This chapter looks at the emergence of the figure of the pistolero, the gunman. These bodyguards for politicians combined their role as experts in the use of violence with illegal activities in which they could profit from their official protection. The chapter examines three cases of political assassination.
This chapter looks closely at a few authors who explored the possibilities of crime fiction to reflect on the problem of truth and on homicide as a form of aesthetic creation. These authors are María Elvira Bermúdez, Rafael Bernal, Juan Bustillo Oro, and Rodolfo Usigli.
This chapter looks at policemen and detectives in postrevolutionary Mexico. It discusses the weakness of forensic methods and the lack of prestige of police and private detectives. It examines the use of torture and extrajudicial violence against suspects.
This chapter examines the emergence of the crime news, known as nota roja, since the late 1920s. This journalistic genre became the most important space in the public sphere for the discussion of matters of crime and punishment—a critical venue for readers and writers. It pays particular attention to La Prensa, the most successful newspaper of the century.
This chapter follows the history of criminal jury trials in Mexico City from their establishment in the late nineteenth century until their abolition in 1929. It focuses on the organization, legislation, and operation of the institution. It examines closely the trials of María del Pilar Moreno and José de León Toral, the murderer of president-elect Alvaro Obregón, and it places both in the context of contemporary politics.
The conclusion summarizes the problems discussed in the book and places them in relation to the contemporary problems of violence, impunity, and lack of judicial transparency in Mexico.
This chapter examines the emergence of famous murderers through the press. It focuses on a few cases, like that of Goyo Cárdenas. It examines the ways in which detectives, judges, psychologists, and journalists focused on these suspects, as well as the way in which some of these suspects used their public visibility to put forward their narratives.
This chapter examines the emergence of a popular genre of crime fiction in Mexico in the 1940s. It looks at magazines and short stories. It argues that despite the lack of official support, this genre became popular and was able to express, through fiction, the problems in the pursuit of truth and justice in front of impunity. Fictional detectives were seldom representatives of the police or the judiciary.
The introduction frames the central themes of the book. It examines the historiography on modern Mexico and violence, and it presents the construction of the country’s reputation as a place of violence and impunity.