We're all familiar with those academic works whose titles – typically tricked out with artful alliterations and ludic parentheses – promise the theoretical earth, but finally deliver just another narrow case study: a detailed miniature presented as if it were a new Sistine Chapel. Lewis Taylor's Gamonales y bandoleros (‘Bosses and Bandits’) is rather the reverse. A substantially expanded version of a 1986 English-language monograph, the book is broader and more illuminating than its workaday title suggests. So, while it does ‘what it says on the tin’, it also does a lot more: an unusual example, in these days of academic hype, of a title modestly underselling its product.
The book begins with a useful survey of ‘Peruvian bandit studies’ – a field of modest extent, but containing some fine studies. Indeed, many of the basic questions raised in the recent (global) literature were precociously addressed by Peruvian analysts as long ago as the 1930s. There follows a longer discussion of that literature, with Hobsbawm given pride of place (and treated quite charitably), although Taylor notes both incisive criticism (e.g. by Anton Blok) and perceptive post-Hobsbawmian syntheses (such as Gilbert Joseph's). It's widely recognised that Hobsbawm relied excessively on literary and folkloric sources; and that in stressing the role of the ‘social bandit’ – the Robin Hood figure who robbed the rich and helped the poor – he was guilty of both exaggeration and romanticisation. Taylor rightly accepts social banditry as a genuine phenomenon; but his analysis, based on voluminous primary sources, covers a much wider field, including mercenary – perhaps ‘antisocial’ – banditry, the self-serving links between bandits and provincial elites, both landlords and officials, and the ways that banditry was bound up with political factionalism, with local elections (which, involving force and fraud, lacked legitimacy), and with the bewildering vicissitudes of Peruvian national politics following the disastrous War of the Pacific (pp. 123–4, 137–9).
Thus, in pursuing his bandits, Taylor snares a great deal more. Chapters 5 through 8 deal in graphic detail – including some fine photos – with the violent factional conflicts of the 1900s through 1920s, in particular, the key role of landlord/caudillo/gamonal Eleodoro Benel. This was a ‘low-intensity’ civil war (my phrase), involving armed paramilitaries (some undoubtedly ‘bandits’), led by Benel and his ilk: a remorseless factional struggle, sustained by family vendettas, similar to that which chronically plagued the Brazilian sertão, perhaps also resembling the Colombian Violencia (‘writ small’, we might cautiously add). So serious was the endemic violence that, Benel complained, ‘it was as if we lived in times of revolution’ (p. 199). Amid frequent killings, Taylor notes, the people of Hualgayoc lived in ‘a social climate of terror’ (pp. 201, 210–11, 216). In this Hobbesian environment (Taylor's own term, pp. 151, 187), ‘banditry’ flourished. Many ‘bandits’ were unashamedly mercenary (they are reasonably termed ‘condottieri’: pp. 180, 216); some were escaped gaolbirds (p. 192); and some were simply workers, urban and rural, men (and occasionally women) who had fallen on hard times – not least during the serious inflation of the 1910s (p. 212). Benel commanded 100 – soon to be 200 – pistoleros, men ‘who blindly obeyed his command’ and who – when defending fortified haciendas complete with trenches and tunnels – could take on army detachments twice their number (pp. 212, 222–3, 229, 238). ‘Social bandits’ – noble robbers in the mould of Robin Hood – were thin on the ground. The Vásquez brothers – common peasants, seen by some as ‘social bandits’ – in fact served as ‘hired guns’ of the local landlords (pp. 232–3, 262). True, one bandit gang, led by Raimundo Ramos, stirred up anti-landlord sentiment among the tenants of the Hacienda Llaucan; but their motives were more mercenary than noble – the hacienda was the property of their archenemy, Eleodoro Benel (p. 163).
A key factor in this turbulent scenario, Taylor shows, was the character of the Peruvian state. Weak, remote, under-funded, and largely illegitimate, it left a large ‘political vacuum’ in northern Cajamarca, which rival factions battled to fill (p. 251). Political elites, national and local, were too embroiled in factional rivalries to broker, or impose, any kind of durable peace. The courts were venal, the gaols were leaky, and lawbreakers enjoyed impunity, even a measure of ‘official tolerance’ (pp. 187, 200, 205, 224). The police were few and ineffectual, while modest army detachments of ill-trained conscripts also proved inadequate (pp. 169–70, 184, 198–9, 215, 231). Occasionally, their numbers reinforced and ruthlessly deployed, the army resorted to exemplary massacres of civilians, arbitrary executions, destruction of property and sequestration of provisions – in short, all manner of ‘abuses, robberies and outrages’ (pp. 171, 233–4, 240, 249, 251). But, even when bandit leaders were eliminated, newcomers sprang up to replace them (what Mexicans call the ‘cockroach’ effect) (pp. 213–14).
In 1919 the region voted – at the behest of the local elites – for Antero Aspíllaga; but his opponent, Augusto Leguía, won the presidency and proceeded to crack down on his ‘oligarchic’ enemies, assuming increasingly authoritarian powers (pp. 216, 218). In response, Benel and his allies – some genuine loyalists, some simply opportunistic time-servers – launched a ‘Quixotic backwoods revolution in the best tradition of the nineteenth century’ (p. 237). Initially successful, the rebels garnered popular support; but hopes of ousting Leguía proved illusory, even if the government, for its part, found it hard to extirpate rebels who could retreat to their fortified haciendas and, when dislodged, scatter in the sierras, while rustling cattle and cagily negotiating with the regime (pp. 237–45). Though regularly called a ‘bandit’ – a delegitimising label commonly and casually used in Peru, as elsewhere – Benel was, some opponents conceded, a ‘political rebel’, no mere ‘common criminal’ (p. 244). Either way, he was a thorn in Leguía's side. Bent on centralising power, Leguía created a new ‘Civil Guard’ and took advice from Spain's notorious Guardia Civil regarding counter-insurgency measures, which proved predictably harsh (including, for example, public executions in town squares on Sundays) (p. 252). By now, the forces of the regime were larger and better equipped, while the numbers and weaponry of their ‘bandit’ adversaries had dwindled. When Benel was finally run to ground, his gang consisted of his three sons and ‘the family hound’ (p. 253). Cornered, he blew his brains out. His death eliminated a major ‘bandit’, but not banditry itself, which still simmered in the highlands ‘although at a reduced level’ (pp. 256–7). But, Taylor concludes, the big gangs – the quasi-armies – of the past were finished, as the state extended its reach and new mass parties – APRA in particular – pioneered a more ideological brand of politics. Both were antidotes to the endemic banditry expertly analysed in these pages.
