ABSTRACT
This article discusses the relations between the practices of honor duels with criminal law and national frontiers. The article is organized in three parts: (a) the national State and the frontier, approaching how historiography has dealt with the State action in its borders and the aspects of the juxtaposed sovereignties that defines margins of action for the individuals; (b) the discrepancies of the laws regarding honor duels in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, and their different legal solutions to the same phenomenon; and (c) the search of the duelists for neutral territories, where cases of duels in border spaces are analyzed. Finally, a better understanding of honor and its defense systems is sought in the transition from aristocratic societies to bourgeois societies with the necessary reconfiguration of its meanings and restructuration of its social definitions.
Keywords:
honor; duels of honor; national borders; criminal legislation; Latin-American States