Resumen de Complaining Like a Liberal: Redefining Law, Justice, and Official Misconduct in Venezuela, 1790-1850
One night in April 1822, a slave snuck into Caracas' main plaza, and under cover of darkness, threw the feces of his entire household into the public well. A month later, a local magistrate appeared at the store of José Castellano and Manuel Gonzalez with a contingent of soldiers and arrested them for having ordered their slave to commit this heinous crime. From their jail cell, the two men asserted their innocence and insisted that the magistrate had behaved unacceptably: “Because we have never had any previous warning, because we have not previously been called to appear in court and also because there is no proof … [the magistrate] cannot have been authorised to commit the public insult that he has shamelessly and scandalously put upon our persons.” Their defense relied not only on questions of evidence but also on attacks against the magistrate's civility; they claimed that his actions had transgressed both proper legal and social behavior. This combination of legislative and non-legislative concerns was typical for complaints against officials from the colonial period, and we see it persist directly after independence. In the coming years, however, the formal responsibilities of government employees would change, as would the paradigm for complaints against them.
