The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

46 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
cisely Christianity in its true sense that was astir among the oppressed
classes as a result of their condition and the authorities'
abuse of doctrine. The slave owners and their priests taught a perversion
of Christianity, which eventually facilitated their overthrow.
His accusation was leveled not against Christianity, which he saw
as innately liberating, but against the slave owners and the Church,
whose preaching "was reduced to the idea of a terrifying God so as to
exalt the large landowners, inculcate blind respect for the privileged
classes, . . . combat with the threat of eternal punishment in hell the
libertarianism threatening their hegemony, . . . and to erect as sins
the slightest action of the poor and devalued classes" (1853 :xi-xii,
Ixxix). As Mercado astutely observed, it became a moot point who
was practicing idolatry, the rulers or the ruled. The tremendous
power of the slave owners, nowhere greater than in Cauca, engendered
a religious fanaticism prone to violence.
With the impulse set afoot by the unsettling conditions of the
French Revolution and the Wars of Independence from Spain, the diabolical
God of the slave owners spawned an antithetical vision of
the holy cause among the subject classes—a radical Catholic Utopia,
anarchist and egalitarian, founded in the sacred ways of nature. Confidently
assuming the support of the masses, Mercado declared, "We
have to drag into the light of Christianity the iniquities that they
have committed against the people. The people know that their
rights should not be at the mercy of rulers, but that they are immanent
in nature, inalienable and sacred" (1853 : Ixxix).
Manumission, Laissez-Faire,
and Regional Disarticulation
The significance of these prophetic claims emerges from
the nineteenth-century records of the largest slave estate in the
Cauca Valley, that of the Arboleda family. These records lie in the
Archive Central del Cauca, Popayan, Colombia, and are yet to be
fully classified and indexed. Unless otherwise specified, all the following
citations come from this source. In 1695 the originator of the
clan, Jacinto de Arboleda, had left only forty-seven slaves (Jaramillo
Uribe, 1968 -.22). In 1830, his descendants Sergio and Julio Arboleda
were among the wealthiest men in the republic, with some fourteen
hundred slaves rotated between their mines on the Pacific coast and
their gold placers and haciendas at the southern rim of the Cauca
Valley.