pa r t i v

Conclusions

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 15
Goodbye to the Caciques? Definition,
the State and the Dynamics of Caciquismo in
Twentieth-century Mexico
Wil Pansters 1
1550–15??
‘Pues mire nomás: calladitos, calladitos, los huecos
de poder en todo el país se han ido llenando con los
caciques locales, que estaban allí nomás como tigres
al acecho’
Carlos Fuentes, La Silla del Águila, 2003, p. 154

T he concept of caciquismo has become part of the Mexican scholarly and

popular vernacular. This has inspired continued scholarly attention to the
phenomenon and strengthened the need for analytical and definitional rigour and
innovation. Since scholars like Wolf and Friedrich put forward definitions – still
influential today – of caciquismo a few decades ago the economic and political
systems that gave rise to the cacicazgos they analyzed have profoundly changed.2
Questions about the delineation and validity of the concept therefore seem justified.
Also, current theoretical developments shed new light on these phenomena and
inspire new ways of conceptualizing them. Can or should certain definitional
prerequisites from classic caciquismo studies be upheld in changing socio-political
conditions? What are the effects of contemporary theoretical debates about power
and the state for the analytical value of the concept of caciquismo? What conceptual
insights and empirical data about new and not so new cacicazgos can be gained from
the work of a new generation of scholars? What can be said about the historical
transformation of caciquismo? These are all questions that have been raised in this
collection of articles and to answer them is one of the objectives of this volume.
In this concluding chapter I attempt to pull together a few general thoughts
from the contributions in this volume and the discussions held during the con-
ference meetings themselves, and link them to more general debates about power,
1 I am grateful to Rob Aitken and Alan Knight for their comments on an earlier version of this
chapter.
2 Paul Friedrich, ‘A Mexican cacicazgo’, in Ethnology, 4:2, 1965, pp. 190–209; ‘The Legitimacy
of a Cacique’, in M. J. Schwartz (ed.), Local Level Politics. Social and Cultural Perspectives
(Chicago, 1968), pp. 243–69; Eric Wolf, ‘Aspects of Groups Relations in a Complex Society’,
in E. Wolf, Pathways of Power. Building an Anthropology of the Modern World (Berkeley/Los
Angeles, 2001), pp. 124–38 (originally published in American Anthropologist, 58, 1956, pp. 1065–
78).

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politics and the state. In the first part I will deal with the conceptual demarcation of
caciquismo, since a variety of societal and theoretical developments have urged
different scholars to re-examine key features of caciquismo. I will pay particular
attention to the conceptual links between caciquismo on the one hand and inter-
mediation, discourse and territory on the other. In the second part, I will con-
centrate on the complex issues surrounding the relationship between caciquismo
and the state. I will critically assess the common interpretation of this relationship
as a zero-sum game and stress the diverse modes of articulation between state
formation and the (changing) phenomenon of caciquismo. I will also reflect on the
meaning of recent theorizing on the (postcolonial) state for understanding
caciquismo. In the final part, I will focus on the historical transformation and
changing forms of caciquismo. Here I will question some common views on the
dynamics of caciquismo in the twentieth century and put forward an alternative
interpretation. In general, this review of the major findings of this volume, leads
me to reflect on their most important theoretical implications. This will hopefully
result in pushing the debate about caciquismo in novel directions.

Conceptual boundaries
The concept of caciquismo occupies the centre of a semantic cluster that incor-
porates a number of other notions such as patronage, (inter)mediation, hierarchy,
informality, violence, territory, authoritarianism, but also leadership, consent,
paternalism and corruption. Some contributions to this volume approach the topic
of caciquismo by investigating the association between particular concepts and notions
within this semantic cluster without explicitly addressing the issue of definition.
Instead, they concentrate on the interpretation of particular historical figures or
processes against the background of other scholarly debates, for example about serrano
movements, the revisionism debate in Mexican historiography, the gendered
dimension of politics, or the discursive construction of the state. In comparison,
other contributions focus more explicitly on the conceptual demarcation of the
term. Taken as a whole, and without wanting to iron out the differences and tensions
that may exist between some of the previous chapters, this collection puts forward
a number of ideas that attempt to go beyond previous work in a number of ways.
In 1956 Eric Wolf published an article about the broad historical evolution of
the bonds that connect groups on different levels in complex societies. In it he
argued in favor of moving beyond the study of communities in complex societies as
self-contained and integrated systems and, instead, suggested seeing them as the
‘local termini of a web of group relations that extended through intermediate levels
from the level of the community to that of the nation’.3 He illustrated his approach
by looking at the chief ways in which so-called community-oriented and nation-
oriented groups arranged and re-arranged themselves in the course of Mexico’s

3 Wolf, ‘Aspects of Group Relations’, p. 125.

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political and economic history. Despite the fact that Wolf did not use the concept
of caciquismo, this is a text much quoted by anthropologists interested in caciquismo,
because it opened up a field of study that shifted anthropological attention towards
the articulating mechanisms and groups between localities and national institu-
tions. In particular, the study of the political and cultural role of brokers helped to
shift attention ‘from the internal organization of communities to the manner of
their integration into larger systems’.4 The structural role and function of inter-
mediation became closely associated with the concept of caciquismo. Recently,
some authors have even argued that caciquismo should be regarded first and
foremost as a problem of political intermediation and articulation, while others
have suggested that this role has been exaggerated.5 In any case, caciquismo is mostly
located at a level between local/regional social domains and the central state.6
Wolf’s influence on the study of caciquismo is, however, not limited to this seminal
article. His work on the ‘older brother’ of the cacique – the caudillo – written
together with Edward Hansen, constitutes another, almost obligatory, reference
point for many later studies about caciquismo and, of course, caudillismo.7 Here the
focus is on how structural conditions and systemic forces in post-independence
Latin America explain the emergence, characteristics and demise of the system of
caudillo politics. In addition, questions of strategy, agency and behavioural features
receive attention, such as the personal skills, organizational qualities and, above all,
the political use of masculinity and sexual prowess by (would-be) caudillos. Some of
the key characteristics of caudillismo, such as armed patron–client networks and the
use of violence, have also become associated with caciquismo.
One of the first to draw systematic scholarly attention to the concept of
caciquismo was Paul Friedrich, who organized his original 1965 article around two
broad perspectives.8 The first referred to the political functions of the social
structures of rural Mexico that are essentially defined by natural and ceremonial
kinship relations and land tenure. The second perspective pointed to the ‘more
purely political organization’ of caciquismo, which is elaborated with the help of
concepts as factionalism, competition, intermediation between community and
higher levels, and the strategies that (potential) leaders use to succeed in politics,
4 Ibid., p. 138.
5 Fernando I. Salmerón Castro, ‘Caciques. Una revisión teórica sobre el control político local’,
in Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Año XXX, 1984, pp. 107–41. See also
Rogelio Hernández in this volume. For a critical view on the role of caciques as efficient
intermediaries, see M. Nuijten, Power, Community and the State. The Political Anthropology
of Organisation in Mexico (London, 2003).
6 This is also the sense in which Matsuzato has used the term ‘post-communist caciquismo’ to
talk about meso-elites and regional chiefs in contemporary Russia, see ‘From Communist Boss
Politics to Post-communist Caciquismo – the Meso-elite and Meso-governments in Post-
communist Countries’, in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 34, 2001, pp. 175–201.
7 ‘Caudillo Politics: A Structural Analysis’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.
9, No. 2, 1967, pp. 168–79.
8 Friedrich, ‘A Mexican Cacicazgo’, in Ethnology, 4:2, 1965, pp. 190–209.

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such as verbal persuasion, intrigue, organizational capabilities and violence.9 What

is clear from Friedrich’s early analysis was his deliberate attempt to develop a non-
reductionist perspective on caciquismo that encompassed ‘far more than the
political functions of social structures’.10 While this was helpful in accounting for
the complexity of the phenomenon, the downside was that the research focus was
primarily oriented at the local level. Certainly compared to Wolf’s proposition,
Friedrich paid modest attention to the question of intermediation, and, as a con-
sequence, the meaning and function of local caciquismo for the broader political
and economic systems was hardly explored.11
It is precisely towards this point that later studies of caciquismo have gravitated.
In the early 1970s, Luisa Paré developed her own theoretical framework for the
study of caciquismo and criticized Friedrich for claiming a meaning for caciquismo
beyond ‘the political functions of social structures’.12 For Paré, caciquismo is a
phenomenon that results from of Mexico’s particular socioeconomic and political
structure. It should be studied against the background of Mexico’s rural class
structure and as an expression of global processes of dependency and forms of
internal colonialism.13 In this sense Paré’s work is an explicitly Marxist elaboration
of Wolf’s call for the study of articulating mechanisms. Paré relates caciquismo to
the articulation of capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production in rural areas,
since such situations represent a ‘historical necessity’ for political brokers between
the dominant class of the capitalist mode of the production and the groups associ-
ated with the dominated mode of production.14 Factional disputes are understood
as fractured class conflicts. Moreover, cacical brokerage acquires an economic role
as caciques play a pivotal role in the circulation of commodities from the com-
munities towards outside markets, and of outside capitalist commodities into the
community, ‘leaving the cacique with the surplus value extracted from local
peasants’.15 Whereas Paré’s view has the benefit of structurally placing caciquismo
in a wider socio-political framework, her approach can hardly give due attention to
agency and performance. A cacique is not chosen for his virtues or popular authority,
but ‘his power is supported by economic influence and is therefore coercive’.16 In
Paré’s work there is little room for a cacique who commands a degree of
legitimacy, which, as Friedrich demonstrated, derives from the ‘normative power of

9 Ibid., pp. 198–206

10 Ibid., p. 198.
11 In his later work the intermediary functions of caciques received more attention. See, for
example, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970), pp. 65, 71.
12 Luisa Paré, ‘Diseño teórico para el estudio del caciquismo actual en México’, in Revista
Mexicana de Sociología, Año XXXIV, nr. 2, 1972: p. 338.
13 Ibid., p. 340.
14 Luisa Paré, ‘Caciquismo y estructura de poder en la Sierra Norte de Puebla’, in R. Bartra et
al., Caciquismo y poder político en el México Rural (Mexico, 1985 [1975]), p. 34.
15 Ibid., ‘Caciquismo y estructura de poder’, p. 37.
16 Paré, ‘Diseño teórico’, p. 340.

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the factual’ or efficient brokerage.17 Viewing caciquismo as coercive power also

stands in stark contrast with the idea that the activities of a cacique can be justified
by a form of ‘authority’ related to shared values, beliefs and customs between
cacique and the governed.18 From a Marxist structural perspective that underlines
economic power and coercion, and not political maneuvering and consensus
building, Primo Tapia, Gabriel Barrios and Saturnino Cedillo could perhaps not
be seen as caciques at all.19
The strong emphasis on the structural functions of caciquismo in the broader
social and political system is not the result of a Marxist approach per se. Using the
Weberian language of status and roles, Sabloff likewise stressed that the repro-
duction of caciquismo, which she defined as the concentration of the roles of
broker, patron and leader of a political faction in one individual, should be seen as
a function of a particular postrevolutionary legal regime in agrarian matters, in
combination with an oligarchic political structure.20 The legal regime that regulates
the ejido system demands a sole representation of the community to the state,
whereas the oligarchic one-party system tends to concentrate access to power and
resources in a limited number of ‘entry’ points and enhances the situation that local
leaders depend more on higher levels than on local support. These conditions
‘increase the possibility that an individual may and can play three roles (broker,
patron and leader) … and become the cacique of the community’.21
This brief review of key contributions to the early debates about caciquismo
brings out at least two things. First, the emphasis on the structural determinants
and functions of the caudillaje system in terms of political-economic and social
organization (hacienda, kinship) was taken up by scholars of caciquismo (social
structure, political economy). At the same time, the first generation of caciquismo
studies, exemplified by Friedrich’s early work, combined structural analysis with
attention to agency, practices and psychology.22 Secondly, the 1970s witnessed a
gradual shift towards approaches that more and more focussed on the structural

17 Friedrich, ‘The Legitimacy of a Cacique’, in M. J. Swartz (ed.), Local Level Politics. Social and
Cultural Perspectives, (Chicago, 1968), pp. 260–3.
18 Friedrich, ‘The Legitimacy’; In Agrarian Revolt Friedrich stresses how local peasants
considered Primo Tapia as ‘one of us’, despite his long-term experiences outside Naranja and
the state and despite the fact that he possessed a relatively high level of education, pp. 61, 71–
73. Also Salmerón, ‘Caciques’, pp. 126–9.
19 This obviously does not mean that these caciques eschewed coercive methods of control.
20 Paula Sabloff, ‘El caciquismo en el ejido post revolucionario’, in América Indígena, Vol.
XXXVII, nr. 4, 1977, pp. 851–81.
21 Ibid., p. 865. In contrast, Nuijten has recently criticized the centrality and effectiveness of
brokerage and intermediation by local caciques. Her analysis suggests that ‘the relations of
the ejidatarios to the state cannot be reduced to a general vertical intermediation model with
the cacique occupying a nodal point within the system’. See Power, Community and the State,
p. 194.
22 See for example, Friedrich’s extensive treatment of Primo Tapia’s upbringing and intellec-
tual and emotional socialization in Agrarian Revolt, pp. 58–77.

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aspects and functions of caciquismo and analyzed caciquismo in its wider societal
context, as Wolf had already suggested in the 1950s. The most important concept
in relation to this is that of (inter)mediation. It is therefore not surprising that
several of the contributions to this volume explicitly dwell on it. It will, however,
also become clear that there is much more to caciquismo than its structural function
of intermediation.
Rogelio Hernández (this volume) maintains that the concept of caciquismo has
gradually lost explanatory power and come to be employed mostly for descriptive
purposes. In an effort to explore the limits of the concept in the context of complex
politics, he puts forward the crucial distinction between two key aspects generally
associated with caciquismo: the first refers to a set of practices and ideas related to
‘traditional’ political leadership and the second refers to a set of structural or
systemic conditions or functions. For Hernández, the analytical value of the con-
cept of caciquismo lies in the systemic role of intermediation. Therefore, informal
and autocratic political practices of a particular leadership in the absence of inter-
mediation does not warrant the application of the term caciquismo. Thus, caciquismo
refers to the political domination by an individual or a small clique over a certain
community and the control of (economic and political) resources to which the
community does not have free access. Through the control of the flow of resources,
the cacique then becomes an intermediary between community and society. This
control stands at the basis of the cacique’s capacity to impose his will and power.
With changing societal conditions, such as the emergence of more open markets
where political and economic resources can be obtained, the need for intermedia-
tion, and thus for the reproduction of caciquismo, can in principle vanish. Here the
discussion about the conceptual delineation of caciquismo borders on the question
of its historical transformation, which I will explore in the final section.
Practices of personalized intermediation are indeed recognized in many contri-
butions to this volume as a, if not the, key characteristic of caciquismo. The context
and the type of resources vary enormously, but the generic function is widely
underscored. Brewster argues that the cacicazgo of Gabriel Barrios in the Sierra
Norte de Puebla of the 1920s was instrumental in the construction of relations
between (new) external actors and institutions and local indigenous communities,
especially in the context of turbulent change. Barrios was an intermediary in the
true sense: both the Sierra and the federal state sought solutions to their problems
(military control, access to resources) through what they viewed as the most
effective channel, the Barrios cacicazgo. Boyer suggests that the caciques of the
Zacapu area in Michoacán functioned as pivotal cultural brokers insofar as they
mediated between village political cultures and the revolutionary ideologies espoused
by postrevolutionary state-makers such as Cárdenas and Múgica. Maldonado
presents ample evidence of the forms of intermediation in the urban-industrial
space of the Valley of Mexico City and the ways in which they construct union or
urban cacicazgos, while Pansters documents how the university cacique controls
access to crucial financial resources from the federal government.

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These examples of caciquista intermediation bring me to a discussion of an

influential typology of cacique regimes that comes under criticism in this volume,
that of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ caciquismo. With the proliferation of the regional
historiography of the Mexican revolution, which was well underway in the late
1970s and was consolidated during the 1980s, it became increasingly clear that the
period following the armed phase of the revolution witnessed a profound trans-
formation of the nature of both caudillismo and caciquismo. The work of Ankerson,
Jacobs, Buve, Fowler Salamini, Joseph and Falcón, but also later work such as that
of Alvarado and Martínez Assad made important progress in differentiating
between different types of caciquismo and trying to understand the underlying
logic.23 The period of the armed struggle of the revolution and the virtual absence
of an effective central government gave, according to Buve, rise to the temporary
re-emergence of mid-nineteenth century classic caudillaje, which Ankerson des-
cribed as traditional caudillismo.24 This variant was thought to be personalistic, of
rural origin, localized, informal (kinship networks) and heavily dependent on
military force. The 1920s and 1930s saw political and economic reconstruction and
institutionalization, thereby creating the conditions for the emergence of modern
or revolutionary caciques, who operated from within the new political and bureau-
cratic institutions and managed to construct a more impersonal power base, more
closely integrated in the state.25
While these distinctions proved to be very useful, they were, inevitably, also liable
to be caught in a dichotomy. A recent spate of studies, some results of which are
published in this volume, have taken up this point and developed a more sophis-
ticated approach. In his analysis of the history of a cacicazgo that emerged during
the Cristero revolt in the western part of Michoacán, Butler shows its ambiguous

23 Arturo Alvarado, El portesgilismo en Tamaulipas. Estudio sobre la constitución de la autoridad

pública en el México posrevolucionario (Mexico, 1992); Dudley Ankerson, Agrarian Warlord.
Saturnino Cedillo and the Mexican Revolution in San Luis Potosí (Chicago, 1984); Raymond
Buve, ‘Peasant Movements, Caudillos and Land reform during the Revolution (1910–1917)
in Tlaxcala, Mexico’, in Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, no. 18, June 1975,
pp. 112–52. Raymond Buve and Romana Falcón, ‘Tlaxcala and San Luis Potosí under the
Sonorenses (1920–1930): Regional Revolutionary Power Groups and the National State’, in
W. Pansters and A. Ouweneel, Region, State and Capitalism in Mexico. Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century (Amsterdam, 1989), pp. 110–33; Romana Falcón, Revolución y caciquismo
en San Luis Potosí, 1910–1938 (Mexico, 1984); Ian Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt. The Mexican
Revolution in Guerrero (Austin, 1982); Carlos Martínez Assad, Los rebeldes vencidos. Cedillo
contra el estado cardenista (México, 1990); Gilbert M. Joseph, Revolution from Without.
Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924 (Durham, NC, 1988 [1982]). See also the
contributions of most of these authors to David Brading (ed.), Caudillo and Peasant in the
Mexican Revolution (Cambridge, 1980).
24 Buve, ‘Peasant movements’, p. 118; Dudley Ankerson, ‘Saturnino Cedillo, a Traditional
Caudillo in San Luis Potosí, 1890–1938’, in Brading, Caudillo and Peasant, pp. 140–1.
25 Heather Fowler Salamini, ‘Revolutionary Caudillos in the 1920s: Francisco Múgica and
Adalberto Tejeda’, in Brading, Caudillo and Peasant, pp. 169–92.

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nature. Cristero caciques with conservative views on property and religion, a

defensive attitude towards outside intervention in local affairs, a rural power base
and an anti-agrarista ideology could easily be classified as ‘traditional’. However,
when the caciques survived the Cristero rebellion itself, their military power was
recognized by the regime in the interest of establishing public order. Henceforth,
the caciques started to work with and through state-controlled institutions. There-
fore Butler suggests that what developed in Coalcomán is best viewed as a ‘con-
stantly evolving, hybrid caciquismo containing a mixture of traditional and modern
elements’. Moreover, this ambiguity is not considered to be something that is
structurally given, but much more the outcome of strategic interventions and
negotiations. The importance of subaltern agency for deconstructing the traditional/
modern dichotomy is also underscored by Brewster. On the basis of his own case
study and other recent work about rural leadership and power relations he calls for
an interpretation that can account for complexity and diversity. The hybrid
character of Gabriel Barrios’ cacicazgo is substantiated by the fact that he appeared
as a traditional and charismatic patriarch in the small indigenous communities, but
simultaneously as a bureaucratic broker linked to government institutions. The
differentiation between different roles and practices is also noted by Purnell, who
writes about how Che Gómez combined more ‘traditional’ personalistic relations
with his constituency in the Juchitán area with a pragmatic and more ‘modern’
engagement with state institutions. The studies in this volume thus make a clear
case for an approach that leaves behind the traditional/modern dichotomy and
accounts for the complexity, contingency and hybridity of caciquismo, without
losing sight of its changing forms.
More than two decades ago, Joseph argued that an artificial dichotomy between
‘good’ and ‘bad’ caciquismo should be avoided. Agrarian caciques, for example,
might work in one instance to further the aspirations of campesino supporters, but
in another they are primarily engaged in serving themselves and their closest
followers.26 In this volume, Zárate confirms how difficult it is to reach a convincing
normative judgement about caciques: ‘for governments, popular leaders constitute
‘troublemaking caciques’, while those whom the government considers ‘exemplary
leaders’ … are, from the perspective of popular groups, ‘self-serving caciques’. This
ambiguity can be explained by regarding caciques above all as Realpolitiker, who are
not hampered by any particular moral or ideological commitment. It would not be
hard to find ethnographic and historiographic evidence that corroborates this. Yet
it is also true that caciques have at all times been active in tapping into particular
discourses or systems of meaning that frame their political and social strategies and
provide them with a sense of orientation and legitimacy. The point to make here is
that recent scholarly work has advanced considerably in the elaboration of what
could be called the discursive dimension of caciquismo. To examine the discursive

26 Gilbert M. Joseph, ‘Caciquismo and the Revolution: Carrillo Puerto in Yucatán’, in Brading,
Caudillo and Peasant, p. 201.

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construction of caciquismo clearly goes beyond taking notice of the ‘skilful manipu-
lation of ritual and symbol by the cacique for the purpose of legitimising his
political power’.27
The agrarista discourse that flourished in the 1920s formed the basis for the
construction of the campesino identity and had a pronounced influence on the
political discourse of the well-researched Zacapu caciques in Michoacán. In fact,
these caciques were at the same time instrumental in bringing this new language of
collective political action and identity into the villages and able to appropriate the
discourse of campesino struggle in order to give meaning to what could be the
highly autocratic leadership of their communities (Boyer, this volume). Whereas
Boyer’s contribution to this volume is very explicit about the need to broaden the
scope of our study of caciquismo in twentieth-century Mexico, other chapters also
take account of the constitutive role played by discourse in the history and workings
of cacicazgos. The list of the discourses – always buttressed by practices and
institutions – that are mobilized by leaders and caciques, is long: discourses of local
and regional autonomy and identities (Purnell, Brewster, Butler), of law and order
and security (Brewster, Pansters), of ethnic and communitarian solidarity (Calderón,
Rus, Zárate), of labour rights and new unionism (Maldonado), of masculinity/
feminity (Fernández, de Vries), of neoliberal reform and accountability (Pansters)
and even democracy (Zárate). The mutually constitutive relationship of caciquismo
and discourse is most systematically elaborated in the contribution by de Vries. It is
his contention that the ubiquity and persistence of caciquismo can only be fully
appreciated by moving beyond its strategic and structural dimensions and con-
centrating on the performative, discursive and imaginative aspects of politics and
caciquismo. Taken together, these findings and proposals point to new directions in
research about caciquismo.
Caciquismo has long been associated with particular territories, especially local
or regional domains. The first element of Ugalde’s definition of a cacique was that
of a leader who ‘has total or near total political, economic and social control of a
geographic area’.28 As many scholars worked on village politics and agrarian leader-
ship, the territorial reference was mostly identified with rural areas. However, the
first generation of scholars of urban caciquismo followed this line.29 The question is
whether the definitional element of (near) total territorial control can be upheld in
the context of large-scale urban-industrial agglomerations, where cacicazgos seem to
emerge in particular sectoral domains such as informal street vending. Moreover, as

27 Joseph, ‘Caciquismo’, p. 200.

28 Antonio Ugalde, ‘Contemporary Mexico: from hacienda to PRI, political leadership in a
Zapotec village’, in R. Kern et al. (eds), The Caciques. Oligarchical Politics and the System of
Caciquismo in the Luso-Hispanic World (Albuquerque, 1973), p. 124. Friedrich’s seminal
definition makes a reference to a strong and autocratic leader in local and regional politics,
‘The Legitimacy’, p. 247.
29 Wayne A. Cornelius, ‘Contemporary Mexico: A Structural Analysis of Urban Caciquismo’,
in Kern, The Caciques, p. 138.

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the phenomenon of caciquismo is also identified with complex institutions and

organizations, the spatio-territorial element is likely to become less significant. In a
way, this can be related to current discussions in the social sciences and geography
about processes of social, economic, political and cultural de-territorialization. It
could be argued that, in view of the increased mobility of people, goods and ideas
and the density of communication networks in today’s Mexico, the territorial
dimension of caciquismo should be abandoned as a defining characteristic. Such an
approach would, however, neglect caciquismo’s intimate connection with the
crucial issue of intermediation. After all, the possibility to dominate the points of
mediation and exchange between different (geographical) domains (Wolf’s ‘crucial
junctures or synapses of relationships’) has long depended on the fact that caciques
were able to control particular spaces (militarily or otherwise), sometimes helped
by physical geography. It is no coincidence that Brewster depicts Gabriel Barrios as
the only leader able to ‘unlock’ the military potential of the indigenous commun-
ities in the Sierra Norte de Puebla and to ‘access’ the state machinery (this volume).
Without Barrios ‘opening up’ these communities, they would have remained
‘closed off’ from all kinds of resources from the outside. If the Sierra communities
had been able to access resources through alternative channels, the basis for the
reproduction of the Barrios cacicazgo would gradually disappear. The existence of
relatively closed social, economic and/or political spaces as opposed to open poli-
tical and economic markets as a precondition for the reproduction of caciquismo
constitutes the key argument of Hernández’ contribution to this volume. The fact
that territorial control, intermediation and caciquismo are thus intimately related is
perceptively expressed in the classic cacique’s maxim: ‘aquí no hay más ley que yo’.
But what does the ‘aquí ’ mean when we are dealing with a union or a university
cacicazgo? The contributions to this volume put forward at least two ideas that add
up to an ambiguous conclusion and open up new pathways for research.
The first takes as a starting point the idea that the increasing complexity of
economic systems and governance structures, social differentiation and mobility,
and institutional density in highly urbanized societies make it unlikely that
cacicazgos will construct a power monopoly over entire territories. These multi-
faceted dynamics continuously breed new actors, new demands, new conflicts, new
institutions and rules, and new forms of mediation. The social basis of current
urban-syndical or organizational cacicazgos is much more fluid (horizontal and
vertical mobility) than that of their rural counterparts in the 1930s and perhaps
even of their contemporary rural counterparts. Instead of (near) total control of a
given geographic area, this situation can give rise to caciques who have a compart-
mentalized control over certain resources or institutional domains. As a con-
sequence, the territorial dimension of such cacicazgos will have to be rephrased in
the non-geographic terms of institutional or sectoral spaces.30 Put more strongly,

30 I am indebted to Raymond Buve for making this point very clear during the conference
meetings in Oxford.

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this line of reasoning would point to the de-territorialization of caciquismo. The

university cacicazgo I analyzed in this volume does not possess an immediate
geographical reference point, but pertains basically to an organizational entity and
professional identity. These are in fact made up of complex networks of relations
that stretch well beyond certain territorial boundaries. Nevertheless, because of a
whole series of legal, administrative and political arrangements, a modern Mexican
university has to be regarded as a relatively closed institutional space that
(potentially) confers immense power on the chief executive. Similarly, particular
legal and administrative characteristics of unionism allow leaders to exercise power
in a personalistic, arbitrary and often violent way and convert these organizations
into massive platforms for cacicazgos (see Maldonado in this volume).
The second idea starts out from the existence of compartmentalized cacicazgos
but goes on to signal tendencies of re-territorialization, that is, the geographic
projection and expansion of a compartmentalized cacicazgo onto a certain territory.
The analysis of Maldonado is highly significant in this respect, as he demonstrates
how union leaders stretch out from their ‘compartment’ into the politico-
administrative domain and other domains of the reproduction of the urban-
industrial working classes. The organization of a proletarian barrio sponsored by a
labour union, the distribution of housing based on union membership, access to
public services, and the protection of sources of employment make up the spectrum
of activities through which a union cacique turns urban space into a resource of
power. It is then only a small step towards the conquest of political, administrative
and bureaucratic power. The cacique of the street vendors in Morelia, examined by
Zárate, understood this very well: he managed to obtain control of key posts in the
municipal government that gained him influence in the administration of markets
and shopping centres and all that comes with it (such as permits, tax collection,
conflict resolution). The incursion into municipal or regional government structures
by these new types of caciques has profound influence on the organization of local
and regional power structures, and will further shore up the process of territorial-
ization.
A final dimension of territorialization that emerges from several of the contri-
butions to this book refers to the remarkable desire of present day urban or institu-
tional caciques to build (symbolic) centres of their often compartmentalized power
domains. These symbolic centres of authority regularly take the form of a rancho
situated just outside major urban-industrial centres, complete with thoroughbred
horses and the paraphernalia of the charrería. In the Mexican political imaginary
such symbolism is reminiscent of the El Gargaleote ranch, ‘the mysterious sanctuary’
of one of country’s most notorious postrevolutionary regional caciques, Gonzalo
N. Santos.31 The issue of the imagery and performance of caciquismo is further ex-
plored in the next section. The investigation of the complex and ambiguous relation-

31 Fuentes, La Silla, p. 252. Santos’ El Gargaleote ranch was situated in Tamuín, a small cattle-
raising town at the entrance of the Huasteca that was under his absolute control.

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ships between the non-territorial and compartmentalized sources of modern cacical

power and its coincident tendencies of political and symbolic re-territorialization
seems an important task for future research on modern caciquismo.

Caciquismo and the state

The Mexican state has long been looked upon as a colossus that casts a long and
dark shadow over its citizens, economy and culture. The state has always invested
much in its political, administrative and economic strength, but also in its
imaginary and ideological powers. Like its Venezuelan counterpart, the Mexican
state has ‘been constituted as a unifying force by producing fantasies of collective
integration into centralized political institutions’.32 One can think of the pomp and
grandeur of public rituals, symbols and buildings, perhaps best expressed in the
fantastic magnificence of the place that everybody knows of, but almost nobody
really knows, Los Pinos, where, according to one author, the only ‘real cacique’ of
Mexico lives!33 But one should also think of the powers invested in the imagination
of the past in schoolbooks, the electronic and printed media and art, and in the
struggles with the Church and the private sector about education, religion and
morality. In recent years, the view of the Mexican state as the sole ‘independent’
actor of postrevolutionary modernity that maintains relations with other, ‘subsidi-
ary’ actors and social groups (business, political parties, peasants, unions, students,
the Church, etc.) has been seriously reconsidered. Through a new lens ‘dependent’
actors have become more discernible in the dim shadow of the state. More impor-
tantly perhaps, the persona of the state itself as a giant has been laid low by the
slingshots of Gramscian and Foucauldian notions of power, politics and the state.
In the light of these shifting views of the state, it seems worth reflecting on the
complex relations between caciquismo and the state. The standard account has it
that cacical rule will flourish particularly in the context of a weak state (whether as
an inherent and permanent quality or as a result of a temporary decline of effective
state power, for example, during revolutionary upheavals and their aftermath). The
strengthening of the postrevolutionary Mexican state, particularly since the 1930s,
the argument goes, undermined the (political and economic) spaces in which
caciquismo could reproduce. This has generated a kind of teleological reasoning or
zero-sum-game argument, in which the centralization of political power and the
territorial and functional expansion of state institutions positively correspond with
the decline of caciquismo. Writing about the decay of the Cedillo cacicazgo in the
late 1930s, Martínez Assad states that the strengthening of political centralization

32 Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago
and London, 1997), p. 4.
33 Carlos Loret de Mola, Los Caciques (Mexico City, 1979), p. 52. In this sense the hidden (physical)
reality of Los Pinos stands in stark contrast to the ‘nakedness’ of the residence of the US
president.

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was possible because of the elimination of regional caciques.34 The relation between
caciquismo and state formation was basically seen as one of ‘adapt or perish’ for the
former, as the Figueroa caciques in Guerrero had already found out in the 1920s.35
I would like to call this interpretation of the relationship between state (growth)
and caciquismo the ‘elimination’ argument. Recent scholarly work has raised doubts
about the general claims of this view and several of the chapters in this volume
provide evidence for a more differentiated view. The question is not if the institu-
tional and economic muscle of the state grew after 1930, but how this played out
through time, in particular domains or localities, and in the interactions between
different state and non-state actors. My intention is not to disprove that cacicazgos
were demolished by a strengthening (central) state in the 1920s and 1930s – there is
sufficient evidence for that – but whether this was the only game in town at the
time and in the years to come. In order words, it is the generalization of the elimin-
ation argument that is questioned here, not its particular historical validity. So
what else can be said about the nature and evolution of the relationship between
caciquismo and the state?
In this volume Calderón argues that during the 1920s local elites resented state
intervention as a form of interference in local affairs, but in the 1950s, intervention
was actively sought by local caciques to maintain their power. A similar point is
convincingly made by Butler who shows how Coalcomán Cristero caciques did
everything in the 1920s to keep the state and its policies out, but later worked
through state channels and profited from the resources that became available. At
the same time, the regime itself recognized the (military) strength of these caciques
and hence tempered its claims to control local society. These findings seem to
substantiate the argument that caciquismo can facilitate or create the conditions for
the state to penetrate into local and regional dominions, as opposed to be
undermined by it.36 I would like to call this the ‘facilitation’ argument. Cacicazgos
then appear as what Butler calls ‘a mediating barrier’ or a ‘semi-porous wall’,
capable of letting through some state initiatives while blocking others. In equal
terms, Brewster demonstrates that Gabriel Barrios became part of the state machinery
in facilitating resources for economic and social development, but never became a
‘state-derived’ authority or a tool in the hands of state managers. The ‘facilitation’
view on caciquismo–state relations does away with simple oppositions such as
resistence vs. domination, autonomy vs. dependency, intervention vs. autonomy or

34 My emphasis. ‘La relación cedillista o el ocaso del poder tradicional’, in Revista Mexicana de
Sociología, n0. 3, 1979, p. 728.
35 In those years ‘the central government had steadily regained full political control of the state,
crushing any ambitions for regional domination which the local revolutionary elite might
still harbor’. See Ian Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt. The Mexican Revolution in Guerrero (Austin,
1982), p. 135.
36 John Gledhill, ‘La dialéctica región-centro-nación a fin de siglo: poderes regionales, poderes
transnacionales y la transformación del estado’, in S. Maldonado (ed.), Dilemas del estado
nacional. Una visión desde la cultura y el espacio regional (Zamora, 2001), pp. 48–9.

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good vs. bad cacicazgos (criticized by Purnell, Brewster, Maldonado and Zárate
respectively in this volume). Instead, what becomes apparent in the relations of
these types of cacicazgos with the (federal) state is their unfixed, variable and
shifting nature, which is partly explained by the fact that they are shaped by local
histories, memories, pressure groups and standards of behaviour. Here we must
link the discussion about caciquismo with the more general debate about the
‘negotiation of rule’ in modern Mexico, in which state and society are no longer
viewed as separate spheres, one colonized by the other, since this ‘poorly represents
the interpenetration of state and society’.37
While the concept of state intervention as being fundamentally shaped by
caciquismo opens up pathways for a more differentiated and subtle theory, it does
not exhaust the relationship between state and caciquismo. In what could be called
the strongest or most ‘productive’ variant of this relationship, particular cacicazgos
are directly triggered by state penetration and policy interventions. Institutional
interventions, new resources or the introduction of new political and social organi-
zations can function as platforms or sources of power for would-be caciques, that is,
for those able to exercise control over a particularly crucial resource within a certain
region or sector and, in addition, to expand their control to other institutions and
domains. A powerful example of the so-called ‘productive’ argument can be found
in the work of Rus which shows how during the Cardenista years the national
government and party, operating through Erasto Urbina in highland Chiapas,
were able to drastically reform political relations within the indigenous communi-
ties and between these communities, the ladino elites and the state. State and party
interests did so by imposing a new generation of bilingual escribanos-principales to
represent the community before the state (embodied in projects such as land
reform and organization of labour), but who would gradually turn their recently
acquired positions of influence into powerful cacicazgos.38
The coming to fruition of the developmental state in the 1940s and 1950s gener-
ated a whole range of possibilities, as did the expansion of state economic power
from the late 1960s and 1970s. The foundation of the Comisión del Tepalcatepec in
1948, a regional development agency headed by former president Cárdenas, would
form the platform for the rise of the Toledista cacicazgo in the Sierra P’urhépecha as
it entrusted the channelling of resources from several branches of government to
particular individuals (Calderón in this volume). Building a cacicazgo or a political
group in post-Cardenista Mexico necessarily involved dealing with the country’s
increasingly complex institutional networks of bureaucracies, para-state companies,

37 Arthur Schmidt, ‘Making it Real Compared to What? Reconceptualizing Mexican History

since 1940’, in G. Joseph, A. Rubenstein and E. Zolov (eds.), Fragments of a Golden Age. The
Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940 (Durham, NC, 2001), p. 37.
38 See Jan Rus, ‘The “Comunidad Revolucionaria Institucional”: The Subversion of Native
Government in Highland Chiapas, 1936–1968', in G. Joseph and D. Nugent, Everyday
Forms of State Formation. Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham,
NC, 1994, pp. 265–300; see also his contribution to this volume.

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party branches, trade unions and peasant organizations. This argument ties into
the idea put forward by de la Peña that the institutionalization and centralization of
state power in postrevolutionary Mexico led to a fragmentation of local and
regional power domains to a degree that each (institutional) actor can only control
part of the strategic resources. Centralization and bureaucratization therefore re-
establish the need for new forms of mediation that can serve as platforms of new
cacicazgos.39 The penetration of state institutions often provides incentives to
‘caciquize’ – if I may borrow Butler’s original idea – different forms of leadership
and authority.
A perusal of the relationship between caciquismo and the state produces a
differentiated and ambiguous image. Forms of cacical power have succumbed to a
strengthening central state, but at the same time caciquismo has facilitated and
conditioned state intervention. Caciquismo can even be a direct product of state
expansion and penetration in particular regional or sectoral domains. Moreover,
relationships of elimination, facilitation and production do not correspond to
particular historical phases, although perhaps certain patterns can be distinguished
after more systematic study. The variability of the relationship between state and
caciquismo is also, as I have already pointed out, conditioned by particular local
political, economic, cultural, social and discursive mediations.
Shifting the contours of the debate about caciquismo and the state does, how-
ever, not only feed on new historiographies and ethnographies. It is also the outcome
of the emergence of a more sophisticated theory of the state. Such a theory
conceives of the state not as a coherent, articulated actor, but rather as a fragmented
ensemble of institutions, procedures, rules, techniques of governance as well as
symbolic enactments of authority. Moreover, such a theory opens up and broadens
our understanding of the state and politics to include diverse locations of meaning
and practices, where power is enacted and resisted.40 These theoretical orientations
have made serious inroads into the study of the Mexican state, power and politics,
hence their relevance for our study of caciquismo. Inspired by the Foucauldian
notion of the state as an ‘institutionalized crystallization’ of things that occur else-
where, the boundaries between what are explicitly states or political phenomena
become vague and obscure. It is one of the central arguments of Everyday Forms of
State Formation, the influential volume edited by Joseph and Nugent, when discus-
sing the relationship between popular culture and state formation as ‘each
connected to, as well as expressed in, the other’.41 In reviewing the literature and his
own research in Oaxaca, Rubin concludes that cultural phenomena (religion,
gender, kinship, ethnicity, violence, etc.) ‘are as much the shapers of power in

39 ‘Poder local, poder regional: perspectivas socioantropológicas’, in Jorge Padua and Alain
Vanneph (eds.), Poder local, poder regional (Mexico, 1986).
40 J. W. Rubin, ‘The State as Subject’, in Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 15, 2002, p. 110.
41 G. M. Joseph and D. Nugent, ‘Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary
Mexico’, in G.M. Joseph and D. Nugent (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation, p. 22.

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Mexico as the central state’.42 In this terrain where state and society are increasingly
difficult to distinguish as separate actors and where the boundaries between state/
politics and culture are fluid, local cultural forms act simultaneously to challenge
the directives and project of the central Mexican state and to reproduce forms of
local political and cultural sovereignty in areas as land distribution, language and
justice.43 Rubin’s work on Juchitán and Friedrich’s work on Naranja suggest that
caciques play key roles in these processes as they preside over local politics and
cultures that can be at odds with those promoted by the central state. However,
they can, at the same time, be imagined as instruments in the hands of the central
state. The fact is that regional cacical structures should not be seen as simple
obstructions to central state arrangements but as active forces that shape local
people’s daily experiences, define the terms of central state action and thus generate
direct impacts on national politics.44 Understanding the complex articulation of
state and popular culture, the balance of centralizing and localizing political forces
at a given moment in time and the amalgamation of state, politics and culture,
requires fine-tuned empirical research of phenomena as caciquismo.45
Recently, Hansen and Stepputat have put forward elements for a re-conceptualization
of the state that combines Gramscian and Foucauldian positions of power, govern-
ment, hegemony and authority with ethnographic and historiographic research. In
methodological terms, this calls for a disaggregated and decentred ‘study of the
state that foregrounds the local, the emic and the vernacular notions of governance,
state authority and resistance to state power’.46 Seeing the state as a dispersed set of
institutional practices, technologies of governance and symbolic enactments of
authority, and as an object of local appropriation and contestation, opens up
multiple ethnographic sites from where to study the workings and effects of the
state.47 For that purpose they explore three dimensions of the workings of the
(post-colonial) state. They argue that modern forms of the state are in a constant
process of construction that takes place through the mobilization of certain dis-
courses of governance and authority, which they call languages of ‘stateness’.48 The
discourses or technical languages of governance constitute the first dimension and
refer to issues of practical governance and discipline, such as territorial sovereignty,
monopolization of violence, the gathering of knowledge about the population and
42 J. W. Rubin, Decentering the Regime. Ethnicity, Radicalism and Democracy in Juchitán,
Mexico, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, p. 261.
43 Rubin, Decentering the Regime, p. 256.
44 Rubin, Decentering the Regime, p. 258.
45 A recent and excellent example of fine-tuned ethnographic research that brings out the com-
plexities of the relationship between local ejidatarios and the state bureaucracy is Nuijten,
Power, Community and the State.
46 T. B. Hansen and F. Stepputat, ‘Introduction: States of Imagination’, in T. B. Hansen and
and F. Stepputat (eds.), States of Imagination. Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial
State (Durham, NC, 2001), p. 9.
47 Ibid., pp. 9, 14.
48 Ibid., pp. 5–10.

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the generation of resources for development and the management of the economy.
In this respect one can think of the meaning of road-building and economic
development projects for the reproduction of caciquismo.49
The second dimension concerns the symbolic languages of authority that help
imagine the state as the authoritative centre of society par excellence. These include
the institutionalization of legal discourse that provides the state with the prestige of
neutrality and distance and the materialization of symbols and rituals (buildings,
uniforms, spectacle, but also documents) and narratives about nationhood and
history (schoolbooks).50 From this theoretical perspective the state involves not
only administrative and geopolitical rationalities and institutional forms, but also
the mythological dimensions that produce authority. The myth of the state, culti-
vated by crucial stakeholders, for example in the bureaucracy, centres on its
supposed coherence, centrality and image as a source of order and rationality. One
way of studying these processes is the analysis of the performative and narrative
aspects of particular phenomena, incidents and actors. Hansen’s original analysis of
the workings and meanings of reconciliation between Muslims and Hindus in
Mumbai after serious and violent riots had ocurred in the early 1990s shows that
the meaning of reconciliation platforms goes beyond mere technical and legal
aspects of governance. He looks at these platforms as ‘state spectacles’ or perform-
ances that aim to reassert the myth of the state as the locus of higher forms of
rationality and justice.51 A comparable perspective can be found in Nuijten’s analysis
of the culture of the Mexican state and the ways it is constituted in the interactions
between local peasants and officials of the Ministry of Agrarian Reform. Her
examination of the symbolism and imagination of the everyday interactions
between ejidatarios and state bureaucracies shows that the culture of the Mexican
state is characterized by an ‘atmosphere of opacity, distrust, and conspiracy’, which
is related to the idea of the state as an effective centre of control and power.52 In
direct connection to caciquismo, Pieter de Vries demonstrates how particular forms of
behaviour and talk continuously construct the myth of the state as the fundamental
centre of power, that in its turn requires particular political operators who can unlock
the ‘magical state’ (this volume). Further research in this direction promises to
expand our understanding of the features of caciquismo and its relations to the state.
Hansen and Stepputat’s third dimension of the working of the state highlights
how languages and practices of stateness emerge from localized political struggles,
contestation and resistance. It is here that the relationships between the state and
its supposed opposites (such as community and society) are analyzed. Hansen and
Stepputat explicitly understand these relationships as the outcome of specific
49 See, for example, K. Brewster, Militarism, Ethnicity, and Politics in the Sierra Norte de Puebla,
1917–1930 (Tucson, 2003), esp. pp. 141–51 on roads. See also Calderón this volume.
50 Hansen and Stepputat, States of Imagination, pp. 7–8.
51 T. Hansen, ‘Governance and State Mythologies in Mumbai’, in Hansen and Stepputat,
States of Imagination, pp. 221–254.
52 Nuijten, Power, Community and the State, p. 17.

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historical and discursive processes.53 For that purpose they study how state-centred
representations work to incorporate communities, such as the ones studied by
Boyer, who shows how the state-sanctioned identity of campesinos tied a particular
social group to the state through local cacicazgos. In her study of the politics of
schooling in the 1930s, Vaughan has demonstrated that the social and cultural
project of the postrevolutionary period should, above all, be seen as a process of
negotiation between central state, regional and local actors about the meanings of
nation and community, citizenship and modernity. In this manner a shared
language for consent and dissent was forged, one that was not imposed by the
central state elites, but ‘mutually constructed through negotiation between a
fledgling, fragmented state and a highly mobilized, fragmented society’.54 By
reworking and appropriating the technical languages and projects of governance
and development as well as the symbolic languages of authority, popular demands
and meanings became incorporated in Mexico’s postrevolutionary language of
stateness, making it ‘more inclusive, more democratic, and more multicultural’.55
The exploration of the institutional, political and cultural aspects of localizing and
contesting the languages of stateness in Mexico and Latin America, will inevitably
encounter the figure of the cacique. After all, he is a key figure in what Chatterjee
has called ‘political society’, that is, the space of negotiations and mediations
between the developmental state and the vast majority of the population’.56
In sum, a more sophisticated theory of the state and state–society relations, as
well as a broader understanding of the state and politics has a number of con-
sequences for future studies of caciquismo. First, the emphasis on the symbolic
languages of authority and stateness opens up an area of research that looks at the
‘styles’ of caciquismo and the role of caciques in the imagination and symbolization
of (state) power in Mexico. This line of research can build on existing work about
the political meaning of cultural performances, such as that of Lomnitz who
examined Gonzalo Santos’s politics of self-representation and his mobilization of
Huastecan regional culture as a way of confronting potosino highland and national

53 Although he does not use the language of postcolonial studies, Jonathan Fox had focused on
the diversity and contradictory relations between different actors within state institutions
some time ago. His analysis of the relationships of poor indigeneous groups to the state
identified at least three de facto situations: authoritarian elites that hold on to traditional
forms of clientelism, moderate state reformers who engage in semi-clientelist power relations
with subordinate groups, and pluralistic or democratic enclaves with government officials
who respect and promote grassroots autonomy and citizen rights. The outcomes of such
conflictual interactions are socially, regionally and historically diverse. See ‘The Difficult
Transition from Clientelism to Citizenship. Lessons from Mexico’, in World Politics, Vol.
46, no. 2, 1994, pp. 151–84.
54 M. K. Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution. Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico,
1930–1940 (Tucson, 1997), p. 196.
55 Ibid., p. 193.
56 Quoted in Hansen and Stepputat, States of Imagination, p. 28.

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elites.57 In this volume, de Vries develops this line of research by focusing on the
performance of a small-town cacique, his partying, story-telling, machismo and
alcohol consumption. A performative aproach to the cacique reveals how he is
implicated in the imagination and reproduction of a particular regime of power.
Second, the extension of our understanding of what constitutes the state and
politics, much along the lines of Rubin’s work, links caciquismo to a wide range of
issues such as gender, religion, identity and morality. While Lomnitz notes the
‘manipulative mix of intimate cultures for the construction of regional leadership’,
Rubin wants to understand the political function of cultural practices beyond
direct and conscious instrumentality.58 A post-structuralist extension of the notion
of the state can gain a lot from Rubin’s idea of ‘seeing and not-seeing’ the state:
‘This means acknowledging the existence, force, and cohesiveness of states and
subjects, while simultaneously recognizing something else at play in them as well,
the mixture of fragments and pieces – with their own histories – out of which states
or subjects are constituted … It enables us to examine how states or subjects are
constructed out of other phenomena and therefore what multiple forces constitute
and crosscut them’.59 Similarly, if cacique politics is caught up in local conceptions
of the world and plays a key role in reproducing community life and identities, its
(hidden) meaning will reach beyond political brokerage and economic domination.60
Moreover, if state formation, as Nugent and Alonso argue, refers to processes
‘through which the identities of subjects of the state are constructed via media or
moral regulation, quotidian administration, and ritual, as well as through manifest,
concrete oppression’, then the study of caciquismo needs to move beyond mechan-
isms of political intermediation and violence.61
Finally, this theoretical perspective leaves behind the idea of clear-cut encounters
between ‘the state’ and (local) ‘community’ or ‘society’, either in the form of the
state that steamrolls society, or in the form of community isolationism, or as rivalry
between clearly identifiable actors. Instead, it permits the study of the ambiguities
and multifacetedness characteristic of the interactions between state and non-state
actors. Such a perspective can account more satisfactorily for several of the findings
in this volume, namely that caciques continue to play key roles in this field and,
more importantly, that their function and performance is deeply ambivalent and
cannot be reduced to previously used models.62

57 C. Lomnitz, Exits from the Labyrinth. Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space
(Berkeley, 1992), p. 302.
58 Ibid., p. 303.
59 Rubin, ‘The State as Subject’, 109.
60 Rubin, Decentering the Regime, p. 256.
61 D. Nugent and A. M. Alonso, ‘Multiple Selective Traditions in Agrarian Reform and Agrarian
Struggle: Popular Culture and State Formation in the Ejido of Namiquipa, Chihuahua’, in
Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms, pp. 210–11.
62 See, for example, Brewster who concludes his extensive study of the Barrios cacicazgo in Puebla
by stating that he portrayed a cacique ‘who was neither one thing nor another, a semi-

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The dynamics of caciquismo and cacicazgos

Since the publication of Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution in 1982,
which concentrated on the period from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s,
there has been no systematic effort to examine comparatively the transformation of
caciquismo over time. By widening the temporal scope to cover the entire twentieth
century this volume has been able to raise key questions about the effects of social,
economic, political and cultural transformation on the nature and role of
caciquismo. By expanding the study beyond the rural sector this volume has also
raised questions about the possibilities and limitations of the horizontal migration
of the concept of caciquismo towards societal domains, actors, organizations and
institutions that hitherto had rarely been investigated in these terms. Moreover, the
analysis of the dynamics of caciquismo in recent years is necessarily framed by con-
temporary debates about democratization, citizenship and changing state–society
relations. The great bulk of these debates has concentrated on ‘formal’ political
processes, institutions and elections. Many studies fall short on the critical socio-
cultural and political rules and practices that inform behaviour and practices,
epitomized by phenomena such as caciquismo, and, by extension, clientelism and
patrimonialism. This generates a number of questions about the possible connec-
tions between caciquismo, changes in civil society, democratization, transition and
alternation in government.
The contributions to this volume deal with dissimilar time frames, social actors
and societal sectors and they adopt a variety of conceptual perspectives. Neverthe-
less, taken together they produce sufficient insights into the wider dynamics of
caciquismo. To organize them I suggest an initial and analytical distinction between
caciquismo and cacicazgos. This distinction is a matter of scale but also of qualita-
tively different questions. Both dynamics frequently, though not necessarily, inter-
lock, hence the distinction should not be reified. The focus on cacicazgos draws
attention primarily to the internal dynamics of specific cacical power systems and
asks if general points can be made about processes inside cacicazgos. In my own
contribution to this volume about the contemporary Mexican university, I
proposed the breakdown of the dynamics of cacicazgos in three ideal-typical phases.
The key argument here is that the constitution of cacicazgos hinges on the capabili-
ties of would-be caciques to extend the sphere of influence beyond their original
domains, something that is confirmed by the findings of other contributions in this
volume. Boyer speaks of the ‘winner-takes-all’ dynamic of agrarian cacicazgos and
Maldonado uses the concept of territorialization to describe the processes by which
union caciques penetrate new domains in urban Mexico. Fernández recounts the

autonomous military leader who periodically lost political control of the area he
commanded’. In similar terms he concludes that ‘successive federal administrations were
never quite sure how much they could control Barrios and were consistently hesitant in
trying to establish a direct relationship with the region’s indigenous communities’, Militarism,
Ethnicity and Politics, p. 165.

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spectacular case of the transformation of Heliodoro Hernández Loza from a

powerful leader of a union of taxi and bus drivers and mechanics into a leading
businessman in urban transport and even into the Secretary of Transport of the
state of Jalisco, a process in which different domains, interests and networks
increasingly centred on the cacique.63 The dynamics of particular cacicazgos are
shaped to a large extent by local political disputes and negotiations, and economic
changes, that are not duplicates of broader shifts in Mexican society. Nevertheless,
the building and eventual demise of cacicazgos are also connected to wider processes
of societal change.
This brings me to the transformation of caciquismo as a generic phenomenon
and its external dynamics. A structural perspective on caciquismo raises questions
about the functions of caciquismo and the prospects for the reproduction of person-
alized mediation and requires situating it in wider shifts in the economy, state,
politics and communication. In his much-acclaimed study of class and ethnic
conflict in the Huasteca of Hidalgo, Schryer analyzed the ranchero cacicazgo of
Juvencio Nochebuena that lasted from the 1930s until the late 1950s.64 Schryer’s
account of the history of Nochebuena’s power can be seen as paradigmatic for the
interpretation of caciquismo during that crucial period. With the Cardenista reforms,
Nochebuena established himself as the chief intermediary between local ranchero
elites, peasants and the federal state. With firm roots in regional ranchero society,
Nochebuena also learned to operate in the newly emerging bureaucratic order of
the postrevolutionary state. Before 1940 the strategic importance of this type of
caciques lay especially in their ability to mobilize and control their armed retainers,
but the centralization and consolidation of state power meant that their position
came to depend more on connections with and knowledge of new state institutions
and their local agents. Schryer concludes that Nochebuena’s eventual downfall was
the result of the profound structural transformation of the economy and the
political system, the effects of which were strongly felt in the Huasteca because of
Nochebuena’s own efforts to integrate the region into the national economic
system. Informed by a rather functionalist Marxist approach Schryer assumed that
‘with the rapid expansion of modern capitalism, the Mexican state no longer
needed to rely on regional caciques for its survival…’ 65
The theory of the exhaustion of the intermediary function and the values and
practices associated with ranchero elites in the face of a strengthened state and a
modernizing economic system has frequently led to the suggestion that caciquismo
will eventually disappear from the Mexican political landscape. To a certain extent
this theory is endorsed by several contributions to this volume. Keith Brewster
states that Gabriel Barrios’ cacicazgo came to end because the combined forces of
63 See also Laura Patricia Romero, ‘La conformación del caciquismo sindical en Jalisco. El caso de
Heliodoro Hernández Loza’, in Carlos Martínez Assad (ed.), Estadistas, caciques y caudillos
Mexico, 1988), pp. 293–311.
64 Francis J. Schryer, Ethnicity and Class Conflict in Rural Mexico (Princeton, 1990).
65 Ibid., p. 150.

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the regional authorities in Puebla and those in Mexico City could establish a direct
and organized presence in the Sierra. Again, Barrios himself had contributed to this
by promoting the incorporation of his power domain into broader politico-
economic systems. Rogelio Hernández also argues that when structural conditions
change and the intermediary function vanishes, caciquismo will eventually disappear,
but he does not relate this explicitly to the changing shape of Mexican capitalism.
For him the crucial factor is the relative openness or closure of domains in which
would-be caciques operate.
Although the relationship between the combined effects of political centrali-
zation and economic transformation on the one hand and the decline of caciquismo
is valid for a number of historical cases, this volume has shown that despite the
further reinforcement of the former, caciquismo has persisted. It has developed in
the heart of urban-industrial capitalism and in universities, not so much in oppo-
sition to a relatively strong state, but rather in juxtaposition to it. The causality
implicit in the modernization and centralization hypothesis is thus flawed. So what
can we say about the dynamics and transformation of caciquismo? The studies in
this volume suggest novel ways of looking at this intriguing question. Instead of
linking the reproduction of caciquismo to a (relatively) weak or strong state per se,
to the development of capitalism or, for that matter, to the institutional density of
civil society, this volume contains arguments that explain the dynamics of caciquismo
by looking at particular historical conjunctures in politics, economy and society.
It is my contention that the reproduction of caciquismo strongly relates to the
(sudden) occurrence of different forms and conjunctures of disorder and inse-
curity. ‘What do the caciques want?’ a character in La sSilla del Águila rhetorically
asks, and ‘pescar en río revuelto’ is the answer.66 I suggest that some combination of
political and socio-economic disorder and conflict is very relevant in this context,
but a crisis of cultural and moral repertoires or a confusion about cultural values
and orientations is of equal importance and will often come together with the
former. This should not be read in structural terms, since situations of disorder will
not automatically produce cacicazgos. Such situations provide the raw material with
which future cacicazgos can be put together. Only if particular actors are able to
capitalize on them (think of Friedrich’s libido dominandi), the raw material can be
transformed into a full-blown cacicazgo, that is, the successful articulation of
different power domains by a cacique. The association proposed here between
disorder/insecurity and caciquismo should not be read in structural terms in
another sense as well: caciquismo is not constantly related to disorder and insecurity.
On the contrary, the emergence of a particular cacical power system results in the
creation of new order and stability, at least during the first phases of a cacicazgo. In
other words, cacicazgos will often persist when the original sources of disorder and
insecurity have disappeared. In sum, broad conjunctures of disorder, instability,
insecurity and conflict – some sources of which I will analyze below – provide the

66 Fuentes, La Silla, p. 148.

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structural conditions for the reproduction of caciquismo, that can, but not neces-
sarily will, be effectively exploited by agents with the purpose of laying the founda-
tions for a cacicazgo, thereby setting off the specific dynamics of cacicazgos mentioned
earlier (articulation, stabilization and disintegration). In this manner, the broad
(external) dynamics of caciquismo tie into the particular (internal) dynamics of
cacicazgos.
In the course of these processes (would-be) caciques act upon particular cultural
repertoires and practices, styles, memories and histories, which provide their
actions and ambitions with an amount of legitimacy. Gonzalo Santos’ employment
of the symbols and practices of aggressive ranchero leadership were effective because
they were rooted in regional cultural and political memories of earlier cacical
experiences. While ambitious political leaders or bosses struggle to make the most of
the political spaces that open up in critical conjunctures of disorder and instability,
their social and political environment will most likely endorse their efforts, especially
if they provide some kind of ‘solution’ to the causes of disorder and instability.67
Cacicazgos thus frequently emerge from conditions of disorder and insecurity, since
the latter create the ‘need’ for the ‘coordination’ and the rearticulation/reordering
of political and social spaces. This often takes the form of rallying behind a (new)
strongman. The establishment of a new ‘centre of gravity’ able to regulate the
political process in a more orderly manner and put an end to instability and
perhaps violence (or at least the promise of doing so), is functional for the more
mundane aspects of governance as well as for the symbolic dimensions of authority.
The re-establishment of a symbolic centre of authority around an emerging strong-
man, who is able to re-imagine the state as a reliable and essential source of power
and resources, is perhaps even a prerequisite for the construction of an institu-
tional, political and economic centre of gravity.
In this volume Zárate explains the remarkable continuity of caciquismo by
regarding it as a structuring power able to construct forms of social organization
that provide solutions for these tasks. The García Barragán cacicazgo in coastal
Jalisco clearly ‘simplified politics’. These social forms may contradict certain aspects
of the formal system of governance, but they also provide a foundation for it.
Caciquismo and the practices of vertical reciprocity and intermediation continue to
play a fundamental role in establishing and maintaining order and social cohesion,
against the background of the de-structuring effects of the recent policies of the
Mexican state and international agencies.
If rallying behind strong leaders has often laid the foundations for subsequent
cacicazgos, questions surface about the forces that lay behind such conjunctures.
The case studies in this volume suggest a few general sources of disorder and insecurity.
67 A recent UNDP study of the state of democracy in present day Latin America seems relevant
in this respect. It shows almost 55 per cent of Latin American citizens would support an
authoritarian government if it would resolve economic crisis and disorder. The sample for the
study consisted of almost 19,000 people in 18 countries. UNDP, La democracia en América
Latina. Hacia una democracia de ciudadanas y ciudadanos, www.undp.org, 2004, p. 137.

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The first, and in the Mexican case most most obvious (and most thoroughly
researched), is that of (post)revolutionary disorder and instability. Brewster notes
that the serranos did not rally behind Gabriel Barrios because of land, serrano
desires for autonomy or political ideology. Their main source of anxiety was the
disorder caused by bandits and rebels. They supported Barrios because he could
stand up against the source of disorder and restore stability, law and order, so that
the serranos could conduct their daily activities without fear of violence. During the
same period, the violence and instability caused by the Cristero revolt were
responsible for the emergence of God’s caciques in Michoacán (Butler).
A second source of disorder and instability can be associated with the sweeping
processes of urbanization and industrialization that turned rural Mexico upside
down from the 1940s onwards. The intensity and speed with which this occurred
created the fragmentation of previously existing power structures. Moreover, it
generated new anxieties and insecurities and hence conflicts, especially among the
urban poor as earlier social, cultural and political mechanisms of solidarity and
contestation became less effective. This provided sufficient space for political entre-
preneurs to re-articulate the shifting and unstable terrain around (prospective)
caciques. The contributions from Maldonado, Fernández and Zárate to this volume
contain examples of how successful political entrepreneurs were able to build long
lasting cacicazgos on the basis of the insecurities of the urban (working) poor.
A third and more recent source of disorder relates to the complex whole of neo-
liberal reforms of the economy, the state and state-society relations. On the one
hand there is Mexico’s extreme social polarization that has been the result of the
economic policies from the last twenty years, and especially of the periodic crisis
brought about by them. Increasing poverty, informality and polarization constitute
a breeding ground for determined leaders to ‘caciquize’ the daily insecurities of the
poor. Moreover, in these contexts governments are obliged to negotiate social order
and public peace with local caciques. The case of informal street vending in
Morelia provides a remarkably strong example of this kind of politización caciquista
of urban hardship (Zárate in this volume).68 On the other hand, the neo-liberal
restructuring of the state has generated tremendous tensions on existing adminis-
trative and institutional arrangements. A case in point is that of higher education,
where the adoption of neoliberal reforms drastically affected the financial and
political situation of public universities. As my own contribution to this volume
has demonstrated, this brought about a crisis in the model that governed state-
university relations for decades. In one of the country’s largest public universities,
this crisis combined with fierce factional disputes and generated extreme adminis-
trative, political and financial disorder, that in its turn prompted the construction
of a powerful institutional cacicazgo during the 1990s.

68 In his study of street vendors in Mexico City, Cross is more reluctant to employ the concept
of caciquismo, though he speaks of the authoritarian nature of street vendor organizations.
See J. C. Cross, Informal Politics. Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City (Stanford, 1998).

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In addition, the dismantling of the Mexican developmental state has created a

vacuum in political and economic intermediation.69 Deregulation, such as in the
case of the dismantling of the massive purchasing and marketing network of the
Mexican Coffee Institute (INMECAFE), vacates institutionalized policy domains
and thus creates opportunities for ambitious political leaders and economic interest
groups to reconstruct coffee-based cacicazgos. Deregulation ushers in new forms of
insecurity and disorder as rivaling groups attempt to dominate the institutional,
political and economic space left open by the withdrawal of the federal agency.
Moreover, these reforms coincided with escalating political instability across Mexico.70
The key issue in what Snyder has called the ‘politics of reregulation’ involved
whether oligarchic groups and local caciques or peasant-owned cooperatives
emerged as the dominant actors in coffee production and distribution. In a fascin-
ating comparative study of these processes in Mexico’s four leading coffee pro-
ducing states, Snyder demonstrates that the outcomes are the result of the complex
interplay between initial reregulation projects put forward by state government
elites, the response of small-producer organizations and their organizational
strength. Whereas Oaxaca saw the emergence of a participatory policy framework
that enhanced the efficiency and quality of smallholder production, Puebla’s weak
producer movement together with the attempt by regional authorities to politically
exploit the federal policies of deregulation and decentralization set the stage for an
exclusionary policy frame that strengthened ‘local authoritarian elites’ and
cacicazgos.71 The divergent pathways followed by Oaxaca and Puebla, as well as by
Chiapas and Guerrero, underscore the argument made previously that the condition
of disorder and insecurity itself is insufficient to account for the reproduction or
resurgence of caciquismo. This will depend on a combination of factors of political
economy, political relations, popular organizations, ideological orientations and
political-cultural traditions. These arguments fit a more general argument in the
study of Latin American politics in the sense that socio-economic polarization and
institutional devastation brought about by neoliberal reform and the spread of new
forms of violence have all led to widespread feelings of fragmentation and
insecurity, that are increasingly mediated politically by national strongmen, or
level-one caciques, to use Alan Knight’s terminology.72

69 Sergio Zermeño, ‘Crisis, Neoliberalism and Disorder’, in J. Foweraker and A. L. Craig (eds.),
Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico (Boulder/London, 1990), pp. 160–80, is
highly relevant in this respect. In it Zermeño attempts to explain the emergence of neo-
cardenismo from this perspective. In another study Zermeño links this interpretation to the
Chiapas uprising, see his ‘Society and Politics in Contemporary Mexico (Modernization and
Modernityin Global Societies)’ in W. G. Pansters (ed.), Citizens of the Pyramid. Essays on
Mexican Political Culture (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 183–208.
70 The case of the deregulation of Mexico’s coffee sector is excellently analyzed by R. Snyder,
Politics after Neoliberalism. Reregulation in Mexico (Cambridge, 2001).
71 Snyder, Politics after Neoliberalism, pp. 45, 191.
72 See also UNDP, La democracia en América Latina; and Knight, this volume.

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The final source is perhaps the most controversial and undoubtedly the least
researched. It refers to the difficult birth of multiparty democracy and government
alternation. The process of democratization is often seen as antithetical to the
reproduction of caciquismo. This is easy to understand since the cacique distorts the
principle of political equality and stands in the way of publicly accountable, legally
transparent, and formal forms of mediation between society and the government.73
Some commentators argue that caciquismo in twentieth-century Mexico was intim-
ately related to the near monopolistic power exercized by the PRI during its seventy
years long reign. With the historic defeat of the PRI, Lorenzo Meyer writes, this
‘fundamental base of political support’ for the caciques has been lost and there is
thus a huge opportunity for the ‘definitive decadence’ of the phenomenon.74 But
Meyer is also cautious and notes that in the short run the PRI might look for
political shelter in union and regional cacicazgos. The reproduction of caciquismo,
however, cannot be reduced to a question of strategy. The political fragmentation,
polarization and confrontations that characterized the 1990s created a great deal of
uncertainty and thus incentives for the transformation of certain organizational
leaderships into cacicazgos. The generalization of ‘democratic party pluralism’ has
provided a propitious terrain for local cacicazgos to accommodate themselves, e.g.
after being ousted from the PRI.75 The insecurities about electoral outcomes,
shifting party alliances, the formation of new parties and an increasingly large float-
ing electorate have fuelled the anxieties of political entrepreneurs and increased the
political and economic risks of ‘political investments’. At a more systemic level, it
has been argued that an important recent source of instability and uncertainty is
the fact that Mexico’s electoral and party systems (still?) possess insufficient strength
to replace the dysfunctional traditional representational and mediating mechan-
isms, such as those associated with corporatism. The electoral arena has become a
channel of protest and a source of pressure and instability, as much as a platform
for political and programmatic options.76 In other parts of the world the intro-
duction of democratic politics has generated new forms of ethnic and tribal conflict
and instability as political leaders mobilize these identities for electoral purposes.
Although it is much too early to make a conclusive assessment of the consequences
of the current processes of democratization and alternation in Mexico, there are at
least signs that some of them could be rather ‘perverse’. The adjectives that have

73 Although this is not the place to investigate theoretically the relationship between demo-
cracy and caciquismo, a quick glance at Robert Dahl’s fundamental criteria for democracy
and democratic institutions suggests that they would be incompatible. See On democracy
(New Haven and London, 2000), pp. 37–8; 85–6.
74 ‘Los caciques: ayer, hoy ¿y mañana?’, in Letras Libres, December 2000, p. 40.
75 Marco Calderón M. and Martín Sánchez R., ‘Cambio social y transformaciones políticas en
Jacona, Michoacán (una propuesta de esquema, 1920–1990)’, in Relaciones. Estudios de Historia
y Sociedad, no. 61/62, 1995, pp. 13–30.
76 Rogelio Hernández, ‘La difícil transición política en México’, in Mexican Studies/Estudios
Mexicanos, Vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 237–57.

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accompanied the notions of democracy and transition in Mexico have been so

numerous, that the latter should perhaps be added.77 In the mind of the fictitious
future Secretary of the Interior in Carlos Fuentes’s recent novel there is no doubt:
‘… donde hemos dado democracia hemos perdido autoridad, hemos creado huecos de
anarquía que llenan, propiciados, los eternos caciques y sus “fuerzas vivas” …’78

Pathways for new research

In the preceding pages I have made an effort to draw some general conclusions
from the contributions to this volume by looking at several critical debates that
surround the concept of caciquismo. I identified several ideas and interpretations
that go beyond previous work on the subject. I was also able to ascertain pathways
that will push the debate about caciquismo in novel directions.
My brief analysis of the history of theorizing about caciquismo and several points
put forward in this volume has suggested moving the terms of debate further than
the dual track of caciquismo as a structural mechanism and/or a particular set of
practices of leadership and concentrate also on the performative and discursive
dimensions of the phenomenon. Contemporary theorizing on the state and power
has argued for a notion of the state as a fragmented ensemble of institutions and
practices, firmly rooted in and mediated by (civil) society and popular culture, and
broadened the meaning of power and politics. This has opened up new territories
for the study of caciquismo. How can the role of a cacique be theorized if the
relations between state, society and popular groups is increasingly framed in terms
of ambiguous, multifaceted and contested interactions? What are the consequences
for our understanding of the nature and role and caciquismo if we link notions of
power and the state to those of morality, gender and religion? What role do
caciques play in the construction, reproduction and contestation of the symbolic
languages of authority and stateness?
Previously common distinctions and oppositions, such as that between tradi-
tional and modern, or autonomous and integrated forms of caciquismo have been
criticized and replaced by more sophisticated and differentiated interpretations of
(hybrid) caciquismo. A rethinking of the classic notion of the territoriality of
caciquismo has opened up pathways to explore the development of compartmen-
talized and de-territorialized control of institutional and bureaucratic spaces as a

77 For an analysis of the nature and the qualifications of the Mexican transition see Wil Pansters,
‘The Transition under Fire: Rethinking Contemporary Mexican Politics’, in K. Koonings
and D. Kruijt (eds.), Societies of Fear. The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin
America (London and New York, 1999), esp. pp. 242–55. The idea of the ‘adjectives’ of
Mexican democracy was elaborated in Enrique Krauze’s well-known essay, Por una demo-
cracia sin adjetivos (Mexico, 1986). For a recent return to this topic see Enrique Krauze, ‘Por
una democracia responsable’, in Letras Libres, June 2003, pp. 12–15.
78 Fuentes, La Silla del Águila (Mexico, 2003), p. 43.

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source of cacical power in highly complex social contexts, as well as the concomitant
tendency of political and symbolic re-territorialization.
My analysis of the relationships between state and caciquismo in terms of the
elimination, facilitation and production arguments creates possibilities for the
development of a more differentiated and subtle theory and raises all kinds of new
research questions. How can the relative importance of elimination, facilitation
and production at a certain moment in time be assessed? Can certain patterns be
distinguished and how can they be explained? If the causal relationship between a
strengthening state and a declining caciquismo is justly questioned, how does the
unquestionably increased muscle of the state then flex itself in different times and
spaces? In similar terms, I demonstrated that the theory that claims a link between
socio-economic modernization and the decline of the cacique cannot be main-
tained in general terms. This led me to explore novel ways of looking at the
dynamics of caciquismo in terms of conjunctures and sources of disorder and
insecurity. Again, this produces all kinds of fresh research questions. For example,
the hypothesis of the relationship between caciquismo and disorder would greatly
benefit from research that looks at a counter-factual process whereby a group or
individual does not manage to build a cacicazgo, despite conscious efforts thereto
and propitious original conditions of disorder and insecurity.
While the ethnographic cases in this volume imply that it would be premature to
wave goodbye to caciques, the theoretical reflections that emerge from this volume
leave no doubt that the study of caciquismo will be with us for some time yet.

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