En tela de juicio: Justicia penal, homicidios célebres y opinión pública (México, siglo XX)

Abstract

In this comprehensive and excellent study, Elisa Speckman Guerra focuses on the history of the Mexico City judicial system between 1929 and 1971 through an analysis of that city's criminal courts and the crimes that helped shape modern Mexico during that formative period of the twentieth century. The penal courts were part of the institutionalization of justice in the decades after the 1910 Mexican Revolution and had to contend with the growth of urban crime and the expanding definitions of justice and citizen rights, factors concurrent with the expanding role of the modern Mexican state. Apart from this theme, analyzed in the book's first half, Speckman Guerra discusses the public image of crime; the role of the judicial system's various actors, including judges, lawyers, and crime reporters; and the reforms associated with the system. The penal courts were a dynamic institution and periodically contended with issues of citizen rights. However, as Mexico City grew, so did popular crime, and the real heart of this book are the case studies, nine in all, of homicides that helped define justice in a modernizing city. These are the focus of the book's second part.As Mexicans lived and worked in their city, they came to know “la nota roja”—famous crimes that attracted attention from the press and, according to Speckman Guerra, also revealed tensions about class, gender, and privilege. Take the case of Humberto Mariles, a military officer who shot a worker, Jesús Velázquez, during a traffic accident in the capital's outer highway system in the mid-1960s. Mariles was an Olympic champion who reeked of entitlement; once detained, he fled, possibly to the United States. Meanwhile, the victim died of his wounds in the hospital. The case was one of military privilege and class, as Speckman Guerra demonstrates; a 10-year sentence for homicide, a relatively easy punishment, outraged Mariles, who appealed and received a much harsher, 20-year sentence when the higher court found errors in the original ruling. A second appeal restored the first ruling, but Mariles, a creature of corruption, would be released early, to eventually be caught trafficking heroin in France, where he ultimately died in his cell.As Speckman Guerra notes, Mariles's fate reveals not only the dynamism of the courts but also their flaws. Instances of judges being unfamiliar with the cases that they were presiding over, violations of guarantees, and corruption were fundamental in deciding one's fate in the tribunal system that oversaw justice in the Federal District. Gender was also important. For women, who sometimes acted in self-defense in cases of homicide, their adherence (or not) to the ideas of how women should behave in a modern Mexico was crucial to deciding their fate or reducing a sentence. Of course, race came into play in indirect ways as well. Mariles's counsel equated Mariles's victim, Velázquez, a day laborer, with savagery, an echo of Porfirian times when the label was associated with Indigenous heritage, even though Velázquez was probably mestizo.For researchers and students of history and law, this study is crucial to understanding how Mexico City's judicial system developed in the last century. The sample of cases, while limited in number, is enough to present a window into a fascinating institution that was ultimately reformed in the early 1970s. As other societies grapple with cases that help reform justice systems, this study offers a valuable look at how Mexico's federal system evolved and dealt with questions of self-defense, class, power, and privilege in a complex urban environment.