Respuestas
The death penalty as an extreme form of punishment and as an expression of
exercise of sovereign power was applied in what is now Ecuador from the
colonial period. In a poorly connected country, with large regional differences, with limited development of the internal market, with fragmentary powers1
and where although the State began to be established, 2
I acted many times
by delegation, 3
the death penalty constituted during the Republic a resource to show the presence of the State. The first Ecuadorian Penal Code
(1837) established 19 cases for the application of the death penalty. In 1850 the
Liberal Pedro Carbo presented a proposal to abolish capital punishment
for political crimes, the same one that was approved. This position also
it was assumed by the conventions of 1852 and 1861 until the president
Gabriel García Moreno (1861-1975) re-established it in the Constitution
of 1869. In 1878, and amid the disputes between liberals, "progressives"
and ultramontane conservatives, the National Assembly introduced its abolition for political crimes and common crimes, excepting crimes
military and parricide, considered a heinous crime. With the advent
of the Liberal Revolution, in 1896, the death penalty for both
political crimes as for the common ones, keeping it for military crimes. Then, the inviolability of life was consecrated in the Political Charter of
1906, with capital punishment abolished for all cases.
The discussion on the death penalty, as it was raised throughout the
XIX century, it occupied a central place in public debates and shows the struggle
that existed between the liberal sectors, which advocated its abolition, and the
conservative sectors, which defended its permanence. President Gabriel
García Moreno made the execution and the death penalty basic instruments for the affirmation and legitimization of his mandate, while the liberals related the death penalty to the arbitrary and authoritarian character
garcianismo. Around 1857 (this is in the period immediately before
Garcia Moreno's rise and amid the social climate that favored that rise), discussions on the death penalty were activated around the
execution of an indigenous man and the suicide, one month later, of the woman
who alleged in her favor: Dolores Veintimilla de Galindo, who showed herself
of this case, in favor of the abolition of the penalty. Some years later it
They held several debates within the legislative and judicial systems.
The purpose of this article is to recover the meaning of these debates between
the years 1857-1896. In a first part, and from a microhistorical perspective, I will take as reference Dolores Veintimilla de Galindo and her position
against the death penalty. I think that reducing the scale of the analysis allows, in addition to relieving the critical position of this character, to understand the
moral climate and aspects of social reality that could not otherwise
know each other.4
Later, I will refer to the debate on the death penalty raised in
the conventions of 1878 and 1896 until their definitive abolition in 1897.
Although the debate on the death penalty took place within the legislative and legal framework, it was directly related to a context
broader dispute over the forms of institution of sovereignty and
conformation of state power. In that sense, I will also take as
theoretical axis the analysis of law and crimes as "a prism to understand society" .5
For García Moreno, the insufficiency of the laws justified their implementation in conditions of "exception" and was one of the
forms of affirmation of sovereignty. As George Agamben points out, 6
the
sovereign not only stands outside the law but declares that there is no
outside the law. For liberalism, on the contrary, the forms of exercising sovereignty needed to be socially legitimized; the legal order
should focus on education and rehabilitation rather than punishment and
society vindictive.