Whereas the French Revolution will forever be associated with the guillotine, the Latin American revolutions came with the firing squad. There is a reason that Latin America’s most famous novel starts with a man facing one while his mind wanders back to a happy childhood memory, “a distant afternoon” when his father took him to the village fair. In its intricate opening sentence, Cien años de soledad (1967) captures key elements of the firing squad as a political reality and symbolic paradigm in the Latin American imagination: their ubiquity; their strange temporality, a convergence of past, present, and future; the affirmation of life in the face of imminent death; and the improbable miracle of surviving them. Colonel Aureliano Buendia is saved from imminent death by José Arcadio, only to go on to lead 32 more uprisings in his lifetime (until he grows tired of war). His seventeen illegitimate sons are not so lucky. They are the bearers of Latin America’s stain of Cain-Aureliano, of the curse of civil strife, and the paredón appears as their inescapable paradero. These scenes make potent allegories of Latin American history as a fundamentally violent experience of modernity and politics, and of the cyclical violence that ensued after independence.
Many heroes of the wars against Spain died at the hands of a firing squad: Hidalgo and Morelos in New Spain, and Caldas, Torres Tenorio, and Barraya in New Granada. Death by firing squad also endured throughout the many conflicts between liberals and conservatives that raged in the nineteenth century. This type of violent, public death also found foreigners with imperial designs, such as William Walker and Maximilian von Habsburg, fusilladed, respectively, in Honduras in 1860 and in Mexico in 1867, in what were important cornerstones of the defense of the young republics. But it is during the Mexican Revolution that firing squads acquired their notoriety and ubiquity. During the world’s first mass-mediated revolution, firing squads were turned into postcard keepsakes and songs and featured heavily in the revolution’s literature.
While fusilamientos would never be used on such a large scale again in the Americas, they did not disappear in the twentieth century. They continued to be a feature in the Latin American guerrilla-led revolutions, where either the firing squad was turned against the henchmen of the former regime (most prominently in the Cuban Revolution) or, in even more tragic and heinous fashion, against one’s own comrades (most famously Roque Dalton). So common were firing squads that another trope weaves itself through the region’s literature of the long Cold War: surviving one (as in Miguel Marmol, 1993; Sobrevivir un fusiliamiento, 2005, and The Volcano Daughters, 2024). This short article traces some instances of firing squads in modern Latin American history and its cultural production to explore what preoccupies almost all these cultural representations: what is the meaning, if any, of these cruel mass-mediated, orchestrated forms of political death and murder, and what is their legacy, if any, today?
The Instant: Firing Squads Photographed and Narrativized
Two European paintings constitute key visual antecedents to the Mexican Revolution’s many photographs of executions by firing squads. One is Francisco Goya’s El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid (1814), which depicts Spanish insurgents being fusilladed in the context of the French occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. Another, heavily influenced by Goya’s painting, is a series of paintings by Édouard Manet of Emperor Maximilian’s execution (together with conservative Mexican generals Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejía) in the context of the French intervention in Mexico. Relics and other visual proof cemented Maximilian’s death as a major political event of the nineteenth century in the global public imagination (at once tragic and a potent affirmation of Mexican sovereignty). Moreover, it created a lasting visual blueprint of fusilamientos as events typically featuring “the victim, the wall, the firing squad and onlookers” (Noble 2010, 91).
In many photographs of the Mexican Revolution the wall is the “potent topographic cue” that indicates that the men we see are about to be fusilladed, even when the firing squad itself is not visible (Noble 2010, 91). An example is the iconic photograph of Fortino Sámano, who was executed in 1917, accused of armed robbery (Casasola 2017; del Valle 2018). His hands in his pockets and knees slightly bent, Fortino stands nonchalantly before a wall. Wearing a hat, a cigar in between his teeth, and with his mouth half open, he seems to grin. In the photo, the doomed man appears relaxed, and composed. That Fortino and others appear so at ease moments before their death has become part of the revolutionary and national mythology.
Notable cultural critics such as Claudio Lomnitz (2005), Octavio Paz (1950), and Carlos Monsiváis (1989) have read the revolution’s firing squads mainly in relation to the construction of a postrevolutionary Mexican nationalism and Mexicans’ supposed particular attitude towards death. The historian Everard Meade argues that the institution of the revolutionary firing squad became Mexico's “black legend” and sign of Mexican “savagery” both abroad and internally, arguing that this, however, obscures the underlying social conflicts and conflictive processes of modernization that caused the Mexican Revolution (2005, 119; 123). This also comes out in the manifold, and often contradictory and conflicted depictions of firing squads in literary texts about the revolution.
Firing squads represented “una tremenda realidad,” as Martín Luis Guzmán puts it in his magisterial El águila y la serpiente, (1928). Through their representations of firing squads, authors discuss and display their most tremendous—mighty, sublime, distressing—findings and appreciations of the revolutionary process. Fusilamientos reveal the Mexican Revolution in all its complexity: its trauma, its brutality, yet also its dignity.
Nellie Campobello’s extraordinary Cartucho (1940) is full of defiant, tragic, dignified, sorrowful, and resigned acts of men about to be executed. Jorge Aguilar Mora argues that the ritualistic actions of the fusilados in Cartucho affirm their human dignity as disenfranchised people facing an oppressive state and a disdainful society (2011, 96). The life of the fusilados is taken away violently, but as Aguilar Mora points out, they maintain a level of control by deciding in which way they will face the firing squad, these men “que tal vez no poseían su vida por completo, sí asumían íntegramente su muerte como el recinto inexpugnable de su redención, como el último recurso de afirmar su humanidad ante todos los testigos de la opresión, la indiferencia, la arbitrariedad, el poder, el menosprecio. Eran desposeídos, eran la escoria, eran bandidos, pero nadie podía arrancarles el dominio sobre su modo de morir” (96). Perfecto Olivas, for example, is not given last words nor time to finish his cigar, but he still intends to die with a dignified gesture. He extends his serape and leaves his forehead uncovered, looking at the firing squad, “como si se fuera a sacar un retrato” (Campobello 2000, 109). By retaining the final gestures of the fusilados, the child narrator reclaims their intentions, dignity, and individuality.
The theatrical gestures of the fusilados notwithstanding, their deaths are not always a heroically defiant act of affirmation. Sometimes, they merely capture the cruel, nonsensical workings of revolutionary war. Campobello’s vignettes are also written against the war machine, la bola, that was so quick to execute: “Aquello era un reborujo; entraban y salían, gritaban, hacían, discutían y siempre lo mismo: 'fusílenlos, fusílenlos...'” (2000, 123). Against the agitated state of the revolutionary war, the child narrator records the names of the revolutionaries. She holds on to their image, even to their dead bodies—in moving vignettes such as “Desde mi ventana” and “Zafiro y Zequiel.” Her tender descriptions of their corpses create a contrast with their brazen treatment and desecration. Overall, by telling these stories of the alzados that end up fusilados, Campobello highlights the precariousness of rising in arms in order to establish one's social and political presence but also reminds the postrevolutionary state of the law-destroying violence/power/force 'to which it owes its existence'—thus echoing Benjamin's conceptualizations in “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin 2002; Esch 2018). In Cartucho, these representations are ultimately a call for a more radical democracy: a call to make postrevolutionary laws in accordance with the precarious, dignified and brutal gesture of the insurgents, and to build a society and political system that is welcoming of difference and dissent. The tremendous reality of the firing squad calls for nothing less.
In contrast, in Martín Luis Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente firing squads appear as a manifestation of the harrowing revolutionary experience, the intersection of velocity, violence, law, and modernity, and the crumbling of intellectual certainty. Guzmán condemns firing squads, calling them “un acto abominable y perverso” (249), while pondering “la irregularidad monstruosa de mandar, sin más ni más, que varios hombres mataran a otro a quien se ponía, atado de manos, de espaldas contra la pared” (243). But at the same time, the text can’t take its eyes off them. The text is full of depictions of fusilamientos: mass executions, individual executions, executions of alleged criminals, of prisoners of war, etc. In them, he searches for a deeper meaning of the revolution. As I have argued elsewhere, in El águila y la serpiente firing squads imply the realization that modernity can be at once violent and cruel, 'civilized' and 'barbarous' (Esch 2018). At the same time, the many executions, which usually happen without due process, also reveal crucial problems in what has wrongly been called revolutionary justice. Often these violent acts are just processes of “law-making violence,” a part of the institutionalization of power, rather than the insurgent overthrow of power (Benjamin 43-4).
These issues with revolutionary justice and martial law also appear in many texts that depict Latin American guerrillas during the so-called Cold War period, for example in Mario Payeras’s testimonio Los días de la selva (1980). His testimonio about the Guatemalan guerrilla experience depicts three executions at length: among them the show trial and execution of a brutal landowner, El Tigre de Ixcán as well as the executions of members of the guerrilla, Minche and Fonseca. The former is seen as a threat to group cohesion because he complains too much and the latter gets executed for getting caught by the army while drunk and for revealing sites of the guerrilla operations after several days of torture. Payeras’s testimonio exhibits in full force what Piglia calls “esa tradición terrible del guevarismo… la vigilancia continua, la tendencia de descubrir al traidor en el débil, en el que vacila en el interior del propio grupo” (2010, 132). Payeras’s depiction of the men facing the firing squad is one of cowards (52), whereas the decision to execute Minche is seen as one of serenity and growth for the guerrilla, elevated to something sublime via pastoral nature descriptions: “Lo fusilamos en abril, una mañana en que cantaban muchos pájaros.” When they return to the camp after the execution, they are all silent and Payeras judges: “La guerrilla había alcanzado la madurez. Probablemente, a partir de entonces, todos fuimos mejores” (49). This is when the revolutionary ethos collapses in on itself, laying bare the incompatibility of martial law and revolutionary utopianism.
The Sequence: Temporalities of Death and Revolution
I already mentioned the strange temporality of facing the firing squad, which at once points to past, present, and future. García Márquez turns to the past conditional and complex syntax for the desired effect, whereas the photograph captures the eternal instant of a man facing the firing squad in what Noble has called “that strange iconic photographic tense, the future anterior” (93). Photographs often captured these executions as a ritualized sequence: before (man standing before the wall and/or the executioners), during (with the smoke of gunpowder caught in the picture frame), after (corpse).
In fact, postcards of fusilamientos during the Mexican Revolution were often sold as a series. Such photographic keepsakes meant that the event could be relived, revisited, and retold again and again. This is reflected in Campobello’s “Las tarjetas de Martín López,” in which a drunk Martín López shows everyone the postcards of the execution of his brother Pablo. Pablo López was executed in Chihuahua following Villa’s attack on Columbus, New Mexico in 1916 and real-life photographs exist of the event. In it, Pablo López stands before a wall that is unmistakably a paredón: punctured by bullet holes (Archivos Históricos en Chihuahua 2013). His attitude is similar to that of Fortino Sámano. He looks straight at the camera, but with defiance rather than a smile. Pablo, who was injured in the attack on Columbus, supports his body with a crutch and leans against the wall. “like Sámano, and maybe more so than him, he seems ready” (del Valle 2018). His execution is also portrayed in Cartucho, in the vignette “La muleta de Pablo López.” However, it is in the former vignette that Martín relives his brother’s execution by going through postcards that depict the series (Parra 2016).
These individualized photographs of the before-moment are different from those that depict the very moment of death, in which the barrel smoke and falling body anonymize the death. The photograph of the execution of several counterfeiters, dated October 1, 1915 (Casasola 1915), captures what Kittler (2021) calls the moment of “impersonal death from gunpowder.” The camera freezes two of the four bodies as they fall forward, their faces obscured by rifle smoke and the motion of their descent.
Of the after-pictures, two weigh heavily on the Latin American imagination: those of Zapata and Che. While neither Zapata nor Che faced a regular formalized firing squad (Zapata was tricked and ambushed, and Che was allegedly shot by only one man); they were both executed, and their bodies were posthumously and photographically exposed to the public. The primary goal was to show that they were indeed dead, to suppress any legends of them still being alive roaming the hills. But, of course, these pictures, more than anything, martyrized and sanctified these revolutionaries. In the most famous post-mortem image of Zapata, he lies with a bloodied chest, surrounded by four men who gaze dramatically at the camera lens while seeming to hold up or cradle his body (Casasola 1919). And of Che Guevara’s post-mortem image, which shows an emaciated, half-naked body, barren feet and long curls and beard, people were quick to point out the likeness to portraits of the martyred Jesus (such as Andrea Mantegna’s Cristo Morto) (Witty 2022). Reproducibility and referentiality are the hallmarks of the final instant made eternal, over and over again.
Everard Meade’s over 1000-page dissertation on capital punishment in Mexico (2005) underscores the impossibility of creating an exhaustive account of firing squads. There are too many depictions to come anywhere close to a comprehensive grasp of the many forms and meanings that executions by firing squads can take on. Nevertheless, it is important to see the different depictions as a means of negotiating and deciphering the meaning of revolutions to this day. Executions by firing squad need to be seen, as Jorge Aguilar Mora pithily put it, as “la afirmación de la intensidad revolucionaria, y después su reafirmación, y también su desintegración” (1990, 398).
