they treat citizens cordially. And this
may indeed be the case. Yet, they only serve citizens they think deserve their
service; anticivil criminals are not considered citizens (Kant de Lima 1986).
In the following subsections, I turn to street policing to explore how the
officers conduct their policing under these two different styles.
Police Work on the Street: Superhero and Family Head

Given the two styles of policing, how do PMESP officers construct the world of
policing? These policing styles are the sets of codes that PMESP as a civil
institution provides. Being members of the institution, PMESP officers are
required to refer to them for constructing the meaningful, practical order on
the street. Although being aware of these codes is in effect mandatory, how the
officers use the codes is largely up to them. Officers construct their own world of
policing by adequately employing the codes while being to some extent
constrained by such codes.
The focus of the order construction is the substantive vagueness of police

civility. If it surfaces, the lack of concreteness is fatal on two counts. First, it
reveals that police may not know what they are instantiating as their mission
and therefore, undermines their legitimacy and self-assumed moral superiority.
Substantive vagueness also implies a blurred boundary between civil and
anticivil, the distinction of which constitutes a fundamental premise of police
work. Second, as a consequence, they would not know how to achieve it. These
become the challenges in officers’ everyday presentation of self as police. They
must incessantly demonstrate civility in such a way that it appears meaningful
and its instantiation is likely.
In the following, I depict such presentation of officers in the two different
styles of policing. Under the traditional style, officers behave as though they are
superheroes who combat anticivil criminals in the extraordinary world to
protect individuals in the ordinary world. When involved in community
policing, officers present themselves as heads of the family who, as moral
leaders, attempt to establish personal ties with ambiguous individuals to
transform them into full citizens.
The Officer as Superhero

The substantive vagueness of civility is particularly critical under the traditional
style of PMESP policing because this style is inclined to reduce civility along
with anticivility. Given reactive policing without active efforts to identify what
civility is, the traditional style does not help fill this semantic void. In short, the
problem is that officers must show that the boundary between civility and
anticivility is unequivocally clear even though it is blurred. As a blurred
boundary may eventually rock the very existence of police by revealing that
identification of the anticivil is actually impossible, asserting the clarity of the
boundary is imperative.
To make the boundary appear clear, PMESP officers establish “ambiguity,”
analogizing it with society, in which neither civil nor anticivil individuals live.
In this way, protecting the ambiguity (society) comes to be the mission of
instantiating the civil sphere.
The officers in traditional PMESP policing aim at establishing this
ambiguity by offering a convincing performance of “officer-as-superhero.”
There are three distinctive roles in this play: civil superheroes (police
officers), ambiguous individuals (society), and anticivil evil (criminals).
By separating these three roles from each other, officers demonstrate the
clarity of the boundary.
In this play, civility is to be achieved via effective exclusion of the anticivil
through the arrest of criminals, rather than via the civil legality of the means.
This is indeed the ideal contradiction of police I elaborated in Section 1. How
the officers’ anticivil preference for exclusion joins forces with civility is
demonstrated in the following example. Responding to my question asking
192 Mayumi Shimizu
what had inspired them to become police officers, three non-commissioned

officers6 replied:
Officer A: I decided to enter PMESP because I really hated thieves. The place where
I grew up had a lot of them.
Officer B: I became a police officer in 1989. In my childhood, two police officers lived
next to my house. They were always inspiring for the fifteen-year-old boy next door.
I thought they were very cool. When I said to my family that I would like to be a police
officer, they didn’t like my idea at all and said that it would be too dangerous.
Officer C: When I was a child, I imagined that the police officers were heroes because
they saved those who need help. Having started my career in PMESP, I realized that I was
right (Officers A and B strongly agreed). The police mission is to save the lives of people.
The three officers in the conversation combine the anticivil means of “police
catch criminals” with the civil goal of “sav[ing] the lives of people.” This
constitutes the superhero’s policeness in which civility and anticivility come
together under the influence of traditional policing. While its anticivility can be
seen in its orientation to excluding criminals, its civility is less clear but could be
interpreted in the officers’ insistence that they act not in their self-interest but for
“those who need help.” Although they were at least initially self-motivated
(“I really hated thieves” and “I thought they [the officers next door] were very
cool”), they now explain their motivation in altruistic and general terms: to
“save the lives of people.” Officer B’s reference to his family also tries to convey
the civility of police. Despite his family’s claim that police work would be
dangerous, Officer B started his career as a police officer, contending
implicitly that he was selflessly serving for the sake of the civil.
the roles of superhero and evil The superhero is the most important of
the three roles in the play. In this leading role, officers attempt to fill the
substantive vagueness of civility with the effectiveness and efficiency of their
policing. Policing effectiveness becomes a criterion for hierarchization. For
example, the capacity to handle heavy arms becomes a symbol of a high
degree of police professionalism. Being a member of a heavily-armed unit
such as ROTA (Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguiar)7 comes to be a sign of
anticivil professionalism and hence a symbol of civility. An ex-commander of
ROTA explains to me that ROTA is the “elite troop” of PMESP and, precisely
for this reason, they serve civility: “PMESP are super-dedicated to people.
ROTA is the unit most open to noncriminals than any other unit of the
institution and we [ROTA] attend to people very well” (interview with
author, November 14, 2012).
To emphasize police professionalism, officers present criminals as
profoundly evil. Although a large part of the police work consists of dealing
with small daily incidents of little consequence, some incidents, especially those
involving firearms, do pose a serious threat, even death. While many officers
seem to think that they should not spend fruitless time addressing small
incidents, they are often enthusiastic in responding to these grave incidents

(ocorrências graves), which include bank robbery, kidnapping, hostage-taking
incidents, and organized crime related cases, among others. Addressing these
cases tends to be highly appreciated in PMESP; in some companies I visited, the
officers who addressed such grave cases tended to be selected as the “officer of
the month.”
Police professionalism is not merely a hierarchizing criterion inside PMESP.
It is applied to individuals outside PMESP, serving as proof of the civil
superiority of police in relation to nonpolice. In other words, police are
morally superior to nonpolice due to their capacity to defeat evil. Police
themselves become the symbol of superiority. Consider the following
comments made by the above-cited ex-commander of ROTA in a feature
newspaper article on police corruption.
It is horrible news that police officers together with the gangs involved in a condo
robbery were arrested . . . I understand that they are traitors who do not deserve an
ounce of compassion because they have not only betrayed their comrades but also have
tarnished the uniform that we all honor and in which many men died wearing it with
pride. Officers arrested in this way should be sent to common prisons and not to the
Romão Gomes Military Prison, reserved for the military police officers who committed
crimes and erred because of [police] duty.8
In this passage, moral superiority clearly separates police officers from the rest
of society. Their uniform is the symbol of superiority, the use of which is strictly
prohibited by non-police individuals (Regulamento de Uniformes 1996, Art. 4º,
§1º). Even if an officer commits a crime, s/he remains superior as long as the
mistake results from their police work. The role of the superhero bears
a sacredness that no other role can attain.
the role of the society member This superiority, however, needs

acknowledgement by members of society. To acquire it, PMESP officers
construct an ostensibly give-and-take relationship with society. Namely,
ambiguous people are recognized as citizens to be protected by the officers as
long as they accept the officers’ superiority. Conversely, those who show lack of
respect for police are immediately suspect and/or treated as anticivil.
In theoretical terms, it could be said that officers insist on their civility from
the formal perspective to complement its substantive vagueness.
This exchange of acknowledgement for protection is not fully implemented,
however. Those who have acknowledged police superiority are still deemed
ambiguous even as they are treated as “citizens” deserving police protection.
Officers suspect that ambiguous individuals can at any moment turn into
anticivil criminals because they generally lack discipline. As a veteran officer
comments:
In my opinion, people do not respect the police . . . [P]eople here do not have discipline
(educação) . . . If people do not respect the police, they at least should have a bit of fear of
194 Mayumi Shimizu
the police. This is not like violence but visual. Our uniform should be more like the
military, as it was before.
The acceptance of police superiority is so important for the officer that it must
be ensured even by displaying the anticivil power of police and causing fear.
According to the officer, fear is necessary because common, nonpolice
individuals in general do not have discipline. In this example, members of
society are categorically treated as morally inferior to police. As superheroes,
police officers thus attempt to establish a division between themselves and
society.
There are two notable subroles that PMESP officers use to procure societal
acknowledgement: the criminal victim and the community leader. Because they
are critical, officers invite the people embodying these roles to their
commemorative occasions. The following citation from my field notes,
depicting the anniversary ceremony of a battalion,9 illustrates how these roles
are vital for police to garner the recognition of society:
The ceremony takes place in the auditorium of a college near the battalion . . .
An announcement, presumably by an officer of the battalion, opens the ceremony by
calling the names of the important guests, such as the presidents of local civic groups,
letting everyone in the auditorium know about their presence. Then, high-ranking com-
missioned officers and local authorities are introduced as they walk up to a big table
placed at the center of the front stage. One of these seven people is the commander of the
battalion, sitting at the end of the table, suggesting that he is the least important of the
seven. After a brief introduction of the battalion, its history, work, and interaction with
civic groups, honors are awarded to the officers selected for having provided excellent
service. Names of award-winning officers are announced as they climb up onto the stage.
The highlight is an officer (sergeant) who receives the award for having addressed
a complicated case . . . We then hear the summary of the hostage-taking incident in which
he successfully rescued the victim from robbers. In the middle of the narration, the
narrator suddenly interrupts to announce the arrival of an ex-general commander of
PMESP, who eventually sits at the table on the stage. The narration resumes with the
description of the hostage-taking incident. The victim of the case is then invited on the
stage and is introduced to everyone. She expresses her gratitude to the sergeant and
hands him a medal as a prize[.]
Both the victim and the community leader roles actualize the superiority of
police. The victim represents a passive and weak individual in need of
protection by the superhero whose activeness and strength contrast to the
victim’s attributes (Stabile 2009:89). For this reason, “criminal victims” are
not just victims but only those who have actually been helped by police. They
are expected to show gratitude and publicly testify to the police’s civility and
professional effectiveness.
In contrast, the community leader is in charge of confirming police
superiority and disseminating this idea in the respective communities. Officers
treat this “authority of civility” in a way that respects their civility by inviting
them to the ceremony and announcing their names before calling those of the
officers. It also suggests that the officers have close ties with the leaders, whose
presence serves as a symbol of the PMESP’s civility. But it is not that PMESP is
admitting that society is morally superior to the police. That the narration for
the awarded sergeant stopped when the ex-general commander arrived
symbolically demonstrates that police are the priority.
constructing scenes: dividing the extraordinary from the

ordinary Having defined the basic characteristics of each role, PMESP
officers organize “scenes” to put them into action in the real world. Their
goal is to demonstrate that the boundary between civil and anticivil is
unequivocally clear and that officers, as superheroes, play an active role in
defending it.
To this end, PMESP officers construct two contrasting scenes: the ordinary
and the extraordinary. The ordinary world is society. Ambiguous people
populate this world. Police officers also belong to it but occupy
a hierarchically privileged place due to their superiority. This is the world in
which normality is the rule, in which a normal everyday life is supposed to
continue uninterrupted. Evil, as part of the extraordinary world, attempts to
disrupt the ordinary. When society is invaded by evil and someone calls for help,
police officers turn into extraordinary superheroes who defeat the evil.
The following text, elaborated by a company, describes a case resolved by an
“officer of the month,” revealing a tale of a superhero:
The military police officer was nominated as the “officer of the month”
for August 2011 . . . [D]uring routine patrolling, [Officer ***] was informed by the
COPOM (the PMESP radio network that manages emergency calls) about a robbery
incident in progress. The officer immediately headed to the place and found strange
movement inside a jewelry store. The officer surrounded the place and, after the arrival
of support units, entered the establishment, succeeded in arresting two individuals, one
of whom had a revolver . . . [A]ll were taken to a police station, where the incident was
recorded as a Robbery Attempt/ Juvenile Delinquency. Officer *** acted with an out-
standing degree of professionalism and respect for the principles of human rights, an
attitude that contributed greatly to the positive and expected results by the organization.
It is therefore a motive of pride to have him as a member of this company.
The narrative effectively separates the two worlds in both formal and
substantive ways. The movement of ordinary-extraordinary-ordinary
constitutes a formal division of the scenes. The story, in which the out-of-
normality world is provoked by a criminal event whose resolution by the
officer brings the peaceful ordinary world back, marks two turning points.
The first is the news of the robbery, which represents a transition from the
ordinary to the extraordinary. Before knowing about the crime, the officer had
been engaging in his “routine patrolling.” Being informed of an emergency,
suggesting the advent of the extraordinary, he stops patrolling and
“immediately head[s] to the place.” This change implies an emergency is the
priority over routine policing. The fact that one of the robbers had a gun also
196 Mayumi Shimizu
conveys a sense of the extraordinary criminal world. The second turning point,
marking the return to the ordinary, is the criminal registration of the arrestees in
a police station.
The tone of the entire description separates the two worlds in a substantive
manner by stressing the excellence of the officer. It suggests how effectively the
officer performed his task as the superhero. It shows that the officer acted
quickly (“immediately headed”) and played a central role in the resolution of
the crime. It implies that the incident was not simple enough, for the case
involved a victim, a revolver, and two perpetrators, meaning that the robbery
was planned. The closing phrases affirm that his actions showed “an
outstanding degree of professionalism” as well as his “respect for the
principles of human rights,” testifying to his excellence as a police officer both
in professional effectiveness and civility. All these points suggest that the
extraordinary world is distinct from the ordinary society. Because those who
have the most power, whether good or evil, rule the world of the extraordinary,
police officers must leave their ordinary life aside for a moment to become the
extraordinary superhero that fights evil. The superhero then returns to normal
life in the ordinary world as a citizen.
The construction of these two distinctive scenes results in separating the three
roles and consequently making the civil/anticivil boundary appear clear.
The invention of the ordinary world is particularly significant. With this
intermediate part, officers can claim, on the one hand, that ordinary
individuals are essentially different from anticivil criminals. Nonetheless,
police never abandon the idea that these ordinary individuals are in reality
ambiguous and could turn into anticivil criminals at any moment. Thus, the
ambiguous and the anticivil are only separated in an ideal-typical and not in
a real sense. On the other hand, they can separate themselves from ordinary
individuals by asserting their extraordinary superiority. Civility, ambiguity, and
anticivility conceptually constitute a hierarchical line. On it, civil police and
anticivil criminals can never be mixed. In a sense, society as ambiguity itself
serves as the boundary between civil and anticivil. Police protect society because
it is their fundamental raison d’être.
The Officer as Family Head

The traditional policing style of PMESP has come under increasing pressure to
become more civil. The pressure for civil repair in São Paulo had become
especially strong in the 1990s, when serious cases of police violence were
revealed. Community policing was introduced to fend off the attack.
By using the words “fend off,” I intend to suggest that the framework of
traditional policing has remained. My intention is not to criticize the fact that
PMESP continue prioritizing car patrolling and emergency response. Clearly,
excluding the anticivil constitutes an essential part of policeness. Rather, I argue
that the traditional role division and methods of scene construction persist and
seem to have been transformed into powerful cultural codes. Many PMESP
officers see themselves as superheroes combatting the evil that attempts to

disrupt ordinary societal life; as the slogan on the wall of the ROTA building
says: “ROTA is reserved for heroes” (A ROTA é reservada aos heróis).
Despite the continuity of the traditional, community policing surely drives
change in policing. It differs from traditional policing mainly on two counts.
First, it tends to eliminate the ambiguity constructed under traditional policing.
Oriented toward prevention, community policing requires the officers to engage
in classification and to make the boundary between civil and anticivil clear.
In classifying, normality as the rule of the ordinary world becomes the
substantive meaning and criteria for discerning civility.
The second point of contrast is that the officers seek to define their role inside
the ordinary world. Traditional policing establishes well the role of officer
relative to the outside, extraordinary world, that is, officers ward off evil. This
role, however, says little about the ordinary life of the superhero. Community
policing fills in this blank by encouraging officers to concentrate more on
inclusion into the civil sphere rather than exclusion from it. More specifically,
the officers are expected to be morally exemplary citizens who help formerly
ambiguous others be securely included in the civil sphere. Community policing
is about the civil hero’s daily, ordinary life. This is the role of the “family head,”
the moral leader of society.
Corresponding to the separation between the ordinary and the
extraordinary, community policing is often seen as completely distinct from
traditional policing. In my fieldwork, a company commander acknowledged
that he did not know anything about “comunitária” because he had worked in
the more reactive, exclusion-oriented units such as the tactical force (força
tática) and ROTA. Nevertheless, most PMESP noncommissioned officers
engage in both kinds of policing. An officer conducting car patrolling today
may be working in a police box the next week. Even while working in
a particular policing modality, officers are required to play both roles. With
the introduction of community policing, the officers have come to act as the
family head in the ordinary world and as the superhero in the extraordinary
world. They thus seek to deal with the contradiction in policeness by separating
the ordinary and the extraordinary.
To act as the family head, PMESP officers take two steps. First, they
classify the ambiguous individuals in the ordinary world into “civil family
members of police” and the “still-ambiguous.” Then, they engage in
community policing activities to make the latter fully civil by constructing
personalized relationships.
police classification of ambiguity Police classification under

community policing ultimately aims at preventing ordinary individuals from
being involved in the extraordinary world of crime. PMESP officers must
identify those society members who live on the edge so that officers can take
measures to keep them away from crime. Officers believe these people are
198 Mayumi Shimizu
socially vulnerable in that they can be easily drawn into the extraordinary world
either as a perpetrator or a victim, or even both. In any case, they all are seen as
distant from what police think is normal.
As the criterion for classification, normality means unidentifiable. In the
ideal world of the civil, every individual becomes equal and unidentifiable in
the sense that everyone upholds and embodies civility. PMESP officers
paradoxically assume that they are civilly superior to others; thus, the
qualities they are supposed to have become the standardized normality to
which every civil individual must conform. People with one or more
identifiable features are classified into the “still-ambiguous” category while
others are seen as civil. The civil sphere is hierarchized according to the
degree of normality.
Identifiable criteria are almost unlimited, defined in negative terms, as are the
prohibitions in PMESP internal discipline. These include uncleanliness,
joblessness, laziness, disrespect for rules, selfishness and being inconsiderate
of others, the inability to fulfill duties as citizens, being too young or too old,
incompetence, weakness, and hedonistic self-indulgence, to name a few.
PMESP officers place some of these criteria together and establish the
categories of anomalies, such as the homeless, street children, adolescents,
and the elderly. There is at least one criterion that becomes the core quality of
each category; for example, having no home for the category of homeless, and
age for street children, adolescents, and the elderly. Other criteria are connected
to the central ones by inference. Whether the classified person has every single
one of these qualities does not matter much. Matching the central criterion is
sufficient for the officers to judge normality.
The following examples suggest how officers construct and apply the
category of “homeless people”:
In a conversation with two officers as they patrol on foot, they stated that a problem on
their beat is homeless people, being addicted to drugs and alcohol. According to their
account, these people do not want to go to the homeless shelter because users of the
shelter must accept discipline, such as taking a shower to stay clean. I knew, however,
about several cases that contradict this view. When I visited one homeless shelter, I saw
one of the users complain that he had been denied use of the shower there even though he
wanted it . . . I told the officers about my experiences in the shelters and asked them how
they had learned that “the homeless hate cleanliness.” The officers answered that they
heard the story from a social welfare worker but they had never visited homeless shelters.
(Excerpt from a company commander making a speech in a meeting with community
members): Homeless people don’t want to go to the shelter. Because there are rules in the
shelter but no rules on the street.
In both cases, the officers connect the central quality, homelessness, with
concomitant qualities such as uncleanliness and disrespect for rules.
The cultural codes widespread in society serve as the basis for the category
construction. The fact that the speech in the second example was made in front
of nonpolice people suggests that the company commander thought that the
society members would share his belief that the homeless hate rules. Other
underlying factors include the officers’ everyday experiences, such as seeing
people with dingy clothes on the street, and gleaning information from
colleagues and collaborators. As the connection eventually gains
persuasiveness, the constructed category becomes conventional knowledge.
It is “protected against induction” (Sacks 1992); as in the first example,
knowledge opposing the officers’ conventional understanding is discarded as
a mere exception.
At this point, the PMESP officers’ classification is paradoxical. Although
community policing on the whole reduces ambiguity through classification, the
officers incessantly and simultaneously reconstruct it by identifying the still-
ambiguous. This constant reconstruction suggests that extinction of ambiguity
is impossible (Bauman 1991; Giesen 2012). As I show in what follows, PMESP
officers do need “still-ambiguous” people because their civil mission is to
protect them.
society as family: the inclusion of ambiguity The PMESP officers

engaging in community policing interact with still-ambiguous people to include
them in the civil side. Direct interaction fosters a close relationship between
police officers and these people. This personal tie anchors the still-ambiguous to
the civil side of police; from the police perspective, they protect and save these
people from ambiguity. The officers then expect the newly included individuals
to be supportive of their community policing activities that address the
remaining ambiguous people. As long as ambiguity remains, community
policing thus goes on.
Community policing officers seek to construct a good, personal relationship
with community members. Indeed, the activities of community policing such as
organizing social projects involve intensive interaction with communities.
These activities frequently place people in a particular “identifiable” category
as the target group for inclusion into civility with personalized ties.
For example, an educational program called PROERD is targeted at
schoolchildren to keep them away from drugs and violence. In this program,
officers who were specially trained for this purpose interactively teach classes in
elementary schools; besides giving lectures to the kids and making them work
through the problems in a workbook, the officers have conversations, sing, and
dance with the kids. In the schools I visited, the officers always wrote their first
name on the blackboard so that the children would be able to call them by their
personal name. Although the effort is not always successful, the intention of
constructing a personalized relationship with the still ambiguous category of
children is clear.
The officers do not expect a close personal tie with the still-ambiguous people
from the beginning; they know it should be gradual. Indeed, the PROERD
officers in the example above neither treated the children personally nor were
willing to do so. For example, as far as I could observe, they did not call the
200 Mayumi Shimizu
children by first name. Instead, they referred to physical traits of the students:
“[Choosing who would read the text among those that raised a hand to show
their willingness] OK, little blonde cutie (loirinho) there, please.” The officers’
relationship with the children was not fully personalized at that initial point.
In the ordinary world hierarchized by the police’s superiority, the more
personal the relationship becomes, the higher one climbs up the civil
hierarchy. A close personal tie with an officer indicates that one is recognized
as sufficiently civil. A personal, informal relationship is allowed only with
individuals at the same moral level in the hierarchy; those inferior in the
moral hierarchy must show respect to the superior in a formalized manner.
This is of course a ubiquitous part of the everyday life of military and
paramilitary organizations such as PMESP, in which failure to give a salute to
a superior is punished (Regulamento Disciplinar 2001, Art. 13, Sole Paragraph,
44). A personal relationship in this hierarchical world means being fully civil.
Recognized as such, full citizens often receive better, “personalized” public
service than still-ambiguous people. The following experience of a community
leader shows how a full citizen is treated (unfairly) better than a still-ambiguous
individual:
The community leader spoke about his experience of being stopped by a police officer
when he mistakenly drove the wrong way up a one-way street. He started his story by
assuring me that rigorous application of the law by police in general was good but it
should not be excessive. He then taught me how to deal with these excessively “mean”
officers when they “got” you. According to him, it is not a good idea to complain about it
and make them mad. Instead, you need to make conversation with them about anything
but your accident in order to become their instant friend. The community leader was sure
that this was how he escaped from the officer who overlooked his traffic offense and
eventually released him without charging a fine.
In exchange for better treatment, recognized full citizens are expected to fulfill
their obligation as citizens: to cooperate with police in community policing
activities. Indeed, the activities such as organizing social projects often count on
the cooperation of the full citizens:
Recently, we [members of the police box] are busy because of a change in social projects.
We’ve recently finished the kitchen garden project [in which a private in the police box
taught homeless people how to grow vegetables in a small garden] and are now starting
a new project. In this new one, Officer *** [the same private responsible for the kitchen
garden project] encourages elderly people to make simple handcrafts out of recyclables
such as plastic. For this new project, we use a classroom in a school building run by the
charity organization with which Officer *** worked in the kitchen garden project.
In this case, the new project is made possible by the close relationship between
Officer *** and the staff of the charity organization. It is worth noting that the
informant officer remarked that only Officer *** and another officer in his
police box played an active role in running social projects even though there
were at least five more officers assigned to the daytime shifts in this police box.
It implies that the relationship was a personal tie built between Officer *** and
staff of the charity organization rather than an organizational partnership
between the police and the charity.
As it has become clear by this point, these personal relationships differ from
the universal solidarity of the civil sphere (Alexander 2006:4). The scope of
solidarity is not universal. It is limited depending on what PMESP officers think
their civility is; anticivility is precluded from it. The space inside the civil is
hierarchized according to how close one personally is to the police officer.
A degree of personality becomes a proxy of civility here. For PMESP officers,
inclusion in the civil means to be a “family” member of the police. As the general
commanders of PMESP often mention in their speeches, “PMESP is a family.”
But the family is not limited to inside the organization. It permeates “civil”
society. As DaMatta (1991) points out, family in Brazil is a hierarchized sphere
where personal ties count.
Brought into policing, the family takes over civility. If community policing
thoroughly eliminated ambiguity, PMESP would lose their civil meaning and
become a mere anticivil institution that excludes their enemies in defense of
their family. As in traditional policing, ambiguity plays an imperative role in
maintaining policeness. Although PMESP’s community policing reduces
ambiguity, the policy never eradicates it completely, simultaneously
reconstructing it. In the end, community policing coexists with traditional
policing in the framework of the latter. In either case, PMESP officers always
need the ambiguity as society. Whether by focusing on exclusion or inclusion,
PMESP’s civility resides in the social meaning of “police protect society.”
final remarks
Police are not just about the anticivil. Both civility and anticivility constitute
policeness, the meaning of being police. The two meanings intertwine and
constitute the ideal foundation of police and policing: the manner in which
anticivility is a means of achieving civility and the latter justifies the former by
providing its goal and legal basis. Losing either one of the component meanings
would result in the loss of the raison d’être for the police. Maintaining a delicate
balance between the two is a challenging task for every police organization,
especially in their street operation.
PMESP in Brazil are one such police organization struggling with this
contradiction. Although the institution has been facing this challenge since the
democratic transition in the 1980s, tension increased in the 1990s, when police
violence scandals were revealed and broadcast in and outside the country.
In response to societal criticism, PMESP reviewed their traditional policing
framework and adopted community policing. While traditional policing
focuses on excluding the anticivil through emergency response, the new
community policing stresses prevention through inclusion of ambiguous
202 Mayumi Shimizu
individuals into the civil side. They are actually a reflection of the contradictory
meanings in policeness.
These two forms of operation coexist in PMESP policing on the street.
Although the two forms of policing differ in orientation, coexistence is
possible because they both construct an ambiguous space between civility and
anticivility. As their civil mission, PMESP officers protect this intermediary
space called society to maintain their civil meaning.
Constructing ambiguity is the complementary process to creating a symbolic
division between the ordinary and the extraordinary, which manifests in
different ways according to the situation police officers face: the division
between civil and anticivil, police and nonpolice, ambiguous and
nonambiguous, private and public, and family and enemy. The officers move
back and forth between the two worlds and maintain policeness. Under the
mask of police superiority, they themselves are in fact ambiguous individuals
living in society.
To conclude, the following excerpt from my field notes about
a commissioned officer who was awarded a medal by the municipal assembly
of an interior town in São Paulo State reveals such ambiguity. In the ceremony,
the officer is suspended between the two worlds. He is in the public world of
police work, where his father symbolically gives him a pep talk about the future
of his career. He is simultaneously in the private world of family life, where his
mother and other female family members applaud him by offering testimony
that he had been an excellent person in his private life.
In the hall of the municipal assembly, there are many commissioned officers with their
families. No non-commissioned officers are present. In the front seats sit the family
members of the commissioned officer to be awarded the medal. A video camera from
a local TV station is preparing for the live broadcast.
The ceremony begins by introducing two aldermen (vereadores) and other local
authorities. Finally, the awardee enters with his wife . . . One of the aldermen starts
dictating the honor for the awarded officer. It starts from the birth of the awardee and
goes all the way up to the present: about his family, schools, and career . . . The next part
of the ceremony is a short video in which the friends and family of the officer speak about
what he is like. His colleagues in PMESP praise him first. Then, his friends and, finally,
his family, comment. Interestingly, the speakers in his family are all women: his niece,
sister, wife, and mother. The later one speaks in the video, the more intimacy one seems
to have with the awardee. Between the comments private pictures are displayed, includ-
ing wedding and family photos . . .
In the speech of the awardee, his personal history, about his family, wedding, and
career, is repeated. He compares himself with his father, who was also a PMESP
commissioned officer, and says that he is still not as great as his father was . . . He
concludes his speech by individually calling the names of those to whom he would like
to express his gratitude[.]
notes
1. Some authors have demonstrated that police culture is conceptualized as something
evil, responsible for the various bad practices of officers (Paoline 2003: 200,
Waddington 1999: 287). In the context of newly democratic Brazil, see, for
example, Battibugli (2009) and Rolim (2007).
2. See, for example, Huggins, Haritos-Fatouros, and Zimbardo (2002) for police
violence under the 1964 regime and Motta (2010) for its political aspects in the
relationship with the United States.
3. The Massacre of Carandiru is a case in which PMESP’s intervention in a prison
rebellion resulted in death of 111 prisoners. Favela Naval is the name of place in the
municipality of Diadema, in which an amateur camera operator recorded an image of
police officers beating and killing innocent citizens. This image was broadcast in a TV
news program and provoked a firestorm of criticism.
4. PMESP have been committed to invest in information and communication
technologies for more productivity. See Kahn and Camilo (2008) for an overview
of the technological tools used in PMESP operations.
5. I first conducted fieldwork from August to September in 2008. I then stayed in São
Paulo from January 2011 to May 2013, engaging in fieldwork while pursuing a PhD
at the University of São Paulo.
6. All PMESP officers are classified into two categories: commissioned and
noncommissioned. Commissioned officers are hierarchically superior to their
noncommissioned counterparts, responsible for contemplating, deciding, and
commanding. Noncommissioned officers account for a large proportion of PMESP
officers and are responsible for implementing policing on the street.
7. ROTA is a shock unit notorious for their reportedly violent ways of repression
(Pinheiro 1991: 169; Barcellos 1994). My informants in the unit frequently
remarked that ROTA was an elite unit of PMESP.
8. “Ladrão em pele de polícia,” Diário de S. Paulo, April 11, 2012.
9. A battalion is an operational unit responsible for supervising several companies.
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8
Citizenship and the Established Civil Sphere

in Provincial Mexico
Trevor Stack
During ethnographic fieldwork in western Mexico between 2007 and 2013,

I asked a range of interviewees what it meant to be a citizen. Several replied that
citizenship was defined by law and included rights and responsibilities, but most
went on to stress that being a citizen was ultimately about “living in society.” They
insisted that “living in society” was something one simply cannot avoid and which
includes most or all aspects of life beyond the home, including using the street or
public space, interacting with people beyond the family, working and consuming,
contributing to the community, and participating in politics. When I asked if it
was sometimes easier not to be a citizen, some interviewees surprised me by
replying that it was impossible not to be a citizen, unless perhaps one was
a hermit. Yet they were clear that some were better citizens than others – there
were good citizens and not-so-good citizens. Good citizens were civil in the sense
that they took care of their obligations and behaved with respect to others around
them, which included going beyond what was obligated by law.
In this chapter, I draw on Civil Sphere Theory (CST) to help understand what my
Mexican interviewees meant by “living in society,” and how it affected their
perception and experience of citizenship as membership in a political community.
Despite the peculiarity of the Mexican case, I make a broader claim about the
relationship between citizenship understood as political membership and the moral
universalism that Alexander associates with the civil sphere. Not only does
citizenship as membership in a political community have informal dimensions
that extend beyond the formal parameters, but it typically entails a still broader
horizon of moral universalism – which CST can help us to understand.
using cst to develop my findings and vice versa
Applying CST to Better Understand My Mexican Fieldwork

In previous publications (2013a; 2015; 2012a), I have discussed the
implications of my Mexican interviews for scholarly understandings of
206
Citizenship and Civil Sphere in Provincial Mexico 207
citizenship. By stressing that citizenship eludes legal definition, my Mexican

interviewees were postulating a form of citizenship beyond the state, that is,
beyond the formal rights-bearing membership of a nation state. Specifically,
I argue that my interviewees’ version of citizenship had something of the
structure that Martha Nussbaum attributes to the Stoics’ critique of Athenian
citizenship:
The Stoics who followed [Diogenes’s] lead developed his image of the kosmou polites or
world citizen more fully, arguing that each of us dwells, in effect, in two communities –
the local community of our birth, and the community of human argument and aspiration
that “is truly great and truly common, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that,
but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun” (Seneca, De Otio) (Nussbaum
1994).
Not only did my interviewees echo the Stoics in resisting the idea that citizenship
could be exhausted in its formal parameters, but like the Stoics, they placed
formal and informal membership within a broader horizon of moral
universalism, which was ultimately human in scope. One of the effects was,
I argue, to qualify the claims made by the Mexican state, including those set out
in legal frameworks, thus underwriting spaces for solidarity and political action
beyond those marked out by the state. Though this might seem emancipatory,
I acknowledge that the same spaces beyond the state often featured hierarchy
and exclusion. They could also serve paradoxically to extend the state’s reach
by transferring responsibility to citizens.
In this chapter, I turn to CST to develop the insights into citizenship that
I draw from my Mexican fieldwork. I find that, even if the context is very
different from the US contexts on which Alexander drew, what CST
characterizes as the civil sphere or society is very much of a genre with the
species of political membership that I identified in Mexico:
[C]ivil society is . . . a realm of structured, socially established consciousness, a network
of understandings creating structures of feeling that permeate social life and run just
below the surface of strategic institutions and self-conscious elites. To study this sub-
jective dimension of civil society, we must recognize and focus on the distinctive sym-
bolic codes that are critically important in constituting the very sense of society for those
who are within and without it. These codes are so sociologically important, I would
argue, that every study of social division and conflict must be complemented by reference
to this civil symbolic sphere. (Alexander 2006:54)
My Mexican interviewees’ accounts of citizenship figured very much as “a
realm of structured, socially established consciousness,” which manifested
itself in the many other contexts of social and political life that I observed
through fieldwork. It is striking that my interviewees’ spoke of “living in
society,” echoing Alexander’s account of the “civil codes [that]
constitute . . . the very sense of society” (2006). I found in a series of case
studies of disputes with local government that, as Alexander indicates,
actors on different sides made appeal to elements of this civil code (Stack
208 Trevor Stack
2013a). Civil Sphere Theory encouraged me to take seriously the discourses

of civility and justice which can serve to shape and limit the terms and
strategies of claim-making by all sides in dispute, as well as the solidarities
that emerge.
Moreover, CST pushed me to consider membership in political communities
other than the national, as well as to look beyond the state institutions that
dominate so much scholarship:
TCS . . . takes aim at theories that conceptualize nations as the principal noneconomic
referents of modern collective identities. Such thinking, widespread in contemporary
social science, ignores the existence of civil spheres, cultural and institutional entities that
are independent analytically from nation-states, even if, empirically, the two are deeply
intertwined. (Alexander 2015:178)
I have noted elsewhere that Mexicans showed signs of being citizens of their
towns and cities, and not only of nations (Stack 2012b). My reflections on
“living in society” led me to understand that their citizenship was not easily
contained in towns and cities, either. In postulating a civil sphere that was
linked and yet not reducible to the nation-state, CST offered another way of
understanding the complexity of my interviewees’ political subjectivity. I use
the term “civil sociality” to gloss their account of “living in society” not only
because the term “civil” captures the moral framework implicit in their
concept, but also because – as the Stoics had intended for the Athenian
polis – the moral framework was nurtured by a sphere that went beyond the
state.
Civil Sphere Theory led me in turn to develop my thinking on the workings
of the Mexican state. It is important to recognize that states themselves
produce powerful moral (and often relatively universalizing) frameworks
that include elaborate symbolic codes, which serve precisely to
“constitute[e] the very sense of society for those who are within and without
it” (Alexander 2006:54). I will show that the Mexican state has itself
promoted the axiom of “living in society” that my interviewees espoused,
while packaging it with other universalizing frameworks such as those of
corporatist nationalism and of liberal autonomy. However, CST encouraged
me to question the Mexican state’s monopoly of legitimate moral frameworks.
While CST recognizes the importance of state institutions from the legislature
to the justice system in producing and sustaining moral frameworks, it draws
attention to the possibility that a much broader panoply of extra-institutional
actors – from newspapers to chambers of commerce and social movements –
play similarly important roles in developing and mobilizing such frameworks,
making their demands on and through institutions while policing the claims of
other extra-institutional actors.
While rethinking my interviewees’ responses in the light of CST pushed me to
develop my understanding of the context of provincial western Mexico, it has
also pushed me to extend and develop CST.
Drawing on My Mexican Fieldwork to Extend and Develop CST

Applying CST to the relatively mundane setting of a market town is already
a significant extension of Alexander’s approach, and my attention to everyday
encounters, such as those between street traders, also goes beyond other
writings on the civil sphere. But I believe my account will also help CST to
sharpen its understanding of the role of law in civil spheres. Alexander (2006)
writes of the “civil force of law” in acknowledging that the justice system can
serve as an institutional anchor of the civil sphere. What I find in Mexico is that
law is given more importance in principle than in practice, and that law’s
practices are queried precisely in terms of the civil. I suspect this is the case in
other contexts when civil spheres are unable to count on the law to sustain them.
More broadly, my Mexican fieldwork affords a window into the vexed issue
of the relation between citizenship and the civil sphere. My interviewees’
responses pointed to the way in which citizenship itself – often regarded as the
prerogative of states – can be shaped and inflected within civil spheres, as part of
an expansive moral framework, by constellations of powerful actors who are
not reducible to the state, even if they may be intimately linked to state
institutions. That is, citizenship is not antithetical to the civil sphere, but has
a civil horizon that exceeds the claims made by states, including those pitched in
legal terms. The Mexican context is illuminating in this regard, since my
interviewees repeatedly stressed that citizenship was not exhausted in their
relationship with the state. Despite the specificity, I suspect the same is true
elsewhere, to a greater or lesser degree. I conducted interviews in California and
found that my Anglo interviewees gave more weight to the legal status of
citizenship, but still sometimes talked of citizenship as something that went
somewhat beyond and could be at odds with the legal framework.
In consequence, the fieldwork led me to reformulate slightly Alexander’s
critique of national identity as a particular version or aspect of citizenship. For
Alexander, civil discourse is distinguishable from national discourse in the reach
of its universalizing ambitions:
As compared with city-states, national identities certainly provided more expansive and
inclusive containers; yet, territorial boundedness severely limits any nation’s universal
moral claims. Anchoring social community in a singular territory builds anticivil hier-
archy into the very heart of real civil societies, demanding special status for one’s own
version of civility over others’ (Alexander 2015:178).
Although I agree with the overall point, the crucial difference in my view lies less
in the territorial limits of national solidarity, since I believe that any
universalizing project has its particular limits and more in the state’s
monopoly over how it is defined and policed. Moreover, Alexander
(2015:178) recognizes that states do “often promote universalistic rather than
primordial concerns,” and Mexico is a case in point. Mexico has seen two
relatively universalizing moral frameworks rolled out across the nation by the
state. One was and is liberalism, albeit a rather different version to that which
210 Trevor Stack
Alexander glosses. The other was the corporate nationalism developed after the
Mexican Revolution. Both continued to have some resonance in 2016, even
within regions such as those of my fieldwork that have been historically
resistant to the designs of the Mexican state. What marks liberal autonomy
and corporate nationalism apart from “living in society,” in my view, is less that
they stop at national boundaries, and more that they are both very much
discourses of state – that is, they are discourses that give the state pride of
place. Mexican liberalism differs markedly from civil sociality in its accent on
individual autonomy but still more markedly in its insistence on building
a Rechtsstaat strong enough to uphold the rights of individual citizens (Stack
2010:352–353). Corporate nationalism paid scant regard to individual
autonomy but was entirely contingent on the PRI regime and thus, at odds
with a civil sociality that grounded political subjectivity in a “society” that lay
beyond the state. Although both liberalism and corporate nationalism made
some appeal to horizons beyond the state, claiming the universality of such
values as freedom and social justice, they assumed the sovereignty of state as
their sine qua non. I have said that civil sociality was also sponsored in part by
the Mexican state, and yet I argue that it wedged open a ground beyond the state
to evade some of its demands, including in disputes with state institutions (Stack
2013a). As such, it is true that civil sociality offered greater scope for solidarity
with nonmembers, as Alexander suggests. What I emphasize, though, is how
civil sociality served to qualify the authority claimed by state institutions,
including the moral and legal frameworks developed by the state. As such,
civil sociality was an example of how a civil code can serve to relativize the
“special status for one’s own [or rather, the state’s own] version of civility over
others” – including, in this case, the statist frameworks of liberalism and
corporate nationalism.
Reflecting on how civil sociality served to qualify the authority of state
institutions leads me to develop CST into a theory of political establishment.
The term “political establishment” has many meanings and is sometimes
polluted in civil discourse as a sphere of self-serving factional interests. Yet the
same pollution of a corrupted establishment implies a vision of a civil
establishment, in which networks of political actors reaching beyond the
confines of state have recourse to moral frameworks that are not the monopoly
of state, even if states may try to harness and invest in them. Political actors can
draw on these frameworks to articulate political subjectivities beyond those of
national membership, making for a multidimensional political community whose
horizon stretches beyond the boundaries of the state’s jurisdiction.1 Even if
Alexander does not emphasize the established character of the civil sphere in
the United States, I believe my reading fits his account of how, for example, the
Northern media policed access to the US civil sphere of movements such as that of
Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK). It applies a fortiori, in my view, to a context that
is more familiar to me as a UK national. The British Establishment comprehends
a broad set of institutional elites and prestigious organizations, from the
broadsheets and the BBC to the Anglican Church and leading NGOs like Oxfam,
which together lay hand to a set of universalizing discourses of propriety and
civilization, although this changes over time and is inflected variously by
Establishment actors. The British Establishment differs in important respects
from the US civil sphere as characterized by Alexander, and both contexts are
very different in turn to provincial Mexico. Nevertheless, I argue that the notion
of “living in society” that I encountered in Mexico was similarly a language of
public life that was not the monopoly of the Mexican state, and yet which had
some hold over state actors, and thus, traction in disputes with government.
“Living in society” was mobilized by a range of organizations and institutions,
including the Catholic Church (Stack 2015:60–64). They were able on occasion
to describe themselves and their causes in its terms, even if the same actors might,
on other occasions, employ other frameworks such as liberal autonomy or
revolutionary nationalism. I use the term “established civil sphere” (or “civil
establishment”) to gloss these spheres of influential organizations and institutions
that share a language of public life that is not simply the preserve of state.
In presenting the civil sphere as a species of political establishment,
I would suggest finally that the Mexican case can push CST to reflect
more critically on the optimism that characterizes Alexander’s approach to
civil spheres. Alexander makes a point of providing an upbeat account by
stressing the progressive potential within civil spheres, but he acknowledges
that civil spheres need not be progressive and my field material leads me to
develop this point. It leads me to emphasize that qualifying formal
citizenship can erode solidarity among citizens, as well as compromising
the relative universalism of the state’s own projects.2 It can do so by
undermining the institutional structures which might otherwise serve to
create egalitarian solidarity, such as those of progressive legislation.
Qualifying formal membership can also bring into play hierarchies of
civility and incivility which, as Alexander writes of national membership,
“build. . . anticivil hierarchy into the very heart of real civil societies,
demanding special status for one’s own version of civility over others’”
(2015:178). Thus, civil spheres can be spaces in which social hierarchies
are established. Finally, though I do not have space to expand on this, civil
sociality was sponsored to some extent by the Mexican state itself, and the
spaces it opened up could be interpreted as extending the state’s reach rather
than limiting it (2012a:878).
Methods and Contexts

My methods are different from those of Alexander and other scholars who have
drawn on CST. Whereas he analyzed often-dramatic claims made by social
movements, media commentators, and political actors on regional and national
stages, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in two unremarkable regions of
provincial Mexico, allowing me not only to explore civil spheres beyond the
212 Trevor Stack
United States and at local level, but also to gauge the workings of civil spheres in
mundane contexts out of the limelight.
The context on which I focus in this chapter is Zamora, a city of around
130,000 inhabitants, located in the western part of the state of Michoacán but
linked closely to Guadalajara, the capital of the neighboring state of Jalisco.
Zamora grew dramatically through the twentieth century on the strength of
commercial agriculture, which remains a major economic activity, while seeing
equally dramatic growth in the informal sector, including the street trading that
I mention below.3 Zamora is renowned as a conservative town, where the
Catholic diocese retained considerable power for decades after the
Revolution. In 1983, Zamora saw the election of a municipal president from
the conservative National Action Party (PAN), one of the first nationally to
break the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)’s monopoly of power.
My fieldwork was not informed by CST and yet I have found in CST
a powerful tool to interpret my findings. I began with a series of in-depth
interviews with a wide range of interviewees, focusing on understandings of
citizenship. Each interview started with the question: What does it mean to you
to be a citizen? I also conducted multiple case studies, mainly of disputes with
local government, geared to understanding whether and how my interviewees’
replies about citizenship were reflected in practice. I found that social actors in
dispute did draw on elements of the discourse that figured in the interviews, and
CST has informed my understanding of the complex social and political life of
that discourse. Because I believe, like Alexander, that social processes are best
understood over longer periods of time, I supplemented my interviews and case
studies with the analysis of secondary historical literature, as well as primary
sources such as civics textbooks dating back over more than a century.
In addition, I make sporadic reference in the chapter to the interviews on
citizenship that I conducted among Anglos in northern California, which
allowed me not only to consider citizenship in a context of Mexican
migration, but also to set in relief the responses of my Mexican interviewees.
citizenship beyond the state as code of civil sociality

At the heart of my interviewees’ responses lay a tension between law and what
they termed sociedad, although I also discern two inflections of sociedad in their
discourse: una sociedad was used to describe a particular political community
while la sociedad meant human society, understood as the horizon that
encompasses particular sociedades (in the plural). The symbolic code on
which I focus in this chapter is organized around the dichotomy between law
and a sociedad that is at once particular and universal. I do not claim that this
was the only symbolic framework in Mexico, and I will make clear that it was
sometimes combined with other frameworks, including those of corporatist
nationalism and liberalism. Unlike those other codes, though, civil sociality
underwrote a version of political establishment that exceeded the state.
My interviewees in Mexico gave some importance to law. In response to my

question “What does being a citizen mean to you?” my interviewees mentioned
that law defined who can be a citizen, as well as the rights and responsibilities
that ensue, even if they seldom spelled out the definition of citizenship or what
those rights and responsibilities were. Yet the interviewees typically went on to
say that even if citizenship is definable in law, it entails going beyond the legal
definition. Many concluded that citizenship is ultimately about living in
sociedad (literally, society). Much of my analytical work in the years that
followed was taken up by deciphering what they meant by “living in society.”
Sociedad turned out to be a complex construction. Una sociedad, that is,
a particular society, tended to figure in their discourse as either a town or city
or as a nation. Una sociedad was effectively what I have termed elsewhere
a “political community,” where the ruled are somehow invoked or involved
in the business of ruling. Una sociedad has norms which are neither exhausted
by law nor always entirely consistent with it, and by the same token, political
membership always exceeded its formal definition. But sociedad also figured as
human society or indeed as the human condition of sociality, leading some
interviewees to conclude that it was impossible not to be a citizen. If sociedad as
political community went beyond the formal coordinates of national
membership, sociedad as human society qualified political community by
placing it within a relatively universal horizon.
Civil Sphere Theory helps us to understand how citizenship can exceed
states’ designs on it, especially when it is embedded in a moral framework
that is not monopolized by the state, which is how I understand Alexander’s
term “civil code.” Yet civil codes vary considerably, and I emphasize two
differences to the US civil code as described by Alexander and reflected in the
responses of my Anglo interviewees in California. First, although my
Mexican interviewees considered law to be in principle consistent with the
civil, in practice law was often set aside in favor of norms associated with
sociedad. Second, my Mexican interviewees were suspicious of the
voluntarism that Alexander celebrates in the United States, a sentiment
echoed in my California interviews. Society was a kind of matrix that
served to contain what was assumed to be the wayward will of the
individual. When I asked about freedom (libertad), for example, I often
heard that libertad was important but could easily slip into libertinaje
(license). Bad citizens were those who had turned from sociedad, such as
drug traffickers together with politicians and – as I discuss below – the líderes
(leaders of labor unions, vendor associations, and land and housing
movements) who were held to be in cahoots with them. This is not to say
that the individual has no place in the civil code. In the political sphere, for
example, freedom of expression was highly valued and it was considered
important to vote freely in elections. The difference is rather one of accent: in
California, the autonomous will was idealized, while in Mexico, it was seen
as somewhat more problematic.
214 Trevor Stack
whence the code of civil sociality? moral frameworks

within and beyond the state
Before going on to locate civil sociality in everyday practice, and then
considering how it bears on the articulation of sociopolitical actors and
institutions, it is important to consider how the Mexican civil code, or
versions thereof, has developed. I will emphasize the relation of civil sociality
to two other dominant moral frameworks – those of the Rechtsstaat and of
revolutionary nationalism – which have been historically important in Mexico
and surfaced in my interviews. This will also bear out my broader point that the
framework of civil sociality, unlike those of Rechtsstaat and revolutionary
nationalism, implies a civil establishment which is irreducible to a state and
does business in a lingua franca that, even if the state invests in it, leaves some
room for maneuver beyond it. Though distinct, I do not claim the frameworks
are irreconcilable and in practice, organizations and institutions draw on civil
sociality in one moment and in others on Rechtsstaat and revolutionary
nationalism, as well as combining them in a number of ways.
Whether labeled “citizenship” or not, the code of civil sociality has a long
and complex history. Briefly, that history goes back to the colonial period in
which Catholic missionaries insisted on getting the native population to “live in
society” or, to use the contemporary term, “in policía” (Ramírez Ruíz and
Fernández Christlieb 2006). Policia was the term used to translate the
Aristotelian concept of politeia, which Aquinas had Christianized, and an
equally Aristotelian term república was used for the townships into which the
natives were resettled. Just as I have glossed una sociedad as a polis set within
the universalizing horizon of la sociedad, policía was the civilizational medium
within which repúblicas were expected to flourish. The colonial origins remind
us that the civil code, here as elsewhere, has an imperial history (Fitzgerald
2007). They also draw our attention to the hierarchies embedded in the civil.
For example, the indigenous were still at the time of my research described by
some as exemplars of civil sociality while in their townships, but as pariahs in
the city (Stack 2013b:179–185). The role of colonial missionaries in
propagating the universalist code of Christian civilization draws our attention
to the ongoing role of the Church in sponsoring civil sociality. Civil sociality still
has Catholic undertones and my informants’ suspicion of libertinaje was
informed by a view of fallen “Man” whose wayward passions can only be
contained in society (Forment 2003:49–65). The priests whom I interviewed
gave a similar account, and Lourdes Arizpe recorded a priest in Zamora
complaining about the weakness of moral and civic teachings in schools. This
is not to say that civil sociality is reducible to Catholicism. The Catholic roots
and Church sponsorship do help to explain the difference between the civil code
that I detected in Mexico and the Puritan-derived code that Alexander identifies
in the United States. Yet the civil code was not understood as exclusive to
Catholicism:
Challenging my argument that the civil sphere rests on the “putative commitment to
a common secular faith,” Bellah insists, in the American case at least, on the centrality of
religion in the more traditional sense: “Almost all the elements of civil society that
preceded the Bill of Rights developed in the religious sphere” . . . But this is special
pleading. Puritan religiosity had to be connected with republican and liberal ideologies
for American democracy to succeed. (Alexander 2015:176)
Although Catholicism was declared the official state religion in the 1824
Constitution, this was revoked in the liberal Constitution of 1857. It is
noteworthy that while many of my interviewees stated that being a Catholic
was consonant with being a citizen, they were clear that the relationship was
contingent. It was not necessary to be Catholic to be a citizen.
It does appear that the Church and its allies deployed the idea of civil sociality
to combat the individual autonomy championed by radical liberals from the
mid-nineteenth century. After Independence, liberals used the language of
citizenship to attack the corporate status of the Catholic Church, as well as of
the Indian townships or republics. People were to be treated as citizens as
opposed to being treated as members of a caste group, corporate township, or
as churchmen (Hale 1968:108–147). Mexican liberalism tended to view the
liberal values that Alexander describes for the United States as contingent on the
building of a Rechtsstaat – a state strong enough to protect the individual rights
of its citizens. Against the pernicious linkage of individual autonomy and the
sovereign State, the Church made fresh appeal to the principle of natural
sociality. In practice, the doctrines of individual autonomy and civil sociality,
though seemingly contradictory, were spliced together in a number of ways.
Aguilar Rivera (2012) has noted, for example, that even radical liberals were
reluctant to abandon altogether the horizon of natural sociality.
The Mexican Revolution introduced another universalizing moral
framework, that of corporatist nationalism. Under corporate nationalism,
unlike Rechtsstaat liberalism, Mexicans were not to participate in politics as
citizens but as members of corporate organizations within the ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which held the national presidency
from its creation in 1929 until 2000. They were massified citizens who could
seek access to lands, credits, and urban services only as members of one those
organizations, through their líderes, not by virtue of their rights as individuals
(Lomnitz 2001:73–78). Despite the contrast with Rechtsstaat liberalism, there
was a crucial similarity: the framework of corporate nationalism was deployed
by and constitutive of the state. Yet again, not only were tenets of liberalism
eventually spliced together with revolutionary nationalism, but the state itself
laid hand to the framework of civil sociality. From the 1940s, the PRI regime
sought reconciliation avant la lettre with the Church, as well as prioritizing the
ends of building institutions and restoring social order. The rapprochement
with the Church, together with the concern for social order, helps to explain
why, from the 1940s, civics textbooks include a chapter explaining, sometimes
even quoting Aristotle, that individuals are dependent on others in society.
216 Trevor Stack
The textbooks also instruct pupils to pursue their responsibilities to society

beyond the dictates of the law. Meanwhile, the Church sought to reposition
itself by sponsoring a wide range of new organizations which, unlike earlier
organizations, were not explicitly Catholic and often preferred to identify as
“civil society.” Early examples were a wave of anti-PRI “civic” movements of
the 1950s and 1960s, which used the same Catholic-inflected language against
the PRI adopted in civics textbooks (Smith 2012:279).
From the 1970s, it was the figure of the individual citizen, related to the
Rechtsstaat, which staged a comeback. Diverse social movements converged on
“citizenship” since the 1970s in a bid to challenge the PRI’s hold on power.
They insisted on the need for fair, competitive elections in which they could
exercise political rights as individual citizens (Tamayo Flores-Alatorre 1997).
Government also used the language of individual citizenship in trying to bypass
mass organizations that made demands for services by preferring to treat
claimants individually. From the 1990s, moreover, there was an increasing
emphasis in civics texts on individual ethical judgement as well as the
individual legal subject. Government began to introduce the language of
human rights into textbooks, especially from around 1970, after it subscribed
to a number of international treaties. Human rights were and are precisely
a language of moral universalism, and it is significant that they were taken up
by the Catholic Church from the 1990s as well as being mobilized by a wide
range of actors in Mexico and beyond. Nevertheless, the human rights
framework emphasizes the states responsible for the protection of human
rights, as well as the individual who exercises the rights.
Yet even in the 2000s, civics textbooks still typically began with a section on
“living in society,” before going on to set out the particular form of the rights-
protecting state, with extensive reference to international human rights, as well
as incorporating varieties of nationalism although toning down the mestizo
corporatism of previous decades. My interviewees also combined the respective
frameworks. For example, they said that it was important to claim rights but
also to reflect on the responsibilities that one bears, which led on to a discussion
of mutual obligations in society.
In sum, Mexico has seen at least three moral frameworks – liberal autonomy,
corporatist nationalism, and civil sociality – all of them relatively universalizing.
All three have been at some point sponsored by the state, in different
permutations and combinations, but civil sociality is the framework that most
obviously exceeds the state, at least in the discourse of my interviewees. Liberal
autonomy has also been sponsored beyond the state, and against the state,
especially in periods such as from the 1950s to the 1970s, and as such, it
arguably acted as a civil code, underwriting some kind of civil sphere beyond
the state. Indeed, it might be argued that liberalism has been more effective in
this regard. Nevertheless, I argue that Mexican liberalism has remained primarily
a discourse of state (hence my use of the term Rechtsstaat) in contrast to civil
sociality, which places greater accent on the ground beyond the state.
Having sketched out the structure and history of the code of civil sociality,
I will now describe how the code came into play in everyday settings, before
going on to focus on political disputes involving state institutions.
everyday civil spheres and the establishment

of difference
The Interface of Civil and Noncivil in Weakly Institutionalized Contexts

When I asked for examples of being good citizens, or even sometimes without
asking, my interviewees tended to respond by saying that good citizens drive their
cars with consideration for others. Many added that most other drivers were
animals. As different as this might seem from the cases that Alexander develops in
TCS, and as far from my reading of CST as a theory of political establishment, the
example of driving can be read in the light of CST to shed light on everyday forms
of the civil sphere. To begin with, I argue that my interviewees’ choice of driving
as an example of citizenship is evocative of their notion of sociedad as an
expansive public arena in which citizens, inevitably and inescapably, meet and
engage with each other. It is suggestive that my Anglo interviewees in California
tended instead to offer how people kept their house exteriors and lawns as
examples of good citizenship. The driving example also pushes us to reflect on
Alexander’s most provocative claim: the civil sphere can be studied in its own
right, in distinction to the noncivil spheres that are nevertheless essential to it.
Civil society depends on resources or inputs from other spheres, from political life, from
economic and political institutions, from familial and religious life, from territorial
organizations, and from more narrowly constructed primordial communities. In this
sense, it can be said that civil society is dependent on these spheres, but this is true only in
a very partial sense. Civil society—and the groups, institutions, and individuals who
articulate their “interests” in civil society terms—pulls together these inputs according to
its own normative and institutional logic. This is to say that the solidary sphere we call
civil society has relative autonomy and can be studied in its own right. It is homologous
with, to some degree independent of, and sometimes a match for the other “societies”
that constitute the subject of contemporary social science—the economic, the political,
the familial, the ethnic, the religious. (Alexander 2006:54)
Talk of driving in the city is very different from what Alexander has in mind. Yet
being able to drive considerately was also dependent on “facilitating inputs”
from some of those noncivil spheres. One was the economic sphere in which
they had the possibility of earning money to buy and maintain cars in the first
place. Another was the bureaucratic sphere that was supposed to produce the
drivable roads, signals. and traffic police that facilitated considerate driving.
I often heard criticism of the government for failing to provide the conditions
for safe driving, let alone civil driving. Several referred to one spectacularly
inadequate road that the municipal government had completed shortly before
my fieldwork. Yet my interviewees did not regard the inadequacy of the
218 Trevor Stack
bureaucratic input to be an excuse for inconsiderate driving. Good citizens

would nevertheless look out for others. In their eyes, then, the civil sphere was
indeed somewhat autonomous.4 Thus, my interviewees’ example of how
citizens drive their cars is revealing in general of how civil spheres can run
through many contexts of life, as Alexander hints. It evinced their sense of
sociedad as a domain subject to a moral framework that transcended the
frameworks of state – in this case, that of traffic infrastructure and regulation.
In Mexico, as in much of the world, streets are not only sites for driving and
for crossing as pedestrians but also for commerce – street trading has
mushroomed in the forty years since the collapse of formal employment in the
1980s. The example of street trading proved contentious in my interviews, as
well as in media articles, and I ended up interviewing a number of traders as well
as following disputes that involved them. Like driving, street trading might seem
an unlikely context in which to apply CST. Yet I found the civil code cited
alongside the noncivil codes that one would expect in these contexts. No one
suggested that market traders should be guided first and foremost by civic
values rather than those of profit or indeed of obligations to one’s family.
Politics was also crucial in that street traders required protection from
government crackdowns through membership in associations run by leaders
who could not only mobilize their members to protest any crackdown but also
had political patrons who would speak for them. Even religious codes were
important since saints’ festivals afforded important commercial opportunities,
while the associations themselves tended to have their own patron saint. Legal
codes and institutions were referred to, and traders sometimes talked about –
though rarely acted on – having recourse to law, or being subject to it, thus
paying lip service to law’s potential to “pull together these inputs according to
its own normative and institutional logic.” Yet I found that traders
supplemented or substituted law with the framework of civil sociality, or at
least with elements of it, applying it to “translate” their relations among street-
traders, their relations with municipal inspectors, with customers, and with the
broader public. As I show elsewhere (2013a), the recourse to civil sociality
appeared to have real traction in the course of some disputes, as it did in
everyday settings, and I offer some examples in what follows.
The examples of driving and street-trading serve to demonstrate how civil
spheres exist in everyday contexts, as well as what particular shape they took in
the Mexican case. Implicit in these examples, too, was the everyday
marginalization of those who were not deemed fully civil, on which I focus in
the next section.
Civil Constituencies – Within and Beyond the Pale

Alexander maintains that civil codes – however egalitarian in emphasis – are
applied not only to particular actions but also to the purported conduct of
individuals and whole groups. Thus, Alexander uses the term “civil sphere” to
mean not only the ground that opens up when actors engage each other in civil
terms as opposed to economic, political, or identitarian, but also the social
hierarchies of status and authority that open up as a result, marking out some
groups as pivotal while others are considered weak in civil qualities, and some
are excluded altogether. Alexander acknowledges that recognition of
constituencies as civil or otherwise can become contentious. He chooses to
focus on the “civil sphere opening” that arises when the uncivil character of
outlier groups becomes revalued. Yet Alexander also shows that civil spheres
can serve for decades or centuries to establish the bounds between insiders and
outsiders, and the hierarchies lying deep within those bounds. This is one
nuance of the term establishment.
I have already mentioned some examples in my Mexican fieldwork.
Although in some respects living in society was radically inclusive, I argue
elsewhere that it was subtly hierarchical. Talk about being citizens slipped
easily into talk about being good citizens, and it was clear that some were
better citizens than others. Some (but not all) interviewees went on to suggest
that some were more citizens than others – urban residents lived more in society
than did those living in remote villages. I considered in a previous book (2012b)
the insidious hierarchy between urban and rural dwellers, which is arguably
reproduced in the notion of living in sociedad. Within cities, there was civil
contempt and suspicion for the residents of the poorer neighborhoods.
The residents of such neighborhoods, as well as more rural settlements, were
often said to be incapable of answering my questions about citizenship – they
were held to lack the capacity to understand citizenship, much less to act upon
it. Particular contempt was reserved for neighborhoods whose residents were
said to have “invaded” lands, such as the aptly named Railway neighborhood
whose residents had built illegally on the federal land left after the railway was
closed in the 1990s. Similarly, street traders were keen to define their conduct as
civil precisely because they were aware that their street-stalls were sometimes
described, by functionaries and others in Zamora, as polluting public space.
Street traders applied their own civil hierarchies and I have described elsewhere
the despective remarks made by one street trader about indigenous traders,
which reflected the racist dismissal of the indigenous especially when in the city
(Stack 2013b).
Thus, although civil sociality did place an accent on equality, the universalizing
egalitarian code served (as so often) to establish social hierarchies, providing
a powerful language through which to justify the superiority of some over others.
civil establishment transcending the state

By civil establishment, again, I mean one version of the political establishment,
understood as the ground – part imagined and part real – on which elites meet
each other, literally and metaphorically. Other versions of political
establishment include the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that, for example,
220 Trevor Stack
Mexico opposition leader López Obrador denounces as the “mafia of power.”

Another is the legally sanctioned formal structure which, in provincial Mexico,
lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats, and politicians are most likely to claim to
uphold. What distinguishes the civil establishment is that elites engage with
each other, or are held to engage each other, using discourse, practices, and
institutional forms associated with the civil, which tends to privilege those who
are best able to carry it off. Whereas the UK civil establishment is generally held
to take in the legal establishment, I will argue that in Mexico it is seen as going
beyond it and, hence, being irreducible to the state.
Civil Representatives and Civil Sphere Champions

Not only do civil codes entail the recognition of individuals and groups, but
certain social and political actors can become recognized and established as
privileged protagonists of the civil:
Civil society is . . . constituted by its own distinctive structure of elites, by the institutional
oligarchies that direct the legal and communications systems, the influential who exercise
persuasion through civil associations, and the “movement intellectuals” who lead social
movements. (Alexander 2006:54)
Here I find it useful to distinguish more sharply between actors recognized
as legitimate representatives (in a broad sense) of particular causes and/or
constituencies recognized as civil, and those regarded as champions of the
civil sphere itself, and who may indeed act as referees of others’ claims
(some in their roles within the institutions detailed in the next section).
The former might, in Alexander’s account, include MLK once he acquired
civil standing, while the latter would include the Northern journalists who
reported sympathetically. Civil sphere champions act as gatekeepers for the
civil sphere, assessing critically the aspiration of other actors to claim
legitimacy.
Just as the civility of constituencies is typically contentious, the same is true of
civil sphere representatives and champions – for example, the Northern media
were represented as parochial and repressive by Southerners. In Zamora, even
the most obvious civil sphere elites were viewed somewhat ambivalently.
Examples were the various environmentalist groups, as well as groups
associated with the Catholic Church. The clergy themselves were held up as
paragons not only of Christ-like virtues but also of broader virtues of humanist
compassion, yet were on other occasions regarded as hypocritical and even
corrupt. Other potential civil sphere elites were members of the chambers of
commerce and the architects’ and engineers’ colleges, as well as the universities,
though again they were at other times dismissed as self-interested or
bureaucratic. Within the legal system, the preeminent figures were the
notaries who played a pivotal role in authorizing any and every transaction in
a context in which, as one notary put it in an interview, “as society is in effect
corrupted (maleada), we have to see that things are done right.” I should add
that not all interviewees agreed that notaries were putting things right.
The more respectable elites were quick to dismiss the interventions of uncivil
representatives of uncivil constituencies. Civil representatives were, to begin
with, expected to act with respect for authority, as the guarantors of public
order, and I often heard organizations protesting the respectful nature of their
own protest while criticizing others’ lack of respect. Alternatively, they
complained that other organizations were linked to political parties and thus,
simply looking for electoral wins. They focused their ire on líderes, that is,
leaders of popular movements and associations such as those of street traders.
Despite the attempts of street traders to justify their work as essentially civil, the
líderes who made possible their presence on the street were hard pushed to
portray themselves in the same light. Líderes were commonly associated with
local political parties, themselves seen as vehicles of a panoply of self-interest,
and their unholy alliance seen as one axis of a covert establishment, held to
subvert civilization as we know it.
Just as civil recognition is seldom unambiguous, even well-established civil
stigmas can be challenged. Alexander emphasizes the potential for civil sphere
opening, whereby hitherto uncivil constituencies and their representatives –
again, MLK is the obvious example – come to be recognized by the civil
establishment as worthy interlocutors. I return to the point in my conclusion.
In the next section, I follow Alexander in indicating that civil sphere champions
typically have a close relationship with institutions, and may hold office in
them.
Civilizing (the) Institutions, Within and Beyond the State

I will show how the liberating and repressive stipulations of this moral community
articulate with organizational power via such regulatory institutions as party and
legal systems, voting, and “office,” on the one hand, and with such communicative
institutions as mass media, public opinion polls, and civil associations, on the
other.
(Alexander 2006:54)
My section title is intended to capture both the attempts of civil sphere

champions to civilize institutions in the sense of holding them to the civil
code, whether from within or outside, and the potential of such institutions,
once under the thumb of the civil sphere, to civilize society at large.
With regard to “regulatory institutions,” I asked my interviewees about
government, in order to gauge whether or not they saw their citizenship
primarily in relation to government. I was told that government was needed
to maintain order, resolve disputes, and meet the needs of citizens. It was
associated primarily with the office of mayor, who was expected to remain
responsive to sociedad, especially by giving audience to the parties in dispute,
222 Trevor Stack
rather than ignoring or diverting them through bureaucratic or legal channels.

This was reflected in many situations in my case studies in which groups
attempted to make their petitions directly to the mayor. A common complaint
was that mayors refused to meet with them and instead routed their demands
through bureaucratic channels. Another set of regulatory institutions featuring
in the interviews were the State and Federal Electoral Institutes, which acquired
some civil respectability locally and nationally with the election of 2000, in
which for the first time since the 1920s, an opposition candidate was elected
president. By the time of my fieldwork in 2007, some of my interviewees
complained that the Electoral Institutes had become the plaything of political
parties. Political parties were considered mere vehicles of political and economic
interests, and as such, deeply uncivil, even if they continued to insist on their
civil standing.
As for Alexander’s “communicative institutions,” there were numerous local
newspapers as well as a TV channel and a few webpages, including that of the
Municipal Government. The newspapers were often subject to civil disdain and
were regarded as mouthpieces of the municipal government, which subsidized
them heavily. The one newspaper that was said to be independent, and claimed
not to be subsidized or to depend entirely on advertising revenue, did feature
a number of local “influentials” among its columnists. This paper was notable
for reporting favorably the demands of more marginalized groups in the city in
their disputes with local government. The only other somewhat critical paper
was a weekly subsidized instead by the Catholic diocese. Opinion polls were
only very occasionally conducted, and public opinion featured instead in the
form of “society” being said to support or be offended by particular acts – an
example was a protest by street traders in 2010. Planning law often required the
municipal government to consult such venerable bodies as the Chamber of
Commerce and the Architects College, which had existed for many years.
The Chamber’s officeholders claimed to be above party politics – I was told it
was “highly political but nonpartisan” – but it was clear that, having been
dominated for decades by the PAN, it was now predominantly PRI, and
Chamber officers went on to serve in the PRI municipal administrations.
Thus, it is possible to identify something of a civil establishment drawing on
a moral framework transcending that of state, though it is notable that attitudes
toward such organizations and institutions were often ambivalent.
Civil Bracketing of Law as Authoritative Institutionalized Moral Framework

Among the civilizing institutions, Alexander (2006) devotes particular attention
to those of law, and his remarks on law help to illustrate his broader point.
When law has been discussed [in the social sciences] . . . it has usually been treated merely
as the means to gain some economic interest or political end, not as a means for
establishing civil solidarity . . . I propose to rethink law as a form of symbolic representa-
tion. Law highlights, stereotypes, and pollutes actions that are considered threatening to
civil society. The regulatory power of such legal representations is extraordinary. They
constitute simultaneously symbolic constructions and normative judgments, and, in the
name of the civil community, they can draw upon coercion and even control the bureau-
cratic state. Even while such control is exercised for the civic good, it often legalizes
exclusion and domination at the same time. Law applies the sacred principles of civil
discourse case by case, in real historical time; in order to do so, it must identify and
punish the profane.
In the US disputes that Alexander chronicles, crucial moments include the
passing of civil rights legislation, making it a crime to obstruct the registration
of black voters, which in his account indeed “highlights, stereotypes, and
pollutes actions that are considered threatening to civil society” in a way that
“can draw upon coercion and even control the bureaucratic state,” precisely to
the end of “establishing civil solidarity.” By extension, law has the potential to
formalize and buttress the civil sphere’s potential to “pull together [noncivil]
inputs according to its own normative and institutional logic.” Law’s own
normative and institutional logic is for Alexander itself shaped by the civil
sphere, and is not merely sui generis or reducible to the logic of state.
When I presented my preliminary conclusions to a local intellectuals’ society
in Zamora, the Sociedad de Geografía y Estadística, the lawyers in the room
responded by referring to how citizenship was defined in law, especially in the
1917 Constitution.5 The nonlawyers present differed sharply from them. One
or two insisted on the virtue of patriotism, others on the importance of sociality.
An elderly priest insisted that law was ultimately about living in society. Many
of my interviewees, as I have said, responded in a similar fashion. They gave
importance to the legal definition of citizenship, but concluded that citizenship
went beyond the legal parameters, concluding that it was ultimately about
“living in society.”
My interviewees’ reluctance to rely on the legal definition of citizenship is
telling, but it led them to different conclusions. One municipal official stressed
that it was important to go beyond what law required of citizens, and civics
textbooks tended to stress the same. Yet I argue that civil sociality also served to
ground their citizenship beyond the reach of state, in terms of a moral
framework which in principle encompassed the legal framework and
institutions, but in practice was often deployed to find the law wanting.
On the one hand, interviewees often said that obeying the law – a common
example was paying taxes – was in principle expected of a good citizen. On the
other hand, they tended to view law precisely as a device to “gain some
economic interest or political end, not as a means for establishing civil
solidarity.” Moreover, although in certain moments they spoke of a law that
“highlights, stereotypes, and pollutes actions that are considered threatening to
civil society,” for the most part law was presented as itself somewhat
threatening. There was good reason to doubt that law played an effective role
in “control[ing] the bureaucratic state” and I heard it said (even by municipal
councilors) that the government’s actions were more often illegal than legal.
224 Trevor Stack
Laws themselves were viewed as poorly drawn up by legislators who were

sometimes regarded as parasites on society. In addition, the criminal justice
system was commonly regarded as desperately uncivil. One interviewee who
had just returned from giving a deposition in the local court, was fuming after
complaining about how questions were repeated and being told just to answer
the questions, in a way that seemed to him profoundly uncivil.
The case studies reflected a similar attitude toward law. Street traders, for
example, referred to and sometimes talked of having recourse to law or being
subject to it. However, they supplemented or substituted law with the
framework of civil sociality, or at least with elements of it, applying it to
“translate” their relations with other street traders, municipal inspectors,
customers, and the broader public.6 As I have mentioned, there was still some
talk of seeking legal resolutions, especially in organizations with lawyers among
their members, but there was little confidence in their success.
Thus, my Mexican interviewees tended to perceive law in a different vein to
Alexander’s (2006) characterization in The Civil Force of Law. Without
dismissing the value of the legal framework and of obeying the law as
desirable in citizens, they tended to characterize the workings of law as at
odds with the civil sphere. This meant that civil sphere elites were reluctant to
count on the “coercion” of law to “identify and punish the profane” or even to
“control the bureaucratic state.”7
conclusion: citizenship and the established civil sphere

In this chapter, I have drawn on CST to develop the insights into citizenship that
I glean from my Mexican fieldwork. I have shown that, even if the context is
very different from the US contexts on which Alexander drew, what Alexander
characterizes as civil sphere is eminently comparable to what I had encountered
when investigating citizenship in Mexico. In particular, the civil code though
rendered in terms of citizenship served similarly to constitute “the very sense of
society,” even if the “sense of society” that it constituted was significantly
different to that outlined by Alexander, since it placed less emphasis on
voluntarism and law and greater emphasis on sociality beyond the state. CST
also pushed me to develop the connection between my interviewees’ responses
to my questions about citizenship and the structures of elites and institutions
that Alexander characterizes as belonging to the “civil sphere.” Here, again,
there was a difference. The civil sphere eclipsed the institutions that Alexander
depicts as supporting it, qualifying their authority.
As well as drawing on CST to understand my Mexican material, I have
drawn on the fieldwork to develop the insights of CST. First, I suspect that
the civil disdain for the workings of law that I found in Mexico is a common
feature of civil spheres in weakly institutionalized settings. Second, my focus on
citizenship in Mexico led me to reflect on where citizenship figures in civil
spheres. Citizenship has, on occasion, been portrayed as alien to the civil
sphere. I have tried to nuance CST by proposing that citizenship will tend to
exceed state-defined frameworks, such as national membership, to the extent
that civil spheres mobilize moral frameworks that are not the monopoly of
state, even if states may try to harness and invest in them.
Wedging Open the Civil Sphere

Alexander stresses the potential for civil sphere opening, which occurs when
constituencies that are hitherto deemed uncivil (in the United States: African
Americans, Jews, women) come to be considered civil, together with the actors
who represent them and thus are effectively admitted to the civil sphere.
Alexander is also attentive to the opposite and equally dynamic process that
I term civil-sphere closing, by which groups hitherto recognized in and by the
civil sphere come to find themselves excluded. The events of 1930s Europe,
which Alexander documents in part of his book, could be read as the closing of
the civil sphere to Jews who had long been victims of civil spheres but had
established some claim to recognition in the preceding years. Indeed, Alexander
recognizes that opening to new groups may inevitably entail stigmatizing those
who refuse to admit them, such as Southern whites, while creating new
exclusions such as when the African Americans left in inner-city regions
become criminalized.
I have omitted an account of civil-sphere opening and closing in my
fieldwork for reasons of space, but also because I find it difficult to
identify a clear process of civil opening or closing within the period of my
fieldwork. There were moments of apparent opening, such as the setting-up
of the Municipal Ecological Council, which gave environmentalist groups
a formal voice in municipal decisions, or when for the first time a street
traders’ leader was allowed to sit on the Chamber of Commerce committee.
Yet the Municipal Ecological Council was effectively neutralized when it
became too critical, while the street traders’ leader turned out to be the
vehicle of an attempt by a criminal organization to extort the entire
Chamber membership. I have suggested elsewhere, more broadly, that civil
sociality served to neutralize the capacity of state institutions to deliver
equality and inclusion. It is worth asking whether civil sociality served as
a remedy for weak institutions or whether it contributed to limiting the
development of those institutions in the first place. I do take Alexander’s
point that it is necessary to look over the longue durée for clear signs of civil
sphere opening, given the complexity of civil sphere dynamics. Even here,
I remain ambivalent. I noted, for example, that civil sociality was deployed
from the 1950s by several movements objecting to the PRI’s dominion, but
the discourse of Rechtsstaat deployed from the 1970s proved arguably more
effective in bringing about electoral alternation.
Indeed, my fieldwork and historical research made me wonder whether
opening is, to begin with, an intrinsic function of the civil sphere, or just one
226 Trevor Stack
more way in which civil spheres can develop. Does the appeal to values such as
equality and inclusion tend to make for opening, however hesitant? For
Alexander, it does appear to be a general tendency.8 I suspect that civil
spheres, once they are established, require wedging open by hitherto uncivil
forces – MLK’s sit-ins are an example – if the civil sphere is to rival the state’s
capacity for extending solidarity rather than simply reproducing the bounds of
the pale.
notes
1. Indeed, to the extent that civil spheres exist, it may become difficult to neatly delineate
the state – both the United Kingdom and the United States are obvious examples.
2. Alexander characterizes the civil sphere as meta-ideology in which seemingly
conflicting ideologies, such as those of US Republicans and Democrats, can be
rendered (2015). Though I can see the point, I would still tend to see the civil code
as a political ideology but one with strong ontological claims, akin to liberalism, for
example, and which has come to be taken as common sense across much of the
political establishment.
3. The second site (which I mention only in passing) is the small town of Tapalpa, with
a population of 8,000, which is in the state of Jalisco and so also closely linked to
Guadalajara. Because of its proximity to Guadalajara, Tapalpa has become a popular
weekend getaway, making tourism the focus of its economy (Stack 2010).
In Tapalpa, I focus on an organization called Citizen Power which, in contrast to
the traders’ union in Zamora, sought mainly to establish political participation in
municipal government.
4. I took time to observe drivers in Zamora and found that they were generally
courteous – they did not, for the most part, drive as animals. Although I cannot
substantiate this, I believe that one reason for the courtesy was that drivers were wary
of being dismissed as animals.
5. Even so, I believe there was a difference between the lawyers’ understanding of the
legal parameters and what Alexander postulates for the United States, which was
echoed to some extent by my interviewees in Anglo California. I found that Anglos
also spoke more frequently of the legal boundaries of citizenship, specifically in
relation to undocumented workers. They also identified with law in a number of
ways, for example, as prospective jury members or as plaintiffs. However, my
impression is that, unlike the Mexican lawyers who tended to see law as at one
with the bureaucratic logics of state, my Anglo interviewees saw it as a sphere attuned
to moral frameworks beyond the bureaucratic logic of state, including that set out in
the Constitution.
6. I asked specific questions of the amparo writ or injunction, which served to stay the
hands of authorities in appeal to the Constitution, and which lawyers often presented
as the ultimate defense of the citizen. Even lawyers tended to justify the amparo in
a peculiar way, though. Law professors explained it, they noted, as necessary due to
the corruption and inefficiency in the legal system. My interviewees, meanwhile, were
somewhat mystified by it and tended to describe it in an instrumental fashion, as
a way of defending oneself against the law, rather than as a defense by the law against
arbitrary acts of authority.
7. Although I was unable to reinterview in 2016, it would appear likely that residents’
faith in law’s capacity to punish the profane had eroded considerably by then, in the
face of extraordinary impunity. Indeed, the default assumption in 2016 was that
police forces had been incorporated into criminal organizations.
8. For example: “Such institutional impediments to effective government, however,
actually make the American civil sphere more rather than less important. Far from
civil binaries creating political paralysis, their utopian aspirations and polluting
powers have significantly bent the arc of justice. Conservative presidents have
governed for most of the last century, often deploying fiercely anti-inclusive
ideology. Yet, the boundaries of social solidarity have been gradually enlarged.
One after another, restrictive elites have been polluted as anticivil, their subalterns
being certified as civil in turn—all this thanks to the performative power of social
movements, figurative civil rhetoric, and responsive communicative and regulative
institutions” (Alexander 2015: 184).
references
Aguilar Rivera, José Antonio. 2012. Ausentes Del Universo: Reflexiones Sobre El
Pensamiento Político Hispanoamericano En La Era De La Construcción
Nacional, 1821–1850. Sección De Obras De Historia. Mexico: Fondo de
Cultura Económica.
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2006. The Civil Sphere. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2007. Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of
Religion and Related Categories. New York, NY; Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Forment, Carlos A. 2003. Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900 Volume I, Civic
Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Hale, Charles A. 1968. Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–53. New Haven,
CT; London, UK: Yale University Press.
Lomnitz, Claudio. 2001. Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of
Nationalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1994. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” Boston Review,
October 1. Retrieved June 25, 2017 (http://bostonreview.net/martha-nussbaum-
patriotism-and-cosmopolitanism).
Ramírez Ruíz, Marcelo and Federico Fernández Christlieb. 2006. “La Policía De Los
Indios Y La Urbanización Del Altepetl,” in Territorialidad Y Paisaje En El Alteptl Del
Siglo XVI, edited by Federico Fernández Christlieb and Ángel Julián
García Zambrano. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 114–167.
Smith, Benjamin T. 2012. The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society,
and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750–1962. Santa Fe, NM: University of New
Mexico Press.
228 Trevor Stack
Stack, Trevor. 2010. “A Just Rule of Law?” Social Anthropology 18 (3):346–355.

Stack, Trevor. 2012a. “Beyond the State? Civil Sociality and Other Notions of
Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 16 (7):871–885.
Stack, Trevor. 2012b. Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship.
Santa Fe, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Stack, Trevor. 2013a. “In the Eyes of the Law, in the Eyes of Society: A Citizenship
Tradition in West Mexico.” Critique of Anthropology 33 (1):66–90.
Stack, Trevor. 2013b. “Ser Ciudadano Y Ser Indígena, Entre El Estado De Derecho Y El
Vivir En Sociedad,” in Identidades Diversas, Ciudadanías Particulares: Reflexiones
Sobre La Relación Entre “Ser Indígena” Y “Ser Ciudadano,” edited by Jorge Uzeta.
Zamora, Mich.: El Colegio de Michoacán, pp. 161–186.
Stack, Trevor. 2015. “‘Citizens’ and their Stance Toward ‘Religion,’” in Religion as
a Category of Governance and Sovereignty, edited by Trevor Stack, Naomi
R. Goldenberg and Timothy Fitzgerald. Leiden: Brill, pp. 38–67.
Tamayo Flores-Alatorre, Sergio. 1997. “La Participación Ciudadana: Un Proceso.”
Revista Mexicana De Sociología 4:155–185.
part iv
COMMENTARY AND CONCLUSION

9
Commentary
Is Civil Society Dangerous for Democracy? New Directions
for Civil Sphere Theory in Latin America
Isabel Jijón
On April 15, 2016, in a forum on social inequality, Ecuador’s then

President Rafael Correa said that civil society is dangerous for democracy.
“[In this meeting] we have said that civil society has an important place [in
democracy],” said Correa, “but I tell you that we have to be careful with
that; it depends on how we define the State.” The State, for Correa,
represents the will of the people: “Sometimes when certain opponents say,
‘We are representatives of civil society,’ I wonder, then, who do I represent
after having won an election? Martians?” Civil society in this vision is
a problematic assemblage of private and foreign interests: hence, Correa
warned about “an invasion of NGOs, many of them not spontaneous, many
of them not-nongovernmental,” that “want to impose a political agenda,
without political responsibility, without democratic responsibility.” For
Correa, civil society is not legitimate because it is not democratically
elected. He joked: “We live in a world with alcohol-free beer, nicotine-
free tobacco, caffeine-free coffee, and now we want politician-free politics.”
He also admitted, more seriously: “I am worried when people want to
replace the State with an ambiguous definition of civil society” (El
Telégrafo 2016).
I have started with Correa’s speech as it reflects many conceptions about civil
society in Latin American politics and in regional academic writings. Like
Correa, many studies broadly define civil society as a set of organizations:
NGOs, but also social movements and voluntary associations (Fischer 2010;
Foweraker 2005; Lavalle and Bueno 2011). Like Correa, many scholars think
about civil society normatively, in relation to democracy: they ask how these
organizations might help or hinder democracy (Beasley Murray 1999;
Mascareno Quintana 2008; Salazar Villava 2002), or how they have
contributed to processes of democratization (Galindo Hernández 2014;
Korovkin 2001). And like Correa, many have noted that civil society is
a “strategically ambiguous” concept (Fischer 2010:1). But unlike Correa,
I suggest that we shouldn’t walk away from the concept but work harder to
231
232 Isabel Jijón
expand and deepen our understanding of the social and cultural forces captured
by this term.
The chapters in this volume show how Alexander’s Civil Sphere Theory
(CST) provides a useful alternative to more slippery and politically loaded
definitions of civil society. CST is empirically precise, theoretically rigorous,
and it shifts our attention from organizations towards discourses and structures
of meaning. CST invites us to focus on culture, where “every action, no matter
how instrumental, reflexive, or coerced . . . is embedded to some extent in
a horizon of affect and meaning” (Alexander and Smith 2006:12).
In what follows, I argue that CST contributes to studies on Latin American
politics in three ways: it shows us other actors and organizations that compose
the civil sphere, apart from the “usual suspects” normally associated with civil
society; it shows us that the civil sphere also exists in nondemocratic systems;
and it shows us that ideas of the civil sphere coexist with, are polluted by, or
stand opposed to patrimonial or militant political discourses. Instead of asking
whether civil society is necessary or dangerous for democracy, we should ask
how different actors construct democracy in the first place. We should look at
how they draw on shared notions of “necessary” and “dangerous,” “good” and
“evil,” “sacred” and “profane.”
civil sphere theory and the centrality of culture

Civil Sphere Theory’s most radical contribution is its insistence that cultural
structures are at the heart of politics. For Alexander and others working in the
CST paradigm, politics is not what happens when certain actors with certain
interests cooperate or compete over resources and power. Actors live in a world
structured by cultural categories of pure and polluted, sacred and profane.
Politics, therefore, is what happens when actors – motivated by these idealized
expectations – cooperate or compete by performing a culturally legitimate
persona, by drawing boundaries between civil and uncivil political groups, by
telling moral stories about the past, present, and future, by creating a sense of
solidarity while simultaneously inventing the Other (Alexander 2006; see also
Mast 2012; Smith 2010).
In this view, the civil sphere is not just a set of organizations in relation to the
State. The civil sphere is a discourse or set of meanings that define what it means
to belong, what it means to be civil, what are the legitimate or illegitimate
motives actors can have, relationships they can enter, or institutions they can
build. The civil sphere is an incomplete project that can never be fully achieved
or, for that matter, suppressed. And, while political actors may use this ideal to
broaden solidarity – opposing the exclusionary discourses of the political,
economic, family, or religious spheres – the dark underbelly of the civil sphere
is that it creates its own forms of exclusion. People often define others as uncivil,
barring some from full participation in society. But, as Alexander notes, there is
always room for “civil repair.”
Is Civil Society Dangerous for Democracy? 233
Alexander’s theory points to different organizations and institutions that

mobilize the discourse of the civil sphere. Apart from social movements, and
voluntary associations, Alexander also writes about legal institutions, factual
and fictional media, voting mechanisms, public opinion polls, political parties,
and the ethics of office. This is not, as Correa would have it, “politician-free
politics.” But the circle of actors involved in the cultural construction of society
is widened beyond politicians.
The chapters in this volume tell us why this matters. CST provides each
author a different angle to study their cases. CST opens up new possible
questions. And CST helps us move past the only two outcomes considered by
politicians and studies of civil society in Latin America: that civil society is either
good or bad for democracy. This volume demonstrates, instead, that we should
look at how actors mobilize ideas about good and evil, how they are stretching
or tightening the boundaries of social solidarity.
alternative actors in the civil sphere

The chapters in this volume study a variety of cases: political scandals and
notions of citizenship in Mexico, civil protests in Argentina, Chile, and
Venezuela, policing in Brazil, and political discussion in Cuban blogs and
Colombian universities. There are many ways these authors could have
approached these cases. They might have looked at the State, at social
movements, at the organizations supporting or opposing each cause, or
mapped out people’s “interests” or how actors mobilized resources and
interpretive frames. CST gave them another option: to focus on meanings.
These authors ask what each case means and to whom, how actors define the
civil and the uncivil, how they create, contest, and navigate shared moral
assumptions, and what is the shape of local political discourses. Whether the
authors conduct archival research, media analysis, interviews, or
ethnographies, they look for stories, performances, and moral binaries. So,
rather than reducing the scandal over alleged acts of corruption by Mexico’s
president to a simple epiphenomenon of political interests, Arteaga and
Arzuaga find a deeper structure of meaning informing the debate. Similarly,
Luengo shows how, in politically polarized Argentina, a social movement
protesting violence against women managed to overcome this political divide
by connecting this issue to broader ideas about the solidary community.
The scholars in this volume look at alternative actors and institutions.
Thumala, Luengo, Tognato, and Arteaga and Arzuaga study the media.
Tognato also studies the university campus, and Thumala and Luengo look at
social movements. Martínez asks how new forms of social media can be
incipient spaces for civil discussion. Stack looks at the ways regular people
make sense of citizenship. Villegas examines discourses in political parties and
organizations. Shimizu writes about the police, who must abide by both civil
and noncivil discourses.
234 Isabel Jijón
Villegas takes this questioning even further and demonstrates that actors
themselves are culturally constructed: while most research on class and politics
explores how different social classes bolster or undermine democratic
institutions, Villegas demonstrates that class itself is given moral meaning.
This points the way for further research: How do people ascribe moral
meanings to other institutions? How are the law, the media, the university,
and the police culturally constructed? And how might these meanings, in turn,
shape what these institutions are able to do? CST and this volume broaden the
scope of what “counts” as civil society.
the civil sphere in imperfect democracies

Civil Sphere Theory encourages new questions. Instead of only asking how civil
society relates to democracy, these authors explore how civil discourses shape
the academic sphere in Colombia, the economic sphere in Chile and Venezuela,
and the intimate sphere in Argentina. The boundaries between these spheres are
porous and flexible. The logics of one may spill into the other. Questions about
democracy are still important, but just as CST enlarges the number of actors
available for study, it also widens the set of questions we can now address.
What is more, by focusing on discourses, the authors have found that ideas
about the civil – values like equality, transparency, legality, inclusion, and
freedom – exist even in imperfect democracies or authoritarian states. Arteaga
and Arzuaga argue that in Mexico, despite a strong patrimonial culture, a “cult
of the president,” and one political party’s monopolization of power, different
actors still judge the president against a civil yardstick. They may not be
successful in changing political institutions – Mexico has no legal mechanism
to expel leaders from office – but the fact that the discourse is available shows
that civil repair is always a possibility.
Similarly, Martínez’s chapter on Cuban blogs contends that even in “an
authoritarian and militant political and social regime,” there are spaces where
political actors define and espouse a civil mode of discussion. The creators of the
blog all belong to revolutionary organizations and aim to defend the revolution
to outsiders. But they also value openness, inclusion, and critical deliberation in
their debates, as opposed to the official mandate of “discipline, obedience, and
cohesion.” The civil sphere in this case, exists in spite of official efforts to
suppress it. Martínez looks beyond organizations and towards cultural work
and structures of meaning.
civil, patrimonial, and militant discourses

This volume’s most interesting insight is that civil discourse coexists with other
political discourses. Colonialism, neocolonialism, internal colonialism, and
inequality in Latin America have created a set of patrimonial narratives, what
Tognato calls “hacienda culture” or the “patron/peon code.” While there are
cultural differences across nations, the authors find that these discourses tend to
value order, paternalism, charity, and loyalty. In reaction to this, and in reaction
to the broken promises of civil narratives, other Latin American political actors
have developed a militant revolutionary discourse, what Villegas terms the
“countercode.” Again, we shouldn’t underestimate country-to-country
differences, but the chapters on Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia show how
proponents of this discourse usually celebrate revolution, the collective cause,
loyalty, self-sacrifice, and secrecy. Civil discourses exist between, and enmeshed
with, these extremes (see also Baiocchi 2006; Gauna 2016).
In both Tognato’s chapter on Colombia and Arteaga and Arzuaga’s chapter
on Mexico we see that, in fact, civil discourses are often intertwined with
patrimonial ideas. In both cases, actors espouse civil values but still worry
about the additional binary of order versus chaos. But civil discourses can
also stand opposed to patrimonial ideas, as in Luengo’s chapter on the
#NiUnaMenos movement. Here, activists redefine domestic violence as
a public issue over fairness and equality, not a private, paternalistic problem
between men and women. And, unlike all these cases, Thumala’s chapter on
protests in Chile shows how even if there are multiple discourses available, they
do not always interact. While Chile has its share of patrimonial and
revolutionary movements (Cañas Kirby 1997), in this case, activists marched
and protested and boycotted by drawing exclusively on civil meanings.
Therefore, there are many ways for political discourses to coexist. CST
prompts scholars to stretch these theoretical findings further.
future directions for cst

CST provides empirical and theoretical tools that help us understand politics
and democracy in Latin America. That being said, we must be careful not to
gloss over the continent’s cultural and political diversity. While many Latin
American nations share similar colonial and postcolonial histories, similar
ethnic, class, and gender structures, and similar actors vying for civil repair,
we shouldn’t extend the insights from this volume indiscriminately. Patrimonial
discourses may be different in postdictatorship Uruguay than in
postdictatorship Argentina, for instance, because in the former the meanings
of the military past are still being debated (Ros 2012). Militant revolutionary
discourses in Peru are probably not the same as in Colombia, because in the
former guerrilla groups were in tension with other Peruvian leftists and were
more effectively discredited and stopped by the end of the 1990s (Wickham-
Crowley 2014). More work is needed in each context to see how CST fits.
We must also keep in mind that many studies focus on what Stack accurately
terms the “privileged protagonists of the civil.” We should also consider other
actors and cultural structures. To give just one example, Andean and
Amazonian indigenous communities have alternative definitions and practices
regarding justice (Brysk 2000; Trujillo, Grijalva, and Endara 2001). These
236 Isabel Jijón
discourses may also clash, compete, or combine with those of the civil sphere,
even as such communities come to play a greater practical and symbolic role in
global civil activism over issues such as climate change (Hames 2007).
And we should question where all these different discourses come from.
Alexander develops his theory using US and European examples, noting that
ideas about the civil were shaped by the cultural legacies of Ancient Greece,
Medieval Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism, to name a few.
What about ideas of civility in Latin America? Or, for that matter, the
patrimonial and militant discourses? We know that military leaders during
Latin America’s wars of independence, like Simón Bolívar, interpreted and
adapted Enlightenment values to the local context (McFarlane 1998).
We know that other actors, like certain segments of the Catholic Church,
have also shaped ideas about the civil (Levine 1988). We know that
marginalized groups, like Afro-descendants and Indigenous peoples, have
since expanded definitions of “the good society” and citizenship (Sánchez
2007; Yashar 2005). We need a more comprehensive cultural history that ties
all these sources together and explains where these countries’ civil spheres come
from, how they have shaped and been shaped by colonialism, war, cultural
appropriation, and cultural hybridity.
Finally, we must recognize that we live in “times of globalization” (Mato
2007). Groups of people who identify as a solidary community extend beyond
political borders (Herrera 2003; Levitt and Jaworsky 2007). Movements for
civil repair grow, connect, and find support in transnational advocacy networks
(Brysk 2000; Yashar 2005). Ideas and symbols and stories move across nations
and acquire new meaning (Auyero 2001; Robertson 1995; Tsing 2005).
This volume suggests this global context: protests against gender violence in
Argentina were followed by similar protests in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and
Mexico. Concerns over the civility of the police extend far beyond São Paulo.
And the people who discussed Cuban politics, enacting a civil ideal online, only
found this space because of political upheavals in the USSR, the mass migration
of Cuban expatriates, the global expansion of the Internet, and because in 1994,
a student at Swarthmore College invented blogs as a format for online
discussion (Harmanci 2005). So, a new direction for CST is for scholars to
look at how these discourses shape and are shaped by global processes. How do
ideas about citizenship in provincial Mexico change when people in these areas
migrate? How are debates about the boundary between the civil sphere and
academia shaped by transnational alliances in higher education? How are
economic protests in Chile influenced by global economic crises? How do
actors in Latin America and elsewhere try to engage with a globally imagined
civil sphere?
The civil sphere isn’t dangerous for democracy. It isn’t guaranteed to help
democracy either. Alexander’s contribution is his emphasis on culture, but
people and institutions must make this culture “walk and talk” (Alexander
2004:554). Social movements need to translate particular problems into
a universalizing language. The media need to construct a sense of solidarity.

The law needs to regulate free from uncivil pressures. Polls and elections need to
capture the will of the people. Political offices need to generate trust. Citizens
need to recognize that the civil sphere is an ideal. And, because it is an ideal, it
always requires more political and cultural work. CST, in other words, makes
us step back from normative debates over civil society and ask what are the
moral assumptions underlying these debates? What do people really mean when
they say “good,” “bad,” “necessity,” or “danger”? How do these cultural,
moral concepts shape local politics?
Latin America is the most unequal continent on the planet (Bárcena and
Byanyima 2016). But, as the chapters in this volume show, people are still
motivated by universalizing ideals as they try to fix their political institutions,
to change their gender relations, to challenge their economic practices, to
redefine the boundaries between different social spheres. Not all these
attempts work, but civil repair is never off the table. As scholars of Latin
American politics, we need to recognize and promote the transformative
power of culture.
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Conclusion
Democracy and the Civil Sphere in Latin America
Peter Kivisto and Giuseppe Sciortino
This book is part of a larger project aimed at “de-provincializing” Alexander’s

civil sphere theory (CST). It takes CST out of its initial instantiation, very
explicitly rooted in the US experience, and, faithful to its universalistic
ambition, applies it to other world settings. The goal is twofold: to use civil
sphere theory productively to address its relevance in different societal and
national settings, proving that its scope is not restricted to the United States
(or to the world’s most stable liberal democracies); but secondly, not simply to
employ the theory but to advance it. Regarding the latter, from the outset,
Alexander and those sympathetic to his intentions consider CST to be an
ongoing project with an unfinished agenda (Sciortino, 2007; Kivisto 2007).
Part of our task is thus to distill the lessons derived from these case studies
that point to future theoretical work.
This is done with the recognition that Latin America constitutes a broad and
not altogether precise group of nations. In its most expansive expression, Latin
America amounts to every nation in the Western Hemisphere other than
Canada and the United States. In a more delimited understanding of which
nations count as “Latin” American, the term is used to refer to those nations
whose colonial histories were defined by the two empire builders located on the
Iberian Peninsula – Spain and Portugal. Whether by design or not, the seven
countries examined herein are all Iberian American nations. This makes them
interesting tests for CST, as their discourses of membership and solidarity are
rooted in cultural traditions – not least the national imaginations of the creole
pioneers celebrated by Benedict Anderson (1983) – that are surely distinctive
and diverse in comparison to those of the United States and Canada.
every empirical application is an interpretation

Exploring the significance of CST outside of North America is a project initiated
by Alexander himself, with his essay analyzing the Arab Spring uprising in
Egypt in 2011, which he conceptualized as a battle among contesting forces
240
Democracy and the Civil Sphere in Latin America 241
bringing to bear cultural power in attempting to gain the upper hand in shaping
collective representations. In this battle, both the regime and the protesters
framed their actions and motives according to symbolic codes remarkably
similar to those identified in The Civil Sphere (Alexander 2006).
This book, like those that will follow, is meant to go further along this road,
exploring in a more systematic way the varieties of civil spheres in various parts
of the world. It is unlikely such explorations will leave CST unscathed. Each
collective work on a given area brings, and will bring, to light inevitably not
only a number of empirical challenges, but also different emphases concerning
the CST framework itself. Any empirical application, as Alexander has always
stressed in his theoretical work, is actually a revision and a reinterpretation. We
evaluate a theoretical framework not only in the light of our empirical findings
but also our theoretical concerns.
Our starting point is consequently to look at what dimensions of CST are
taken as crucial by the authors of the chapters, and which ones are made latent
or placed in the background. It is obvious that the main concern of nearly all
authors is the relationship between civil solidarity and political democracy. A
significant element, from the point of view of a broader development of CST, is
precisely the endemic emphasis in the chapters on the connection between the
dynamics of the civil sphere and the development of democratization (or de-
democratization) processes. This will consequently comprise the core of our
comments.
It is equally important, however, to pay attention to the dogs that do not
bark. It is evident that some topics that loom large in The Civil Sphere do not
find their way into the collection. The more obvious to our eyes is the issue of
competing modes of incorporation of marginalized groups. While some
chapters are clearly concerned with the civil repair of long-standing
inequalities, they pay only marginal attention to the issue of social difference
(with the important exception of a chapter on gender). Modes of incorporation
are a key feature of CST, which has proved fruitful in refreshing the ever-
pressing study of ethnic, racial, and religious incorporation (Alexander 2013;
Kivisto 2012; Sciortino 2012). It is interesting – and intriguing – to note that
none of the authors has felt the need to appropriate this topic, a fact that we take
is connected not to the lack of material, but rather to theoretical priorities and,
most importantly, to the kind of intellectual dialogues the authors participate
in. Equally intriguing is the (relative) lack of attention to the connections
between the highlighted cleavages in the definition of societal membership
and conditions of extreme socioeconomic inequality, despite the fact that it
could help to make sense both of the enduring strength of the revolutionary
code in Latin America and of the frequent othering of the poor as a dangerous
class of disqualified members.
It is also important to listen to what some dogs seem only to whisper. In
several chapters, there is an important, and potentially innovative, change in the
vision of the civil sphere itself. In Alexander’s original formulation, the civil
242 Peter Kivisto and Giuseppe Sciortino
sphere is relatively unified and consistent. Its discourse of membership is,

although endemically encroached by ascriptive traditions and noncivil
sectoral interests, unitary. Even radical opponents share the same code and
fight within it, inverting the same polarities to indict their opponents (and vice
versa). In some of the chapters reviewed herein, on the contrary, the civil sphere
is often presented as internally contested. Other competing discourses of
membership and solidarity constantly challenge it. Several chapters thus
endorse Carlo Tognato’s innovation of positing not a single discursive
structure concerning membership, in which opponents use the same codes
with inverted polarities, but rather a set of membership discourses, in which a
civil discourse stands in contrast to, and sometimes besieged by, other
normative visions of the good social life. Tognato, followed by other
colleagues, identifies both hacienda and militant revolutionary discourses not
as external encroachments on a shared civil sphere, but as alternative symbolic
structures. The question is: Can a civil sphere actually have multiple codes, each
one embedded in traditions defined by highly diversified understandings of what
“civil” means? What is the relationship between the civil as a universalizing
sphere of collective membership and the civil as a specific liberal discourse
competing with different social understandings? The chapters pave the way
for the discussion of a key tenet of CST, and we expect it to trigger some
important debates in the near future.
the civil sphere as a universal phenomenon

All the chapters in this volume explore, in different ways, the CST claim that a
distinctive feature of the civil sphere – as a differentiated sphere of
universalizing common membership – is a universal social phenomenon. The
chapters converge on the finding that, even in repressive or highly fragmented
societies, the codes of the civil sphere are immanent to a variety of societal
dynamics. They resonate with Farhad Khosrokhavar’s argument that, except
for very extreme forms of political atomization and oppression, some form of
the civil sphere operates even in highly authoritarian societies, even though at
times (such as the aftermath of the Arab Spring in Egypt), it persists solely or
largely in the subjectivity of citizens rather than objectively in institutional
manifestations (Khosrokhavar 2015).
Alexander, in the first two of his “Nine Thesis on The Civil Sphere” has
similarly argued that the civil sphere “is not exclusively modern,” although he
has also stressed the difference between primordial forms of solidarity and more
universalizing ones – the latter associated with modern and modernizing
societies (Alexander 2015: 172–173). Whereas in the first thesis, he locates
the civil sphere in relationship to modernity, in his second thesis, “the civil
sphere can be partial,” he locates it in reference to democracy (Alexander 2015:
173–174). His stance is a simple one: civil spheres can exist in nondemocratic
(or partially democratic) societies, but not fully. Taken together, the argument is
that a civil sphere with sufficient cultural power to advance a universalistic form
of solidarity, justice predicated on a commitment to the sacredness of the
individual, and a mode of incorporation based on the recognition of
difference is only possible in a modern democratic society. The achievement
of such a civil sphere is always partial, historically contingent, and an ongoing,
ever-reconstituted achievement. Real-existing democracies are in constant need
of civil repair. No society is, nor will any ever be, fully modern. Likewise, no
society is or will ever become anything resembling a pure democracy.
The cases analyze in detail how the working of a civil sphere can be traced
and documented across Latin America, producing a varied set of consequences
for the democratization (and de-democratization) processes recorded in the
continent. They do so in terms of two interconnected continua: traditional/
modern and authoritarian/democratic. Such distinctions are hardly new: they
have been at core of the thinking of modernization theorists such as Walt
Whitman Rostow, Lucien Pye, Daniel Lerner, and Gabriel Almond. Civil
Sphere Theory scholars, however, approach the same questions with a
radically different set of tools. They do not have any trace of the
modernization theorists’ delusion of having discovered a teleological social
science model, a “universal, general syndrome that changes the same lives of
people in the same way in all regions of the globe,” bringing democracy as an
inevitable outcome (Latham 2000:53). Civil Sphere Theory, moreover, does not
see Western liberal democratic societies as models to be imitated or benchmarks
to be adopted. Even they are local instantiations of a more abstract, analytically
autonomous, cultural pattern that can be found, in different forms and ways, in
other forms of societies.
Given such a stance, coming to terms with the particularities of democracy
and the salience of civil society in Latin America, as the case studies herein
attest, requires being able to locate the present in terms of the region’s deep
history, a history that has shaped distinctive (and perhaps multiple) discourses
that come to characterize and frame participation in the civil sphere.
varieties of political regimes

As we have noted at the outset, a distinctive feature of the chapters, within the
background of the existing CST literature, is their strong focus on the
connections between the civil sphere and democracy. They adopt CST mainly
to analyze the impact of particular political regimes on the workings not only of
the civil sphere, but also of civil society more broadly (and vice versa). Here it
may be useful to read them having in mind the large variations in the degree of
democratic arrangements among the selected case studies. Two widely-used
metrics that provide global comparisons reveal perspectives on the democratic
prospects in Latin America generally and the seven case-study nations in
particular. They offer, if approached critically, a means for deriving
comparisons within the case-study nations.
The oldest of such reports, produced annually since the 1970s by Freedom
House, seeks to measure the freedom status of individual citizens based on the
level of existing political rights and civil liberties as they are defined by the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Each country is ranked as free, partly
free, or not free. In terms of freedom status, three of the case-study nations have
been ranked as free: Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Colombia and Mexico have
been ranked as partly free, while Cuba and Venezuela have been deemed not
free. Turning to press freedom, a separate index, Chile is the only case-study
nation to be ranked as free. In three nations, press freedom is partly free –
Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia – while the remaining three – Cuba, Mexico,
and Venezuela – are considered to be not free (Puddington and Roylance 2017:
20–24).
The Economist Intelligence Unit launched its Democracy Index in 2006. It
contends that such an index offers a thick, in contrast to Freedom House’s thin,
understanding of democracy. The Democracy Index classifies nation states as
full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, or authoritarian regimes.
Adding to the issues that factor into Freedom House’s index, the Democracy
Index explores governmental functioning, judicial independence, the rule of law
predicated on adequate checks and balances, and – particularly germane to
exploration of the civil sphere – an assessment of whether the political culture of
the nation is supportive of or undermines democracy (The Economist
Intelligence Unit 2017). According to the report, little more than 10 percent
of current nation states may be judged full democracies. Slightly less than 50
percent of the world’s population lives in either full or flawed democracies (The
Economist Intelligence Unit 2017: 3).
Uruguay is the only Latin American country that makes the list of full
democracies. In fact, with Canada, it is only one of two nations in the
Western Hemisphere so categorized. Five of the seven case-study nations are
located in the flawed democracy list; in rank order from highest to lowest
rankings within the category are Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and
Mexico. Venezuela is considered a hybrid regime, while Cuba is classed
authoritarian. The report observes how Latin America remains the most
democratic region of the developing world, albeit the region’s average score
has continued to decline in recent years: “The region has relatively strong
democratic fundamentals – including comparatively high scores for electoral
process and pluralism and civil liberties – but the full consolidation of
democracy in the region continues to be held back by issues regarding
political effectiveness and culture” (The Economist Intelligence Unit 2017: 39).
applying civil sphere theory to latin america

The value of these case studies for advancing the civil sphere as a theoretical
project rests in part on the fact that five of the seven nations examined are
democracies, however flawed and fragile they might be. If Khosrokhavar has
tried to distinguish different types of authoritarian regimes (as older distinctions

between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes similarly sought to do), the
chapters collected here show the importance of similarly distinguishing really-
existing democracies along a continuum involving degrees of robustness and
embeddedness of democratic culture, institutions, performative practices, and
rituals.
We may now return to the issue of how these cases contribute to clarify the
ways in which civil sphere theory has a capacity to expand understanding of the
cultural dynamics that work for or against democratization. We start with the
two nations that reside at the opposite sides of the authoritarian/democratic
spectrum: Cuba and Chile.
Attempting to Carve Out Space for the Civil Sphere in an Authoritarian Society
Cuba, which from the moment it excised itself from the repressive and corrupt
Batista dictatorship in 1959, was caught in the tentacles of the Cold War. Siding
with the Soviet Union, the Castro regime modeled itself both politically and
economically on its powerful benefactor, creating an authoritarian state
apparatus and a centralized command economy. To solidify its control of the
island nation, it squeezed the existing civil sphere. Just as it clamped down on
any efforts to promote economic markets, so it clamped down on autonomous
organizations that might be perceived as challenging or criticizing the regime.
Liliana Martínez Pérez’s chapter captures a moment in which change leading
to a more democratic future appears to be a possibility. The long decline and
death of Fidel Castro in 2017 signifies the beginning of the end of the
revolutionary generation. That an attempt to construct space for a civil sphere
has been initiated in the blogosphere reflects the penetration of new media
technologies even in a place that has been more isolated than other Latin
American nations. La Joven Cuba represents an effort to reframe the inherited
revolutionary discourse that strenuously defended Cuban communism and the
militancy associated with permanent revolution in a more civil direction. In
doing so, as the evidence presented by Martínez Pérez reveals, a tension exists
between defending the revolution and engaging in a critique of it and of its long-
term consequences. The persistent calls for the continuation of “militant self-
censorship,” combined with the censorship exhibited by the government,
reveals the tenuous and fragile state of civil society in contemporary Cuba,
and illustrates the significance of a struggle over discursive codes in attempting
to forge a civil culture. It also highlights the fact that a democracy movement, if
it is to succeed, must acquire both political and cultural power.
Democratic Ritual Enacted in a Flawed but Currently Stable Democracy

The Chilean case study can be viewed as the “normal” functioning of the civil
sphere in a flawed democracy (ranked 34 in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s
list, sandwiched between Taiwan and Belgium). Chilean media operate with a
degree of relative autonomy quite different from Cuba. M. Angélica Thumala’s
study addresses the relationship between democracy and capitalism, a perennial
topic in the social sciences.
Thumala’s study of two price-fixing business scandals, in the pharmaceutical
and paper industries, may be appreciated in light of the fact that Chile is
characterized not only by relatively low levels of political participation, the
lowest level of trust in other people among OECD nations (OECD 2011), but
also by low levels of corruption (Transparency International 2017) and high
levels of commitment to and trust in democratic institutions (Corral 2011: 9).
Thumala analyzes a clear case of civil repair: once media reporting on price-
fixing took hold among a critical mass of the public, citizens demanded redress
in the court of public opinion. And in so doing, both media and citizens engaged
in what Alexander (2003: 155–177) called – in his own case study of the
Watergate scandal – a “democratic ritual,” a ritual in which the colluders
were successfully defined as polluted while the members of the public were
seen as rights-bearing citizens who had been abused by uncivil actors and in the
name of fairness, expected redress. The degree to which they succeeded is a
reflection of the capacity of two crucial civil sphere institutions – the media and
regulatory organizations – to be efficacious in the performance of their duties.
The longer-term outcome – still to be determined – can be expected to involve a
continuing struggle to tame capitalism sufficiently to prevent it from
exacerbating its inherent tendencies to generate unacceptably high levels of
inequality and the political disempowerment of those lacking economic
power. Here the question is whether the civil sphere is sufficiently robust to
ensure that this movement back and forth occurs within democratic parameters.
Democratic Ritual Stymied

Nelson Arteaga and Javier Arzuaga’s chronicling of a political scandal in
Mexico also constitutes a case, albeit sui generis, of civil repair. It does so in
the context of a nation that after seven decades of rule by the authoritarian
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), has given way to a political opening for
a multiparty political system, with more limited success in the concomitant
democratization of that system. The authors point to the fact that “in Mexico,
free and competitive elections, independent newspapers, and intellectuals who
lead informed criticism of the government support the operation of a civil
sphere.” Mexico and Chile are similar in some respects. Mexico ranks third
from the bottom among OECD nations in terms of levels of interpersonal trust,
thus paralleling Chile on this measure (OECD 2011), while also being on the
higher end in terms of trust in basic governmental institutions (Corral 2011).
However, there are significant differences, as well. Corruption is a far more
serious problem compared to Chile. Mexico is also more violent, as measured
by homicide rates. Mexico is also considered one of the most dangerous places
in the world for journalists, something that has a clear impact on the dynamics
of its civil sphere. Mexico, thus, would appear to be a prime example of a Latin
American nation in which, as Magaly Sanchez (2006) describes it, “insecurity
and violence” constitute a “new power relation.”
It is in this context that the analyzed scandal over a luxury home acquired by
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto played out. It did so without, it appears,
insecurity on the part of the critics or the use of violence by those accused of
polluting the civil sphere. In some respects, it was like a soap opera, with
Angélica Rivera, Nieto’s wife and a former soap opera actress, in one of the
lead roles. At one level, this scandal points to a functioning civil sphere. A
minority of the electorate elected Nieto, and criticism by his opponents was
considered legitimate. Independent journalists uncovered the story and the
media presented it to the public, where it led to considerable debate. At the
same time, Arteaga and Arzuaga show how the public debate over the scandal,
including whether or not it ought to be viewed as a scandal, was caught between
two competing discourses: that of the binary codes of a democratic civil sphere
and that of a patrimonial society predicated on traditional ideas of hierarchy
and order. They think the presence of such competing discourses contributes to
explain why the “White House” scandal was a draw, in which neither the
defenders of patrimonial codes nor those advocating for a civil code
succeeded in getting the upper hand. Thus, the authors are quite correct to
characterize the Mexican civil sphere as both real and partial.
Civil Repair and Progress

The preceding two case studies represent examples of attempts aimed at the
sort of civil repair that corrects an uncivil aberration, fixing it but not
fundamentally changing the civil sphere in a progressive direction. In
contrast, María Luengo’s study of attempts to combat endemic violence
against women in Argentina describes a type of civil repair that, if it
succeeds, results in a civil sphere that redefines societal solidarity in a more
egalitarian and just way. Argentina is, after Chile, the most democratic
nation among these seven case studies. It also shares with Chile a history
of military rule. What distinguishes Argentina from its neighbor to the west
is a long history of populism dating to the nineteenth century, but having its
greatest and most lasting impact during the rise and fall of Juan Perón. As in
any populist vision, Perón portrayed opponents as “unpatriotic” and as
“enemies of the people” (Horowitz 2012: 22–23). Perónism was predicated
on, to borrow the language of Carl Schmitt (1996 [1932]), “the concept of
the political” that pitted friends against enemies. The result is a polarized
political system and society, one that can make difficult the functioning of a
democracy based not on friends and enemies but on opponents one is
expected to engage, by alternatingly challenging and cooperating in an
ongoing performance of politics predicated on mutual respect.
Luengo, however, shows how even within strongly polarized societies, there
are possibilities for substantial civil activism, endorsing the codes of the civil
sphere. The campaign she analyzes fought against the murder of women that
occurred with a certain impunity reflective of a patriarchal culture.
Characterizing such murders as “femicides,” activists polluted the notion that
these were crimes of passion that, though unfortunate, were inevitable. On the
contrary, they linked such violence to the discredited human rights abuses of the
military junta that were now widely described as acts of genocide.
The movement, working across the political spectrum, sought to rearticulate
cultural codes about the place of women in Argentinian society. It thereby
sought to strip away the ideological trappings of patriarchy – the “macho
culture” that the movement condemned – that justified the subjugation and
marginalization of women in the civil sphere. A new cultural script was
introduced that depicted women no longer as isolated victims, but as citizens
who were to be viewed as autonomous actors in all realms of life – including the
family – as democratic coequals.
This campaign ignited in 2015, which means that it is too early to determine
how the struggle between civil and uncivil codes will end up, but it reflects the
capacity of forces of civility to successfully interject the debate into civil sphere
discourse. The open question here is whether such a civil movement, challenging
a deep-seated patriarchal understanding, can succeed in a context marked by
such strong political polarization.
The Vital Center I: Reclaiming It

Alexander (2016: 79) concludes a recent article by asking, “Is there a vital
center?” The idea of a vital center derives explicitly from a book by historian
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1998 [1949]), writing with communism and fascism in
mind, which sought to assess the challenges of extreme polarization on both the
left and the right in the United States in the immediate aftermath of World War
II. He was convinced that a functioning pluralist democracy required a rational,
civil center left competing with an equally rational and civil center right, with
both sides concerned about the threat posed by illiberal extremism. Subsequent
defenders of liberal democracy share a conviction that only when the center
holds, is it possible to conceive of a shared understanding of the good society
(Alexander 2016: 79; see also Bellah, et al. 1991 and Gorski 2017). It is with the
idea of the significance of a vital center for the civil sphere that we turn to two
cases characterized by extreme polarization.
The first case is contained in Carlo Tognato’s analysis of civil life in a
Colombian university – a microcosm of a society that has confronted intense
violent conflict pitting left-wing guerilla groups, in particular the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the state, right-wing paramilitaries, and
drug cartels against each other, which began over a half century ago. Over time,
the boundary separating the university from the political sphere was breached,
resulting in the intrusion of political partisanship into the realm of scholarship

and teaching. The result was that whereas in the past, efforts to advance
democratic civil discourse in the university (and elsewhere) confronted the
deeply traditional and organicist worldview embraced in a culturally
embedded hacienda discourse, it now had an additional discursive challenger,
the militant revolutionary (akin to the situation in Cuba except that there, after
the revolution, this discourse precluded alternatives from entering the civil
sphere for decades).
Both of the noncivil discourses advanced competing authoritarian visions
pitting friends against enemies, and justified recourse to violence. The peace
accord with FARC in November 2016 has now created an opening for
advocates of democratic civility, the emergence of one of the preconditions for
a project of establishing a vital center. Tognato, however, is careful to stress
how difficult seizing such opportunities will be.
The Vital Center II: Losing It

If the trend line in Columbia has been moving toward the establishment of a
vital center, in neighboring Venezuela, the movement has been in precisely the
opposite direction, leading to a degradation of democracy. Celso Villegas’s
analysis of the current stalemate between anti-Chávez and pro-Chávez forces
focuses on the discursive battle over what it means to be middle class and
whether members of that class are to be viewed as political allies or
opponents. He traces the shifting significance attached to the middle class
from 1958 (the Punto Fijo period) until today, showing how the debate on the
role of the middle classes closely mirrored the radically changing political
climate in the country. Villegas documents how the competing depictions of
the middle class are actually a way of drawing the lines regarding who
constitutes the “people.” In the civil code, although with much blatant
ideology, the entire citizenry constitutes the people, from the shantytown
poor to the wealthiest oligarchs. In contrast, Chávez’s leftist populism
differentiates between the popular classes and the capitalist classes, the former
constituting the victimized people and the latter the exploitative elite. The issue
becomes one of knowing how to classify members of the middle class into either
of these categories – the pure or the polluted.
Villegas shows that Venezuela contains a civil sphere, now a highly polarized
one, but one where an intense struggle for cultural power is underway that is
reflected in part in competing collective representations of the middle class.
Civility and the Civil Sphere

The importance of classification struggles is also key to Mayumi Shimizu’s
exploration into the role of the police in the boundary work differentiating
civility from uncivility. Shimizu describes the routine differentiation of urban
dwellers into virtuous insiders (located in the center of society) versus ostracized
outsiders (consigned to the periphery), as an anticivil act of classification. Doing
so, Shimizu advances a nuanced, interaction-level, analysis of the ways in which
the civil sphere operates in mundane, everyday settings.
The chapter contributes to explaining the seeming paradox of a country,
Brazil, which is ranked as a relatively benign flawed democracy, two decades of
military juntas notwithstanding. This is commonly explained by the fact, as
Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter (1986:22) write, that the
Brazilian generals opted to “rule largely by distorting rather than by
disbanding the basic institutions of political democracy.” When they returned
to the barracks, the institutional framework for a democracy did not have to be
reinvented. Shimizu makes clear, however, how the legacy of the junta period
endures in several key areas, including police violence.
Regulatory institutions in CST are one of the fundamental types of
institutions necessary for the civil sphere to function. Shimizu, by treating the
police as a regulatory institution, makes clear that such institutions are part of
the political sphere, thereby raising two questions: 1. how to understand the
boundaries between the political and civil spheres, and 2. how those boundaries
are to be mapped onto particular societal institutions. While she does not
attempt to resolve the theoretical question, she succeeds in casting a spotlight
on it. One step in wrestling with these questions is to reconnect her discussion of
civility to the issue of civil discourse in the civil sphere. To the extent that
discourse is informed by a democratic civil code, the citizenry and not the
police are the ultimate arbiters in determining whose motives are to be
construed as civil or anticivil, including not only criminals, but also the police,
and (as the political scandal sweeping Brazil at present reveals) the political
leadership stratum.
Citizenship and the Civil Sphere

Unlike the other case studies, Trevor Stack’s ethnographic study of the residents
of a neighborhood in the medium-sized Mexican city of Zamora does not
address scandals, polarization, or categorization. Rather, he is concerned with
the everyday, taken-for-granted routines of his subjects and their understanding
of their place in their society. Doing so, Stack addresses one of the curious
features of the original formulation of CST: although its concerns regarding the
democratic prospect are the same as those animating contemporary theorizing
about citizenship, Alexander has not positioned his analysis in relationship to
those theoretical currents (Kivisto 2007: 113; Sciortino 2007: 510).
When Stack asked people what they meant by citizenship, they frequently
asserted that it meant “living in society,” which on the surface appears to be a
rather vacuous characterization. However, when he pursued the topic further, it
became clear that what they meant was that being a citizen involved more than
merely being connected to the state. Stack’s informants pointed to an
understanding of citizenship that transcended the state, also locating it squarely

in the civil sphere. As a mode of social identity, it is inclusive, recognizing that
everyone in their nation is “living in society” and that thus, presumably, rights
are to be guaranteed to all.
While Arteaga and Arzuaga depict a discursive struggle pitting a civil code
against a patrimonial one, Stack contends that a civil code – “civil sociality” is
his term – competes with two codes, or “moral frameworks,” both of which
have been at various historical moments sponsored by the state: liberalism and
corporate nationalism. Stack does not develop in any detail the specifics of these
codes, but the one thing that is very clear is that both discourses place a premium
on the centrality of the state and thus, to the extent that one or both are
successful, they facilitate a blurring of the boundaries between state and
nonstate sectors in a manner that undercuts the potential relative autonomy
of the civil sphere. The degree to which civil discourse has succeeded in
displacing these uncivil codes is difficult to ascertain from Stack’s description,
but it would appear to have made substantial inroads.
lessons for the cst project

As case studies making use of CST, at times critiquing elements of it or going
beyond it, the chapters in this book are expected to advance CST not through
explicit theoretical revisions but rather through opening up for scrutiny issues
and concerns that can point to directions for furthering the theoretical project.
With this in mind, we conclude by pointing to three areas calling for further
theoretical reflection. First, there is a need to further specify the relationship
between spheres and institutions, a topic relevant to the issues of boundaries
raised in four of the case studies. Put simply, spheres and institutions do not
neatly map onto each other. Thus, the university (Tognato’s focus) is not simply
an instantiation of the educational sphere. While it is primarily located in the
educational sphere, it is also interpenetrated by other spheres, including the
political, the economic, and the civil. Thus, future theoretical work addressing
boundaries must also ipso facto inquire into the ways in which institutions serve
simultaneously as the loci for functional differentiation based on their manifest
purpose while also representing sites for the intrusion of other spheres seeking
to work through the institution for more latent purposes.
Second, reflecting a concern found not only in the case studies, but beyond
them to contemporary nations confronting “the populist explosion” (Judis
2016; see also Müller 2016), or for other nations characterized by other
forms of extreme polarization, the significance of a vital center to civil sphere
functioning bears further development. Democracy requires, and a vital center
provides, a sense of a shared national identity and some fundamental agreement
about what the common good entails to permit political opponents to engage in
“working the binaries” (Alexander 2010: 89–110) in rational and civil ways.
But what happens to the civil sphere if the vital center erodes and opponents
become enemies? And, from the other side of the coin, what happens if the civil
sphere is insufficiently democratic, if its deficits undermine it (Brysk 2000)?
Finally, related to an aspect of contemporary citizenship theorizing,
these chapters contribute to introducing into CST the issue of center and
periphery. Shimizu uses this term without reference to the classic essay by
Edward Shils (1975), but turning to Shils can be instructive. His
understanding of the center dovetails with Schlesinger’s description of the
vital center, but rather than being concerned with societal polarization,
introducing the idea of a center counterpoised to a periphery facilitates
analytic consideration of the impact of inequality and marginalization on
the civil sphere. Thus, in a world characterized at present by widespread
global migration, the binary citizen/alien has acquired greater salience than
was true a half century ago (Bosniak 2006), while in every existing nation-
state containing oppressed minority groups, the matter of dividing the
citizenry into those construed as full citizens versus second-class citizens
is a division of longstanding with implications for the capacity of such
groups to be received as equals in the civil sphere (see e.g., Glenn 2002).
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Index
#NiUnaMenos (#NotOneLess) movement, Asociación Chilena de Farmacias

39–63, 235 Populares, 78
#SupermercadosVacios, 81 Associated Press, 48, 51
4th National Congress of COPEI and authenticity, 9, 29, 32–33, 108, 113, 119, 153,
Independent Social Christian 158, 168–171, See also authenticity
Professionals and Technicians, 124 problems
authenticity problems, 118, 134–138, 141–143
Abate, Florencia, 58 authoritarianism, 3, 5, 8–9, 10, 11, 19–33, 62,
Abiuso, Marina, 55 100, 113, 138, 234, 243–245
Acción Democrática (AD), 122–125, 126, Azuaje, Titina, 138
128, 130
Administrative Court of Appeal (Consejo Bachelet, Michelle, 86 n.4
de Estado – Bogota), 164 Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, 22, 62
Agrest, Diana Cohen, 45 Balandier, Georges, 19, 30
Alcaraz, Florencia, 54 Barcelona, 63 n.2
Alckmin, Geraldo, 187 Barrancos, Dora, 52
Alfonsín, Raúl, 44–45 Basics of Qualitative Research, 49
Almagro, Luis, 143 n.1 Batista, Fulgencio, 97, 245
Almond, Gabriel, 243 Battibugli, Thaís, 203 n.1
Anderson, Benedict, 240 Bautista, Francisco, 133
Anglican Church, 211 BBC Mundo, 51
antichavismo, 119, 131, 134, 137, 141, 142 Beck, Ingrid, 49, 56, 63 n.2
anticivility, 52–53, 179–202, 211 Belgium, 246
Aporrea, 122, 136, 137 Beltrán Cely, William Mauricio, 161
Aquí la Gente, 81 Beltran, Miguel Angel, 163–171
Aquinas, Thomas, 214 Bergolio, Jorge, 63 n.2
Arab Spring, 121, 143, 240, 242 Bernalette, Oscar Hernández, 139–140
Arenes, Carolina, 52 Betancourt, Romulo, 123
Argentina, 5, 10, 11, 39–63, 120, 164, 233, Biblioteca Nacional de Venezuela, 122
234, 235, 236, 244, 247–248 binary discourse, 4, 11, 51, 70, 85, 235
Aristegui, Carmen, 25–26, 27, 28, 30 binary narratives, 24, 131–134, 142
Aristotle, 142, 214, 215 Bogota, 12
Arizpe, Lourdes, 214 Bolívar, Simón, 236
Arreaza, Jorge, 139 boundaries, 8, 10, 70, 132, 184, 191, 196, 197,
Asia, 7 232, 234, 251
255
256 Index
boundary institutions, 269–72, See also civil society, 5–7, 133, 232–237
interstitial institutions civil sphere
boundary relations, 10, 67, 83, 84, 149–172, closing of, 225–226
248, 249–250 communicative institutions of, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10,
bourgeoisie, 5, 137, 156 11, 21, 70, 72, 120, 121, 125, 129, 142,
Bravo, Mario, 80 180, 222
Brazil, 22, 40, 60, 62, 72, 74, 120, 179–202, contradictions of, 2, 143, 179–202
233, 236, 244 facilitating inputs into, 10, 66, 70, 149, 150,
Bremer, Luis, 53 189, 217
British Establishment, 210–211, 214 formative institutions of, 150, 151–152, 153,
Buxton, Julia, 129 171–172
opening of, 225–226
Cabet, Étienne, 155 real, 2, 6, 83, 149
Camilo, Álvaro Batista, 203 n.4 regulative institutions of, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11,
Canada, 105, 240, 244 21, 33, 40, 70, 72, 73–75, 120, 122, 123,
Canal 13 TV, 49 125, 129, 142, 179–202, 221–222,
Canal Encuentro, 46 246, 250
Cannon, Barry, 132–133 utopian ideals of, 1, 2, 7, 11–12
capitalism, 5, 8, 66–67, 68–69, 98, 99, 102, Civil Sphere Theory (CST), 7, 9, 10–11, 21, 22,
106, 109, 156, 246 40–41, 66–69, 72, 84, 85, 96–97, 118, 119,
Capriles, Henrique, 139 121, 123, 141–143, 149, 206–211, 212,
Cárdenas Lema, Harold, 104, 112 213, 217, 218, 224–225, 232–237,
Caritas, 86 240–252
Carmona, Pedro, 131 Civil Sphere, The, 66, 120–122, 149, 217, 241
Carta Abierta (Open Letter), 49 civil translation, 47, 59, 70, 113, 120, 142, 180,
Castro, Fidel, 97–98, 102, 103, 105, 107, 245 220, 236
Castro, Raúl, 102–103, 107, 110 civility, 179–202, 211, 249–250
Catholic Church, 71, 82, 159, 211, 214–215, Clarín, 48, 49, 51–52, 62
216, 220, 236 Clase Media en Positivo (CMP), 137–138, 143
Centro de Estudios Publicos (CEP), 79 Clase Media Revolucionaria, 138
Centro de Operações da Polícia Militar Clase Media Socialista, 138, 139
(COPOM), 188 classification, 179–202, 249–250
Chávez, Húgo, 9, 118–119, 128, 129–134, 136, Clinton, Bill, 34 n.9
138, 140, 141, 249 CNN (Cable News Network), 48, 77
chavismo, 119, 129–131, 132, 134–138, code(s)
141, 142 bandit, 156
Chile, 5, 10, 40, 66–86, 120, 233, 234, 235, binary, 40, 67–68, 96, 98, 99, 123, 141–143,
236, 244, 245–246, 247 155–157
Cienfuegos, Jaime, 164 chavista revolutionary, 119, 129–131, 133,
Citizen Power, 226 n.3 134, 136–137, 139, 141–143
Citizens Defense (Agrupación Defensor civil, 45, 70, 83, 85, 119, 133, 180–181,
Ciudadano de Aysen), 76 212–213, 218, 220, 224, 242, 247,
Citizens Front Against Collusion, 81 250, 251
citizenship, 11, 206–226, 250–251, 252 civil sociality, 214–217
civil establishment, 210–211, 219–220 corporatist, 74
civil instantiation, 179–202 counterdemocratic, 53, 60, 63
civil power, 119, 120, 122 Cuban revolutionary, 95, 98
civil repair, 2, 10, 51, 59–63, 70, 71, 84, 113, cultural, 122, 183, 248
119, 141, 149, 179, 185, 196, 232, 234, democratic, 22–24, 63
235, 237, 241, 245–248 law/sociedad, 212–213
civil sociality, 208, 209–210, 211, 214–215, liberal, 74
218, 219, 223, 251 middle-class, 142–143
Index 257
patrimonial, 22–24, 74, 247 cultural structures, 68, 70, 141–143, 153,
patron/peon, 22–23, 156, 234 155–156, 157, 232, 235
Codina, Germán, 78 culture, 68, 232–237
Cold War, 98, 245
collective representations, 121, 126–128, 132, DaMatta, Roberto, 201
141–143 de Carlotto, Estela, 61
collusion, 10, 66–86 democracy, 4, 5–8, 10, 11–12, 19–33, 42–47,
Colombia, 10, 11, 22–23, 40, 62, 72, 66–67, 85, 118, 121, 122, 124, 126, 132,
75, 149–172, 233, 234, 235, 236, 141, 143, 151, 185, 232–237, 243–244,
244, 248 248, 251
Colombian Communist Party, 155 Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), 27
Colombian Conservative Party, 153–154 democratic ritual, 246–247
Colombian Liberal Party, 153–154 Desormeaux, Paulette, 86 n.5
Colombian Students National Union Diario Uno, 45
(Union Nacional de Estudiantes Díaz-Canel, Miguel, 111
Colombianos), 160 Dillón, Marta, 49, 56
colonialism, 2–4, 7, 234 discourse
Comité de Organización Política Electoral Cuban revolutionary, 96, 97–98, 101–103,
Independiente (COPEI), 123, 124–125, 105, 106–112, 113
128, 130 hacienda, 22–23, 153–158, 163–171, 172,
Committees for the Defense of the Revolution 242, 249
(CDR), 100 militant revolutionary, 10, 96, 97–103,
communism, 98, 99, 102, 106, 109, 106–112, 113, 153–158, 163–171, 172,
120, 248 242, 249
Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), 100, performative instability of, 150, 153, 162,
102–103, 104, 114 n.6 168–171, 172
Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles discourse of civil society/civil sphere, 1, 42, 76,
y Cartones (CMPC), 79–80, 81, 84 80, 83, 95, 128, 153–158, 172, 180, 233
Confederación de Trabajadores de Dominican Republic, 120
Venezuela (CTV), 130 Dresser, Denise, 29
Confederación Nacional de Funcionarios
Municipales de la Salud (Confusam), 76 Ebrard, Marcelo, 28
Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC), 101 Economist Intelligence Unit, 245
Corbin, Juliet, 49 Ecuador, 164
Corporación Nacional de Consumidores Egypt, 240, 242
y Usuarios (Conadecus), 80, 81 Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National
Correa, Ana, 55 Liberation Army—ELN), 154
Correa, Rafael, 231–232 Ejército Popular de Liberación (EPL), 154
corruption, 7, 23, 27, 31, 66–86, 119, 246 El Argentino, 64 n.4
Cortiñas, Nora, 61 El Cronista, 51
countercode, 129, 235 El Mercurio, 69, 76, 78, 79
counterpublics, 121 El Mostrador, 69
Cousiño, Carlos, 67–68 El Nacional, 122, 128, 131, 132, 133
Criminal Court of Appeal of Bogota, 164 El País, 48, 51
Crisp, Brian, 123 El Socialismo y el Hombre en Cuba (Socialism
Crónica, 64 n.4 and Man in Cuba), 99
Cruz Verde, 71, 73 El Trece TV, 55
Cuba, 9, 95–113, 167, 233, 234, 235, 236, 244, El Universal, 24, 28, 122, 138, 139–141
245, 246 El Yuma, 109
Cuban Communist Party’s Commission for elites, 3, 66, 77, 82, 124, 219, 220–221
Economic Policy, 114 n.6 Engels, Friedrich, 155
cultural performance, 39–63 Enlightenment, 3, 68, 214, 236
258 Index
Escales, Vanina, 49 Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, 45, 61

Espeche, Ximena, 57, 58 Grella Vieira, Fernando, 187
Etcheves, Florencia, 49, 53, 59 Guardian, 48, 51, 53
Europe, 2, 3–4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 40, 120, 236 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 99, 102, 111,
Excelsior, 24, 27, 28 155, 161
Guiteras, Antonio, 104
Facebook, 58, 86 n.1
facts, 8 Haiti, 120
fact-totems, 121 Haritos-Fatouros, Mika, 203 n.2
Farmacias Ahumada (FASA), 71–73 Hellinger, Daniel, 126
farmacias populares (popular pharmacies), Henken, Ted, 109
78–79 Hernández, Clodovaldo, 137
fascism, 248 hierarchy, 183–184, 193–195, 211, 218–219
Favela Naval (1997), 186 Higa Group, 25–26, 29
Federación de Cámaras y Asociaciones de Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy, 41,
Comercio y Producción de Venezuela 46–47, 48
(FEDECAMARAS), 131 History Shall Absolve Me, 97–98
Federación Nacional de Trabajadores Huellas Verdes, 82
Profesionales Universitarios de los Huggins, Martha Knisely, 203 n.2
Servicios de Salud (Fenpruss), 76 human rights discourse, 11, 39, 41, 42–43,
Federal Institute for Access 44–47, 59–61
to Information, 30 Hurtado, Carlos, 139
femicide, 10, 11, 39–63, 248
feminism, 42, 52–53, 55–56, 61 Iglesias, Mariana, 51–52
First National Conference of the Cuban imperialism, 102, 106, 109, 156
Communist Party, 103 Inspector General (IG), 164, 168
Fiscalía Nacional Económica (FNE), 71–74, Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), 19, 24,
79–80, 84 27, 31, 32, 212, 215–216, 225
Foucault, Michel, 169 institutional thickness, 152–153
Fourier, Charles, 155 International Institute of Strategic Studies
France Press, 48 (IISS), 164
Freedom House, 244 Interpol, 164
Freire, Paolo, 168 interstitial institutions, 10, 67, 73–75, 84, See
Frontera, Paz, 55 also boundary institutions
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de
Colombia (FARC), 154, 157, 159, 162, Jadue, Daniel, 78
163–171, 248–249 Japan International Cooperation Agency, 190
Funes, Mercedes, 49, 54, 57, 59 Johnson, John, 119–120, 122
Justice Works, 45
Gaitán, Jorge Eliecer, 154, 160
Garcia, Daiana, 47 Kahn, Túlio, 203 n.4
Garfinkel, Harold, 163, 166 Karadima, Fernando, 82
gender, 6, 39–63 Kennedy, John F., 34 n.9
Generación Y, 106 Khosrokhavar, Farhad, 121, 141, 242, 244
Gente, 54, 59 King, Jr., Martin Luther (MLK), 210, 211, 220,
Germani, Gino, 3 221, 226
Glasnost, 101 Kirchner, Cristina, 42, 62
Gómez Albarello, Gabriel, 165 Kirchner, Néstor, 41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 62
Gomez, Juan Vincente, 122 Kirchnerism, 11, 41, 42, 43, 45–46, 49, 55, 59,
González Peralo, Roberto, 104, 109–112 60, 61, 63 n.4
González Sehwerert, René, 111–112 Krauze, Enrique, 32
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 101 Kulko, 82
Index 259
La Canasta Peñalolén, 82 Mast, Jason, 24, 32

La Federacion de Sociedades Civiles de master frame, 41, 69
Clase Media con El Proceso Bolivariano Matte Larraín, Eliodoro, 79–80, 82, 84
(Federation of Middle-Class Civil Mearsheimer, John, 151, 152
Societies with the Bolivarian Process), 137 media, 1, 9, 19–33, 53, 72–73, 101, 120, 121,
La Jornada, 24, 29, 30 135, 180, 211, 246
La Joven Cuba, 9, 95–113, 245 Menem, Carlo, 44–45
La Nación (Argentina), 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54 Mesa de Unidad Democrática (MUD), 139
La Nacion (Chile), 69, 78 Mexico, 9, 10, 11, 19–33, 40, 120, 164,
La Razón, 64 n.4 206–226, 233, 234, 235, 236, 244,
La Tercera, 69 246–247, 250–251
Lacabana, Miguel, 124 middle class, the, 10, 11, 81, 118–143,
Lagarde, Marcela, 53 249
Laguardia, Juan Manuel, 143 n.4 Mignolo, Walter, 214
Lameda, Guaicaipuro, 133 Milenio, 24, 27, 28
Las Doce, 49 Military Units in Support of Production
Latin America, 2–9, 11–12, 60, 67–68, 103, (UMAP), 101
119–120, 160, 179, 186, 232–237, Minici, Florencia, 49, 58
240–252 Miradas al Sur, 64 n.4
Lenin, Vladimir, 155 Mockus, Antanas, 12, 162
Leninism, 155, 157, 162 modernity, 2, 7, 121
Lerner, Daniel, 243 modernization, 3, 25, 154–155
Let’s Buy Together (Juntos compremos), 82–83 Modernization Theory, 10, 119–120,
Leuco, Alfredo, 62 121–122, 243
Levin, Richard, 152 Molina, Gerardo, 160
Lewinsky, Monica, 34 n.9 Mosciatti, Tomas, 77
liberalism, 2, 120, 209–210, 212, 215, 216 Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, 41, 42–43, 45, 52,
Lineamientos de la política económica y social 61, 62
del Partido y la Revolución (Guidelines 205 Motta, Rodrigo Patto Sá, 203 n.2
for the economic and social policy Mr. Cross-Out, 162
of the Party and the Revolution), 114 n.6 Muñoz, Ernesto, 80
Lleras Camargo, Alberto, 160
Lopez Maya, Margarita, 128 National Action Party (PAN), 24, 27, 212
López Sánchez, Roberto, 137 National Council of Scientific and
López, Leopoldo, 139 Technological Research (CONICET), 52
López, María Pía, 49, 56 National Council of Women, 60
Los Andes, 46 National Memory Archive, 46
National Police Agency of Japan, 190
M-19, 154, 159 National Regeneration Movement
machismo, 56 (MORENA), 27
macho culture, 51, 52–53, 58, 59–61 National University Federation (Federación
Macri, Mauricio, 41, 46–47, 48, 49, 63 n.1 Nacional Universitaria – FUN), 160
Maduro, Nicolás, 118, 119, 138–139 National University of Colombia, 10,
Mao Zedong, 155 149–172
Marcucci, Carolina, 49 nationalism, 41, 129
Marquez, Patricia, 125 corporate, 209–210, 212, 215, 216
Martí, José, 98, 103, 107–108, 114 n.10 revolutionary, 211, 214, 215
Martz, John, 123 New York Times, 48, 52
Marx, Karl, 155 Ni Una Menos, 48
Marxism, 11, 136, 155 noncivil spheres, 1–2, 3–4, 10, 41, 70, 96–97,
neo-, 6 149, 217–218, 220, See also boundary
Massacre of Carandiru (1992), 186 relations
260 Index
Norms for the Operational System of PMESP populism, 4, 8–9, 10–11, 41, 68, 119, 122, 247,
(NORSOP), 188 249, 251
North America, 3–4, 7, 8, 10 Portugal, 2, 240
Nussbaum, Martha, 207 postcolonialism, 6, 7, 235
postmodernism, 6
O’Donnell, Guillermo, 250 Primicia, 127
Obama, Barack, 48, 61–62, 115 n.11 protests. See also social movements
Obrador, López, 220 street, 75–77, 83
Observatorio Crítico Cubano (Cuban Critical public narratives, 122, 127, 142
Observatory), 109 Pumarejo, Lopez, 160
Ojeda, Marcela, 39, 47, 54, 57, 59 puntofijismo, 119, 122–128, 129–130, 249
Organización de Consumidores y Usuarios Pye, Lucien, 243
de Chile (Odecu), 80
Organization of American States Quijada, Reinaldo, 138
(OAS), 118
Owen, Robert, 155 race, 6, 41, 124
Radio Nacional, 52, 54
Páez, Chiara, 39, 47, 58, 59 Ramírez, Gabriela, 138
Página/12,48, 49, 53, 56, 61 Rangel, Jose Vincente, 133
Panama, 153 Rebel Army, 98
Paraguay, 120 Rechtsstaat, 210, 214–217, 225
Partido por la Democracia (PPD), 75 Reforma, 24, 27, 29
Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela Reuters, 48
(PSUV), 135 Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), 98
patriarchy, 6, 10, 42, 52, 248 Revolutionary National Militias (MNR), 98
patrimonialism, 19–33, 154, 234, 235 Revolutionary Socialist Party, 155
Peña Nieto, Enrique, 9, 20–31, 32, 247 Reyes, Raúl, 163
Penacchi, Florencia, 47 Rivera, Angélica, 20–31, 247
Perestroika, 101 Rivera, Daniel, 49
Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 123 Rodríguez, Paula, 48, 54
Pérez, Carlos Andres, 126–127, 129 Rolim, Marcos, 203 n.1
Pérez, Luis Carlos, 161 Romero, Luis Alberto, 43, 46
Perfil, 64 n.4 Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguir (ROTA),
performance, 12, 29–30, 40, 70, 129, 137–138, 192, 197
139, 142–143, 191, 247, See also cultural Rosales, Manuel, 139
performance; discourse, performative Rosende, Patricio, 75
instability of Rostow, Walt Whitman, 243
Perón, Juan, 247 Rozas, Eliana, 86 n.5
Peru, 40, 60, 235, 236 rule of law, 2, 24, 44, 53, 74, 132, 222–224
Peschard, Jacqueline, 30 Russia, 105
Pía López, María, 59
Pinochet, Augusto, 71 sacralization, 19–20
polarization, 8–9, 11, 25, 41–42, 44–47, 62–63, Saint Simón, Henri de, 155
118, 122, 129, 133, 141, 158, Salcobrand, 71, 73
248–249, 251 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 28
policing, 10, 179–202 Sánchez Roque, Osmany, 104, 106–108,
policlasismo, 123–125, 128, 142–143 110, 111
Political Change in Latin America, Sanchez, Magaly, 247
The Emergence of the Middle Sectors, Sánchez, Yoani, 106–107
119–120 São Paulo State Military Police (Polícia Militar
political establishment, 210–211, 219–220 do Estado de São Paulo PMESP), 179–202
Pomeraniec, Hinde, 49, 54 SCA, 79, 80, 81
Index 261
Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur, 248, 252 Trotsky, Leon, 3, 155

Schmitt, Carl, 247 TV Azteca, 26, 28
Schmitter, Philippe, 250 TV Todo Noticias, 59
School of Mines in Medellín, 160 Twitter, 39, 47, 57–58, 78, 86 n.1
Servicio Nacional del Consumidor (SERNAC),
73–75, 80–81 Union of Young Communists (UJC), 100, 104
Shapiro, Harold, 151 Union Republicana Democratica (URD), 123
Shils, Edward, 252 United Kingdom, 211
Silva, Mario, 137 United States, 8, 9, 11, 40, 105, 113, 120, 236,
Slim, Carlos, 28 240, 248
social integration, 67–68 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 244
social movements, 2–3, 4, 70, 96, 97–98, 112, universalism, 1, 68, 98, 156, 206, 207,
120, 211, 236, See also protests 209–210, 211, 216, 237, 243
social problems, 2, 5, 7, 45, 134 Universidad de los Andes, 160
socialism, 98, 99, 102, 106, 109, 113, 118, 156 Universidad Externado de Colombia, 160
Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (SOFOFA), 78, 80 Universidad Libre, 160
Sociedad de Geografía y Estadística, 223 University of Antioquia, 161
solidarity, 1, 8, 11, 40–41, 51–52, 60, 63, 66, University of Matanzas “Camilo Cienfuegos”
70, 76, 83, 85, 96–97, 98, 123, 129, 142, (UMCC), 104
143, 171, 201, 207, 209, 232–233, UPI Chilean Spanish News Service, 69
237, 243 Uruguay, 40, 120, 235, 244
Spain, 2, 48, 105, 240 USSR, 101–102, 236, 245
Strauss, Anselm, 49
symbolic power, 19, 33 Valenzuela, Eduardo, 67–68
Venezuela, 9, 11, 118–143, 164, 167, 233, 234,
Taiwan, 246 235, 244, 249
Telesur, 135 VI Congress of the Cuban Communist Party,
Televisa, 26, 28 114 n.6
Territorial Troupe Militias (MTT), 98 Villavicencio, Claudio, 86 n.5
The Clinic, 69 violence, 6
The Economist Intelligence Unit, 244 against women, 39–63, 247
The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador violent pluralism, 6
and the Secret Archive of “Raúl
Reyes,” 164 Weber, Max, 23, 184
Thompson, E. P., 11 WhatsApp, 86 n.1
Tiempo Argentino, 48 White House scandal, 19–33
Tinelli, Marcelo, 58–59 Work Party (PT), 27
Torrealba, Jesus “Chuo,” 140–141 World War II, 248
Torres Alpízar, Eduardo, 104, 106–108
Torres, Camilo, 155, 161 YouTube, 69, 77
Tribunal de la Libre Competencia (TLC), 73,
77, 79, 84 Zimbardo, Philip, 203 n.2

Alexander & Tognato - 2018 - The Civil Sphere in Latin America

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The Civil Sphere

Social thinkers have criticized Latin American development as incom-

Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

List of Figure and Tables page ix

Introduction: For Democracy in Latin America 1

part i scandals and civil indignation 17

part iii law, order, and solidarity 177

Jeffrey C. Alexander is Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale

“Sociologies of Violence: Structures, Subjects, Interactions and Symbolic

hijos de Saturno. Intelectuales y revolución en Cuba (2006), edited Cubanos

sphere leaders throughout Latin America. He was soon joined by Nelson

Jeffrey C. Alexander and Carlo Tognato

fateful compromises are made. Classes, races, genders, sexualities, ethnicities,

a sphere whose institutions, culture, and associations aspired to a broader social

shaped a public controversy in Colombia, when the National University in

the civil as if it were a distinctive mark of Latin American democracy.

Pasotti, Eleonora. 2009. Political Branding in Cities. Cambridge: Cambridge University

SCANDALS AND CIVIL INDIGNATION

The Civil Sphere in Mexico

Nelson Arteaga Botello and Javier Arzuaga Magnoni

Certainly, in Mexico, free and competitive elections, independent

democratic and patrimonial codes

Carmen Aristegui’s group of journalists managed to contaminate the

the fractured image

Faced with these objections, some columnists of conservative newspapers

reconstructing the image

Conservative newspapers emphasized that the president’s wife used her

the commitment to oblivion

Dresser, Denise. 2014a. “¿Nada que esconder?” Reforma, November 24, p. 6.

Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast. Cambridge: Cambridge

Villoro, Juan. 2014a. “El reino de Oz.” Reforma, November 21, p. 7.

Shaping Solidarity in Argentina

introduction: cultural generalization

to “genocide,” the term used in Argentina to reference the mass murders

collective created out of a broad front of solidarity that is deﬁned substantively

democratic power and destructive polarization of human

The Merging of Democratic Ideals and Human Rights

people – the euphemistic description given to victims of state terrorism – began

The Polarization of Human Rights Discourse

war crimes, triggered criticism, and created a division between violence

recently reemerged in the midst of structural social problems such as poverty

against femicide: the civil reframing of human rights

Method and Data

Alexander’s (2015:187) model brings meaning structures, texts, and narratives

Putting Human Rights into Civil Codes: Solidarity, Inclusion, Pluralism

The Public Coding of Private Gender Violence: Macho Perpetrators

sexual hierarchy and authoritarian male-female relations should be excluded

Cultural Scripts (I): Human Rights as a Bulwark against Partisan Intrusions

Cultural Scripts (II): From Isolated Victims to Autonomous

Text: The Dramatic Effectiveness of Narrating Civil Demands

New Media, Mass Images, and the Role of Celebrities

Mise-en-Scène: The Plaza

conclusion: the civil repair of invisible “macho” violence

considered socially accepted was widely presented as an antidemocratic threat to

disapproved of the negative reactions of human rights representatives, which, it

Civil Indignation in Chile

María Angélica Thumala Olave

complex societies. Based on this framework, they understand phenomena such as

working concepts: a brief (and selective) introduction

the background: a wave of indignation that illuminates

case 1: collusion among pharmacy chains

colluding to ﬁx the prices of 222 medicines. The collusion resulted in price