The Death Penalty and the Post-Colonial Condition in Latin America

With a handful of exceptions, Latin American states used the death penalty less and abolished it earlier than their European counterparts.  And yet, most analyses of the death penalty in the Americas rely upon a European teleology of abolition.  The key to revising this model is a deeper understanding of the nature of sovereignty in post-colonial Latin America.  Most histories of the death penalty assume that the power to take life via on behalf of a broader polity has been the origin point and base condition of sovereignty since ancient times.  The transition in Europe from princely to absolutist sovereignty, and then to modern national sovereignty, in turn, has played a virtually uncontested role in explaining the decline of the death penalty from the Enlightenment to World War I.  Absolute sovereigns “reclaimed” the exclusive “right of the sword” from a variety of aristocratic and religious intermediaries, and made themselves the focal points of entire justice systems in which their power approximated that of the divine.  After they fell to republican revolutions, members of burgeoning national communities came to empathize more closely with each other across social divides, and constitutional governance formalized this sentiment through the protection of individual rights and reductions in the use and publicity of the death penalty.  International wars and “the problem” of ethnic and racial minorities excluded from full citizenship within nation states forestalled outright abolition (and temporarily rejuvenated the practice of capital punishment).   This paper will reveal a different trajectory towards abolition and thus an alternative understanding of sovereignty by exploring: 1)the historical usage of the term and its foundational metaphors; 2)the origins of penal reform in imperial social control; and 3)the changing signification of both punishment and penal reform wrought by prolonged armed conflict.