Ciudadanos armados de ley studies the formation of Bolivia as an independent nation in the decades that followed independence. This period has received little attention in the Bolivian historiography and, thus, it continues to be a fertile area for research. Marta Irurozqui studies political conflicts in the country between 1839 and 1875, yet she resists labelling the complex political history of this period as caudillismo, a category in Latin American historiography with negative connotations. Instead, she underscores how important it is to study the specific character of political violence and the ubiquitous presence of armed citizens in the context of the nineteenth century. By doing this, Irurozqui not only questions the implicit connection between nineteenth-century military interventions and twentieth-century dictatorship; she also challenges the assumption that Bolivia is a naturally bellicose country led by unscrupulous and greedy generals.
In the same vein as James Sanders's The Vanguard of the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2014), Irurozqui highlights the novelty of the republican experiment. Caudillos emerged in Bolivia, as was the case in the rest of Latin America, from a power vacuum caused by the downfall of previous political institutions. She reminds her readers that this was also a period when the army did not have the monopoly of violence, when citizens and non-citizens understood patriotism as being ready to bear arms in order to participate in public affairs; and when violence was not only an act, but also a powerful argument to delegitimise the claims and demands of the opponent.
Each of the four chapters studies one episode of political violence that, according to Irurozqui, reshaped Bolivian political institutions, redefined the inclusion and exclusion of social actors in politics, and involved a political mobilisation from below. Chapter 1 studies the political conflict that arose at the end of the Peru–Bolivia Confederation (1836–9). According to Irurozqui, José Ballivian's revolt against President Andrés de Santa Cruz (1839–42) was not only a military coup but also the expression of a popular demand that called for the consolidation of Bolivia as an independent political project from Peru or Argentina. Irurozqui highlights how potent the language of freedom against tyranny continued to be even a decade after independence. According to Irurozqui, Santa Cruz's attempts to impose political order and his personal heritage as the son of a Spaniard and an Indian cacique resonated among the rebels like echoes from the colonial past. The author also notes that in these critical years Bolivian elites passed new laws to consolidate the separation of the three powers. For instance, one of these laws created by the Bolivian Congress prohibited members from holding positions in the executive or judicial branch.
Chapter 2 focuses on the 1861 Yáñez massacre. This conflict forced political elites to transition from conceptualising the state as the expression of a unanimous political voice to establishing a political system that represented the different interests of society. Irurozqui highlights the prominent role that popular urban sectors, mainly artisans (pejoratively called cholos), had in this crisis. Irurozqui reminds us that the nineteenth-century historian Gabriel René Moreno had already exposed the role of the cholos in the Yáñez massacre. For him these brutal events exposed society's unleashed base instincts. While René Moreno did not explain the causes behind the massacre, Irurozqui argues that it had deep economic causes; it was driven by the anger of the artisans who felt unable to compete with the foreign manufactures then entering the country. The artisans’ political mobilisation was also a cry for a more inclusive democracy. In the mid-nineteenth century, ethnic distinctions between gentlemen (caballeros) and the working class (cholos) remained latent. The cholos’ participation in this uprising was an attempt to challenge those distinctions and to assert the democratic principles the republic guaranteed to them.
Chapter 3 studies the revolts against President Mariano Melgarejo in 1870, which encompassed massive indigenous mobilisation in the countryside against privatisation of communal lands. Irurozqui argues that to rise up in arms was not uncommon. As she shows throughout the book, it was part of the way in which people viewed politics – in other words, part of the way Bolivians understood citizenship and patriotism. The revolt had a positive effect on the elites’ political imagination as it resonated with Indian participation in the guerrilla warfare before independence. It involved the collaboration between Indians and vecinos (mixed-race town people living in the countryside), something that was not unusual in the politics of the 1870s. Finally, it gave the Indian population the hope that they would regain the position they had held in the colonial period as property owners and productive members of society.
Chapter 4 focuses on the low-ranking soldiers’ riots between 1872 and 1875. Irurozqui argues that in these years a deep transition took place, as political violence stopped being seen as patriotic and revolutionary and became instead an act of sedition that put the government in danger. She highlights how this transition had profound political effects, particularly for the indigenous population. During the Federal War of 1899, political elites interpreted Indian political revolt very differently from the way they viewed the revolts of 1870. While those revolts seemed to give Indian groups the possibility of entering into the country's national political imagination, 1899 marked the beginning of their marginalisation, seen by the political elites as justified by the brutality and carnage of the indigenous revolt. This book makes a key contribution to Bolivian scholarship. Irurozqui's detailed analysis of the nascent republic, which offers rich descriptions of events, battles and geographies, requires the reader to have some previous knowledge of Bolivian history to fully grasp its value.
