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“El Chalequero” or the Mexican Jack the Ripper: The Meanings of Sexual Violence in Turn-of-the-Century Mexico City

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-3-4-623

1527-1900

Pablo Piccato,

Politics and Society in Latin America

During the 1880s, Francisco Guerrero, aka “El Chalequero” or “Antonio el Chaleco,” committed a long series of violent crimes, including at least two murders, against women who worked in the northern suburbs of Mexico City. The Mexican press compared him with Jack the Ripper, who killed five prostitutes in London in late 1888. However, unlike his British contemporary, whose true identity is unknown, Guerrero did nothing to hide his, and for several years he remained active and unpunished. He was finally arrested in 1888 and sentenced to death. President Porfirio Díaz commuted his sentence to 20 years in prison, and Guerrero was released early in 1904. In 1908 Guerrero was arrested again and convicted for the homicide of another woman; he died in 1910 awaiting execution. While Jack the Ripper has inspired many a mystery narrative, the story of El Chalequero straightforwardly displayed violence against women—sexual violence in particular—as part of Mexico City’s everyday life.This article presents multiple facets of El Chalequero’s life between 1888 and 1908—as a street thug, pimp, and criminal suspect. The perspectives of criminologists discussed in the latter part of this article shed more light on the larger meanings of El Chalequero than those offered by the police or judiciary. Science was involved in the investigation of Jack the Ripper’s identity. In Mex-ico, criminologists and psychiatrists were summoned to explain Guerrero’s behavior during his trial, and their reports concluded that he was not a pathological case, but a rather normal example of sexual conduct among the poor. By stating this, they took part in a discussion about the criminal nature of male sexual attackers, who international specialists preferred to not typify as criminals.On 18 October 1887 the police retrieved the body of a woman, partially covered with brush, from the Consulado River. According to forensic doctors, the victim was approximately 40 years old when her throat was slit. Two months later, another corpse with similar characteristics and wounds appeared in a ditch close to the same river.1 The word out was that such findings were common in the northern limits of Mexico City, including the new settlements (colonias), Peralvillo and Santa Ana, Calzada de Guadalupe, and the proximity of the village of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Other bodies had appeared in previous years, and several women had been raped and robbed near the Consulado River and the Calzada de Guadalupe. The culprit(s) had not been discovered.These were still scarcely populated areas, although characterized by an intense movement of carts and porters entering the city through the Peralvillo gate. Travelers, pilgrims going to and from the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and merchants—all lacking the means to use the train—patronized the many inns, pulquerías, and prostitutes of the area. Each December, during the celebrations of the Virgin, traffic and public parties increased beyond the ability of authorities to maintain order. Vending and washing laundry at the river were other important activities, both largely conducted by women. More densely populated colonias between downtown and Peralvillo, such as La Bolsa and Tepito, were feared as zones of crime and vice. As with other new lower-class settlements in a city undergoing a process of rapid growth, these areas lacked the traditional social networks of older barrios near the center of the city, especially necessary in the absence of police protection. This was hardly a problem for authorities and writers who associated the working women of the area with the hygienic and moral perils of prostitution.2The author of these crimes was compared with Jack the Ripper (el destripador), whose crimes became internationally known in late 1888. Liberal newspaper El Siglo Diez y Nueve called him “The mysterious man who repeated in Mexico the same scenes that Jacques the Ripper [sic, suggesting the French sources of the journalist] in the London neighborhood of Whitechappel.”3 The similarities seemed obvious: the victims were prostitutes in London and women who worked in the streets in Mexico; all had been attacked at night in public spaces; all were around 40 years old; all had suffered gruesome wounds. As with the Mexican murderer, Jack the Ripper was blamed for previous crimes against prostitutes.4One of the prevalent hypotheses about the identity of Jack the Ripper, based on the wounds suffered by his victims, posited that he was a doctor.5 The wounds inflicted on the Mexican victims revealed, according to the local press, that the culprit was a man “educated enough” to know the fatal results of a cut in the arteries of the neck. In addition, the murderer of the Consulado River seemed to have, in the eyes of the press, an uncanny ability to escape the police. For El Siglo Diez y Nueve, he possessed “the fabulous ring of Amasis which made its owner invisible.”6 Even after Guerrero’s arrest, writers such as well-known criminologist and journalist Carlos Roumagnac compared him with Jack the Ripper and other European criminals. There was certain pride in this comparison: for Mexican elites, it conveyed the progress of the capital, which brought not only the technology, architecture, and fashion of the most advanced European countries but also their new forms of crime.7 The murders of London and Mexico City were useful in drawing the moral geography of modern cities, as they represented the contrast between “the world of crime” and vice, and the elegant and civilized city. Both cases also suggested a dangerous reversal of that geography, in the threat posed by devious upper-class men to working-class women.Public perceptions of El Chalequero were not limited to these cosmopolitan comparisons. For those who were less sophisticated, El Chalequero recalled images of brutality in a semirural environment. Two engravings by José Guadalupe Posada (see figures 1 and 2), reproduced in popular leaflets, stressed the cuts in the victim’s neck. Posada, in a desolate landscape, chose to portray the killer with a charro hat and a large knife and the victims as defenseless and modest in their attire.8Perhaps because of the cruelty involved in both murders, the police finally set out to find a suspect. In June 1888, shopkeeper Antonio Mayorga identified Francisco Guerrero as responsible for both crimes and several previous rapes. Guerrero was arrested a month later and sentenced in December 1890. The press and public opinion quickly blamed him for up to ten homicides.9Guerrero proved to be closer to Posada’s description than to the newspapers’ earlier hypotheses, yet less powerful than the image of the engravings. According to El Siglo Diez y Nueve, the police looked for him among “the social scum,” but they were surprised that “Neither Guerrero’s height, build nor aspect showed that strength and ferocity that should characterize the terrible degollador; the suspect was one of the many characters with a slightly criminal aspect, but which one can come across every day without causing great concern.”10 Jail records showed he was not too tall (1.57 m), rather lean and perhaps hunchbacked (see figures 3 and 4). He was born in 1850 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and claimed to be a shoemaker and painter. He hardly fit the image of a gentleman exploring the underworld to attack lower-class women. As a young man, he had worked in his father’s butcher shop, where the slaughtering of pigs (not education, as reported by newspapers) gave him the knowledge about the effects of degüello. During the trial, witness María Navarro declared that she considered Guerrero to be “her husband” because they had lived together for 15 years—even though he used to come home “late at night, drunk, and with clothes covered with dust and mud.”11 The image of small, married, jacket-wearing Guerrero contrasted with that of contemporaneous bandits of greater fame, such as Jesús Negrete, “the Tiger of Santa Julia,” who still spread fear in the countryside around the capital.12Francisco Guerrero, as many other inhabitants of “the world of crime,” became well-known during his trial.13 The jury hearings of Guerrero’s trial attracted such a crowd that a brigade of soldiers was required to prevent it from breaking into the courtroom. Underground characters—the “crème-de-la-crème of the lower prostitution of those neighborhoods,” in the words of Roumagnac—paraded as victims or witnesses during the audiences.14 However sordid, the spectacle of criminal trials were at the center of a popular public opinion which, instead of the respectable newspapers, relied on word of mouth, leaflets, and the penny press to convey information. When jury trials were abrogated in 1929, El Chalequero’s case was remembered as one of those that attracted the greatest interest, along with that of the prostitute María Villa, “La Chiquita,” sentenced for homicide in 1897.15 Spectators seemed to relish the drama of interrogations, constructed at the intersection of the elevated discourses of law and science and the lowly impulses of criminals and their victims.The testimonies of witnesses confirmed that the accused was, in fact, responsible for abusing several women in the deserted areas near Peralvillo. According to his own testimony, he was called “El Chalequero” because “since long ago he has had the habit of forcing women.”16 (In Mexico, A chaleco means “by force.”) The nickname served him, more specifically, to “scare prostitutes.”17 It was well-known, even before the discovery of the two corpses in 1887, that other women had previously been found murdered in a similar fashion. According to Roumagnac, Guerrero’s responsibility for those attacks had been established by the inhabitants of the area, but nobody dared denounce him.18 “The public voice” claimed that he had murdered seven women, slitting their throats after robbing them. He was also responsible, according to the prosecutor Alonso Rodríguez Miramón, for the frequent evening robberies that created fear “among the Indians walking the Calzada.”19 In 1887 Emilia González, laundress in an upper-class home, was attacked by a man who tried to rape her. Her shouts attracted other passersby, prompting the escape of the aggressor, though not before sinking his knife into her body. She died 19 days later at the hospital, without having identified Guerrero as the attacker. Even so, the prosecutors accused him of the crime.20Besides the case of González, which was weakened by an autopsy report that explained her death as the result of natural causes, the prosecutors of the 1888–90 trial made little effort to link Guerrero with earlier murders known to the neighbors of the area. The accusation did not focus on specific events, but merely sought to establish that Guerrero was El Chalequero. In an effort to deny it, Guerrero explained that his bad reputation came from the fact that on several occasions he had told the Río Consulado prostitutes that he was the feared criminal—but only with the goal of inspiring fear and obtaining their submission.21 Nevertheless, most witnesses identified him as the man who indeed spread terror among those who lived and worked near the Calzada and the river. His lengthy record was eloquent: he had been imprisoned eight times for different offenses. His first entrance in the books of the Mexico City jail had occurred in 1878, for assault. Six arrests followed (for theft, battery, and threats), none lasting more than a month.22 He had already committed several crimes by 1881, when he threatened Candelaria Mendoza with a knife and a warning that “she would not be the first woman [he] killed.”23The testimonies against Guerrero suggest that his threats were never anonymous. In his relationship with the working women of Peralvillo, murder was only the extreme result of interactions that included sexual abuse and exploitation. Antonio Mayorga, who first denounced him, declared that Guerrero was a man “who approached the prostitutes . . . outside the Peralvillo gate, where he cheated them—by having intercourse by force—and then robbed them and slit their throat.”24 But the victims who survived these attacks did not dare to accuse him until he was arrested in 1888. Soledad González, for example, declared that Guerrero had wounded and robbed a friend of hers in 1886; in 1887 he offered her one peso to “have carnal relations.” She rejected him, but he took her to a lonely place by the river. After claiming that he was El Chalequero, Guerrero put four reales in her hand, threatened her with a knife, and raped her. Then, he took back the four reales plus another one that she was hiding inside her mouth—because it was her only cash, she explained. Other women, such as Josefa Rodríguez, Camila Sánchez, and Nicolasa García, declared that Guerrero had threatened them with different weapons and had told them that he was El Chalequero, and had stolen clothes they were about to wash. In sum, Guerrero operated with the full knowledge that women knew and feared him, and that nobody would dare to accuse him. Three women had witnessed his attack against Margarita Rosas, but no one dared to help her or call the police.25 There is no evidence that Guerrero ever used violence against a man, and none accused him until Mayorga blamed him for the murder of Mucia Gallardo.The crime against Gallardo differed in several ways from previous attacks. She was, according to several witnesses, and despite María Navarro’s claim, Guerrero’s amasia (common-law wife). She also seems to have had a somewhat higher status than the other victims, who were prostitutes, domestic workers, or laundresses. In the words of Roumagnac, Mucia “ran almost all the famous and disgusting lupanars of Tepechichilco, and she was also a prostitute.”26 Gallardo and Guerrero had been linked in using violence against other women: together, for example, they had assaulted Josefa Rodríguez to steal from her.27 The night of Gallardo’s death, several witnesses saw an argument between her and Guerrero. Concepción Escamilla tried to leave because Guerrero had “hit her and stolen her reboso previously,” but Gallardo convinced her to stay because she believed that she could control Guerrero. The discussion continued until Mucia slapped Guerrero and defied him to go out and fight, claiming that she did not fear him even if he was “the terror of the women of Santa Ana.” The witnesses saw them take the street, which was “lonely and dark, because it was eight or nine in the evening.” A short time later Guerrero came back, holding in his hand a knife covered with blood. Genovevo Soto confronted him by saying, “you have killed Mucia Gallardo,” but he did not call the police. Hours later, Concepción Escamilla saw Guerrero watching the corpse of Gallardo being taken out of the river. Guerrero threatened her and took her to a hotel, where he cried for Mucia and showed her the knife and other weapons, “which he never left behind.”28 In contrast with other victims, Gallardo enjoyed some power over Guerrero. Years later, Guerrero confessed to Roumagnac that Mucia had always harassed him and that, after killing her, “he was satisfied of not seeing her again.”29The evidence suggests that El Chalequero’s attacks were part of a larger pattern of sexual and economic exploitation in which Mucia was involved. The victims who spoke out against him at the trial shared many characteristics of his attacks: sexual abuse and violence was always accompanied by the expropriation of their possessions. María de Jesús Martínez already knew Guerrero in 1884, when he raped her and took her money. He raped another victim and forced her to buy him some pulque.30 It is in this regard that Mayorga accused Guerrero of “cheating” the prostitutes.The association between Guerrero and Mucia Gallardo probably included the task of forcing petty prostitutes who worked the streets on their own to seek refuge in a brothel, preferably one of the “disgusting lupanars of Tepechichilco” controlled by Gallardo. This would also explain why, on the night of her death, Mucia told Concepción Escamilla that she should not fear Guerrero while she was around.31 Cut loose from Mucia’s control, Guerrero was perceived as a greater threat and was thus denounced to the police.By pushing women to seek protection, Guerrero’s violent acts were an integral part of the business of prostitution in the marginal areas of Mexico City. As in other areas of the urban labor market during these years of rapid economic and demographic growth, prostitution was adapting to the changing relationships between workers and their employers, and among workers, employers and the state. The 1867 Regulation of Prostitution, reformed in 1873, pursued not only hygienic goals but also attempted to consolidate those relationships. “Registered” prostitutes had to undergo frequent medical examinations, with the penalty of fines or imprisonment if they avoided them. The regulation bolstered madams’ power by adding to their role of employers that of intermediaries between workers and sanitary authorities. According to researcher Itzel Delgado, madams were “a decisive linkage,” particularly for the control of low-class prostitutes. The regulation authorized the police (usually an interested party because of the bribes they collected) to place those women who failed to comply with the law under the control of a matrona.32 The business was increasingly lucrative by the end of the nineteenth century. Madams profited because of their role as mediators among prostitutes, authorities, and customers, and also through a relationship of “complete subordination” with their pupils. Despite the regulation, “clandestine” prostitution continued to grow through this period, clashing with the interests of madams and the state. According to Delgado, most independent prostitutes and low-class brothels were located at the periphery of the city, particularly in the northern areas. In these cases, less formalized relationships between madams and work ers included protection and the establishment of connections with patrons, not always in the physical context of a brothel.33Fully identified as El Chalequero, neither Guerrero’s guilt nor his innocence was the overarching consideration in the judicial and penal proceedings against him: the fascination of the public for the jury hearings of his trial did not stem from the question about his fate. As in the case of La Chiquita, and many other suspects, Guerrero was implicitly condemned before meeting his jury, and for all practical purposes he lacked legal representation. On the day of the audience, Guerrero dismissed the two public attorneys who had technically represented him during the previous months, and appointed Adolfo Dublán. Because Dublán refused, the judge ordered two other lawyers to take the job although both stated their complete ignorance about the case. At any rate, the audience went on and, as was the system according to Mexican penal legislation, the judge ruled over the proceedings and worked as an aggressive prosecutor, interrogating witnesses and the suspect.34The entire process was fraught with irregularities. At the beginning of the process, in 1888, Guerrero had been accused of six robberies, seven rapes, two batteries, and three homicides.35 Immediately after his arrest, according to the records, the suspect had confessed to murders committed in places as distant as the barrio of La Merced, and the eastern San Lázaro and Coyoya plains. Yet the fact-finding phase of the trial, preceding the jury hearing, took a year and a half to complete. In front of the jury, Guerrero declared that he had signed those confessions because the police had hung him from his thumbs. To counter the claim, the judge exhibited the signature by those statements and argued that they could not have been made by someone who had just suffered such torment.36 After that, Guerrero remained silent during the rest of the trial. Prosecutors and the judge were not very concerned about mounting a flawless case from the legal point of view, to the extreme that a namesake of Margarita Rosas, who had been attacked and had testified in the previous investigation, showed up at the hearing. The judge ordered the jury not to interpret this as a consequence of carelessness since “most women called to the witness stand lacked a fixed address and name—as they belonged to the lowliest kind of prostitution—thus any mistake that the police could have made when bringing them to testify was excusable.”37One of the main witnesses against Guerrero was his relative José Montoya, who Guerrero accused of committing some of the murders that he had been blamed for. Montoya was interned at the San Hipólito Hospital for mental illness and, according to the reporters of the jury, “presented all the abnormal traits that characterize the insane.” Montoya himself accepted that “he was sick of his stomach, of his sight, and his brain” and that “he felt that someone pulled his hair . . . and gnawed at his eyes.” A physician called by the judge declared that Montoya’s mental state was the result of alcoholism. Nevertheless, Montoya’s statements seemed more credible than those of Guerrero’s to the judge, and the former was acquitted of the accusations made by the latter.38There was ample evidence against Guerrero in the death of Mucia Gallardo. In the case of Francisca N., “La Chíchara,” the second corpse found in the river, the only evidence against him was the similarity of her wounds to those observed in Mucia’s body.39 In June 1892, President Porfirio Díaz commuted Guerrero’s sentence to 20 years. Although pardons were common under Díaz, they were not the rule for those who killed women. He was released after serving twelve years at the San Juan de Ulúa fortress in Veracruz.40 Even after his second trial for homicide, in 1908, Guerrero continued to deny his involvement in the crimes he had been accused of, except for that of Gallardo.41If it was common for most Mexican suspects to be denied due process, why was Guerrero convicted of only two murders and why did Díaz commute his sentence from execution to 20 years in prison? Why did it take so long for him to be arrested, and why were most witnesses against him (prostitutes and other working women) afraid and reluctant to talk, even during the jury? Answers to these questions begin to emerge when we look at contemporaneous attitudes of the police and judicial system toward victims of sexual abuse.Women did not accuse Guerrero of rape because they all thought that he would be acquitted by a jury, and that policemen and judges would only add to their humiliation, mainly because they were prostitutes, domestic workers, or peddlers. Several cases in the Federal District’s judicial archives confirm the negative attitudes faced by all victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse, regardless of their social background, when they dared to accuse their attackers. The premise of judges and juries was that any woman who was willing to ventilate a matter concerning her honor lacked shame and thus could not be trusted. There were several ways in which these prejudices emerged through the judicial process. First, the definitions of rape, statutory rape, and abduction in the penal code allowed for several interpretations to the benefit of the accused. Rape, according to the code, only took place when physical violence had been used.42 Many cases, including those in which the victim or her parents had denounced a rape, were downgraded by judges to statutory rape, or simply abduction, which were not defined by violence but by the fact that the suspect had used false promises and deception. The accused usually claimed that the victim had consented to having intercourse. In most cases, in accordance with the penal code, the case was dismissed when the accused promised to marry the victim, even though the processes did not include verifying that the promise was fulfilled. In the few cases in which a trial reached the jury phase, the accused were usually acquitted.43Medical procedures played an important role against victims. It was generally believed that, because of the nature of the female body, sexual crimes were difficult to prove.44 Judges did not think that forced penetration amounted to violence; thus, for a rape accusation to be supported, forensic doctors had to examine the victim and find clear signs of physical violence in different areas of her body. The testimony of the victim was not enough to establish that a rape had been committed, and for this reason, many cases were dismissed. A medical examination was required to establish the age of the victim. The premise was that rape could otherwise be easily simulated, or provoked by the victim, and that women could easily resist it if they wished to.45 The examination was in itself a painful and humiliating procedure, similar to that undergone by “registered” prostitutes. Many victims, such as Asunción Gómez, in 1921, had to go through two examinations. In her case, the second established that she had not been raped and the charges against her attacker were dismissed. Such a result was more likely when victims hesitated several days, and understandably so, before pressing charges.46 Even when female victims complained about offenses other than rape, they could be subject to medical examinations at police stations. Students of medicine usually occupied the place of physicians at these stations and even gendarmes advised victims against undergoing the examination. In sum, the benefits of the procedure were not evident, and some women resisted it forcefully. In 1929 the government of the city ordered that no woman be examined at police stations unless she presented serious wounds. The goal was to end the “disgraceful examinations” inflicted on them, and the shame that followed when “many persons who happen to be at the station learn about the results.”47As a consequence, the chances of obtaining a guilty verdict after an accusation of sexual abuse were smaller than for other crimes. Table 1 shows that, in 1897 and 1900, only one guilty verdict was obtained for every five accusations of rape, 25 of statutory rape, or 87 of abduction. An improvement can be perceived in the data from the 1930s, presented in table 2: one guilty for every four accused of rape and statutory rape; one for every three in rape. Table 3 shows that in other crimes the proportion of guilty verdicts was higher. The rate would be even lower if we compared guilty verdicts to the total number of crimes, that is, including those that were not denounced. From a sample of 22 cases of sexual violence in Mexico City that took place between 1900 and 1931, 15 cases concluded when charges were dropped—a fact not reflected by official statistics. In other words, 68 percent of the cases involving sexual violence concluded this way, against 32 percent for the total of 223 cases of different crimes examined as part of a larger research project about crime. In view of the inefficacy and cost involved in judicial action, many victims refused to even bring up charges, thus making these ratios more biased.48The number of arrests and convictions for rape diminished after 1871, even when data are normalized to population growth (see table 4). The decrease may be explained as a result of an actual reduction in the number of crimes committed. An alternative explanation, supported by El Chalequero’s case, is that judicial and police interest in sexual offenses was diminishing, while the number of actual crimes may have remained stable. When jurist and criminologist Miguel Macedo compiled an extensive survey of the opinions of lawyers about the reforms needed by the penal code in the late 1900s, no major reforms to the articles on rape were deemed necessary.49The two trials against Guerrero gave specialists an opportunity to examine his behavior from a scientific point of view. The extreme violence of the crimes invited a psychopathological explanation, rather than one centered on moral considerations. However, scientists agreed in defining El Chalequero as a judicial and penal problem, not a medical one. The thought was comforting: he might represent an interesting case for science, but he was hardly a problem as a criminal.In the first trial, Guerrero’s mental sanity was at issue. The judge asked two forensic doctors whether the suspect’s behavior was a consequence of his “hallucinations.” The penal code reduced and even eliminated punishment for the mentally ill—on the premise that sanity and insanity were clearly distinguishable states, two personalities of the same individual without intermediate states.50 Questioned by Guerrero’s lawyer, the doctors recognized that it was not possible to identify insanity “at first sight,” although they insisted that some mental diseases “irresistibly” impelled the patient to commit crimes. In their opinion, however, these diseases did not limit Guerrero’s penal responsibility, and as a consequence the judge denied the defense lawyers’ request to consider his mental health as a mitigating circumstance.51The issue of the suspect’s responsibility was also raised in the second trial in 1908, although by this time the strength of criminological arguments had become greater than that of medicine itself. Guerrero’s attorneys requested the opinion of Carlos Roumagnac, Francisco Martínez Baca (one of the earliest practitioners of craniometry in the country), and physician Miguel Lasso de la Vega.52 The reports concluded that Guerrero was responsible for his acts. Reflecting the broad ambitions of positivist criminology, Martínez Baca and Roumagnac went to greater lengths to ascertain what kind of criminal pathology he exemplified best. At the same time, they also expressed the eclectic character of the discipline. Martínez Baca, on the one hand, performed a study