In the Shadow of the State: The Politics of Denunciation and Panegyric during the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1940-1958
2003; Duke University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-83-2-295
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean and African Literature and Culture
ResumoThis essay examines the politics and practice of official discourse during the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic, one of the longest dictatorships in modern Latin America (1930–61). I focus here on two official oratorical genres: denunciation, and a highly stylized form of “panegyric,” or praise speech, to Trujillo that became pro forma in all public arenas by citizens and state officials alike. These speech forms were most important in the capital of Trujillo City, the central theater of government and Trujillo’s dominion, and most relevant to the emergent public sector of state employees that resided there. This group expanded more than fourfold under the regime and formed the basis of a new urban middle class, particularly in the capital, by the 1950s.1 Denunciation and panegyric were institutionalized in the Public Forum (Foro Público) column of the newspaper El Caribe, the main organ of the Trujillo regime in the 1950s. Some 5 to 15 letters of denunciation were published there daily from 1948 to 1961; a single accusation might be followed up with as many as 5 letters in defense of the denounced individual that reestablishing his or her credentials as a devout Trujillista via an exorbitant encomium to El Jefe. Foro Público published a grand total of 4,000 such columns, and more than 30,000 letters in all.2 The largest percentage of the letters in the Public Forum was written by citizens accusing civil servants of corruption, inefficiency, or improper conduct. This is a surprising discovery, given the ironclad control over even trivial forms of dissent during the regime and Trujillo’s emphasis on public order and discipline.3 Lipe Collado argues that “reputation death squads” from the official party of the dictatorship, the Dominican Party, channeled local grievances collected via intelligence reports into these public missives, although some were authored by Trujillo’s cronies or official Foristas under pseudonyms. Trujillo’s son Radamés, for example, wrote under the nom de plume of Mexican revolutionary general Pancho Villa.4 At times Public Forum accusations commenced in private letters of complaint directed to the Dominican Party that resulted in the dismissal of public functionaries, as explored below.5Denunciation and panegyric were also pervasive speech genres outside the press, although denunciation was elsewhere generally secret, appearing in private letters to the government concerning third-party infractions or anonymous allegations sent by mail directly to the accused (pasquines). Praise, by contrast, was highly public and a ubiquitous feature of the hundreds of civic rites and holidays staged in Trujillo’s honor. Scholars have seen denunciation as evidence of Trujillo’s authoritarianism. I suggest it should also be seen as a sign of the regime’s populism. Even if the accusations were edited or compiled in the National Palace, most originated in local concerns articulated via private letters or intelligence reports to the Dominican Party, and state officials could be censored or even replaced as a result of such citizens’ charges.6 The Foro Público was populist in another sense as well. It translated into print an oral genre—gossip and backbiting—that was especially characteristic of the mulatto lower middle classes in the Dominican Republic. This group—who, like strongman Rafael Trujillo himself, had been catapulted into positions of social and political power as a result of the regime—held a tenuous grip on their social positions, since they lacked the requisite wealth or family history necessary for legitimacy. The son of a mulatto cattle rustler, Trujillo had come to power through the National Guard, the constabulary force trained during the U.S. military occupation (1916–24), by means of a coup d’état rather than an election. The Foro mimicked a form of popular speech characteristic of the intense rivalry and status competition among “small big men”—one that was normally confined to small talk behind closed doors—and placed it squarely in public view.7 We can dismiss as patently absurb Trujillo’s macabre claim that the Foro— as an example of the freedom of the press and the responsiveness of government to popular grievances—revealed the democracy of the regime. Nevertheless, it still could have served as a populist technique that lent credence to his claim that his government was “born from the people and maintained by the people,” since both the content and the form of the Foro Público had deep roots in Dominican popular culture.8While the practice of denunciation has been seen as evidence of state domination, it was actually a more complex phenomenon. Even when the claims of a denunciation were patently false, they nonetheless “operated within a double field of belief and doubt,” defiling individuals through the selective revelation of public secrets and casting aspersion on the public honor of officials.9 Accusations of public malfeasance could be rebutted. More difficult to contest, however, were charges of amorality, such as those set forth in one accusation that decried “the personal and domestic disasters, the endless orgies, the habitual drunkenness, the welching on gambling debts, the bare-faced passing of bad checks, the broken homes and abandoned homes” that the accused, “a degenerate, a blackmailer, a traitor,” had left behind.10 Even if the accusations were unfounded, they were painful because of their conspicuity in the national press and the fact that they left precious little space for what Erving Goffman has termed “the arts of impression management”—individual control over one’s self-image.11 The denunciations I examine here represent a liminal boundary where the public and private, and the state and civil society, crossed paths.12Denunciation and official praise fulfilled several important functions of state. They enabled citizens to take up certain state roles—such as policing the civil service—either by articulating their gripes or by simply observing the spectacle of shame that was the Foro. Indeed, when denunciation became institutionalized in 1948 in the Public Forum column of El Caribe, civil society was given an important role in this arm of social control or, in the words of the Dominican Party, “rectitude and morality.”13 Trujillo’s extension of systematic surveillance outside the police and intelligence apparatus through the creation of “inspectors,” or spies, created a “panoptical” regime in which no one escaped the purview of the state, and everyone was implicated. Once their findings were broadcast nationally in the Foro Público, the entire nation was called upon to judge the crimes and misdemeanors of its citizenry and civil servants.14 It also may have fostered a new consciousness of the self (to paraphrase historian John Brewer), as citizens pondered themselves or their acquaintances on the public national stage of the print media for the first time.15The effusive laudatory recitals of accolades to Trujillo, which contrasted with denunciations and are thus an important part of the picture, had several functions. These ranged from the popular use of sycophantic speech as a form of “investiture” to gain recognition and reap rewards such as contracts, jobs, or handouts, to the insinuation of negative criticisms within the very formulaic conventions of praise to the “Benefactor.”16 The heavily encoded language of official praise, rich in metaphor and imagery, could voice certain veiled criticisms of Trujillo through allusion or even oblique parody. Thus, while both speech forms ultimately fulfilled hegemonic functions for the regime, they did so through the medium of individual agency, and at times contradictory messages simmered under the surface.The literature on authoritarian regimes has assumed a direct correlation between actual violence and what Guillermo O’Donnell has called the “culture of fear.” It has thus neglected certain forms of symbolic domination that were important to the quotidian experience of terror during regimes such as the Trujillato. Most studies of cultures of fear have focused on genocide, ethnocide, civil war, or bureaucratic/authoritarian contexts where disappearances were a daily reality, brutal repression was a commonplace, and entire social groups were crushed.17 Certainly, the dramatic expansion and deprofessionalization of the military and police under Trujillo contributed to unprecedented levels of violent, if sporadic, excess—such as the use of arbitrary incarceration and torture as a preemptive strike against the formation of political opposition. Waves of general repression did occur after the 1949 and 1959 coup attempts, and toward the end of the regime as Trujillo’s health declined and his control faltered. Indeed, repressive measures were eventually successful insomuch as they exported all effective antiregime mobilization to exile communities in Havana, New York, Port-au-Prince, and, to a lesser extent, Caracas. Moreover, everyday life during the Trujillato was characterized by pervasive insecurity and atomization as an ever expanding apparatus of espionage developed, which by the 1950s rivaled the formal political apparatus itself in organizational strength. And in 1957, when Johnny Abbes García was placed at the helm of the newly formed Military Intelligence Service (SIM), a body that centralized and coordinated the various intelligence operations that previously had operated in an overlapping honeycomb, the regime sank to new levels of savagery.18What is striking about the Trujillato is that while the culture of terror was deep and pervasive, in comparison to other authoritarian regimes, relatively few Dominicans were actually killed by state violence until the final years. Aside from the atrocious 1937 Haitian massacre, in which some 15,000 Haitian border migrants were brutally slaughtered, political scientist Jesús Galíndez noted the relatively low levels of actual Dominican deaths by official repression.19 Certainly, in part this was because official assassinations were always reported as mysterious unsolved “accidents” or random crimes in the press. Nonetheless, the culture of fear was strikingly asphyxiating for all, although the middle-class residents of Santo Domingo suffered perhaps more than most due to the fact that the capital city was the central hub of police and SIM intelligence gathering, as evidenced in the ubiquitous sinister black Volkswagen beetles—the official SIM cars. Unlike Haiti under François Duvalier, for example, the experience of terror was not relegated to a particular class fraction. And unlike Argentina during the Proceso Militar, the state enemy was never clearly defined, and thus no one felt entirely immune from potential repression. The sense of subordination and a fear of potential arbitrary punishment was generalized throughout society, although it varied in kind from the provincial interior to the urban professional class of the capital. What accounted for the acute and generalized culture of fear under the Trujillo regime? Why did denunciation emerge in the postwar period as a dominant mode of political competition and control? These are the historical questions that my analysis of denunciation explicitly addresses.Oral narratives of the Trujillo period invoke the official use of denunciation and pasquines as pervasive and frightening media of official sanction.20 For the urban middle class, the culture of terror was arguably more a result of the threat of job loss—as embodied in the denunciation as a political practice— than the threat of random arrests, murder, and torture, although they certainly were mutually reinforcing.21 And even if one was falsely denounced, simply being tildado (called attention to) by the regime caused stigma and social isolation, as others feared their own possible guilt by association. Denunciation had both material and social costs. It could result in loss of one’s job, but it also entailed the undoing of social honor. Called in popular parlance “shooting blanks,” denuncias were a form of symbolic violence that could result in social death— that is, radical isolation from, and rejection by, society. Denunciation defiled the public persona, resulting in an aura of sin.22 Stories abound of prominent intellectuals who, refusing to collaborate with the regime, were denounced and—it was said—actually died of social disgrace, even when the accusations were clearly false.23 To stand accused was to lose respeto, which in this context was to lose face, to abdicate personhood.24The truth value of the charges was not the most important factor determining whether or not the allegations were actually believed, since in most cases there was no way of determining the actual facts. Moreover, the context was characterized by what one scholar has termed a “poetics of opacity.”25 The secrecy surrounding the true authorship of accusations probably amplified the resultant fear, as the circulation of rumors echoed and amplified the perceived circuits of power.26 Not only was Trujillo’s inner court shielded by a veil of concealment that created a deep rift of social distance between them and the majority, but the identity of second-tier regime partisans was often masked in ways that tended to augment their perceived potency and influence. An example of this is the bizarre case of José Almoina, who while denounced wrote a book exalting Trujillo, and a play in the name of Trujillo’s wife, María Martínez. This created shock waves of gossip about him at a time when he was in exile and officially invisible. What is more, while in his exile of shame, he received $12,000.00 for the book, making him the highest paid griot of the regime.27 As Vicente Rafael has said, “Rumors … work by separating seeing from believing.”28 Indeed, denunciation wreaked havoc by doing just that: forging ruinous hearsay of unknown provenance and unlikely veracity that was believable only by virtue of its everyday style.29 Denunciation worked by creating the illusion that there was a responsible agent behind it and that there existed a space outside of dissimulation and subjection. As Timothy Mitchell has argued in another context, the regime operated less via a system of terror than one of fear generated through insecurity. Denunciation gave gossip an official imprimatur and created the illusion that the accused were actually at fault.30The Trujillo regime invented neither panegyric nor denunciation. Both discourse genres have deep roots in Caribbean popular oratory, as well as in nineteenth-century Dominican regional caudillo politics. Panegyric and denunciation are elaborations of a popular culture of masculinity and its resultant ritual idioms of deference and defamation, of honorifics and profanation.31 Public accusation was also a staple of nineteenth-century political discourse, and newspapers from the period are rife with pugnacious reproof of state ineptitude, corruption, and irregularity, or personal attacks on individual honor often involving unpaid debts, theft, or allegations of influence peddling among politicians and state representatives. As in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Nazi Germany in the 1940s, or even China during the Cultural Revolution (via wall graffiti), denunciation was chiefly aimed at local state authorities and their incompetence.32 However, given the stakes involved in leveling accusations against the public honor of prominent local notables in this small, face-to-face society, such allegations were primarily anonymous so as to avoid disrupting the structure of trust undergirding interpersonal relations. The use of pseudonyms in the press was extremely widespread, even when the actual names of certain prolific or popular authors were an open secret, in order to avoid direct insult or confrontation and thus conform to a culture of deference that required protecting the public “face” or honor of reputable persons. Anonymity enabled the public expression of grievance while conforming to rules of deferential avoidance, in a context where political positions were inextricably tied to specific individuals and family lineages, and their participation in historical events.33However, the nineteenth-century Dominican newspaper did not yet hold a monopoly on the formation of public opinion. It competed with other popular fora, such as “décimas” or “coplas,” poetry that was typically recited in parks and colmados (corner groceries) and sold in single sheets in the marketplace. These public poems aired popular or factional complaints about official corruption or ineptitude and were also anonymous. Décimas were “popular” insofar as they were memorized, repeated, and adapted by the public at large; yet particular poets did achieve fame for their lyricism, trenchant political satire, or unabashed adulation of politicians, generals, or strongmen. Particular decimeros could also become spokesmen for particular parties or politicians. In fact, late-nineteenth-century “order and progress” dictator Ulises Heureaux sponsored the most influential bard of the 1890s, Juan Antonio Alix, to compose verse in his favor as a form of political propaganda. Alix wrote “servile praise” for whomever would provide him recompense: governors, provisional governments, generals, “friends,” Haitian revolutionary leaders, newspapers, even esteemed Dominican gentlemen in New York City.34 Décimas were considered more effective in swaying public opinion than other printed forms, which were frequently liberal in persuasion and had a very small constituency in this highly illiterate society. Nineteenth-century Dominican newspapers were typically blatantly partisan, depending on state or party subsidies for their existence, and openly acrimonious.35 Thus, even “anonymous” published denunciations were identified with particular political persuasions.However, the meaning of the public denunciation changed under Trujillo, since it was widely perceived as emanating from the National Palace and thus carrying official weight; from a sign of partisanship, it became an insignia of state.36 If, as Judith Irvine notes, “defamation is fundamentally an audience effect,” institutionalizing denunciation in the press brought the entire nation to bear on the purported moral improprieties of the accused and thus dramatically increased the scalding impact of the accusations.37 As it became officialized, denunciation became a key technique of rule during the Trujillato, one that channeled popular grievances against official abuse, while keeping the civil bureaucracy in check.38 Yet, this form of punishment must be seen as having a “complex social function”; one in which social control was achieved through mechanisms that were intimately linked to repression but not merely reducible to it.39 This is why, ironically, denunciation could ultimately become an avenue for resistance as well as hegemony.Even if Trujillo actually intervened at times in these circuits of accusations, it seems highly unlikely that most were drafted in the National Palace. Sheer numbers aside, the content of many denunciations focused on minor figures in particular hamlets and was simply too local for the state to have invented. Clearly, the invisible hand of an editor was at work at least in selecting those to be printed, or at most, as Lipe Collado contends, in actually crafting denunciations from party inspectors’ intelligence reports.40 If the latter scenario was the case, however, these were compiled from popular sources; most were not drafted freehand in the National Palace, as is the popular impression. Only one genre of denunciations—those accusing individuals of being communists or political enemies of the regime—appear to have been actually planted by the National Palace, but these are a minority of the total published.41 Even if the culture of denunciation ultimately served Trujillo’s interests by generating factional strife within the civil bureaucracy that checked the formation of rival political cliques, I argue that denunciation derived from the particular political sociology of the regime, not Trujillo himself, even if it was Trujillo who created the structure in the first place. Denunciation thus belies approaches that assume the dictator’s centrality in all areas of policy making under statist regimes of this kind. In re-creating the state bureaucracy, Trujillo forged what Weber called “a power instrument of the first order,” yet one that could not remain entirely within his ironclad control.42Trujillo financed an enormous horizontal expansion of government through the creation of the official Dominican Party, a process that did more than merely redistribute political capital in the form of state jobs and enforce the regime’s structure of domination. Founded in 1931, the party quickly came to be the prime nexus of articulation between the state and the political subject, with a mass membership of approximately one-half of the country’s population.43 The party provided a mass base to a regime that at the onset did not receive support from the traditional elite, who spurned Trujillo for his lowly origins. From the perspective of the populace, party membership became synonymous with citizenship itself, since the party card (called the palmita for the party’s palm tree symbol) was fundamental to access everything from jobs to bus service, in combination with the cédula and the voter’s registration. (These three pieces of identification together were nicknamed los tres golpes, “the three blows.”) An extension of Trujillo’s person, the party coordinated and planned civic ritual, “civic reviews” (revistas cívicas), and dispensed official charity in his name so as to, in its own words, respond to the “urgent need to create a citizen consciousness submissive to the principle of authority.”44 Trujillo also financed a dramatic expansion of the structure of government; by the 1940s he had created 17 new ministries and other state agencies, all told resulting in a fourfold expansion of urban professionals as the state came to employ a full 15 percent of the labor force. The number of university graduates had also expanded threefold by the 1950s, thus augmenting the number of middle-sector professionals, especially in the capital city.45State expansion thus not only aided in the consolidation of Trujillo’s political control but also helped form a new status group of party functionaries who were, in economic terms, middle class, but who had the social capital of a new elite, a form of “state nobility.”46 One Barahona senator described the social structure of his province as effectively divided into two parts: “professionals, businessmen/traders, and industrialists” forming an “upper class” that held a “middling economic position, some culture, and a certain morality,” and a lower-class majority that was composed of workers, day laborers, and so on.47 This bifurcated vision was in part a legacy of the weak and regionally fragmented bourgeoisie that existed in the period preceding Trujillo’s rise to power, a strata that was only really consolidated through the state during the Trujillato. Note how professionals are accorded a special status as the sole group not defined primarily by socioeconomic position, but rather by their access to “culture,” as if sufficient culture translated quite directly into social capital. One indication of the social prestige ascribed to party representatives is the fact that in 1940 skilled foreigners feigned to be party members.48 Even a cemetery inspector had not a small measure of status. During the depression, the vogue of professionalism could be explained as a result of rural poverty and desperation, but after World War II, import substitution meant that Dominican farmers thrived as a result of strong primary commodity prices. Party membership was more than empty status signaling; it was a quest for the protection and political capital to be found under Trujillo’s mantel. The creation of a new professional class of party functionaries and civil bureaucrats helped offset the influence of the traditional rural elite (typically white landowners or cattle ranchers) and offered a means of social climbing for mestizos.With their national affiliation, constituency, and distinction, party functionaries were a novel sort of local intellectual. They represented the “nexus between domination and public discourse,” as brokers whose power appeared to lay in their ability to define the nation to the region and vice versa; however, they drew their authority from their social position as state delegates, and not from the content of their ideology.49 As such, denunciation was a particularly appropriate medium for expressing the ambiguities of social position and identity of this interstitial group, since it represented the “intermediate space between the society ‘below’ and the state or the authorities ‘above.’” In this way, as Colin Lucas characterized it, denunciation “lies along the fault line dividing those who find themselves in tension with the state and those who see some of their own identity in the state; it marks the division between a state that is ‘externalized’ and one that is ‘internalized’ by the citizens.”50Trujillo accorded respectability to the expanded middle class forged by this new party bureaucracy by officializing it with the trappings of professional identity—such as uniforms or responsibility for official organization and speech making. The basis of traditional forms of clientelism was more limited, since the exchange was based primarily on tangibles—land use for a portion of the harvest and occasional political support or other acts of loyalty, rather than the signs of status that Trujillo awarded his bureaucrats for their loyalty. The violence of the Trujillo regime was therefore largely symbolic, insomuch as its beneficiaries were rewarded primarily through recognition and the fear of its withdrawal rather than direct material reward.51 Unlike traditional forms of clientage, the social position of these new middle-class bureaucrats was based as much on distinction from the masses as it was on identification with a powerful patrón.52The social category of party functionary built upon new forms of professional identity, such as the figure of the civil servant that had emerged in the 1920s with state formation and the rise of urban culture. The novel El hombre de piedra contrasts the modern state bureaucrat with the traditional caudillo, both in forms of rule and in styles of political identity.53 The character of Ricardo Cuesta is a new modern bureaucrat, employed by the Department of Public Works, who arrives in the town of San Juan de la Maguana as part of a road construction project. While much state activity during the 1916–24 U.S. military occupation was devoted to road construction, this association between the state and roads holds a deeper significance. Ricardo is the quintessential stranger, an alienated nomad who seems to hold no membership in a particular community, but rather goes wherever the state sends him: as one character observes, “He is that road”—unknown and unknowable. As the embodiment of the street, he is associated with money (his surname, Cuesta, translates as “cost”), which plays on the image of bureaucrats as corrupt and often “bought” through payoffs by whatever party they work for. The street, of course, also invokes social dirt—“matter out of place” in Mary Douglas’s terms—in this case rootless individuals lacking a family lineage. This goes against traditional Dominican concepts of status, which must be grounded in a particular region: to “be somebody” you must be from somewhere. The street thus contrasts with home and patriline, and “new bureaucrats” such as Cuesta can be seen as like affines: tied to, but not of, the bloodline, with all the ambiguities of allegiance this implies.54The enormous lateral extension of low-level state functionaries created a peculiar political sociology. I suggest that this helps explain the development of denunciation as an individual phenomenon in the 1940s and its transformation into an officially sanctioned, and even sponsored, practice by the 1950s, when the Public Forum column of El Caribe newspaper became an institution. In this case, the bureaucracy did not merely reflect, but also actively produced, a new social order.55 One aspect of state expansion was the creation of several parallel categories of public functionaries, from inspectors to party heads. This, in part, resulted from Trujillo’s desire to institutionalize policing mechanisms that could effectively check potential threats to his base of power. While inspectors (who drew their salaries from the party and were strongly associated with it) were entrusted with surveillance, party delegates were in charge of symbolic mobilization for the regime—choreographing the party functions, civic holidays, and Trujillista rites that proliferated during the regime.56 In contrast to the traditional provincial bureaucracy, these parallel networks’ vague set of jurisdictional responsibilities may have created a structural basis for competition with traditional local authorities. Since the invisible hand of the Foro was commonly a Dominican Party spokesman, one could argue that such party functionaries used the Foro and popular gripes to brandish the power of Trujillo’s shadow bureaucracy over the civil bureaucracy.57The institutionalization of a shadow bureaucracy via the creation of the Dominican Party rearticulated the popular vision of the state. Drawing upon anthropologist Michael Herzfeld’s research on the sociology and culture of bureaucratic organizations, one could say that the traditional civil service came to be seen as the patriline, or male bloodline, of state power and the nation, while the far more amorphous, unpredictable, and dangerous party bureaucracy came to be seen as the affines of gove
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