Communist Honor in 1920s Uruguay: or When Shooting a Congressman is Acceptable Behavior

David S. Parker Dapartment of History Queen=s University Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6 CANADA

Prepared for Delivery at the 2003 Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association

Dallas, Texas, March 27-29, 2003.

Panel HIS044: Honor and Political History in the Modern Period

Draft: Please consult the author before citing. parkerd@post.queensu.ca

Juan Cat, gerente of ALa Comercial,@ Montevideo=s electric tramway

company, waited on the sidewalk outside the old Cabildo (at that time the home of Parliament), accompanied by his son and nephew, hand in his coat pocket tightly clutching a revolver. It was the afternoon of March 15, 1923. He was waiting for Celestino Mibelli, Communist deputy, editor of Justicia, the man who had destroyed his family=s reputation. Upon catching sight of Mibelli entering the building, Cat followed, intercepted his adversary in the vestibule, pulled out the gun and opened fire. Mibelli threw himself to the floor, reached for his own weapon and fired back. Luckily, Cat was not a particularly good shot; only one bullet hit Mibelli, causing a serious but not life-threatening injury. Mibelli, for his part, grazed Cat in the leg. As a crowd of several hundred people gathered, Cat fled to the Club Uruguay, where (according to some reports) he was greeted with congratulations. He then turned his gun over to the police and was taken to his doctor=s office to look after what turned out to be a rather minor injury. Back in the Cabildo, police disarmed Mibelli and accompanied the ambulance to the Hospital Maciel, where his wounds were treated and he was placed under house arrest.

When the news hit the papers it was the talk of Montevideo; many declared that an event like this had been in the cards for some time. Over the past month Mibelli had been publishing in the pages of Justicia a series of exposés entitled ALas machonas en Montevideo,@ inspired by the scandalous (some said pornographic) French bestseller La garçonne. When Justicia started running Victor Margheritte=s novella in installments, Mibelli (or one of his writers) had explicitly declared his intent to Ashow readers the customs of the bourgeois world, apparently clean but in reality filthy.@ Soon afterwards he went one better, offering genuine stories about the moral and sexual dissipation of the local elite. AThe aristocracy,@ wrote Justicia:

has always artfully veiled its repugnant vices, and has known how to present itself before the gullible eyes of the multitude with grave tone and severe gesture, ....in order that people would believe in their austerity and unstained rectitude. ...But vice exists, and with it, the depravation of customs among certain aristocratic circles of the most shining and exalted. By disposition and by totally imitative idiosyncrasy, the vices that corrode old European society have also begun to take root in our midst. Now it=s not only Acocaine,@ ether, morphine, and opium dens that in the grey afternoons morbidly console the lethal tedium of our Adistinguished.@ Other perverted enjoyments, other inconfessable pleasures call imperiously to [their] senses, bereft of ideals and lacking even one healthy diversion. ...Details? We are in a position to give them in quantity. And we could provide lots of names, too, without fear of being proven wrong.

The stories, some of them ostensibly uncovered with the cooperation of

hotel personnel, others open secrets widely whispered around town, mostly involved drunkenness, semipublic nudity, and single or group sex with partners other than their spouses. Although proper names were not provided, enough hints were given that the identities of the individuals were easy to guess. For example:

One [of the three women] has three surnames: one of a now-deceased Argentine President that begins with Q and the other two, whose initials are R. and L., that correspond to distinguished politicians of our country. Another is a relative of an ex-intendente of Buenos Aires, whose surname begins with A., known as Athe little marquesa...@

In addition to his front-page exposés of the wild Carnival parties of the rich, Mibelli opened his paper to other kinds of charges as well, from the trivial to the serious. On the trivial side, Justicia publicized a taxi driver=s claim that he had been stiffed for a fare to the elegant Parque Hotel casino. The name of the offender did not appear in the paper, but his home address did. On the more serious side, the paper took up the cause of two domestic servants, one an 11-year-old girl who had allegedly been raped by her employer=s brother-in-law. The other servant, also young, charged that she had been beaten by her employer=s son after refusing to have sex with him, and when she reported the case to the police, she was allegedly treated like the criminal, and told that she should have obeyed the young man. In both of these cases Justicia named names.

As was to be expected (and as Mibelli gleefully anticipated), Montevideo society was scandalized by this campaign, and a number of papers vehemently criticized him and his paper. Dr. Alejandro Gallinal fulminated in the Senate against the diffusion of Margheritte=s novella in the pages of Justicia, and asked for a new law to combat pornography. El Diario del Plata called Justicia=s articles

an excess without precedents, that goes beyond all bounds, with no consideration for the most respectable sentiments. On occasion an extravío like this has occurred, but always in the heat of [political] battle, against those directly involved, and even then it has been universally condemned. Here this is not what is going on. The aggression wounds personas intachables, who are completely foreign to the din of battle, and for whom there is no antecedent whatsoever to explain, let alone justify, the aggression.

Mibelli, of course, welcomed the furor, because it served to illustrate precisely the two points he was trying to drive home: first, that the aristocracy were two-faced hypocrites, puritanical in public but libertine in private, and second, that the mainstream press lived by a double standard, filling the police page with scandalized accounts of the transgressions of the poor, while at the same time, in the name of honor and privacy, hushing up the indiscretions of the rich.

The rich press bombards us daily with moralistic sermons, designed to cover up the degrading scenes of the golden canalla. Corruption is only criticized in the poor, in the workers. He who gets drunk on cane liquor is perverted; but he who gets tipsy on champagne is a Agay@ young man or a Aliberal@ young lady. ...Money closes all mouths, and the bourgeois dailies, so concerned about public morality, so >indiscrete= when writing about a victim of hunger, [in this case] are not scandalized, but guard the silence of the tomb....

The scandal also did not hurt Justicia=s sales. Mibelli described the frenzy caused by the paper=s appearance at the Carrasco beach and casino, and revelled in the delicious irony of a Communist newspaper being snatched up greedily by Montevideo=s high society, most hoping to read the latest juicy gossip (although one person allegedly bought 100-plus copies in order to remove them from circulation!) Mibelli even seemed to relish the hatred he was inciting. He described receiving a pale pink, perfumed envelope with the following note carefully written in a feminine hand:

Señores of La Justicia, If you continue publishing these ugly things about the aristocracy, you are a bunch of cowards. Because nobody has the right to stick his nose in others= business, and if you keep doing it, it is possible that it might cost more than one of you your life.

Five days later, Mibelli lay in a hospital bed with a gunshot wound, and he remained under arrest. His attacker Cat, whose daughter had been involved in one of Justicia=s recent exposés, was also under house arrest at the office of his physician. As the case began to work itself through the criminal justice system, all of Montevideo had their opinion as to which man was at fault and which should be punished.

ABourgeois@ Justice and Legal Fiction-Writing: Cat=s Innocence, Mibelli=s Guilt

Mibelli described the ensuing legal process as a predictable example of Abourgeois justice.@ The initial police report, to begin with, described an exchange of gunfire, leaving the impression that it was impossible to know who had shot first, notwithstanding the dozens of eyewitnesses who all agreed that Cat had fired several shots before Mibelli was able to reach for his revolver. While Mibelli was immediately detained, Cat had been allowed to leave the scene of the crime without any resistance from the authorities. Although Cat and Mibelli were both under house arrest, Cat was reportedly allowed to see all kinds of visitors, while Mibelli was only permitted a visit by his mother. And in the immediate aftermath of the attack, the fiscales del crimen immediately met, not to discuss the prosecution of the attacker Cat, but to pursue the possibility of shutting down Justicia and preventing the publication of any further inflammatory articles. What Justicia called the Acapitalist press@ equally seemed to place the blame on the victim. Some papers contended that Cat was entirely justified; others took the position that the attack, while perhaps a bit misguided, was understandable just the same. All agreed that the AMachonas de Montevideo@ articles had exceeded all bounds of responsible journalism, and more interestingly, they also all agreed that neither Cat nor Justicia=s other subjects had any real recourse other than violence, because the legal remedies against slander and defamation were so inadequate. To this point we will return later.

Because Mibelli, like all Deputies, enjoyed immunity from prosecution, the Minister of Interior was constitutionally required to communicate the fact of his arrest infraganti delicto, in order that the House might decide whether or not to expel him and deprive him of his parliamentary privileges. The Cámara=s Legislation Commission held an emergency meeting to formulate their report, and a deep division became immediately evident. The Colorado majority, led by Domingo Arena, concluded that Mibelli should be released from police custody while investigations were ongoing, and argued that the House could reconsider Mibelli=s desafuero if, after the investigation was complete, the authorities continued to insist on prosecuting him. It appears that the Colorados= hope was that the whole thing would eventually just go away. The Blanco minority, led by Eduardo Rodríguez Larreta, wanted an immediate vote on Mibelli=s expulsion. Although a good deal of the debate was cloaked in the discussion of process and legal precedent, Rodríguez Larreta made clear all the same his belief in Mibelli=s fundamental guilt, even if Cat was the one who had fired first (an issue the Deputy did not bother to dispute). His logic is worth repeating:

It is evident that Deputy Mibelli has been the one who provoked events. No one can deny that Mr. Cat never would have come to the atrium of the Cabildo with a revolver in his hand had it not been for the systematic campaign by the daily of which Deputy Mibelli is director. Thus he [Mibelli] is not free of guilt. And indeed, for legitimate self-defense to

exist, three conditions are necessary: that the aggression that is being defended against be an illegitimate aggression; that the means employed in self-defense be rational; and that there not be provocation on the part of the one who defends himself.

If the first of these conditions is, at least, in doubt; if people can reasonably disagree as to whether Cat=s aggression was legitimate or illegitimate-- for my part I am inclined to believe that it is legitimate and I believe that all men of honor [Atodos los hombres de corazón bien puesto@] think as I do-- in regards to the third condition there is no doubt at all: I believe that there existed an initial provocation that was sufficiently grave on the part of Deputy Mibelli. Thus, it cannot be argued that he acted in legitimate self-defense.

Cat, in contrast, could credibly invoke self-defense, according to Rodríguez Larreta:

Another legal scholar... emphasizes that legitimate self-defense exists not only in defense of one=s person, but also in defense of the rights of the individual, and among those rights the first he cites is honor. Mr. Cat acted in defense of his honor, so he, [unlike Mibelli], can say that he acted in legitimate self-defense.

By this logic, then, the only one who could claim self-defense was the man who had armed himself, who had deliberately sought out his antagonist, who had pulled out a gun without warning, and who had shot repeatedly at a man lying on the floor. Small wonder that Mibelli saw Abourgeois justice@ at work.

Rodríguez Larreta=s rather extreme views on legitimate self-defense did not decide the two legal cases, but they just as well might have. On the one hand, Arena=s majority opinion prevailed in the House of Deputies and Mibelli was neither stripped of his parliamentary immunity nor was he tried for his actions on the 15th of March. Presumably cooler heads realized that prosecution of the victim of an attempted assassination might be construed as a miscarriage of justice, a point further driven home when Alfredo Villegas Márquez, another target of Justicia=s public morality campaign, marched into the Hospital Maciel on the afternoon of March 21 and tried to complete Cat=s unfinished work. This brazen, premeditated, and cowardly assault on a bedridden hospital patient-- frustrated by the alert intervention of one or more individuals who noticed Villegas Márquez=s nervous demeanor and alerted the policeman on duty-- seemed a case of tragedy trying to repeat itself as farce.

But on the other hand, the authorities showed no interest in prosecuting Cat, either. Less than a week after the incident, the streetcar magnate regained his freedom. The release order from Judge Del Castillo was a finely-crafted work of pure fiction, that exaggerated the confusion in the original police report in order to arrive at

conclusions not too different from Rodríguez Larreta=s. The ruling is worth reproducing at some length:

Resultando, ...que el periódico Justicia se ha venido sindicando de un tiempo a esta parte, por una persistente propaganda, en la que se ponen de relieve vicios que atribuye a parte de nuestra sociedad.

Que esta propaganda, comentado en los tonos más diversos y opuestos, conforme con la mentalidad impresionable, multiforme y cambiante de las multitudes, rebasó los límites de lo tolerable, al poner en la picota del escándalo, a determinada joven, ofendiendo profundamente a un hogar respetable, y con ello, a todo el pueblo honesto sin distinción de clase alguna.

Resultando: ...que por tanto, debe tenersela en cuenta a efecto de poder apreciar la responsabilidad del procesado Juan Cat, quien, por ser padre de la joven aludida, se consideró profundamente agraviado, a causa de aquella propaganda,

Resultando: Que el prevenido, en tal estado de espíritu, armado de un revólver, salió a la calle en busca de su presunto agraviante, se encontró con él, éste se hallaba igualmente armado y luego, tras un cambio de palabras, ambos dispararon sus respectivas armas, quedando los dos heridos.... surge las hipótesis siguientes:

Primera, El procesado pudo haber procedido en uso de legítima defensa.

La intención que llevó a Cat, a entrevistarse con su adversario, no puede precisarse en su misteriosa elaboración, como una idea persistente de quitarle la vida; y siendo así, hay que desechar las hipótesis de la tentativa o del delito de homicidio frustrado, por falta...de...una decidida voluntad de matar.

Es cierto que el sentimiento de honor del ofendido, la profundidad del agravio; la voz pública, señalando al presunto agraviante, como adversario al duelo y partidario más bien de los encuentros de improviso, hacen suponer, que el procesado llevara la intención de matar, cuando se acercó al adversario; pero esa intención en un espíritu agitado por causas fundamentales, que le impiden controlar las pasiones, puede haber variado, en más de un momento, ese hombre, que es un padre de familia; un esposo; que comprende el alcance de las responsabilidades legales; ha pensado tal vez, que no debía llevar el dolo a su familia; y que una explicación de su presunto agraviante, habría bastado para reparar la ofensa.

Esa explicación, pudo haber tenido lugar si factores extraños a la voluntad de los contendores, no hubieran intervenido.

Mibelli, al enfrentarse con Cat, ha de haberle notado la faz demudada y agitado el porte, y sabiéndolo un enemigo y enemigo fuerte, ha tenido natural instinto de conservación, que ponerse en actitud de defensa, e impedir así,

involuntariamente quizá, que se produjeron las explicaciones aludidas. En la rapidez con que se desarrollan de ordinario estas escenas, Cat, creyendo que la actitud de Mibelli fuera de ataque, lo que no es de extreñar; pues siempre el que se defiende, ofrece una apariencia agresiva; ha pensado, que su vida se hallaba en peligro; y de ahí su reacción también, de defensa....

Se resuelve, decretar la excarcelación de Juan Cat, bajo fianza....

Justicia ridiculed Judge Del Castillo=s fallo from beginning to

end, and even brought in a legal analyst to point out all its errors of fact, logical inconsistencies, and willful misinterpretations of the Uruguayan Criminal Code. The paper compared the ruling to past cases argued by the judge and by fiscal Pérez Maggiolo, when apparently similar confrontations led to convictions and stiff prison sentences, based on quite different interpretations of statute. Mibelli=s point, repeated day in and day out, was that this was all a predictable product of bourgeois justice, of a legal system that mobilized the full force of the law against workers and the poor while shamelessly coddling criminals of wealth and connections. As much as Mibelli had a point, the decision not to prosecute Cat and the logic that runs through Judge Del Castillo=s ruling reveal more about Uruguayan society than the mere existence of class privilege and inequality before the law. The remainder of this paper will attempt to contextualize this extraordinary anecdote, in order to understand why Mibelli=s actions so enraged the political class, to the point that most of them appear to have concluded that the author of an assassination attempt perpetrated in the very halls of Parliament in front of numerous eyewitnesses had no need to face trial. Cat=s impunity cannot be understood without reference to Uruguayan conceptions of honor, to the importance of the gentlemanly honor code as a regulator of political discourse, and to the severity of Mibelli=s challenge to the unwritten rules of journalism and public life in the Oriental Republic. It is to these issues that we now turn. Honor/Virtue, Appearance/Reality: Mibelli=s Critique of Honor Ideology

Eduardo Rodríguez Larreta, as we have seen, viewed Mibelli=s journalistic campaign as a violent provocation, and Cat=s armed attack as a justified response, an act of Aself-defense.@ The implication, in effect, was that defense of family honor was no different from the defense of life itself. And although not everyone agreed that Cat=s actions were entirely justified, no one found them either surprising or indefensible. El Día, a paper that was no friend of Cat=s, wrote:

In all social classes, an attack against the family, when it impugns the sexual honor...of the woman, generally ends up causing an armed confrontation between men. There is nothing that incites violent passions more than the hostile intromission of an outsider into intimate affairs of family.

For this one does not have to be a bourgeois, it suffices to be a man. The recent campaign in the Communist paper was inevitably going to incite an excessive reaction. Without a doubt, no attempt against the life of another is ever justified; but it seems almost natural, when the offense deals with matters that cannot easily be talked about, that a violent aggression on the part of the offended party would occur.

Diario del Plata measured its words even less, calling Mibelli=s stories not just Aan offense@ but Aan agression.@ And despite the government=s ultimate reluctance to shut Justicia down completely, fiscal Pérez Maggiolo and judge Del Castillo were not alone in viewing Mibelli=s campaign to chronicle the excesses of the rich as a case of defamation if ever they had seen one.

Interestingly, however, the Aoffense@ or Aaggression@ that transformed a premeditated assassination attempt into an exonerable case of Aself-defense@ strikes our modern, jaded eyes as surprisingly mild. Compared to some of the stories in Justicia, the piece on Cat=s daughter had not presented her in a particularly unfavorable light. What the story did was repeat a piece of gossip that had been floating around for several days about a scandal that occurred in a hotel ballroom when a rich older woman, allegedly an ex-lover of the girl=s fiancé, confronted him at a dance and supposedly told him: AIf you marry her, I=ll shoot you.@ The article, which described the boyfriend as a notorious womanizer who was primarily after Cat=s fortune, portrayed the daughter in the role of innocent, naïve victim. On the one hand, Cat could not have enjoyed reading the following words about his little girl: AShe, an exquisite little doll, is a new and tasty morsel for the young hunter of succulent prey....@ But on the other hand, nobody challenged the veracity of the account, and it was hard to make a case that it in any way defamed either Cat or his daughter.

So how do we, used to a daily diet of tabloids and celebrity gossip shows on T.V., explain the violence of Cat=s response and the overwhelming outpouring of opinion in his favor? Two answers come to mind. First of all, the fact that most of the Justicia articles involved much bigger scandals, often painting the protagonists as depraved, sex-crazed libertines, probably led many to ignore the fact that the revelations about Cat and his daughter were not of the same order. But the second reason for the solidarity with Cat surely lay in the widespread belief that Mibelli, in publishing a story about the romantic life of Cat=s young daughter, had crossed an uncrossable line between public and private, between the rough-and-tumble world of public, political journalism, where insult and diatribe were permitted, and the sacrosanct intimacy of the home, where women and children were off-limits to public scrutiny and family honor was never to be questioned. This line between public and private, moreover, was explicitly protected in Uruguayan press law. According to Article 407 of the 1879 Código de Instrucción Criminal, an abuse of the press against an individual has occurred Awhen family secrets are revealed or facts are presented that diminish [a family=s] honorability, so long as

[those facts or secrets] are of no public relevance.@ Note that the law in no way required the imputations to be deliberate fabrications, or even that they be untrue; it only required that they deal with private matters Aque no interesen el órden público.@ Indeed, by law, truth was not permitted as a defense.

Mibelli of course knew the line he had crossed, and almost certainly appreciated the legal implications of having crossed that line. He also had a crystal-clear understanding of what he was doing and why. His campaign was deliberate, premeditated, and well-thought-out; his intention was precisely to illustrate the hypocrisy embedded in reigning elite conceptions of honor. On numerous occasions Mibelli used the pages of Justicia to explain and justify the AMachonas@ series. First, he pointed out that without exception, the stories related events that had occurred in public places and had been witnessed by others. These were incidents that had taken place not in the sanctum sanctorum of private homes, but in hotels, clubs, ballrooms, cafés, casinos, even on public beaches. As such, these were certainly not Afamily secrets@ or anything of the sort. Second, he pointed out that Montevideo=s elites seemed to have no qualms about publicizing details of their private lives in the so-called Asociety pages,@ where, according to Mibelli:

we find news items more or less like these: AYesterday young man so-and-so made his first official visit to Señorita such-and-such.@ AIn the greatest intimacy the interesting Señorita so-and-so celebrated her engagement to the young Doctor such-and-such.@ A...Mr N. M. has just departed for Buenos Aires.@ ACelebrating her birthday yesterday in the home of the Señorita so-and-so were the following persons: ....@ AThe bride wore an elegant chiffon dress, etc., etc.@ AAmong those in attendance we noted the presence of the following persons: So-and-so, dressed in silk..., diamond necklace and emerald rings.@ ...Is this or is this not private life?

Third, Mibelli denounced the fact that no one cared about the honor of the poor when details of their private lives were splattered all over the police pages of the very same newspapers that were now so protective of people=s right to privacy. El Sol, Montevideo=s Socialist paper (and no friend of the ex-Socialist Mibelli), put it this way:

[W]e do not recognize the bourgeois press=s right to get indignant over [Mibelli=s] campaign, assuming the attitude... of the guardians of morality. They are in no position to blame another for exploiting for profit the hunger that a certain public has for titillating Asocial@ gossip and slanderous tales... seasoned with pornography, [when these same] newspapers rely on the police pages as one of their most important sources of revenue, serving up to their readers... descriptions that lack for nothing: not the intense red tint of the most shocking details, nor the taste of obscenity, nor the dirty investigation of scandal, nor the revelation of the

filthiest intimate facts or the most sickening antecedents of the case. Everything is brought out into the open, and generally highlighted by indiscrete and eye-catching photographs. Nothing is respected.

But most important of all, Mibelli denounced bourgeois Ahonor@ as a

hypocritical preoccupation with appearance over reality. Time and time again Mibelli pointed out that no one disputed the truth or precision of his allegations. Indeed, he noted that papers such as El Día described the AMachonas@ stories as tired gossip that everybody already knew. This being the case, Justicia=s only sin was to dignify in print truths that people already talked about but only behind closed doors. In other words, Mibelli argued, while Senators and the mainstream press denounced Justicia for corrupting the morals of society by publishing a Apornographic@ French novella in installments, the sons and daughters of that same elite were already living the corrupt life depicted in La Garconne, everybody knew it, and everybody hushed it up. While those same Senators and newspapers denounced Mibelli for dragging the names of supposedly Ainnocent@ families through the mud, it was the behavior itself that rightly deserved censure. An article from La Internacional of Buenos Aires, reprinted in Justicia, described the double standard especially well:

It is not the degeneration of its favorite sons that appalls bourgeois morality. It is something else: the publicity.... Bourgeois morality cannot tolerate, at any price, that its scandals become known. The commission of the most condemnable act is permissible-- it can even be a mark of distinction, of gentlemanliness, of style-- but public revelation [of such acts] is the object of the most absolute condemnation.

Bourgeois morality takes care to ensure not that immorality does not exist, but that it is never voiced aloud....

To drive this message home, Mibelli reprinted the society page of Diario del Plata, the paper of Juan Andrés Ramírez, one of Deputies who most actively advocated his expulsion from the House. Right in the middle of a story describing an elegant party in the Parque Hotel, Diario del Plata had placed a two-inch, two-column advertisement for the AGran Hotel du Paradis,@ according to Mibelli a well-known, high-priced Acasa de citas,@ the kind of place where a man could discretely take a woman who was not his wife. If any slow readers might have missed the point, Mibelli was even more explicit a couple of days later:

These facts should serve to demonstrate how indecent the press of the rich is, and how it propagates, without any scruples, not only vices as repugnant as alcohol and gambling, but prostitution as well. And this is the press that dares to talk about morality?

Scholars of the idea of honor in Mediterranean and other western

societies have long identified the tension between two very different conceptions: honor as inner virtue and integrity, versus honor as public reputation and esteem. It has, I think, generally been assumed that one aspect of the West=s long march toward modernity was the gradual abandonment of the latter in favor of the former. Such a perspective violently oversimplifies, but Mibelli=s campaign is hard to interpret in any other way. Denouncing an elite obsessed with honor-as-reputation but devoid of genuine concern for honor-as-virtue, Mibelli painted himself as the lone voice of truth in a nation of hypocrites. In this way he was able to convince himself that publishing scandalous tidbits about Montevideo=s high society in order to sell his newspaper was both a blow against class privilege and a profound act of moral instruction. In the end, Celestino Mibelli succeeded in earning general repudiation, the hostility of the authorities, a gunshot wound, and a fair amount of publicity. But the point that needs to be made is that the intense hostility Mibelli inspired, a hostility that translated into widespread sympathy for the assassin Cat, cannot be dismissed as mere class justice or defense of privilege. Mibelli=s aggressive repudiation of reigning honor ideology did in fact pose a direct and significant challenge to deeply-held values. Dueling, AIrresponsibility,@ and Mibelli=s Disregard for the Norms of Public Life

Mibelli=s repudiation of dominant elite conceptions of honor was a provocation in and of itself. But in some ways, his even greater provocation lay in openly rejecting the gentlemanly honor codes that effectively governed public discourse. More specifically, Mibelli=s unwillingness to duel, and hence his open refusal to adhere to Agentlemanly@ protocol in the settling of disputes of honor, lies at the heart of the reason why most Uruguayan elites, judge Del Castillo included, believed that Cat had little choice but to confront Mibelli in the way he did. To explain this crucial but complicated point, we need to take a broader historical look at dueling, the press, and the idea of Aresponsibility@ in Uruguay.

By Latin American standards (indeed, even by European standards), Uruguay=s press laws were liberal ones: the first national legislation, approved in June 1829, set the principle of free expression without prior censorship. The 1830 Constitution confirmed press freedom as a fundamental right. According to the text of article 141:

The communication of thought, by means of the spoken word, private writings or published in any type of press, is entirely free, with no need for prior censorship; the author or publisher takes responsibility for any abuses that might be committed, in accordance with the law.

At the same time, as the Constitutional text makes clear, newspapers could be held accountable, after publication, for any excesses that they might have committed. So at the very moment that freedom of the press

was enshrined as a right, also enshrined was the idea of responsibility, that the author, publisher, or owner of a newspaper could be held criminally liable for slanderous or inflammatory language.

This constitutionally-mandated idea of responsibility was normal. Libel laws throughout the world place limits on freedom of the press. The problem for Uruguayans was the widespread perception-- surely based to some degree in reality-- that their slander and defamation laws were deficient and the institutional mechanisms to prosecute libel were ineffective. Diario del Plata, referring to the Mibelli articles, explained the problem in the following terms:

It is evident that either the offended individuals or the Fiscales, as representatives of society, could bring charges against the publications in question. Why don=t they do so? [The offended individuals do not], because know that by bringing charges they will only give greater publicity to the scandal, and will end up, after a long process and in the best of circumstances, obtaining against the delinquents a maximum penalty of a 300-peso fine or three months of prison. Would action by the Fiscales be any more effective? Not easily. The scandal would resonate even more [since the accused would be allowed to testify], ...and all for what? For a maximum penalty of six months in prison or a 600-peso fine?

But if the courts were unsatisfactory, what was a person who believed himself defamed to do? Increasingly, what he did was to turn not to the courts or the criminal code for satisfaction, but to an alternative Acode,@ that of the Count of Chateauvillard. From about the mid-nineteenth century on, Uruguayan public men, like their counterparts in France, Italy, Argentina and many other places, came to the conclusion that the Code duello, not defamation law, constituted the only effective means to protect honor in the rough-and-tumble world of politics and the press. Dueling Alaw,@ not defamation law, therefore became the normal everyday regulator of public discourse. Whenever journalists or politicians considered whether or not to sign an editorial, whether or not to publicize an accusation for which they lacked proof, whether or not to use a particularly inflammatory turn of phrase, their decisions were guided by an anticipation of how their adversary would respond in the so-called Agentlemanly@ arena, rather than in the legal arena. Dueling law, as written in the honor codes and as established by Agentlemanly@ precedent, essentially made the rules by which the public sphere operated.

As the dueling codes came to supplant the criminal code as the remedy of choice in cases of alleged defamation, the popular definition of Aresponsibility@ changed as well. When the authors of the 1830 Constitution referred to the author=s Aresponsibility@ for his words, it is reasonable to assume that they meant his legal responsibility, in accordance with libel and defamation statutes. But Uruguayan politicians and journalists by the second half of the nineteenth century had developed their own conception of responsibility, which they often called Agentlemanly responsibility.@ To be Aresponsible@ meant to be

willing and able to answer for one=s words and actions in the manner dictated by the honor codes, and on the dueling ground when necessary. AIrresponsibility,@ the converse, explicitly described the man who hurled insults or engaged in heated polemics without being prepared to Aguarantee@ his words at swordpoint or gunpoint if challenged. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century it had become formulaic for writers and speakers to declare publicly their readiness to defend their words "on any terrain" ["en cualquier terreno"], be that in the courtroom or on the so-called "field of honor." This idea that a journalist or politician might be called to account for his words in either of two arenas, one with lawyers and jurors, the other with seconds and pistols, lay at the heart of the idea of Aresponsibility.@

So dueling protocol had largely come to supplant libel and defamation law as the preferred means for airing matters of honor, and for settling political debates when they crossed the line into ad hominem attack and invective. Socialists and Communists, however, rejected the duel, which they denounced as elitist, futile, even comic. Following the lead of Juan B. Justo=s Socialist Party in Argentina, Uruguayan Socialists had adopted party statutes that called for the expulsion of any member who participated in a duel or who issued or accepted Agentlemanly@ challenges. Back in 1916, when Mibelli was still a Socialist before the Party split, he had been formally reprimanded for dueling with Colorado hothead Washington Paullier. Reprimand was chosen over expulsion Aen virtud de consideraciones especiales@: special considerations including the fact that Mibelli had initially refused to duel and Paullier had responded by attacking him violently with a walking stick. From that time onward, Mibelli remained a vocal and forceful enemy of the duel, despite being an accomplished fencer.

But if Socialists (and later Communists) did not accept the duel, how could they be made Aresponsible@ for their words? How could they be called to account when they allegedly crossed the line of decorum in political debate? Their enemies often voiced exactly that complaint. In 1923, for example, Chief of Police Juan A. Pintos took Socialist Deputy Emilio Frugoni to court for abuse of press freedom, accusing him of having committed libel when he denounced Pintos for corruption. Why did Pintos take the case to the courts? On this the Chief=s answer was remarkably candid:

It would be futile for me to attempt to meet Dr. Frugoni on the terreno that men seek out when they wish to respond to offenses received; because it is public knowledge that Dr. Frugoni does not recognize that terreno.

The Socialist Frugoni was generally viewed as a man who debated within the boundaries of civility, or at least respected the separation of issues from personalities. So even though he received his fair share of challenges, most of his adversaries learned to live with his refusal to duel. The same could not be said for Celestino Mibelli. His confrontational personality repeatedly placed him in the center of controversy, inciting the ire of opponents who railed against his

Airresponsibility.@ Mibelli responded to the charge by declaring his willingness to meet any opponent, but without seconds and without all the aristocratic protocol. Sometimes an antagonist took up the offer. On February 11, 1920, Mibelli got involved in a fistfight in the Parliament building with a Deputy-elect named Doria. More often they did not. In August of the same year the following exchange occurred between Mibelli and Deputy Pablo María Minelli, an exchange that started when Mibelli used the word Adishonest@ to characterize a particular proposal:

Minelli-- Only coming from a socialist deputy could the expression Adishonest@ be admitted to the record, because as everyone knows, they are irresponsible in such matters. Mibelli-- I warn you that I am responsible, en cualquier terreno, and you know it. Minelli-- If you are responsible, we=ll find out soon enough. Mibelli-- We=ll find out right now (he rises from his chair and heads toward the exit). Minelli-- Do you actually think I fight mano a mano, like some lowlife (como cualquier vil persona)? Mr. President-- Order, señores diputados! Mibelli-- Come outside! (He leaves the hall). Minelli-- We=ll see, Mr. President, if he is responsible, when I send my seconds.

Minelli did send his seconds, and Mibelli answered them with the following note: It is my pleasure to inform you, regarding the mission that

Mr. Pablo María Minelli entrusted to you, that if he wishes any Areparation@ from me, he can get it any place, any time, by coming for it in person, and to that end I am at his complete service.@

This is what judge Del Castillo was talking about when he described

Mibelli to be Apublicly known as an enemy of the duel and more a partisan of encuentros de improviso.@ Why did the judge mention this fact? What was its significance? I would argue that this was perhaps the single most important sentence in the entire document, the key to Del Castillo=s exoneration of Cat. Because Mibelli was publicly known as a man who refused to take part in duels, neither Juan Cat nor any of the others offended by the Machonas series could respond in the accepted, proper manner. They could not send their seconds to deliver the formulaic demand for Aexplanations,@ nor could they settle the conflict on the Afield of honor@ in a controlled and civilized way. Mibelli=s disavowal of the gentlemanly honor codes allegedly deprived Cat of any course of action other than the one he took, which was to confront the director of Justicia directly, in public, pistol in hand.

Indeed, seemingly minor disagreements between the accounts of what happened take on profound meanings when we consider them in the light of the dueling ritual. The initial police report, the account of the

confrontation in the more conservative papers, and Del Castillo=s final ruling all coincide in asserting that Cat exchanged words with Mibelli before opening fire. In his letter to the Minister of Interior, Chief of Police Juan Carlos Folle (clearly relying on Cat=s version of events) reported that Cat Ademanded an explanation in response to an article that had appeared in the daily Justicia.@ These words that Cat claimed to have spoken (despite the lack of corroboration from witnesses) were in every detail identical to the language of dueling protocol. Judge Del Castillo, clearly wishing to refute any possibility that the attack showed premeditation, speculated that the only thing Cat really wanted when he confronted Mibelli was an Aexplanation@ to Arepair the offense@ to his honor. In other words, Cat allegedly sought the Asatisfaction@ normally obtained through a gentlemanly challenge, an exchange of seconds, and (if necessary) a duel. Mibelli, precisely because he did not duel, supposedly precipitated the conflict by compelling Cat to seek explanations in such a violent and irregular manner. Conclusion

Sometimes the normal functioning of a system only becomes clear at the moment when it starts to break down. I think that in March 15, 1923, the day a respectable executive fired six shots at a Congressman in the very vestibule of Parliament-- only to be released without charges a few days later-- we are witnessing such a moment. Although there surely was an element of bourgeois justice at work here, just as Mibelli claimed, the outpouring of support for the attacker and rebuke for the victim cannot be explained away so easily. Those who rallied behind Cat did so not because of his wealth or his family name, but because they believed he had acted in defense of values they shared: honor, family, the sanctity of the home, and the separation between public and private life. Mibelli most certainly had a point when he denounced those values as empty and hypocritical, a concern for appearance instead of reality, reputation instead of virtue. Today most of us would agree with him. But Uruguay=s political class in 1923 emphatically did not. Furthermore, many blamed Mibelli rather than Cat for the gunfight at the Cabildo because Mibelli=s alleged offenses against honor were compounded by what people considered his irresponsibility. By the early twentieth century, Uruguayan elites had developed a reasonably well-functioning system to deal with the kinds of conflicts that came with a free press. It was a system that relied on the duel, not the courts, to enforce civility in public discourse and to solve the disputes that arose when civility failed. So Mibelli=s repudiation of the duel, I would argue, was believed to threaten the very foundations of public life itself. By this logic, I do not think I exaggerate-- or at least not too much-- when I contend that Mibelli became a victim of injustice because he was a menace to society. Put another way, his transgressions, which to modern eyes might appear trivial or even comical, were anything but. In many ways they constituted a novel challenge to an entire way of life and way of thinking.

Notes:

1. El País, March 16, 1923, pp. 3, 9, AEl incidente de ayer en el Cabildo.@ El Sol, March 16, 1923, p. 1, AEl incidente de ayer;@ El Sol, March 17, 1923, p. 1, ALa agresión al diputado comunista.@ Diario del Plata, March 16, 1923, p. 3, AEl suceso de ayer.@ According to the version in El País, Cat and Mibelli exchanged words before any shots were fired. Cat was supposed to have said: ADefend yourself because I=m going to kill you.@ Mibelli=s Justicia portrayed events quite differently, contending that Cat had been accompanied by several other people, that he fired point-blank without any prior warning, and that at least some of the shots had been fired by one or more of the other men. This version appears to be the more credible of the two. Justicia, March 16, 1923, pp. 1-2AAyer el entrar a la Cámara el compañero Mibelli es agredido a traición;@ Justicia, March 17, 1923, p. 1, AMás detalles sobre el vil atentado de anteayer;@ Justicia, March 19, 1923, p. 1, AHabla el compañero Mibelli.@

1. Justicia, Feb. 12, 1923, p. 1, ALa machona: iniciamos hoy su publicación.@

1. Justicia, Feb. 24, 1922, p. 1, ALa farras de los ricos. Algo más sobre lo ocurrido en Carrasco. A chapter of our contemporary history.@ ALa >aristocracia= ha siempre disfrazado, con arteros velos, sus vicios repugnantes y ha sabido presentarse a los ojos ingénuos de la multitud con el tono grave y el ademán severo que usa corrientemente en la vida de relación, para que se crea en su austeridad y en su pundonor sin mancha. ...Pero el vicio existe y con él, la depravación de costumbres entre ciertos círculos aristocráticos de los más copetudos y deslumbrantes. ...En nuestro medio-- por disposición y por idiosincracia totalmente imitativo-- tambien han comenzado a arraigar los vicios que corroen la vieja sociedad europea. Ya no son sólo la >cocaína,= el eter, la morfina y los fumadores de opio, los que en las tardes grises consuela morbosamente el letal tedio de nuestras Adistinguidas.@ Otros goces sádicos, otros placeres inconfesables llaman imperiosamente a los sentidos, faltos de ideal y carentes de una sola alegría sana. ...)Detalles? Estamos en situacion de darlos a porrillo. Y podríamos dar nombres propios a montones sin temor de ser desmentidos.@

1. Justicia, March 12, 1923, p. 1, ALas machonas en Montevideo: una excursión en traje de baño.@

1. Justicia, Feb. 19, 1923, p. 1, AAbusos e injusticias: un caballero que no sabe pagar.@

1. Justicia, Feb. 17, 1923, p. 1, AUna niña de 11 años violada por su patrón.@

1. Justicia, Feb. 14, 1923, p. 1, AUn cobarde atropello@; Feb. 16, 1923, p. 1, ACruel hazaña de un niño >bien=@; Feb. 19, 1923, p. 2, ASobre una denuncia grave: A. Formica Corsi se defiende de las acusaciones que ha hecho la joven sirvienta Maria Andrade.@

1. Diario del Plata, March 14, 1923, p. 3, AContra la pornografía: El Dr. Alejandro Gallinal desde su banca del Senado.@

1. Diario del Plata, March 16, 1923, p. 3, ALo previsto.@ ASe trata de un desborde sin precedentes, que salva todas las vallas, sin consideración a los sentimientos más respetables. Extravío semejante ha surgido alguna vez, pero en el desenfreno de la lucha, contra los directamente interesados en ella, y asimismo, ha merecido la reprobación general. Y aquí no se trata de eso. La agresión hiere a personas intachables, completamente extrañas al estrépito de la lucha, respecto de las cuales no existe antecedente alguno que explique, ya que no justifique la agresión.@

1. Justicia, March 7, 1923, p. 1, A>La Machona= en Montevideo.@ A...la prensa rica nos aturde diariamente con sendos sermones moralistas destinados a encubrir las escenas degradantes de la canalla dorada. La corrupción solo es criticada en los pobres, en los trabajadores. El que se emborracha con caña es un pervertido; pero el que se embriaga con champán es un mozo >alegre= o una señorita >liberal=. ...Con el dinero se tapan todas las bocas, y los diarios burgueses, tan celosos de la moral pública, tan >indiscretos= cuando se trata de una víctima de hambre, lejos de escandalizarse, callan tambien como muertos...@

1. Justicia, Feb. 26, 1923, p. 1, ALa Ba-ta-clán en Carrasco: formidable sensación causada por nuestras revelaciones: Justicia leida en plena rambla aristocrática.@

1. Justicia, March 10, 1923, p. 1, ALas muñecas amenazan.@ It is of course entirely possible that the perfumed death threat was a fabrication, but Justicia later sought to convince the credulous by reproducing a second anonymous death threat (presumably unscented) on the paper=s front page. Justicia, March 14, 1923, p. 1.

1. Justicia, March 16, 1923, p. 2, AUn parte infame.@ Justicia, March 17, 1923, p. 1, AMás detalles de cómo se produjo el atentado: Una patraña innoble urdida por la policía.@ República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, T. 305 (Febrero 2 a Abril 6 de 1923) (Montevideo: Imprenta Nacional, 1923), p. 385.

1. Justicia, March 17, 1923, p. 1, AMás detalles de cómo se produjo el atentado: Una patraña innoble urdida por la policía.@

1. Justicia, March 17, 1923, p. 3, ALa justicia burguesa en su papel.@ El Sol, March 19, p. 1, AJusticia de clases.@

1. Justicia, March 19, 1923, p. 1., AUna formidable reacción gubernamental y periodística se manifiesta amenazante contra Justicia.@ El País, March 19, 1923, p. 3, AAnte la justicia.@ Diario del Plata, March 18, 1923, p. 3, AEl delito de difamación: criterio de los fiscales.@

1. Justicia, March 17, 1923, p. 2, ALa prensa capitalista defiende el crimen de Cat y su patota.@ El Día, March 17, 1923, p. 4, AEl suceso del jueves.@

1. Diario del Plata, March 18, 1923, p. 3, AEl tema del día.@

1. República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, T. 305, pp. 356-357.

1. Ibid., pp. 357-359.

1. Ibid., pp. 362. Note Rodríguez Larreta=s initials, AR. L.,@ the same as those of the woman alluded to in one of Justicia=s exposés. Coincidence?

1. Ibid., p. 363.

1. Ibid., pp. 357-361, 388. Justicia, March 17, 1923, pp. 2-3, AEl parlamento rechaza el desafuero del diputado Comunista.@

1. Justicia, March 22, 1923, p. 1., ANueva tentativa de asesinato contra el camarada Mibelli.@ El Sol, March 22, 1923, p. 1, AEl cobarde y grotesco atentado de ayer.@ For a different take on the attack, see El País, March 23, 1923, p. 3, AExtraordinario,@ which argues that the real barbarity lies not in the predictable action of Villegas Márquez, but in the passivity of the authorities, who permit Justicia to continue publishing scandal and pornography.

1. Diario del Plata, March 23, 1923, p. 3, AIncidente Cat-Mibelli: el Sr. Cat en libertad bajo fianza.@

1. Justicia, March 26, 1923, pp. 1-2, AComo se comenta la vergonzante sentencia del juez del Castillo.@ Justicia, March 28, 1923, p. 1, AUna lección para quienes creen en la justicia burguesa.@ Justicia, March 29, p. 1, AEl disparate jurídica del juez del Castillo.@ Justicia, April 4, 1923, p. 1, AEl juez que libró a Cat de la cárcel tiene mucho que aprender.@ Justicia, April 5, 1923, p. 1, AEl triste papelón de un juez.@

1. Justicia, March 27, 1923, p. 1, AJusticia de clases.@ Justicia, April 2, 1923, p. 2, ALo que va de ayer a hoy.@

1. El Día, March 17, 1923, p. 4, AEl suceso del jueves.@

1. Diario del Plata, March 16, 1923, p. 3, ALo previsto.@

1. Justicia, March 15, 1921, p. 1, ALas >machonas= de Montevideo: las miserias doradas.@

1. Diario del Plata, March 18, 1923, p. 3, AEl tema del día.@

1. Justicia, March 20, 1923, pp. 1-2, ALos verdaderos corruptores de la moral.@

1. Justicia, March 27, 1923, pp. 1-2, ALa vida privada y los burgueses.@

1. Justicia, March 27, p. 2, ARazonando.@

1. El Sol, March 17, 1923, p. 1, ALa paja en el ojo ajeno.@

1. Justicia, March 29, 1923, p. 1, ALo de las machonas no es difamación.@ Justicia, March 27, p. 2, ARazonando.@

1. Justicia, March 23, 1923, p. 2, AUn comentario de >La Internacional=.@

1. Justicia, March 21, 1923, p. 1, ALa >moralidad= de la prensa rica.@

1. Justicia, March 26, 1923, p. 1, ACómo moraliza la prensa de la burguesia.@

1. See especially Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 2. Also Julian Pitt-Rivers, AHonour and Social Status,@ in J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), pp. 21-77. Marie Gautheron, ed., El honor: imagen de sí o don de sí, un ideal equívoco, trans. Raquel Herrera (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1992). Kenneth Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 1-2. Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

1. Peter Berger, "On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor," Archives Européennes de Sociologie 11 (1970), pp. 339-347.

1. Benjamín Fernández y Medina, La imprenta y la prensa en el Uruguay desde 1807 a 1900 (Montevideo: Imprenta de Dornaleche y Reyes, 1900), p. 69.

1. Carlos María Ramírez, Conferencias de derecho constitucional, 2nd. ed. (Montevideo: Imprenta y Litografía ALa Razón,@ 1897), pp. 307-310. AEs enteramente libre la comunicación de los pensamientos, por palabras, escritos privados o publicados por la prensa en toda materia, sin necesidad de previa censura; quedando responsable el autor, y en su caso el impresor, por los abusos que cometieren con arreglo a la ley.@

1. Diario del Plata, March 18, 1923, p. 3, AEl tema del día.@

1. This language was so ubiquitous that citing specific examples may be unnecessary, but the phrase Aen cualquier terreno@ appears, for example, in La Democracia (Montevideo), 14 Oct. 1921, p. 1, APara El Día.@

1. According to article 49 of the party statutes: AIt is absolutely prohibited for any party member to fight in a duel or to accept the preliminary formalities [of dueling]. El Socialista, March 31, 1914.

1. On the reprimand, El Socialista, Feb. 29, 1916, p. 4, AEl incidente Mibelli-Paullier.@ On the duel itself, La Razón, Feb. 12, 1916, p. 1, ALance Mibelli-Paullier: su resultado;@ El Día, Feb. 12, 1916, p. 6, AEl lance Mibelli-Paullier;@ and other newspapers for the same day. On the preliminaries leading up to the duel, El Día, Feb. 9 and 10, 1916; Diario del Plata, Feb. 8 and 10, 1916; La Tribuna Popular, Feb. 8 and 9, 1916.

1. República Oriental del Uruguay, Archivo Judicial, Montevideo, Juzgado de Instrucción Segundo Turno, Expediente #236, Arch. #58, 1925, AJuan A. Pintos, Querella por abuso de la libertad de imprenta,@ fojas 126-127. AInútil sería que pretendiera encontrar al Dr. Frugoni en el terreno que buscan los hombres cuando desean ventilar ofensas recibidas; porque es de pública notoriedad que el Dr. Frugoni desconoce ese terreno.@

1. On the following occasions Frugoni rejected gentlemanly challenges, citing his partisan principles: January 1913, with Justo R. Pelayo; March 1919, with Virgilio Sampognaro; October 1919, with General Duchefrou. See El Siglo, Jan. 14, 1913. La Razón, March 15, 1919, p. 2, APersonal.@ Justicia, Oct. 26, 1919, p.1, APersonal.@

1. Justicia, Feb. 12, 1920, p. 1, AEn la Cámara: el incidente de anoche.@

1. El Día, August 3, 1920, p. 5, AParlamento.@

1. Justicia, Aug. 4, 1920, p. 1.

1. Diario del Plata, March 23, 1923, p. 3, AIncidente Cat-Mibelli: el Sr. Cat en libertad bajo fianza.@

1. See, for example, El Día, March 17, 1923, p. 4, AEl suceso del jueves.@

1. República Oriental del Uruguay, Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, T. 305, p. 356.

1. Diario del Plata, March 23, 1923, p. 3, AIncidente Cat-Mibelli: el Sr. Cat en libertad bajo fianza.@