Circulation and the Politics of Space in Policing Arequipa, Peru

This paper analyzes the politics of space within the southern Peruvian department of Arequipa in the first decades of the twentieth century. With the rise of a militant labor movement in the port of Mollendo and the city of Arequipa, police across the department had to think through the reach of the police—to determine the limits of police power. On the one hand we see disagreements between local police, local state functionaries, and the central state on the powers of the police and their strategies, with questions around whether or not the police have the right to shut down a newspaper, and how should detention and deportation play out with respect to certain leaders and the timing of these methods. While those directing the police implemented a plan of rotating police officers across the department, police officers, in turn, complained of the constant moving, and the resulting inability to develop a sense of place necessary to successful policing. Central to these concerns, too, were the circulations of people—particularly Chilean Wobblies—through Mollendo, and their linkages with port workers, a dangerous transnational relationship in an era when both countries nearly returned to war over still unsettled territory. These frictions of policing across the department and with the central state in Lima point to the importance of local knowledge for policing, and to the dialectical relationship of policing with social movements.