Chale Quero

HAHR 81.
3/4-07 Piccato 9/17/01 6:13 PM Page 623
“El Chalequero” or the Mexican Jack the

Ripper: The Meanings of Sexual Violence in
Turn-of-the-Century Mexico City
Pablo Piccato
During the 1880s, Francisco Guerrero, aka “El Chalequero” or “Antonio el

Chaleco,” committed a long series of violent crimes, including at least two
murders, against women who worked in the northern suburbs of Mexico City.
The Mexican press compared him with Jack the Ripper, who killed five prosti-
tutes in London in late 1888. However, unlike his British contemporary,
whose true identity is unknown, Guerrero did nothing to hide his, and for sev-
eral years he remained active and unpunished. He was finally arrested in 1888
and sentenced to death. President Porfirio Díaz commuted his sentence to 20
years in prison, and Guerrero was released early in 1904. In 1908 Guerrero
was arrested again and convicted for the homicide of another woman; he died
in 1910 awaiting execution. While Jack the Ripper has inspired many a mys-
tery narrative, the story of El Chalequero straightforwardly displayed violence
against women — sexual violence in particular — as part of Mexico City’s
everyday life.
This article presents multiple facets of El Chalequero’s life between 1888
and 1908 — as a street thug, pimp, and criminal suspect. The perspectives of
criminologists discussed in the latter part of this article shed more light on the
larger meanings of El Chalequero than those offered by the police or judiciary.
Science was involved in the investigation of Jack the Ripper’s identity. In Mex-
ico, criminologists and psychiatrists were summoned to explain Guerrero’s
behavior during his trial, and their reports concluded that he was not a patho-
logical case, but a rather normal example of sexual conduct among the poor.
Photo by Graciela Iturbide, courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York.
I thank Silvia Arrom, Jeremy Adelman, Lila Caimari, Gabriela Cano, Xóchitl Medina,
Sonia Pérez Toledo, Cristina Sacristán, Mark Wasserman, Katherine Bliss, John Lear,
Hilda Bonilla, and HAHR’s anonymous readers for their useful comments on earlier drafts
of this article.
Hispanic American Historical Review 81:3 – 4

Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press
HAHR 81.3/4-07 Piccato 9/17/01 6:13 PM Page 624
624 HAHR / August and November / Piccato
By stating this, they took part in a discussion about the criminal nature of male
sexual attackers, who international specialists preferred to not typify as crimi-
nals.
Crimes and Perceptions of Urban Danger
On 18 October 1887 the police retrieved the body of a woman, partially cov-
ered with brush, from the Consulado River. According to forensic doctors, the
victim was approximately 40 years old when her throat was slit. Two months
later, another corpse with similar characteristics and wounds appeared in a
ditch close to the same river.1 The word out was that such findings were com-
mon in the northern limits of Mexico City, including the new settlements
(colonias), Peralvillo and Santa Ana, Calzada de Guadalupe, and the proximity
of the village of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Other bodies had appeared in previous
years, and several women had been raped and robbed near the Consulado
River and the Calzada de Guadalupe. The culprit(s) had not been discovered.
These were still scarcely populated areas, although characterized by an
intense movement of carts and porters entering the city through the Peralvillo
gate. Travelers, pilgrims going to and from the shrine of the Virgin of Guada-
lupe, and merchants — all lacking the means to use the train — patronized the
many inns, pulquerías, and prostitutes of the area. Each December, during the
celebrations of the Virgin, traffic and public parties increased beyond the abil-
ity of authorities to maintain order. Vending and washing laundry at the river
were other important activities, both largely conducted by women. More
densely populated colonias between downtown and Peralvillo, such as La
Bolsa and Tepito, were feared as zones of crime and vice. As with other new
lower-class settlements in a city undergoing a process of rapid growth, these
areas lacked the traditional social networks of older barrios near the center of
the city, especially in the absence of police protection. This was hardly a prob-
lem for authorities and writers who associated the working women of the area
with the hygienic and moral perils of prostitution.2
1. Alonso Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria pronunciada por el Agente del Ministerio

Público . . . en la vista en jurado de la causa instruida contra Francisco Guerrero (a) Antonio el
Chalequero y contra José Montoya, por robos, violaciones, heridas y homicidios perpetrados del año de
1881 a julio de 1888 (Mexico City: Antigua Imp. y Lib. de Murguía, 1891), 7 – 9.
2. Carlos Roumagnac, Crímenes sexuales, vol. 1 of Crímenes sexuales y pasionales: Estudios
de psicología morbosa (Mexico City: Lib. de Bouret, 1906 –10), 91. For the lack of policing in
different areas of the city, see John Robert Lear, “Workers, Vecinos and Citizens: The
Revolution in Mexico City, 1909 –1917” (Ph.D. diss. Univ. of California at Berkeley, 1993),
“El Chalequero” 625
The author of these crimes was compared with Jack the Ripper (el destri-
pador), whose crimes became internationally known in late 1888. Liberal news-
paper El Siglo Diez y Nueve called him “The mysterious man who repeated in
Mexico the same scenes that Jacques the Ripper [sic, suggesting the French
sources of the journalist] in the London neighborhood of Whitechappel.”3
The similarities seemed obvious: the victims were prostitutes in London and
women who worked in the streets in Mexico; all had been attacked at night in
public spaces; all were around 40 years old; all had suffered gruesome wounds.
As with the Mexican murderer, Jack the Ripper was blamed for previous
crimes against prostitutes.4
One of the prevalent hypotheses about the identity of Jack the Ripper,
based on the wounds suffered by his victims, posited that he was a doctor.5
The wounds inflicted on the Mexican victims revealed, according to the local
press, that the culprit was a man “educated enough” to know the fatal results
of a cut in the arteries of the neck. In addition, the murderer of the Consulado
River seemed to have, in the eyes of the press, an uncanny ability to escape the
police. For El Siglo Diez y Nueve, he possessed “the fabulous ring of Amasis
which made its owner invisible.”6 Even after Guerrero’s arrest, writers such as
well-known criminologist and journalist Carlos Roumagnac compared him
with Jack the Ripper and other European criminals. There was certain pride in
this comparison: for Mexican elites, it conveyed the progress of the capital,
which brought not only the technology, architecture, and fashion of the most
advanced European countries but also their new forms of crime.7 The murders
51– 55; Norman S. Hayner, “Criminogenic Zones in Mexico City,” American Sociological
Review 11, no. 4 (1946): 428; Salvador Diego-Fernández, La ciudad de Méjico a fines del siglo
XIX (Mexico City: n.p., 1937), 3; and Pablo Piccato, “Urbanistas, Ambulantes, and Mendigos:
The Dispute for Urban Space in Mexico City, 1890 –1930,” Anuario de Estudios Urbanos 1
(1997). On views of prostitutes, see Rafael Sagredo Baeza, María Villa (a) La Chiquita, no.
4002: Un pará sito social del porfiriato (Mexico City: Aguilar, Leon y Cal, 1996), chap. 4.
3. El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 16 Dec. 1890, 2. Five prostitutes were found murdered in
Whitechapel and Spitafields, in London, between August and November of 1888. The
culprit was not identified, but he acquired the nickname “Jack the Ripper.”
4. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-
Victorian London (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), 2.
5. Ibid., 4, 196, 210; see also Christopher Frayling, “The House that Jack Built: Some
Stereotypes of the Rapist in the History of Popular Culture,” in Rape, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli
and Roy Porter (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 185.
6. El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 16 Dec. 1890, 2.
7. See “Sobre el número y clase de presos que debe alojar la Penitenciaría de México,
Proyecto de Penitenciaría del Distrito Federal, Junta formada por el gob. Ramón
of London and Mexico City were useful in drawing the moral geography of
modern cities, as they represented the contrast between “the world of crime”
and vice, and the elegant and civilized city. Both cases also suggested a danger-
ous reversal of that geography, in the threat posed by devious upper-class men
to working-class women.
Public perceptions of El Chalequero were not limited to these cosmopoli-
tan comparisons. For those who were less sophisticated, El Chalequero
recalled images of brutality in a semirural environment. Two engravings by
José Guadalupe Posada (see figures 1 and 2), reproduced in popular leaflets,
stressed the cuts in the victim’s neck. Posada, in a desolate landscape, chose to
portray the killer with a charro hat and a large knife and the victims as defense-
less and modest in their attire.8
Perhaps because of the cruelty involved in both murders, the police finally
set out to find a suspect. In June 1888, shopkeeper Antonio Mayorga identified
Francisco Guerrero as responsible for both crimes and several previous rapes.
Guerrero was arrested a month later and sentenced in December 1890. The
press and public opinion quickly blamed him for up to ten homicides.9
Guerrero proved to be closer to Posada’s description than to the newspa-
pers’ earlier hypotheses, yet less powerful than the image of the engravings.
According to El Siglo Diez y Nueve, the police looked for him among “the
social scum,” but they were surprised that “Neither Guerrero’s height, build
nor aspect showed that strength and ferocity that should characterize the terri-
Fernández” [1882], Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación: La Penitenciaría de México 5, no.
4 (1981– 82): 35. Roumagnac, Crímenes sexuales, 93. Although Roumagnac does not credit
Guerrero with as much fame and as many victims as his European counterparts, he comes
back to the comparison with Jack the Ripper in his Matadores de mujeres, vol 2 of Crímenes
sexuales y pasionales: Estudios de psicología morbosa (Mexico City: Lib. de Bouret, 1910), 224.
In 1939 Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón mentioned Roumagnac as one of the first “technical
policemen,” who died “in poverty,” and whose contributions to science were still neglected.
See Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón et al., Tendencia y ritmo de la criminalidad en México (Mexico
City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estadísticas, 1939), 129.
8. Moisés González Navarro claims that “the people” saw El Chalequero as a hero,
along Chucho el Roto, in his Historia moderna de México: El porfiriato: La vida social (Mexico
City: Ed. Hermes, 1957), 433. Evidence discussed below indicates otherwise. On the elite
coverage of El Chalequero, see Alberto del Castillo, “Entre la moralización y el
sensacionalismo: Prensa, poder y criminalidad a finales del siglo XIX en la Ciudad de
México,” in Hábitos, normas y escándalo: Prensa, criminalidad y drogas durante el porfiriato
tardío, ed. Ricardo Pérez Montfort (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 1997), 47 – 57.
9. Roumagnac, Crímenes sexuales, 91– 2; El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 16 Dec. 1890, 2; and La
Voz de México, 20 July 1888, 3.
Fig. 1. From a drawing by José Guadalupe Posada, “La próxima ejecución de Francisco Guerrero (a. El
Chalequero) degollador de mujeres” (Mexico City: Imp. A. Vanegas Arroyo, [1890]).
ble degollador; the suspect was one of the many characters with a slightly crim-
inal aspect, but which one can come across every day without causing great
concern.”10 Jail records showed he was not too tall (1.57 m), rather lean and
perhaps hunchbacked (see figures 3 and 4). He was born in 1850 in Guadala-
jara, Jalisco, and claimed to be a shoemaker and painter. He hardly fit the
image of a gentleman exploring the underworld to attack lower-class women.
As a young man, he had worked in his father’s butcher shop, where the slaugh-
tering of pigs (not the education, as reported by newspapers) gave him the
knowledge about the effects of degüello. During the trial, witness María
Navarro declared that she considered Guerrero to be “her husband” because
they had lived together for 15 years — even though he used to come home
“late at night, drunk, and with clothes covered with dust and mud.”11 The
image of small, married, jacket-wearing Guerrero contrasted with that of con-

11. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 245, 201; idem, Crímenes sexuales, 95; and
Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria pronunciada, 38.
Fig. 2. From a drawing by José Guadalupe Posada, “Los crímenes del Chalequero: Asesinato de Mucia
Gallardo” (Mexico City: Imp. A. Vanegas Arroyo, [1890]).
temporaneous bandits of greater fame, such as Jesús Negrete, “the Tiger of

Santa Julia,” who still spread fear in the countryside around the capital.12
The Trial
Francisco Guerrero, as many other inhabitants of “the world of crime,”

became well-known during his trial.13 The jury hearings of Guerrero’s trial
attracted such a crowd that a brigade of soldiers was required to prevent it
from breaking into the courtroom. Underground characters — the “crème-de-
la-crème of the lower prostitution of those neighborhoods,” in the words of
Roumagnac — paraded as victims or witnesses during the audiences.14 How-
ever sordid, the spectacle of criminal trials were at the center of a popular pub-
lic opinion which, instead of the respectable newspapers, relied on word of
12. On Negrete, see Gaceta de Policía, 3 June 1906, 14.

13. The proceedings of Guerrero’s trial are synthesized in Rodríguez Miramón,
Requisitoria pronunciada; and El Siglo Diez y Nueve, Dec. 1890.
14. Roumagnac, Crímenes sexuales, 92; and El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 15 Dec. 1890, 2.
Fig. 3. Francisco Guerrero, 1888.

Source: Carlos Roumagnac, Los criminales en México, ensayo de psicologia criminal, por Carlos Rou-
magnac, sequido de dos casos de hermafrodismo observados por los señores doctores Ricardo Egea
e Ignacio Ocampo (Mexico City: Tip. “El Fenix,” 1904).
Fig. 4. Francisco Guerrero, 1908

Source: Carlos Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, vol. 2 of Crímenes sexuales y pasionales: Estu-
dios de psicología morbosa (Mexico City: Lib. de Bouret, 1906 – 10).
mouth, leaflets, and the penny press to convey information. When jury trials
were abrogated in 1929, El Chalequero’s case was remembered as one of those
that attracted the greatest interest, along with that of the prostitute María
Villa, “La Chiquita,” sentenced for homicide in 1897.15 Spectators seemed to
relish the drama of interrogations, constructed at the intersection of the ele-
vated discourses of law and science and the lowly impulses of criminals and
their victims.
The testimonies of witnesses confirmed that the accused was, in fact,
responsible for abusing several women in the deserted areas near Peralvillo.
According to his own testimony, he was called “El Chalequero” because “since
long ago he has had the habit of forcing women.”16 (In Mexico, A chaleco means
“by force.”) The nickname served him, more specifically, to “scare prosti-
tutes.”17 It was well-known, even before the discovery of the two corpses in
1887, that other women had previously been found murdered in a similar fash-
ion. According to Roumagnac, Guerrero’s responsibility for those attacks had
been established by the inhabitants of the area, but nobody dared denounce
him.18 “The public voice” claimed that he had murdered seven women, slitting
their throats after robbing them. He was also responsible, according to the
prosecutor Alonso Rodríguez Miramón, for the frequent evening robberies
that created fear “among the Indians walking the Calzada.”19 In 1887 Emilia
González, laundress in an upper-class home, was attacked by a man who tried
to rape her. Her shouts attracted other passersby, prompting the escape of the
aggressor, though not before sinking his knife into her body. She died 19 days
later at the hospital, without having identified Guerrero as the attacker. Even
so, the prosecutors accused him of the crime.20
Besides the case of González, which was weakened by an autopsy report
that explained her death as the result of natural causes, the prosecutors of the
1888 – 90 trial made little effort to link Guerrero with earlier murders known
15. Excelsior, 8 Oct. 1929, 1; see Robert Buffington and Pablo Piccato, “Tales of Two
Women: The Narrative Construal of Porfirian Reality,” The Americas 55, no. 3 (1999).
16. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 201.
17. Roumagnac, Crímenes sexuales, 96; and Guillermo Colín Sánchez, Así habla la
delincuencia y otros más, 2d ed. (Mexico City: Ed. Porrúa, 1991). In Spain, “chaleco”
(literally, vest) also means “mujer despreciable y sin atractivo.” See, Diccionario de la lengua
española, 21st ed. (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1992).
18. Roumagnac, Crimenes sexuales, 91.
19. Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria pronunciada, 30 – 31. Roumagnac suggests that
Guerrero was blamed for crimes the police had not been able to solve otherwise. See
Roumagnac, Crímenes sexuales, 93.
20. Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria pronunciada, 5 – 6.
to the neighbors of the area. The accusation did not focus on specific events,
but merely sought to establish that Guerrero was El Chalequero. In an effort
to deny it, Guerrero explained that his bad reputation came from the fact that
on several occasions he had told the Río Consulado prostitutes that he was the
feared criminal — but only with the goal of inspiring fear and obtaining their
submission.21 Nevertheless, most witnesses identified him as the man who
indeed spread terror among those who lived and worked near the Calzada and
the river. His lengthy record was eloquent: he had been imprisoned eight
times for different offenses. His first entrance in the books of the Mexico City
jail had occurred in 1878, for assault. Six arrests followed (for theft, battery,
and threats), none lasting more than a month.22 He had already committed
several crimes by 1881, when he threatened Candelaria Mendoza with a knife
and a warning that “she would not be the first woman [he] killed.”23
The testimonies against Guerrero suggest that his threats were never
anonymous. In his relationship with the working women of Peralvillo, murder
was only the extreme result of interactions that included sexual abuse and
exploitation. Antonio Mayorga, who first denounced him, declared that Guer-
rero was a man “who approached the prostitutes . . . outside the Peralvillo
gate, where he cheated them — by having intercourse by force — and then
robbed them and slit their throat.”24 But the victims who survived these attacks
did not dare to accuse him until he was arrested in 1888. Soledad González,
for example, declared that Guerrero had wounded and robbed a friend of hers
in 1886; in 1887 he offered her one peso to “have carnal relations.” She
rejected him, but he took her to a lonely place by the river. After claiming that
he was El Chalequero, Guerrero put four reales in her hand, threatened her
with a knife, and raped her. Then, he took back the four reales plus another
one that she was hiding inside her mouth — because it was her only cash, she
explained. Other women, such as Josefa Rodríguez, Camila Sánchez, and
Nicolasa García, declared that Guerrero had threatened them with different
weapons and had told them that he was El Chalequero, and had stolen clothes
they were about to wash. In sum, Guerrero operated with the full knowledge
that women knew and feared him, and that nobody would dare to accuse him.
Three women had witnessed his attack against Margarita Rosas, but no one
dared to help her or call the police.25 There is no evidence that Guerrero ever
21. Ibid., 12, 40; and Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 207.

22. Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria pronunciada, 17.
23. Ibid., 18.
24. Ibid., 10 –11.
25. Ibid., 15 –16, 22 – 23, 18-19.
used violence against a man, and none accused him until Mayorga blamed him
for the murder of Mucia Gallardo.
The crime against Gallardo differed in several ways from previous attacks.
She was, according to several witnesses, and despite María Navarro’s claim,
Guerrero’s amasia (common-law wife). She also seems to have had a somewhat
higher status than the other victims, who were prostitutes, domestic workers,
or laundresses. In the words of Roumagnac, Mucia “ran almost all the famous
and disgusting lupanars of Tepechichilco, and she was also a prostitute.”26 Gal-
lardo and Guerrero had been linked in using violence against other women:
together, for example, they had assaulted Josefa Rodríguez to steal from her.27
The night of Gallardo’s death, several witnesses saw an argument between her
and Guerrero. Concepción Escamilla tried to leave because Guerrero had “hit
her and stolen her reboso previously,” but Gallardo convinced her to stay
because she believed that she could control Guerrero. The discussion contin-
ued until Mucia slapped Guerrero and defied him to go out and fight, claiming
that she did not fear him even if he was “the terror of the women of Santa
Ana.” The witnesses saw them take the street, which was “lonely and dark,
because it was eight or nine in the evening.” A short time later Guerrero came
back, holding in his hand a knife covered with blood. Genovevo Soto con-
fronted him by saying, “you have killed Mucia Gallardo,” but he did not call
the police. Hours later, Concepción Escamilla saw Guerrero watching the
corpse of Gallardo being taken out of the river. Guerrero threatened her and
took her to a hotel, where he cried for Mucia and showed her the knife and
other weapons “which he never left behind.”28 In contrast with other victims,
Gallardo enjoyed some power over Guerrero. Years later, Guerrero confessed
to Roumagnac that Mucia had always harassed him and that, after killing her,
“he was satisfied of not seeing her again.”29
The evidence suggests that El Chalequero’s attacks were part of a larger
pattern of sexual and economic exploitation in which Mucia was involved. The
victims who spoke out against him at the trial shared many characteristics of
his attacks: sexual abuse and violence was always accompanied by the expropri-
ation of their possessions. María de Jesús Martínez already knew Guerrero in
1884, when he raped her and took her money. He raped another victim and

28. Ibid., 10 –11; 32 – 34. Lorenza Urrutia also went to see how the corpse was
recovered, and she saw El Chalequero there.
29. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 216; and idem, Crímenes sexuales, 99.
forced her to buy him some pulque.30 It is in this regard that Mayorga accused
Guerrero of “cheating” the prostitutes.
The association between Guerrero and Mucia Gallardo probably included
the task of forcing petty prostitutes who worked the streets on their own to
seek refuge in a brothel, preferably one of the “disgusting lupanars of Tepechi-
chilco” controlled by Gallardo. This would also explain why, on the night of
her death, Mucia told Concepción Escamilla that she should not fear Guer-
rero while she was around.31 Cut loose from Mucia’s control, Guerrero was
perceived as a greater threat and was thus denounced to the police.
By pushing women to seek protection, Guerrero’s violent acts were an
integral part of the business of prostitution in the marginal areas of Mexico
City. As in other areas of the urban labor market during these years of rapid
economic and demographic growth, prostitution adapting to the changing
relationships between workers and their employers, and among workers,
employers and the state. The 1867 Regulation of Prostitution, reformed in
1873, pursued not only hygienic goals but also attempted to consolidate those
relationships. “Registered” prostitutes had to undergo frequent medical exam-
inations, with the penalty of fines or imprisonment if they avoided them. The
regulation bolstered madams’ power by adding to their role of employers that
of intermediaries between workers and sanitary authorities. According to
researcher Itzel Delgado, madams were “a decisive linkage,” particularly for
the control of low-class prostitutes. The Regulation authorized the police
(usually an interested party because of the bribes they collected) to place those
women who failed to comply with the law under the control of a matrona.32
The business was increasingly lucrative by the end of the nineteenth century.
Madams profited because of their role as mediators among prostitutes, author-
ities, and customers, and also through a relationship of “complete subordina-
tion” with their pupils. Despite the regulation, “clandestine” prostitution con-
tinued to grow through this period, clashing with the interests of madams and
the state. According to Delgado, most independent prostitutes and low-class
brothels were located at the periphery of the city, particularly in the northern
areas. In these cases, less formalized relationships between madams and work-
30. Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria pronunciada, 19 – 20.

32. Itzel Delgado, “Prostitución, sífilis y moralidad sexual en la ciudad de México a
fines del siglo XIX” (bachelor’s thesis, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia,
Mexico City, 1993), 65, 153 – 54.
ers included protection and the establishment of connections with patrons, not
always in the physical context of a brothel.33
Fully identified as El Chalequero, neither Guerrero’s guilt nor his inno-
cence was the overarching consideration in the judicial and penal proceedings
against him: the fascination of the public for the jury hearings of his trial did
not stem from the question about his fate. As in the case of La Chiquita, and
many other suspects, Guerrero was implicitly condemned before meeting his
jury, and for all practical purposes he lacked legal representation. On the day
of the audience, Guerrero dismissed the two public attorneys who had techni-
cally represented him during the previous months, and appointed Adolfo
Dublán. Because Dublán refused, the judge ordered two other lawyers to take
the job although both stated their complete ignorance about the case. At any
rate, the audience went on and, as was the system according to Mexican penal
legislation, the judge ruled over the proceedings and worked as an aggressive
prosecutor, interrogating witnesses and the suspect.34
The entire process was fraught with irregularities. At the beginning of the
process, in 1888, Guerrero had been accused of six robberies, seven rapes, two
batteries, and three homicides.35 Immediately after his arrest, according to the
records, the suspect had confessed to murders committed in places as distant
as the barrio of La Merced, and the eastern San Lázaro and Coyoya plains.
Yet, the fact-finding phase of the trial, preceding the jury hearing, took a year
and a half to complete. In front of the jury, Guerrero declared that he had
signed those confessions because the police had hung him from his thumbs.
To counter the claim, the judge exhibited the signature by those statements
33. Ibid., 60, 72. See also Luis Lara y Pardo, La prostitución en México (Mexico City:
Vda. De C. Bouret, 1908); the best study for the postrevolutionary period is Katherine
Elaine Bliss, “Prostitution, Revolution and Social Reform in Mexico City, 1918 –1940”
(Ph. D. diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1996), 41.
34. El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 15 Dec. 1890, 2. On the jury against María Villa, see El Foro,
23 Nov. 1897, 3; 15 Feb. 1898, 1; 5 Apr. 1898, 247; 6 Apr. 1898, 251; 12 Apr. 1898, 259; 13
Apr. 1898, 263; and 20 Apr. 1898, 279, 283. On the jury, see Demetrio Sodi, El jurado en
México: Estudios sobre el jurado popular (Mexico City: Imp. de la Secretária de Fomento,
1909). Public attorneys often failed to show up for the audiences involving their
defendants. See Juez Sexto Correccional to Secretario de Justicia, Mexico City, 27 Oct.
1910, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Fondo Secretaría de Justicia, vol.
716, exp. 895. See also Jefe de Defensores de Oficio en el Fuero Común, José B. Robles to
Jefe del Departamento del Distrito Federal, 7 Oct. 1929, AGN, Fondo Portes Gil, 3/533,
17249; Bonifacio y Tomás Ordóñez to President Madero, 17 Feb. 1912, AGN, Fondo
Francisco I. Madero, vol. 70, exp. 90.
and argued that they could not have been made by someone who had just suf-
fered such torment.36 After that, Guerrero remained silent during the rest of
the trial. Prosecutors and the judge were not very concerned about mounting a
flawless case from the legal point of view, to the extreme that a namesake of
Margarita Rosas, turned out to be a different Margarita Rosas from the one
who had been attacked and had testified in the previous investigation, showed
up at the hearing. The judge ordered the jury not to interpret this as a conse-
quence of carelessness since “most women called to the witness stand lacked a
fixed address and name — as they belonged to the lowliest kind of prostitu-
tion — thus any mistake that the police could have made when bringing them
to testify was excusable.”37
One of the main witnesses against Guerrero was his relative José Montoya,
who Guerrero accused of committing some of the murders that he had been
blamed for. Montoya was interned at the San Hipólito Hospital for mental ill-
ness and, according to the reporters of the jury, “presented all the abnormal
traits that characterize the insane.” Montoya himself accepted that “he was sick
of his stomach, of his sight, and his brain” and that “he felt that someone pulled
his hair . . . and gnawed at his eyes.” A physician called by the judge declared
that Montoya’s mental state was the result of alcoholism. Nevertheless, Mon-
toya’s statements seemed more credible than those of Guerrero’s to the judge,
and the former was acquitted of the accusations made by the latter.38
There was ample evidence against Guerrero in the death of Mucia Gal-
lardo. In the case of Francisca N., “La Chíchara,” the second corpse found in
the river, the only evidence against him was the similarity of her wounds to
those observed in Mucia’s body.39 In June 1892, President Porfirio Díaz com-
muted Guerrero’s sentence to 20 years. Although pardons were common
under Díaz, they were not the rule for those who killed women. He was
released after serving twelve years at the San Juan de Ulúa fortress in Ver-
acruz.40 Even after his second trial for homicide, in 1908, Guerrero continued
36. El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 16 Dec. 1890, 2; Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria

pronunciada, 12, 40 – 41. The use of torture and violence against the accused by the police
seems to have been common. See Hijo del Ahuizote, 26 Sep. 1897, 758; and 28 Nov. 1897.
See also the Archivo Judicial de la Ciudad de México, Reclusorio Sur (hereafter, AJ, RS),
23196, criminal association and robbery, 1930.
38. Ibid., 17 Dec. 1890, 2; and Roumagnac, Crímenes sexuales, 94.
39. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 207; and Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria
pronunciada, 35. The jury also found him guilty of rape, battery and theft. See Roumagnac,
Crímenes sexuales, 97; and Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria pronunciada, 14.
40. Roumagnac, Crímenes sexuales, 97, and Matadores de mujeres, 97. See also Gaceta de
Policía, 25 Feb. 1906, 7.
to deny his involvement in the crimes he had been accused of, except for that
of Gallardo.41
Sexual Crimes and the Judicial System
If it was common for most Mexican suspects to be denied due process, why
was Guerrero convicted of only two murders and why did Díaz commute his
sentence from execution to 12 years in prison? Why did it take so long for him
to be arrested, and why were most witnesses against him ( prostitutes and other
working women) afraid and reluctant to talk, even during the jury? Answers to
these questions begin to emerge when we look at contemporaneous attitudes
of the police and judicial system toward victims of sexual abuse.
Women did not accuse Guerrero of rape because they all thought that he
would be acquitted by a jury, and that policemen and judges would only add to
their humiliation, mainly because they were prostitutes, domestic workers, or
peddlers. Several cases in the Federal District’s judicial archives confirm the
negative attitudes faced by all victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse,
regardless of their social background, when they dared to accuse their attack-
ers. The premise of judges and juries was that any woman who was willing to
ventilate a matter concerning her honor lacked shame and thus could not be
trusted. There were several ways in which these prejudices emerged through
the judicial process. First, the definitions of rape, statutory rape, and abduction
in the penal code allowed for several interpretations to the benefit of the
accused. Rape, according to the code, only took place when physical violence
had been used.42 Many cases, including those in which the victim or her par-
ents had denounced a rape, were downgraded by judges to statutory rape, or
simply abduction, which were not defined by violence but by the fact that the
suspect had used false promises and deception. The accused usually claimed
that the victim had consented to having intercourse. In most cases, in accor-
dance with the penal code, the case was dismissed when the accused promised
to marry the victim, even though the processes did not include verifying that

42. Rape was punished with six years of prison if the victim was older than 14 years
old, and 10 if he or she was younger. See Antonio Martínez de Castro, Código penal para el
Distrito Federal y territorio de la Baja-California sobre delitos del fuero común y para toda la
República Mexicana sobre delitos contra la Federación: Edición correcta, sacada de la oficial,
precedida de la Exposición de motivos dirigida al Supremo Gobierno por el C. Lic. . . . Presidente de
la comisión encargada de formar el Código [hereafter CP] (Veracruz and Puebla: La
Ilustración, 1891), Arts. 795, 797, 793, 794, 808, 809, 812, 799, 800, 801, 813.
the promise was fulfilled. In the few cases in which a trial reached the jury
phase, the accused were usually acquitted.43
Medical procedures played an important role against victims. It was gen-
erally believed that, because of the nature of the female body, sexual crimes
were difficult to prove.44 Judges did not think that forced penetration
amounted to violence; thus, for a rape accusation to be supported, forensic
doctors had to examine the victim and find clear signs of physical violence in
different areas of her body. The testimony of the victim was not enough to
establish that a rape had been committed, and for this reason, many cases were
dismissed. A medical examination was required to establish the age of the vic-
tim. The premise was that rape could otherwise be easily simulated, or pro-
voked by the victim, and that women could easily resist it if they wished to.45
The examination was in itself a painful and humiliating procedure, similar to
that undergone by “registered” prostitutes. Many victims, such as Asunción
Gómez, in 1921, had to go through two examinations. In her case, the second
established that she had not been raped and the charges against her attacker
were dismissed. Such a result was more likely when victims hesitated several
days, and understandably so, before pressing charges.46 Even when female vic-
tims complained about offenses other than rape, they could be subject to med-
ical examinations at police stations. Students of medicine usually occupied the
place of physicians at these stations and even gendarmes advised victims against
undergoing the examination. In sum, the benefits of the procedure were not
evident, and some women resisted it forcefully. In 1929 the government of the
city ordered that no woman be examined at police stations unless she pre-
sented serious wounds. The goal was to end the “disgraceful examinations”
43. See for example, AJ, RS, 1067903, statutory rape, 1921; AJ, RS, 19389, theft, 1927;
AJ, RS, 1051597, statutory rape, 1921; AJ, RS, 596568, statutory rape, 1908; AJ, RS, 19393,
abduction, 1927; AJ, RS, 781387, battery and rape, 1913. A detailed discussion of these
cases in Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900 –1931 (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, forthcoming), chap. 5.
44. According to Lic. Emilio Rovirosa Andrade, the physical evidence for statutory
rape is very difficult to establish, but essential to identify the culprit. In Secretaría de
Justicia, Comisión Revisora del Código Penal, Trabajos de revisión del Código Penal: Proyecto
de reformas y exposición de motivos, 4 vols. (Mexico City: Tip. de la Oficina Impresora de
Estampollas Palacio Nacional, 1912), 1:90.
45. Cesare Lombroso, Lezioni di medicina legale, raccolte da Virgilio Rossi (Torino:
Fratelli Bocca, 1886).
46. AJ, RS, 1067903, statutory rape, 1921. There is a detailed description of the
examination of rape victims in Lombroso, Lezioni di medicina legale, esp. chap. 26.
HAHR 81.3/4-07 Piccato
9/17/01
Table 1: Accused and Sentenced for Sexual Crimes. Federal District. 1897, 1900
Abduction Statutory Rape Abduction and Statutory Rape Rape
6:13 PM
Year Accused Sentenced Accused Sentenced Accused Sentenced Accused Sentenced
1897 136 3 26 1 43 0 23 7
1900 126 0 50 2 43 0 30 4
Sources: Anuario estadístico de la República Mexicana, 1898 (Mexico City: Fomento, 1899); and Cuadros estadísticos e informe del Procurador de Justicia, 1900
Page 638
(Mexico City: La Europea, 1903).

inflicted on them, and the shame that followed when “many persons who hap-
pen to be at the station learn about the results.”47
As a consequence, the chances of obtaining a guilty verdict after an accu-
sation of sexual abuse were smaller than for other crimes. Table 1 shows that,
in 1897 and 1900, only one guilty verdict was obtained for every five accusa-
tions of rape, 25 of statutory rape, or 87 of abduction. An improvement can be
perceived in the data from the 1930s, presented in table 2: one guilty for every
four accused of rape and statutory rape; one for every three in rape. Table 3
shows that in other crimes the proportion of guilty verdicts was higher. The
rate would be even lower if we compared guilty verdicts to the total number of
crimes, that is, including those that were not denounced. From a sample of 22
cases of sexual violence in Mexico City that took place between 1900 and 1931,
15 cases concluded when charges were dropped — a fact not reflected by offi-
cial statistics. In other words, 68 percent of the cases involving sexual violence
concluded this way, against 32 percent for the total of 223 cases of different
crimes examined as part of a larger research project about crime. In view of the
inefficacy and cost involved in judicial action, many victims refused to even
bring up charges, thus making these ratios more biased.48
The number of arrests and convictions for rape diminished after 1871,
even when data are normalized to population growth (see table 4). The
decrease may be explained as a result of an actual reduction in the number of
crimes committed. An alternative explanation, supported by El Chalequero’s
case, is that judicial and police interest in sexual offenses was diminishing,
while the number of actual crimes may have remained stable. When jurist and
criminologist Miguel Macedo compiled an extensive survey of the opinions of
lawyers about the reforms needed by the penal code in the late 1900s, no
major reforms to the articles on rape were deemed necessary.49
47. Excélsior, 17 Oct. 1929, 1. For resistance to the procedure, AJ, RS, 19393,
abduction, 1927.
48. See Piccato, City of Suspects,” 126, 293n. 66.
49. Jurists proposed only that the law be more explicit in stating that statutory rape
would not be prosecuted unless a complaint by the victim or her relative was made, and
suggested an increase in the penalty of homicide caused by rape, from 12 to 16 years. See
Secretaría de Justicia, Trabajos de revisión del código penal, 4:165, 696, and for the new
proposed penalties, 2:172, 177, and 4:166. The reforms proposed by Macedo and the
committee were not adopted. The 1931 Penal Code maintained the punishment of six years
for rape. See Código penal para el distrito y territorios federales y para toda la república en
materia de fuero federal (Mexico City: Botas, 1938), Art. 266.
Table 2: Accused and Sentenced for Sexual Crimes, Federal District,

1937–1939
Abduction y Statutory Rape Rape
Year Accused Sentenced Accused Sentenced
1937 229 49 53 24
1938 305 54 104 28
1939 217 65 98 37
Source: Anuario Estadístico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 1940 (Mexico City: Secretaría de
Economía, 1942).
Table 3: Conviction Rate, by Crime, Federal District, 1900, 1939.

Crime Rate (%)
Theft 41.73
Battery 33.07
Murder 53.85
Rape 32.03
All crimes 36.61
Sources: Ministerio Público del Distrito y Territorios Federales, Cuadros estadísticos e informe
del Procurador de Justicia concernientes a la criminalidad en el Distrito Federal y territorios (Mexico
City: La Europea, 1900); and Anuario Estadístico de la República Mexicana, and 1940.
Table 4: Accused and Sentenced for Rape Federal District

Period Per 100,000
Accused 1885 – 95 15.04

1897, 1900 11.71
1937 – 39 4.84
Sentenced 1871– 85 6.75

1897 – 09 1.42
1916 –19 1.05
1937 – 39 1.69
Note: Data for 1885–95 applies only to Mexico City.

Sources: Estadística del ramo criminal en la república Mexicana (Mexico City: Fomento,
1890); Antonio Peñafiel, Anuario estadístico de la República Mexicana (Mexico City: Fomento,
1897); Anuario Estadístico de la República Mexicana, 1898; Cuadros estadísticos e infome del
Procurador de Justicia, 1900; Procuraduría General de Justicia del Distrito y Territorios
Federales, Sección de Estadística, Estadística de la penalidad habida en los juzgados del fuero
común del distrito y territorios federales durante los años de 1916 a 1920 (Mexico City: Talleres
Gráficos de la Nación, 1923); and Anuario estadístico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 1940.
Science and the Normalization of Sexual Violence
The two trials against Guerrero gave specialists an opportunity to examine his
behavior from a scientific point of view. The extreme violence of the crimes
invited a psychopathological explanation, rather than one centered on moral
considerations. However, scientists agreed in defining El Chalequero as a judi-
cial and penal problem, not a medical one. The thought was comforting: he
might represent an interesting case for science, but he was hardly a problem as
a criminal.
In the first trial, Guerrero’s mental sanity was at issue. The judge asked
two forensic doctors whether the suspect’s behavior was a consequence of his
“hallucinations.” The penal code reduced and even eliminated punishment for
the mentally ill — on the premise that sanity and insanity were clearly distin-
guishable states, two personalities of the same individual without intermediate
states.50 Questioned by Guerrero’s lawyer, the doctors recognized that it was
not possible to identify insanity “at first sight,” although they insisted that
some mental diseases “irresistibly” impelled the patient to commit crimes. In
their opinion, however, these diseases did not limit Guerrero’s penal responsi-
bility, and as a consequence the judge denied the defense lawyers’ request to
consider his mental health as a mitigating circumstance.51
The issue of the suspect’s responsibility was also raised in the second trial
in 1908, although by this time the strength of criminological arguments had
become greater than that of medicine itself. Guerrero’s attorneys requested
the opinion of Carlos Roumagnac, Francisco Martínez Baca (one of the earli-
est practitioners of craniometry in the country), and physician Miguel Lasso
de la Vega.52 The reports concluded that Guerrero was responsible for his acts.
Reflecting the broad ambitions of positivist criminology, Martínez Baca and
Roumagnac went to greater lengths to ascertain what kind of criminal pathol-
ogy he exemplified best. At the same time, they also expressed the eclectic
50. CP 1871, Art. 42. For a criticism of the Mexican legislation, see Rafael de Zayas
Enríquez, Fisiología del crimen: Estudio jurídico-sociológico, 2 vols. (Veracruz: Imp. de R. de
Zayas, 1885), 1:19.
52. See Francisco Martínez Baca y Manuel Vergara, Estudios de antropología criminal:
Memoria, que por disposición del superior gobierno del estado de Puebla presentan, para concurrir á
la Exposición de Chicago, los doctores Francisco Martínez Baca y Manuel Vergara (Puebla:
Benjamín Lara, 1892); Francisco Martínez Baca, Los tatuajes: Estudio psicológico y médico-legal
en delincuentes y militares (Puebla: Oficina Impresora del Timbre, 1899); and Constancio
Bernaldo de Quirós, Modern Theories of Criminality, trans. Alfonso de Salvio (Boston: Little,
Brown and Co., 1911), 120 – 21.
character of the discipline. Martínez Baca, on the one hand, performed a study
of the “degenerative characteristics” of the suspect. He focused on the
anatomical data and stressed the strictly physical and hereditary factors of El
Chalequero’s behavior. Roumagnac, on the other hand, elaborated on the sus-
pect’s “anthropological characteristics” and emphasized psychosocial factors.53
This division referred to the available explanatory paradigms within criminol-
ogy: one that emphasized hereditary factors and another that stressed the
influence of the environment — associated with the Italian and French schools
of criminology, respectively.54
Roumagnac’s report, however, is a clear example of Mexican criminolo-
gists’ taste for explanations that accumulated external and internal factors
without establishing a causal hierarchy. Guerrero was not mentally ill, but the
logical consequence of multiple concurrent factors. He was the eleventh son
among 14 siblings, from a couple of second cousins who lived in common-law
marriage. His father was an alcoholic of “very bad temper” and suffered from
seizures; his mother also had a violent character, the product “of degenerative
causes in her ancestors.” Several of his uncles were also alcoholics. Guerrero
had six children who also demonstrated the hereditary nature of criminality:
one died as a result of a fight; another (a female) lived in common-law mar-
riage; and yet another drank frequently. During his childhood, Guerrero was
beaten by his mother, suffered from several illnesses and a concussion that
fractured his skull, probably the cause of his frequent headaches and night-
mares. He was not an epileptic, however. Roumagnac also listed the features of
Guerrero’s early life in Guadalajara that explained his criminal behavior. He
worked at a butcher shop, where he learned, besides the consequences of slit-
ting throats, to have intercourse with women who patronized the store. When
he was 20 years old, he moved to Mexico City with María Navarro and
behaved well at the beginning. But, explained Roumagnac, his new friends
prompted him to frequent pulquerías and brothels where “the germ of alco-
holism, planted by the father, developed quickly” and led to his crimes.55
By contrast, Roumagnac found “nothing abnormal” about Guerrero’s sex-
ual life — even though the suspect confessed to the criminologist his taste for
minors who were virgins, for elderly women, for prostitutes, and for any
women who seemed available to satisfy his need. In addition to the violence
53. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 182 – 83.

54. See Robert Buffington, Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (Lincoln: Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 2000); and Pablo Piccato, “La construcción de una perspectiva científica:
Miradas porfirianas a la criminalidad,” Historia Mexicana 47, no. 1 (1997).
55. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 185 –189, 191, 193.
that he always added to sexual intercourse, Guerrero confessed to Roumagnac

that he liked to bite women, in one case severing part of the victim’s nose.
Nevertheless, the key datum to demonstrate Guerrero’s “normalcy” was, for
Roumagnac, the fact that he did not masturbate and had not committed “acts
against nature” (that is, homosexual acts).56 Roumagnac also stated that his
subject was not a sadist either, as violence was not part of sexual pleasure for
him. Biting the victims during intercourse could not make him a sadist, rea-
soned Roumagnac, for “who, among men, could then be excluded from the
sadistic family?” Regarding the rapes of which El Chalequero had been
accused, Roumagnac dismissed them explaining that rape did not amount to
perverse behavior. A better explanation was provided by the suspect himself:
the victims had wounded “his self-esteem as a macho.”57
The first consequence of this explanation was to place Guerrero squarely
in the “criminal sphere”— as opposed to that of medicine. Roumagnac classi-
fied Guerrero as a “born criminal,” characterized not by the sexual nature of
his attacks but by the somatic and degenerative traits he shared with other
criminals.58 In this he coincided with the observations of Dr. Martínez Baca
and Dr. Lasso de la Vega, whose anatomical examination established Guer-
rero’s “degenerative characteristics” as a criminal, demonstrated by the form of
his receding forehead, his ears, his “ape-like hands” and other atavistic traits.59
Guerrero, therefore, could be punished because he was not insane.
By defining Guerrero as an exclusively criminal phenomenon, Mexican
specialists echoed positivist criminology’s broad claims about the reach of pun-
ishment over all deviant behaviors. In his 1899 study of Vacher, l’eventreur
(“the disembowella,” or, in Spanish, el destripador), French criminologist Ale-
xandre Lacassagne had arrived at a similar conclusion: even though the suspect
had been confined to a mental asylum and showed clear signs of persecutory
delirium until 1894, the “sadistic” crimes he committed (which included biting
his victims’ ears) between that year and 1897 were “the work of a monstrous
criminal, not that of an insane person.”60 Not that criminology lacked the con-
ceptual tools to deal with mental disease among the factors of crime. “Alien-
ated” were the first category in Italian criminologist Enrico Ferri’s classifica-
56. Ibid., 198 – 200.

57. Ibid., 221– 26.
58. Ibid., 231.
59. Ibid., 233 – 36.
60. Alexandre Lacassagne ed., Vacher l’eventreur et les crimes sadiques (Lyon: A. Storck,
1899), 5, 8. Vacher confessed to killing eleven adolescents, young women and an elderly
woman.
tion of criminals in La sociologic criminelle, which Roumagnac often referred to.

Against criticisms to the first editions of his study that accused him of encroach-
ing on the sphere of other disciplines, Ferri responded in the preface of the
third French edition, in 1893, that the “insane criminal” was responsible, and
contrasted the “social” responsibility of these criminals with the “metaphysi-
cal” moral responsibility which was the premise of classical penology. Psychi-
atrists could study criminals if they wished, stated Ferri, but it was criminolo-
gists who had to deal with “the natural history of the criminal man and to
propose the measures to be taken from the social point of view.”61 The reports
on Guerrero reflected the strong influence of the Italian school and the rela-
tive weakness of medicine in Mexican criminal processes of the period, partic-
ularly in comparison with France and Argentina. As in the case of Albert
Soleilland, who raped a minor in Paris in 1907, the popular reaction of disgust
against the crimes of El Chalequero made it harder to use medicine (still a
privilege for many) to explain his behavior and reduce his punishment.62
Criminology’s authority to deal with gruesome cases came from its ability
to intersect with a wider audience’s interest for deviance. Roumagnac’s books
on “the world of crime” attracted readers outside the circles of criminologists
and penalists. Roumagnac himself was associated with the mundane spheres of
criminalistics and journalism rather than academia.63 Crímenes sexuales y pasion-
ales, which Roumagnac published in 1906, and Matadores de Mujeres, from
1910, reflected his readers’ fascination with sex and crime. Modern interna-
tional science only validated this attraction. Roumagnac cited many foreign
authors and criminal classifications in the introduction to Los criminales en
México, published in 1904 and reprinted in 1912. In the introduction to
Crímenes sexuales y pasionales, he listed several cases of famous sadists, including
Jack the Ripper, as the framework to understand Mexican criminals. Yet, he
61. Enrico Ferri, La Sociologie Criminelle, 3d ed. (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1893), 100.
62. Soleilland also avoided the death penalty and finished in a penal colony, “more
remembered as a symbol of judicial leniency than as a paragon of ferocity.” In Robert A.
Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), 194 – 96. For Argentina, see José Ingenieros,
“Patología de las funciones psicosexuales. Nueva clasificación genética,” Archivos de
Psiquiatría y Criminología, 9 (1910). I owe this reference to Julia Rodríguez.
63. For an assessment of Roumagnac’s influence, see Javier MacGregor Campuzano,
“Historiografía sobre criminalidad y sistema penitenciario,” Secuencia: Revista de Historia y
Ciencias Sociales 22 (1992); and Buffington, Criminal and Citizen, chaps. 2, 3. See also Elisa
Speckman, “Crimen y castigo: Legislación penal, interpretaciones de la criminalidad y
administración de justicia: Ciudad de México 1872 –1910” (Ph.D. diss., El Colegio de
México, 1999), esp. chap. 5.
considered that Mexico was still remote from “such dreadful refinement of
murder and lust” as found in other nations.64 The cosmopolitan and scientific
fascination with sexual crimes seemed to require that Mexican cases be denied
the higher status of their European counterparts.
Criminological discourse, both in Mexico and abroad, did not ignore pat-
terns of male violence against women, but it seemed to be less useful in
explaining El Chalequero. Most classifications did refer to “passion criminals”
in positive terms, as a kind of criminal defined by the exceptionality of the
criminal act, a result of a rage but not premeditation. Even though passion
criminals victimized their spouses or lovers, they were not defined by the sex-
ual content of their deeds. According to the father of Italian criminology,
Cesare Lombroso, the criminal of passion was different from common offend-
ers because he was “urged to violate the law by a pure spirit of altruism.”65
They were not proper criminals: their facial traits were fair and they acted in
response to legitimate causes.66 Roumagnac, who adhered to Lombroso’s basic
ideas, despite (or perhaps because of) his own eclecticism, stated that Guerrero
clearly was not a passion criminal, as he “has never been moved by love.”67
Criminological classifications, however, overlooked the sexual aspects of
criminals’ behavior. The main distinction within these classifications, estab-
lished since Lombroso’s early proposals, was that between occasional or per-
manent criminals. Greater precision was gained by distinguishing the latter
according to the dominant factors over their personality (genetic, environ-
mental, emotional). None of these categories applied exclusively to a specific
crime, as “the criminal,” rather than the crime, was the object for criminolo-
gists. Thus, the most influential classifications made no reference to sexual
crime as a species or taxonomic criterion.68 For example, José Ingenieros, an
internationally known criminologist from Argentina, dealt with violent sexual
deviants as psychopaths, and did not include them in his own classification.69
The place for sexual crimes or criminals varied according to different criteria.
64. Roumagnac, Crímenes sexuales, 19.

65. Cesare Lombroso, Crime Its Causes and Remedies, trans. Henry P. Horton (Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1911), 256; see also Cesare Lombroso, Delinquente epilettico, d’impeto,
pazzo e criminaloide, vol. 2 of L’uomo delinquente, in rapporto all’antropologia, alla
giurisprudenza ed alle discipline carcerarie (Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1889), 238.
66. Cesare Lombroso, Delitti di libidine, 2d ed. (Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1886), 20.
68. See for example Ferri, La sociologie criminelle, 80 – 98, 120 – 28.
69. Ingenieros, “Patología de las funciones psicosexuales”; and Lila Caimari, email
message to the author, 16 Aug. 1999.
In a treaty on forensic medicine, Lombroso discussed rape in the same chapter

as “pederasty,” impotence, sterility and hermafroditism — as a disease rather
than a crime.70 In the large synthesis of his contribution to criminology, he
linked sexual crimes with the diseases mentioned above and with hydrophobia,
senility and others.71
Lombroso’s treatment of sexual crimes was not limited to a medical per-
spective. He treated sexual crimes separately, in a short volume (Delitti dei
libidine), but did not provide sexual criminals a separate place in his taxonomy.
In a general work, for example, he explained that some sexual crimes could be
attributed to “congenital tendencies but another part, and this the greater,
comes under the category of occasional crimes due to the influence of the
comparative barbarism of the country districts, and to passions which have no
other outlet, on account of the absence of prostitution and the difficulty of
marriage.”72 In Delitti dei libidine, he drifted from biological determinism
toward a mix of moral and historical explanations, and linked immoral behav-
ior to primitivism. While intercourse did not offend “primitives,” prostitution
could be more common among some peoples than marriage. Even though
anatomical and behavioral atavisms played a central role in the Italian school’s
understanding of contemporary criminals, rape seemed justifiable when found
amid primitive cultures. Rape and incest, argued Lombroso, contributed to
contemporary monogamy, as they made possible the gradual identification of
women with property.73 Other writers agreed with this general interpretation:
Gabriel Tarde explained the repeated crimes committed by Vacher as a conse-
quence of the increasing mobility and urbanization of contemporary France.74
In the perspective of José Ingenieros, “sexual emotions” were at the origins of
contemporary love.75 Rape, in other words, was part of progress.
Yet gross cases of rape and other forms of violence begged for an explana-
tion. Lombroso acknowledged that a few sexual criminals of “congenital ten-
dencies” were clearly identifiable by their high degree of recidivism, the anom-
alous objects of their desire (children and elderly women, which “would not
excite normal men”), and by the “useless” violence which accompanied their
acts and often replaced them.76 Exceptional murderers, such as the Spanish
70. See the Lombroso, Lezioni di medicina legale, chap. 26.

71. Lombroso, Delinquente epilettico, 238.
72. Idem, Crime Its Causes and Remedies, 256.
73. Lombroso, Delitti di libidine, 3 – 5, 8, 11, 16.
74. G. Tarde, “Les transformations de l’impunité,” in Vacher l’eventreur et les crimes
sadiques, 180 – 81.
75. Ingenieros, “Patología de las funciones psicosexuales,” 4.
76. Lombroso, Lezioni di medicina legale, 360.
Fig. 5. Sexual Criminal

Source: Cesare Lombroso, Delitti di libidine, 2d ed. ( Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1886).
“Sacamantecas” reflected, in Lombroso’s view, that the behavior of “savage

tribes” could emerge in the middle of European civilization.77 Their crania
were clearly different, and their faces were “excessively feminine.”78 (See figure
5.)
Genetic, historical, and moral perspectives coincided in Lombroso’s com-
plicated view of sexual criminals. For the discipline at large, this resulted in the
lack of clear criteria to see them as a subspecies of “the criminal.” In Mexico,
Rafael de Zayas Enríquez noted in 1885 that jurists failed to distinguish the
diversity of pathological behaviors that psychiatrists ( presumably including, at
the time, criminologists) could classify as different stages of “lucid insanity”:
nymphomaniacs, satyrs, “erotómanos” and the jealous.79 In 1910 José Inge-
nieros noted the lack of an adequate classification of sexual anomalies, includ-
77. Lombroso, Delitti di libidine, 37 – 38.

78. Lombroso, Lezioni di medicina legale, 360.
79. Zayas Enríquez, Fisiología del crimen, 103.
Fig. 6. A Victim of Vacher

Source: Alexandre Lacassagne, Vacher l’eventreur et les crimes sadiques (Lyon: Stork, 1899).
ing rape and other crimes.80 The reason behind this partial blindness of
science was the widely shared belief, embraced by those who analyzed El
Chalequero, that the normal and abnormal were hard to distinguish regarding
sexual behavior. Ingenieros defined the goal of sexual activity as the reproduc-
tion of the species, but acknowledged that many practices were morbid exam-
ples of behavior which lacked such a goal.81 Figure 6, depicting one of Vacher’s
victims, synthesizes the perspective of science toward the victims of sexual vio-
lence and offers a stark contrast with Posada’s views: the image lacks detail, the
surroundings are barely sketched, and only the wounds represent evidence.
Yet the sexual elements of El Chalequero’s clearly anomalous behavior
could not easily be denied — as it was not easy for Lombroso to deny the exis-
tence of sexual criminals. It is a meaningful paradox that the report on Fran-
cisco Guerrero’s 1908 trial which proved to be most receptive to the sexual
nature of his acts was the one produced by a physician. In his contribution, Dr.
Lasso de la Vega stated that Guerrero was a sadist, because all his victims were
women, and that he was also a passion criminal, because his crimes resulted
from the frustration caused by his loss of control over women. A close look at
Guerrero’s interactions with his victims challenged criminal classifications, as
none of them accounted for the mix of exploitation and sexual violence that
characterized his crimes. With a different perspective, Lasso de la Vega sug-
gested, an unsettling conclusion could come from the case:
80. Ingenieros, “Patología de las funciones psicosexuales,” 4.

81. Ibid., 9.
Many facts that might seem to be unexplainable for those who are not
close to Guerrero’s environment, may not be so; the similarity in the
aggression against females, the easy provocation of their insults . . . are
details and patterns that commonly characterize the lowly prostitution,
becoming almost common and vulgar facts because of the influence of
habit, and what we have called the normality of abnormality.82
While the reports by criminologists denied the victimization of women as

the defining element in Guerrero’s crimes, Lasso de la Vega stated what every-
one knew but few dared to say: practices that the law defined as crimes were
common among certain groups of the urban lower class, and seldom became
the object of prosecution.
Conclusions
Jack the Ripper’s story is one of mystery, but that of El Chalequero is one of
impunity. The London murderer was never brought to justice. Even though
the prison in San Juan de Ulúa, where Guerrero was sent in 1892, was a fear-
some prospect, it did not imply the end of his sexual life. Working as a porter
at the prison, he saved enough money to pay for prostitutes.83 After 12 years,
he was released on parole. He did not take too long to restart his criminal
activities. In 1904 he was sentenced to two months of arrest for battery; in
1905 he was released after being accused of theft, and shortly thereafter he was
arrested again for sleeping drunk in the street. A murder similar to those of
1887 occurred in 1908. The victim was never identified, although her age was
estimated at eighty years. Her throat had been slit, near the Consulado River.
The police immediately suspected Guerrero. He was arrested and confessed to
the murder (to recant later), explaining that the woman had doubted his viril-
ity after they had intercourse by the river. Dirty, poor, and sick, he was now
only a shadow of his fearsome past. He was sentenced to death again, but he
died of a stroke on 6 November 1910.84
82. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 239 – 44.

83. Ibid., 198. On sexual commerce in prisons, see José Almaraz, “Regímenes
penitenciarios,” 83; and Raúl González, “Algunos aspectos del problema sexual en las
prisiones,” 300 –1 in Memoria del primer congreso nacional penitenciario celebrado en la Ciudad
de México del 24 de noviembre al 3 de diciembre de 1932 (Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la
Nación, 1935).
84. Carlos Roumagnac, Elementos de policía científica: Obra de texto para la Escuela
Científica de Policía de México (Mexico City: Botas, 1923), 150 –151; and idem. Crímenes
sexuales, 180 – 81, 261.
The crimes of Whitechappel crystallized the fears and threats that limited
the spaces and times safely available for women in large cities. The crimes of
Peralvillo had a similar impact, and undoubtedly contributed to decrease the
income and the autonomy that women could establish beyond the protection
of their men and homes. Impunity defined El Chalequero’s crimes because
they could be construed as normal phenomena among the urban lower classes,
and because, as with other sexual crimes, punishment was a remote possibility
for them.
It was precisely the sexual nature of El Chalequero’s attacks that explains
his impunity. While sexual criminals were difficult to classify, prostitutes
themselves were pathological — if not quite criminal.85 And it was the criminal,
not the crime, who concerned scientists: Francisco Guerrero’s deeds, as those
of other men studied by specialists in other countries, were construed as rather
benign consequences of human evolution and masculinity. Sexual violence
needed not become a priority for criminology or penology. Considering El
Chalequero simply as criminal, rather than insane, meant divorcing violence
from sexuality. By denying the sexual nature of his attacks, and thus their gen-
dered character, criminology helped deny their social impact — obvious other-
wise for anyone who walked by the northern suburbs of Mexico City. In this
regard, Mexican specialists were more successful than British detectives: the
legacy of El Chalequero has been forgotten, while Jack the Ripper remains an
icon, however ambivalent his meaning. In contemporary Mexico, it is still easy
to neglect the connections between crime and sexuality, and accept the “nor-
malcy” of rape and other forms of violence against women.86
The case of El Chalequero reveals the linkages between Mexico City’s
“world of crime” and science. El Chalequero was easier to understand as a
“criminal” phenomenon than a social problem. For those who saw urban dan-
ger from a distance, he belonged to areas of the city where deviance was the
norm. His violence contributed to the process of bringing prostitutes under
85. See Lombroso, Delinquente epilettico, 238; and Lara y Pardo, La prostitución en
México, 120 – 21.
86. Between 1995 and 1997 ten prostitutes were murdered in the barrio of La
Merced, in Mexico City. See “Vindicación de prostitutas en el barrio de la soledad,” La
Jornada, 1 Nov. 1998. The October 1999 reforms to penal legislation established rape
victims’ right to anonymity while identifying the suspect. It permitted the victims to
have a physician of his/her sex to perform medical examinations. See Revista Proceso
1194 (1999); http://www.proceso.com.mx/protexto/1194/1194n15html; and Código de
Procedimientos Penales para el Distrito Federal, Arts. 9 bis and 109 bis, text in
http://www.cddhcu.gob.mx/leyinfo/6/.
the control of pimps, madams and, however informally, the state. These link-
ages were established through many paths: hearsay, journalistic narratives,
penny press images, jury audiences, police and judicial practices, and crimino-
logical explanations — proving that the relationship between ideas about soci-
ety and everyday life had become very real, if not always in the pleasant form
of progress.

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HAHR 81.

3/4-07 Piccato 9/17/01 6:13 PM Page 623

“El Chalequero” or the Mexican Jack the

During the 1880s, Francisco Guerrero, aka “El Chalequero” or “Antonio el

Photo by Graciela Iturbide, courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York.

Hispanic American Historical Review 81:3 – 4

624 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

Crimes and Perceptions of Urban Danger

1. Alonso Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria pronunciada por el Agente del Ministerio

“El Chalequero” 625

626 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

“El Chalequero” 627

10. El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 16 Dec. 1890, 2.

628 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

temporaneous bandits of greater fame, such as Jesús Negrete, “the Tiger of

Francisco Guerrero, as many other inhabitants of “the world of crime,”

12. On Negrete, see Gaceta de Policía, 3 June 1906, 14.

“El Chalequero” 629

Fig. 3. Francisco Guerrero, 1888.

Fig. 4. Francisco Guerrero, 1908

630 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

“El Chalequero” 631

21. Ibid., 12, 40; and Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 207.

632 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

26. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 201.

“El Chalequero” 633

30. Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria pronunciada, 19 – 20.

634 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

“El Chalequero” 635

36. El Siglo Diez y Nueve, 16 Dec. 1890, 2; Rodríguez Miramón, Requisitoria

636 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

Sexual Crimes and the Judicial System

41. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 206.

“El Chalequero” 637

Year Accused Sentenced Accused Sentenced Accused Sentenced Accused Sentenced

(Mexico City: La Europea, 1903).

“El Chalequero” 639

640 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

Table 2: Accused and Sentenced for Sexual Crimes, Federal District,

Year Accused Sentenced Accused Sentenced

Table 3: Conviction Rate, by Crime, Federal District, 1900, 1939.

Table 4: Accused and Sentenced for Rape Federal District

Accused 1885 – 95 15.04

Sentenced 1871– 85 6.75

Note: Data for 1885–95 applies only to Mexico City.

“El Chalequero” 641

Science and the Normalization of Sexual Violence

642 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

53. Roumagnac, Matadores de mujeres, 182 – 83.

“El Chalequero” 643

that he always added to sexual intercourse, Guerrero confessed to Roumagnac

56. Ibid., 198 – 200.

644 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

tion of criminals in La sociologic criminelle, which Roumagnac often referred to.

“El Chalequero” 645

64. Roumagnac, Crímenes sexuales, 19.

646 HAHR / August and November / Piccato

In a treaty on forensic medicine, Lombroso discussed rape in the same chapter

70. See the Lombroso, Lezioni di medicina legale, chap. 26.

“El Chalequero” 647

Fig. 5. Sexual Criminal

“Sacamantecas” reﬂected, in Lombroso’s view, that the behavior of “savage

77. Lombroso, Delitti di libidine, 37 – 38.