“La Justicia Divina Se Ha de Conocer y Sentir Aunque Sea Tarde”: Ethnic Violence and Authoritarian Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century Chiapas

Examining judicial and military records related to three alleged ‘caste wars’ in nineteenth-century Chiapas, this paper explores the relationship between liberal laws and institutions and ethnic violence in mid-nineteenth Southern Mexico. Chiapas’s caste wars were not unique. By 1870, ethnic violence had spread across the Mexican periphery threatening to undermine both rule of law and liberal notions of citizenship. Ethnic violence, however, was intimately linked to the politics and institutions constituting (rather than destroying) the nation itself. Indeed, ethnic fears pervaded liberal legislation and institutions, generating contradictions within the emerging legal and political order. On the one hand, elites hoped that by following the law they would achieve the institutional stability and legal legitimacy necessary to ward-off indigenous rebellion. Local judges paid particular attention to legal procedures and to the law, even when threatening to Ladino interests. Many indigenous communities were successful at employing and using the legal system to their advantage. The universal and inclusive nature of liberal law, however, was often in tension with the reality of state violence. Despite its barbaric nature, state violence enjoyed legal sanction, procedural formality, and was institutional rather than vigilante. The paper argues that ethnic conflict and violence were central to the development of an accommodating and resilient form of authoritarian pluralism that would endure, despite its coercive nature, until the late twentieth century.