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Law, Honor, and Impunity in Spanish America: The Debate over Dueling, 1870–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

David S. Parker
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Extract

One day in late February 1873, the comisario of section 10 in Buenos Aires arrived at the home of Jacobo Varela to investigate reports that Varela had been involved in a duel with another young man, Julio Benites. Varela's brother met the policeman at the door and reported that, lamentably, Jacobo was ill and could not see him. When asked if he knew anything about a duel, the brother replied that he most certainly did not. Yes, Jacobo was bedridden because of a sword wound, but that was an accident: he had slipped while playing with the weapon and had fallen on top of it, the blade entering his right side below the shoulder and passing through his body. The additional wounds on his hands came when he attempted to pull the sword out.

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Law and History Review , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , Summer 2001 , pp. 311 - 341
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2001

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References

1. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tribunal Criminal Serie I, B41871–1874, “Benites, Julio Y Jacobo Varela por desafío,”

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Holloway, Thomas, Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a 19th-century City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, provides an unflattering but convincing picture of police behavior in nineteenth-century Rio, where the arbitrary abuse of the poor was habitual. Other Latin American cities may have been different in degree, but not in kind.

6. Some sources in English: Frevert, Ute, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1995)Google Scholar, chap. 1; McAleer, Kevin, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin de Siècle Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 23–34Google Scholar; Nye, Robert A., Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 173–82Google Scholar; Hughes, Steven,“Men of Steel: Dueling, Honor, and Politics in Liberal Italy,” in Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, ed. Spierenburg, Pieter (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 64–81.Google Scholar Nor were these debates new ones; see also Schneider, Robert A., “Swordplay and Statemaking: Aspects of the Campaign against the Duel in Early Modern France,” in State-making and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory, ed. Bright, Charles and Harding, Susan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 265–96Google Scholar; Billacois, François, The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early Modem France, ed. and trans. Selous, Trista (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kelly, James, That Damn' d Thing Called Honour: Duelling in Ireland, 1570–1860 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), chaps. 4–6, esp. 158–67.Google Scholar

7. Burkholder, Mark, “Honor and Honors in Colonial Spanish America,” in The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America, eds. Johnson, Lyman L. and Lipsett-Rivera, Sonya (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 34.Google Scholar

8. On Cuba, see Cervantes, Agustín, Los duelos en Cuba (Havana: A. Miranda and Cía. Imprenta La Moderna, 1894), 6–9.Google Scholar On Mexico, see Escudero, Angel, El duelo en Mexico (Mexico City: Imprenta Mundial, 1936), 56–59.Google Scholar On the fatal 1866 duel in Uruguay, see Saldaña, José María Fernández, La violencia en el Uruguay del siglo XIX (Cronicas de muertes, duelos, atentados y ejecuciones) (Montevideo: Cal y Canto, 1996), 26–30Google Scholar; [Ramírez, José Pedro], La muerte de Servando F. Martínez (Montevideo: Imprenta Tipográfica a Vapor, 1866).Google Scholar A few deadly duels took place in the early nineteenth century, but they appear to have been fought with much less formality. See, for example, Menendez, Armando Braun, “Un duelo histórico: Mackenna-Carrera,” Mapocho (Santiago, Chile) 28 (1980): 29–35.Google Scholar A fatal Mexican duel in 1852 had seconds and a formal challenge, but the weapons were unorthodox, to say the least: shotguns at five paces. Escudero, El duelo en México, 55–56.

9. Cervantes, Los duelos en Cuba, esp. 118.

10. Killed in 1880 were Enrique Romero Giménez by José Paul y Angulo and Pantaleón Gómez by Lucio V. Mansilla. In 1894 Colonel Carlos Sarmiento killed Lucio Vicente Lopez, and only the last-minute intervention of Argentina's most influential men averted a duel between the leader of the ruling party, former President Carlos Pellegrini, and Leandro Alem, leader of the opposition Unión Cívica Radical. Coming but a year after the failed revolution of 1893, a Pellegrini-Alem duel might well have returned Argentina to the brink of civil war.

11. Viale, César, Jurisprudencia caballeresca argentina, 2d ed. (Buenos Aires, 1928).Google Scholar

12. “Actualidad: estadística del duelo,” El Plata (Montevideo), 14 April 1920, p. 1.

13. Viale, César, Jurisprudencia caballeresca argentina, 3d ed. (Buenos Aires, 1937), 500.Google Scholar

14. On Italy, see Hughes, “Men of Steel,” 68.

15. Normally duelists did not shun the press; however, a desire for secrecy might arise if the original offense was of an especially sensitive personal nature, or if the authorities at that particular moment were taking a hard repressive line against the duel. Just as often, duels went unreported simply because the participants were not important enough or well-enough connected to make the papers, or because the duels took place in the provinces rather than in the capital. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 184–86, assumes for France that statistics based on official sources and the press undercount by a factor of three or more, but that figure appears to be only an educated guess.

16. For examples, see the debates sparked by incidents involving Uruguayan presidents José Batlle y Ordonez and Baltasar Brum. La Democracia (Montevideo), 27 April 1906, p. 1; 28 April 1906, pp. 1–2; La Tribuna Popular (Montevideo), 16 April 1913, p. I; The Montevideo Times, 14 December 1922, p. 3; 19 December 1922, p. 3; La Tribuna Popular, 13 December 1922, p. 1.

17. Piccato, Pablo, “Politics and the Technology of Honor: Dueling in Turn-of-the-Century Mexico,” Journal of Social History 33.2 (Winter 1999): 331–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the resurgence of dueling in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Nye, Robert, “Fencing, the Duel and Republican Manhood in the Third Republic,” Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990): 366CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McAleer, Dueling, 3; and especially Hughes, “Men of Steel,” 66.

18. For Mexico City, see Escudero, El duelo en México, 39–50; Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 333. For Buenos Aires, see Cristiani, Roberto J., Reseña histórica del cuerpo de gimnasia y esgrima del ejército y su proyección en la vida nacional: Algunos aspectos de su evolución entre 1897–1960 (Buenos Aires: Servicio de Informaciones del Ejército, 1968), esp. 11–15.Google Scholar

19. See some of the biographies of immigrant Journalists in La Nación, número especial para el centenario de 1916 (Buenos Aires, 1916), 251–60, 338–43.

20. On dueling and the press in Italy, see Hughes, “Men of Steel,” esp. 68–70. On France, see Reddy, William M., The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar, chap. 5; Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 187–90. On the political press in Latin America, see Walker, Charles F., Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 6; Duncan, Tim, “La prensa política: Sud-América, 1884–1892,” in La Argentina del ochenta al centenario, ed. Ferrari, Gustavo and Gallo, Ezequiel (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1980), 761–83Google Scholar; Medina, Benjamin Fernández y, La imprenta y la prensa en el Uruguay (Montevideo: Dornaleche y Reyes, 1900), 42, 66–83.Google Scholar

21. For one of many examples, see the complaints of bias in the 1883 defamation case between José Pesce and El Bien Público of Montevideo. El Hilo Eléctrico (Montevideo), 9 October 1883, p. 2; 12 October 1883, p. 2; La Tribuna Popular (Montevideo), 12 October 1883, p. 1.

22. On the legitimacy crisis and the long struggle to forge a new legal order, see Adelman, Jeremy, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, chaps. 4, 7, 8. See also Guerra, François-Xavier, Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992)Google Scholar; and in English, Guerra, François-Xavier, “The Spanish-American Tradition of Representation and its European Roots,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26.1 (1994): esp. 4–6, 9–12, 24–29.Google Scholar

23. Hughes, “Men of Steel,” 77.

24. Freeman, Joanne, “Dueling as Politics: Reinterpreting the Burr-Hamilton Duel,” William and Mary Quarterly 53.2 (1996): 289–318CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wyatt-Brown, Bertam, “Andrew Jackson's Honor,” Journal of the Early Republic (1997): 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reddy, The Invisible Code, chap. 5.

25. “Private” duels are inevitably underrepresented in the available historical sources, precisely because they were private, sensitive, and hence concealed, unlike political duels, which almost required publicity. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 185–86, makes this point for France. Nevertheless, when Spanish Americans discussed the duel, most noted the predominance of public over private motives, and the magnitude of the disparity seems to negate the possibility that underrepresentation in the sources is a sufficient explanation. That is not to say that duels among competing suitors, for example, did not occur. See, for one, Murias, Francisco Varona, Mis duelos, 3d ed. (Havana: Imprenta de Ricardo Ripes, 1906), 107–12.Google Scholar But Varona's eight or so other duels all arose from politics, Journalism, or both.

26. República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 271, 21 May 1919, p. 55.Google Scholar

27. In 1880, for example, supporters of the editor of a satirical paper in Montevideo repeatedly charged that government cronies provoked duels in order to muzzle the free press. See El Negro Timoteo (Montevideo), 20 June 1880, pp. 212–13; 11 July 1880, pp. 217–27.

28. Years after his famous 1897 encounter with Hipólito Yrigoyen (leader of Argentina's Unión Cívica Radical), expartisan Lisandro de la Torre lamented having fought the duel, precisely because the rules of honor forced him to keep to himself the accusations that had occasioned their falling out. Gonzalez Arrili, B., Vida de Lisandro de la Torre (Buenos Aires, 1940), 79–80.Google Scholar

29. “Personal,” Diario del Plata (Montevideo), 6 November 1915, p. 3. See also “Para ella,” El Día (Montevideo), 28 May 1913, p. 6, and “Escorpion en la Cámara,” El Día, 20 May 1914, p. 5, a cartoon depicting archrival Juan Andrés Ramírez in a dress. The ideas of honor and responsibility that underpinned the culture of dueling were, not surprisingly, heavily gendered. Those who refused to duel or who found excuses not to duel were often accused of acting like women, because women also (allegedly) lacked the ability to guarantee their words on the held of honor. Women's a priori exclusion from the world of the duel in turn reinforced their exclusion from the world of public discourse, political Journalism, and politics itself, a point made in Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 343–46.

30. At present, far more work needs to be done on image making and the representation of leadership during the long and uncertain transition from military to civilian rule in nineteenth-century Latin America. At stake are complex and important issues of political legitimacy and the discursive invention of “public opinion.” For vaguely analogous debates in United States history, see Freeman, “Dueling as Politics”; Greenberg, Kenneth S., Honor and Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, esp. chaps. 1 and 3; Wyatt-Brown, “Andrew Jackson's Honor,” 1–36.

31. Wyatt-Brown, “Andrew Jackson's Honor,” 14–27, makes precisely this point for dueling in the antebellum United States. Interestingly, he draws heavily on studies of patronage in Latin America and Spain. See also Wolf, Eric R., “Kinship, Friendship and Patron-Client Relations in Complex Societies,” in The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies, ed. Banton, Michael (London: Tavistock Publications, 1966), 1–22Google Scholar; and Dealy, Glen Caudill, The Latin Americans: Spirit and Ethos (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), chaps. 4–6.Google Scholar

32. Rodríguez, Juan M., El duelo: Estudio filosóficomoral (Mexico City: Tipografía Mexicana, 1869), 5.Google Scholar The Church's formal denunciation of the duel had been unwavering for more than half a millennium, going back at least to the Council of Valencia in 1229 and strongly confirmed by the Council of Trent, which ordered the excommunication of duelists and seconds and denied ecclesiastical sepulture to those killed in duels. Borras, José, El duelo: Estudio histórico-crítico (Madrid: A de S. Martin, 1888), 23Google Scholar; Billacois, The Duel, chap. 9.

33. Fuentes, M. A. and de la Lama, M. A., Diccionario de Jurisprudencia y de legislación peruana (Lima: Imprenta del Estado, 1877), 226–27.Google Scholar On Dupin, see Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, esp. 134–35.

34. Alejandro Groizard y Gómez de la Serna, El código penal de 1870, concordado y comentado, vol. 4, 2d ed. (Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de los Sucesores de J. A. García, 1912), 681.Google Scholar

35. On informal dueling and masculine honor codes among the lower classes, see Chasteen, John Charles, “Violence for Show: Knife Dueling on a Nineteenth-Century Cattle Frontier,” in The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and Uruguay, 1750–1940, ed. Johnson, Lyman L. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 47–64.Google Scholar

36. “Dictámen de la sección 2a. del Gran Jurado Nacional,” Revista de Legislación y Jurisprudencia (Mexico City), vol. 7 (1894), 86–388.

37. See, for instance, Senator Emilio Frugoni in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Senadores, vol. 120, 5 August 1920, pp. 201–2Google Scholar; Representative Antonio de Tomaso in Argentina, Congreso Nacional, Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, 1917 vol. 4, 21 August 1917, pp. 120–21Google Scholar; Rodríguez, El duelo, 23.

38. Senator Joaquín Secco Illa in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Senadores, vol. 120, 5 August 1920, p. 193.Google Scholar See also Senator Frugoni, ibid., 191–92.

39. Senator Frugoni, ibid., 191. See also Rep. Juan B. Justo in Argentina, Congreso Nacional, Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, 1917 vol. 4, 21 August 1917, p. 126.Google Scholar On British dueling and its abolition by the mid-1800s, see Andrew, Donna T., “The Code of Honour and its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700–1850,” Social History 5 (1981): 409–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Simpson, Anthony E., “Dandelions on the Field of Honor: Dueling, the Middle Classes, and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England,” Criminal Justice History 9 (1988): 99–155.Google Scholar

40. Argued Argentine Socialist Senator Enrique del Valle Iberlucea: “A civilization based on law and Justice cannot allow blood to cleanse.” Código penal de la nación argentina, ley no. 11.179: Edición oficial (Buenos Aires: Talleres Gráficos Argentinos de L. J. Rosso y Cía, 1922), 273.Google Scholar

41. Rep. José Salgado in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 270, 9 May 1919, p. 403; Pedemonte, Emilio, Comentarios del código penal (parte especial), 2d ed. (Montevideo, 1953), 313.Google Scholar

42. Rep. Duvimioso Terra in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 270, 9 May 1919, p. 410.Google Scholar

43. Rep. Argerich in Argentina, Nacional, Congreso, Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, 1900 vol. 1, 13 July 1900, p. 285.Google Scholar See also Código penal de la nación argentina, ley no. 11.179, 184 – 85; Sánchez, Samuel F. and Panella, José, Código argentino sobre el duelo (Buenos Aires: Imp. Moreno, 1878), 12–14Google Scholar; Rep. Juan Andrés Ramírez in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 271, 28 May 1919, p. 132Google Scholar; Tovar, Antonio, Código nacional mexicano del duelo (Mexico City: Imp. Lit. y Ene. de Ireneo Paz, 1891), 13–15.Google Scholar

44. Sostenes Rocha, in prologue to Tovar, Código nacional mexicano del duelo, iv.

45. Rep. Terra in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 270, 9 May 1919, p. 410.Google Scholar Similar sentiments appear in Tovar, Código nacional mexicano del duelo, 9.

46. There are several Spanish translations of Chateauvillard, which was translated into other languages as well. See Ensayo sobre la jurisprudencia de los duelos por el Conde de Chateauvillard, traducido del francés y seguido por comentarios y preceptos adicionales a dicha obra por D. Andrés Borrego (Madrid: Juan Iglesia Sánchez, Impresor, 1890); Fors, Luis Ricardo, Arte del testigo en duelo (Buenos Aires, 1913), 57–93.Google Scholar

47. Julio Urbino y Ceballos-Escalera, Marqués de Cabriñana, Lances entre caballeros ([Barcelona?], 1900), 346, 375–76; Oreiro, Ventura, Reglas del duelo: Precedidas de un prefacio sobre el duelo en general y un bosquejo histórico del mismo (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Mendia y Martínez, 1890), esp. 85–89.Google Scholar

48. Sánchez and Panellá, Código argentino sobre el duelo, 56. Tovar, Código nacional mexicano del duelo, 31, considered smooth-barreled pistols preferable, “if available.”

49. One such example was the “florete sin botón” (foil without safety tip), prohibited in Yzquierdo, Luis Ramos, Código del duelo extractado y traducido de varios autores nacionales y extrangeros (Cienfuegos, Cuba: El Comercio, 1889), 60–61.Google Scholar

50. Ferretto, Escipión A., Código de honor: Compendio de las leyes de honor destinadas a resolver las venencias caballerescas, 6th ed. (1st ed. 1905; Buenos Aires, 1930), 65.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., 74, 79.

52. Tovar, Código nacional mexicano del duelo, 34.

53. Cabriñana, Lances entre caballeros, 13.

54. Tovar, Código nacional mexicano del duelo, iii–xii, 3–5.

55. Sánchez and Panella, Código argentino sobre el duelo, 91–107; Tovar, Código nacional mexicano del duelo, 65–69.

56. DrLuzzi, Pedro Federico Coral, Código de honor con las leyes relativas al duelo: Ajustado a la codificación penal de las Repúblicas O. del Uruguay, Argentina e ibero-americanas (Montevideo: Editorial A. Monteverde, 1950), esp. 11–18, 46–57.Google Scholar See also Levene, Horacio, Duelo: Manual de procedimiento, 3d ed. (Buenos Aires: Revista Militar, 1924), 17–22.Google Scholar

57. Ferretto, Código de honor, 88–90, 130; Levene, Duelo, 44–45.

58. Viale, Jurisprudencia caballeresca argentina, 2d ed., 422–24.

59. Escribano, Carlos, “El duelo en la legislación penal,” La Ley (Buenos Aires) 7 (1937): 18–19.Google Scholar

60. Fors, Arte del testigo en duelo, 50–55; Levene, Duelo, 54–61.

61. Boissón, Mario Ramírez, Estudio sobre el duelo: Parte jurídico penal (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1960), 90–91.Google Scholar Pedemonte, Comentarios del código penal, 322.

62. On the treatment of these issues in Argentine penal codes, see Soler, Sebastian, Derecho penal argentino, vol. 3 (Buenos Aires: Tipogràfica Editora Argentina, 1951), 182–83Google Scholar; on the Mexican codes of 1871 and 1931, see Porte-Petit, Celestino, Delitos contra la vida y la integridad corporal (Jalapa: Editorial Veracruzana, 1944), esp. 202–3Google Scholar; on the 1863 Peruvian code, see Arias, José Viterbo, Exposición concordada y comparada del código penal del Perú de 1863, vol. 3 (Lima: Imp. Torres Aguirre, 1902), 117–20.Google Scholar

63. “Dictamen de la sección 2a del gran jurado nacional,” Revista de Legislación y Jurisprudencia 7 (1894): 351–52.

64. Ibid., 355–56.

65. El General Sostenes Rocha ante el jurado popular con motivo del duelo verificado antre los señores Verástegui y Romero (Mexico City: Hospicio de Pobres, 1895), 8–34, 44–46. See also Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 335–37.

66. El General Sostenes Rocha ante el jurado, 39–40, 51.

67. Latin America was by no means unique in this regard. See Kelly, That Damn'd Thing Called Honour, 193–94.

68. Rep. Terra in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 271, 21 May 1919, p. 44; Rep. Ramirez, ibid., 28 May 1919, pp. 126–29.

69. Rep. Demaría in Argentina, Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, 1917 vol. 4, 21 August 1917, pp. 124–25.

70. Rep. Terra in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 271, 21 May 1919, pp. 44–45.

71. Rivarola, Rodolfo, Exposición y crítica del Código Penal de la Republic Argentina, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Lajoune, 1890), 76Google Scholar, cited in Gayol, Sandra, “Duelos, honores, leyes y derechos: Argentina, 1887–1923,” Anuario IEHS (Tandil, Argentina) 14 (1999): 324.Google Scholar See also Moreno, Rodolfo (hijo), El Código Penal y sus antecedentes, vol. 4 (Buenos Aires: H. A. Tomraasi, 1923), 76–81.Google Scholar

72. For a detailed study of the decriminalization debate in Uruguay, see Parker, David S., “La ley penal y las'leyes caballerescas': Hacia el duelo legal en el Uruguay, 1880–1920,” Anuario IEHS 14 (1999): 295–311.Google Scholar Some of the material that follows appears in that article.

73. República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 194, 16 May 1908, pp. 168–69.Google Scholar The quotation marks denote a pasage cited from the authors of Uruguay's 1888 penal code.

74. Rep. Ramirez, ibid., 23 May 1919, pp. 82–83.

75. El Siglo (Montevideo), 12 Feb. 1908, p. 1.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid., 5 June 1908, p. 1; 12 June 1908, p. 1.

78. Asua, Luis Jiménez de and Oneca, José Antón, Derecho penal conforme al código de 1928, vol. 2, Parte especial (Madrid: Editorial Reus, 1929), 173.Google Scholar

79. Rep. Ismael Cortinas in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 271, 9 May 1919, pp. 57–58.

80. Similar arguments had been employed in Argentina, during debate on a revised version of the 1891 Rivarola-Piñero-Matienzo penal code. See Gayol, “Duelos, honores, leyes y derechos,” 324–26; and Villanueva, Mariano Molla, El duelo: Tesis (La Plata, Argentina: Sesé, Larrañaga y Cía., 1906), 74–77.Google Scholar On the broader issue of Romanticism in Latin American legal philosophy, see Adelman, Republic of Capital, chap. 7 (esp. 167–72).

81. On the question of the criminalization/decriminalization of abortion in Uruguay, see Sapriza, Graciela, “Mentiras y silencios: El aborto en el Uruguay del novecientos,” in Historias de la vida privada en el Uruguay, vol. 2, El nacimiento de la intimidad 1870–1920, ed. Barran, José Pedro, Caetano, Gerardo, and Porzecanski, Teresa (Montevideo: Ediciones Santillana, 1996): 115–5.Google Scholar

82. Piccato goes so far as to argue (following Habermas) that the duel in Mexico was a key factor in the creation and legitimation of a “public sphere” restricted to the community of “men of honor.” Piccato, “Politics and the Technology of Honor,” 343–45. See also Gayol, “Duelos, honores, leyes y derechos,” 327–30.

83. Boissón, Estudio sobre el duelo, 94–115; Molinario, Alfredo J., Derecho penal, segundo curso: El libro II del código penal argentino (títulos I a VI) (La Plata: Talleres Gráficos de Emilio Bustos, 1943), 138 –40Google Scholar; Gómez, Eusebio, Tratado de derecho penal, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Compañía Argentina de Editores, 1939), 223–26Google Scholar; Raggi y Ageo, Armando M., Derecho penal cubano: El Código de Defensa Social, estudio teórico-práctico (Havana: Cultural, S.A., 1939), 367–68Google Scholar; Tabío, Evelio, Comentarios al Código de Defensa Social, vol. 8 (Havana: Jesús Montero, 1950), 297–99.Google Scholar Those who looked to European models noted that the Italian penal code chose to treat the duel as a crime against the administration of justice.

84. Molinario, Derecho penal, 138.

85. Gómez, Tratado de derecho penal, vol. 2, 225.

86. Jiménez de Asúa and Oneca, Derecho penal, 174.

87. Ibid., 173–74.

88. Rep. Salgado in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 270, 9 May 1919, pp. 398–100.Google Scholar

89. El Pueblo (Paysandu, Uruguay), 3 June 1908, p. 8; La Tribuna Popular(Montevideo), 27 June 1908, p. 2; El Paysandu, 15 June 1908, p. 2; 19 June 1908, p. 2. The 19 June editorial, reprinted from L'Italia al Plata (Montevideo), explicitly contrasts the dilatory prosecution of the Gomeza duel with the unfair detention of one of the seconds in yet another first-blood saber duel in Montevideo that very same month.

90. La Tribuna Popular (Montevideo), 18 May 1908, p. 6.

91. El Sigh (Montevideo), 21 May 1908, p. 1.

92. República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 271, 21 May 1919, p. 55.Google Scholar

93. On honor courts in the Prussian and later German armies, see MacAleer, Dueling, 86–107; Frevert, Men of Honour, 53–68.

94. Barnuevo, José Maria, “El duelo ante la razón y la ley,” Revista General de Legislación y Jurisprudencia (Madrid) 110 (1907): 772–73.Google Scholar

95. El Siglo(Montevideo), 25 June 1908, p. 1.

96. Compare the 1908 and 1919 versions of the bill with the final text of the law passed in 1920. República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 194, 16 May 1908, p. 167Google Scholar; ibid., vol. 270, 9 May 1919, p. 390; República Oriental del Uruguay, 1920 Registro nacional de leyes, decretos y otros documentos: publicación oficial (Montevideo: Imprenta Nacional, 1921), 597–98.Google Scholar

97. See, for example, Rep. Ghioldi in República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 283, 4–5 August 1920, pp. 196–97. In the short run, the result of the reform does appear to have been a decrease in the percentage of “gentlemanly conflicts” that made it to “field of honor,” but the benefit was offset by an increase in the overall number of such conflicts.

98. Mexico (Federal District), Laws, Statutes, etc. Código penal para el distrito y territorios federales (Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1929), 231–37.Google Scholar

99. Moreno, Código penal y sus antecedentes, vol. 2, 76–101, covers the legislative his tory and debate in great detail. Also Gayol, “Duelos, honores, leyes y derechos,” 324–30.

100. Porte-Petit, Delitos contra la vida y la integridad corporal, 204. More precisely, the 1931 Penal Code ceased to name dueling as a specific crime, so homicide in a duel became actual homicide, with attenuating circumstances.

101. In Uruguay, for example, the contrast is startling. One or two pages were devoted to sports in the 1910s or early 1920s, while four, six, or even more were standard by the early 1930s.

102. Pablo O'Brien, “Los duelos en el Perú: Cuestión de honor,” Somos [Saturday supplement to El Comercio], December 1996; Varangot, Carlos Jorge, Virtudes caballerescas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones P.S. Carra, 1972), 176–77Google Scholar; Rodriguez, Roger, “Cuestión de honor,” Posdata (Montevideo), 19 September 1997, pp. 24–25.Google Scholar The repeal of legalized dueling in Uruguay had to overcome serious opposition, even in 1992. See República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de Senadores, vol. 349, 16 June 1992, pp. 199–222Google Scholar; 1 July 1992, pp. 272–80. As recently as 1999, former President Julio Maria Sanguinetti lamented the repeal, arguing that it had removed an effective deterrent against irresponsible political discourse. See El País (Montevideo), 28 Feb. 1999, p. 19.

103. See the uproarious parody of Cabriñana's dueling code, published in Peru: Sofocleto [pseud.], El código de honor del Marqués de Cabriñana: Edición corregida, aumentada y deformada (Lima: Editorial Arica, 1970).

104. For example:“Qué tiempos aquellos….,” El Sol (Lima), 16 July 1996.