“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

elationships and secure local courts for their allies. In the process, they provoked sharp
conflicts with their local rivals to control the administration of justice.
The last third of the 19 th century did provide a framework for the creation of new
states. Fueled by growing revenues from the export of agricultural staples, governments
throughout the Río de la Plata developed sufficient power to compel allegiance from their
peripheries. But this power only went so far. National leaders had to forge networks of
local allies in order to consolidate their authority over the borderlands. Elites in the
periphery in turn began to negotiate with putative national figures over the terms of state
authority. Borderlands courts represented critical sites where thorny questions regarding the
relationship between the nation and its peripheral inhabitants were negotiated. Local legal
politics increasingly pivoted around securing the support of national judicial officials in the
persistent struggles over reputation, reciprocal relationships and factional associations. In
this sense, courts occupied a dual role as units of national integration through the law and of
disintegration through privileging local relationships and the legalities defining them.
From this perspective, the consolidation of state authority on the periphery looks
more contingent and uneven. As Guillermo O’Donnell observed, nation-states often
possess within them zones in which legal power has been effectively “localized” or
“privatized.” O’Donnell’s metaphor of a “heat map” in which the extension of state
authority across its territories occurs unevenly, creating “brown” or “green” spaces where
state-centered laws have failed or only partially penetrated local and regional enclaves seems
particularly appropriate. 4 The inhabitants of national peripheries retained their power to
define their personal allegiances and political associations. The presence of national judicial
4 Guillermo O'Donnell, Contrapuntos: Ensayos Escogidos Sobre Autoritarismo y
Democratización, 1a ed. (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1997), 267-69.
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