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Abstract
This dissertation explains why Mexico eliminated the death penalty in the first half of the twentieth century, and what it can teach us about the relationship between the state and different publics. The introduction shows how a series of spectacular murders and assassinations helped to provoke the elimination of the death penalty in 1929. Chapter II examines capital punishment in nineteenth-century Mexico, emphasizing civil conflict and the rise of death as a national symbol. Chapter III argues that the Revolution (1910--1920) reproduced the nineteenth-century saga in condensed form and with a powerful new imagescape. Chapter IV examines how images of executions became a mass-mediated "black legend" of revolutionary Mexico. Chapter V probes the efforts of the 1917 Constitutional Congress to control this imagescape by retaining the death penalty. Chapter VI presents the only major death penalty trial to take place under the new Constitution, that of Felipe Ángeles, suggesting that the politics of sacrifice it displayed doomed both the Carranza government and future support for the death penalty among state-builders.
The second half of this study traces the development of a new pact between the state and civil society through the dialogue between spectacular crime stories and the attempts to reinstate the death penalty that they provoked. Chapter VII shows how the "sex strangler," Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández, ignited a fierce debate over capital punishment in congress and the press in 1942. Chapter VIII explains how legislators preserved the proscription of capital punishment without losing the public convened by crime stories. Chapter IX recounts the institutional odyssey of Gregorio Cárdenas in La Castañeda mental hospital (1943--1948), and Lecumberri prison (1948--1976), as an alternative to capital punishment. Chapter X addresses President Manuel Ávila Camacho's (1940--1946) death penalty policies, showing how he mediated between competing publics by alternately opposing reinstatement, authoring emergency death penalty decrees, and issuing presidential pardons. Chapter XI discusses his manipulation of a series of assassination attempts and other serious crimes, exploring why he pardoned some and condemned others.