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

48 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
1971:192-93). A more businesslike reaction to rebellion and the
plummeting price of slaves was to sell slaves abroad. Julio Arboleda
marched 99 adults and 113 children over the Andes to the Pacific
coast and sold them to Peruvian slavers for some thirty-one thousand
pesos (Helguera and Lee Lopez, 1967)—a diaspora the blacks
never forgot. Whatever peace the Arboledas enjoyed for most of
the slave era, they bequeathed bitter memories that survive today.
Blacks commonly say that the interior walls of the haciendas are
permanently blotched by the blood of whipped and tortured slaves,
which no amount of painting can conceal. At midnight on Good Friday
people claim they hear the clatter of a mule carrying Julio Arboleda,
vainly seeking repentance for his sins.
In 1851, with the avid support of the slave owners of the valley,
the Arboledas led an unsuccessful civil war to oppose abolition.
Against the rising tide of radical liberalism and class hatreds, they
argued that labor would disappear. They were right. Gold mining
in the southern Cauca Valley ceased soon after except for marginal
peasant prospecting. Yet, despite their defeat and loss of slaves, the
Arboledas maintained a semblance of their previous hacienda operations—a
readjustment facilitated by their wealth and status and
their location between two important and closely connected towns,
Cali and Popayan. Most important, Sergio Arboleda, Julio's brother
and owner of Japio, had prepared contingency plans for abolition—a
policy encouraged by the national government's vacillation. By abolition
in January 1852,, the hacienda Japio and its subdivision of
Quintero had prepared for the transition by institutionalizing a new
category of workers, the conceitados: blacks who, in return for a
small plot of a few hectares, worked a certain number of days on the
hacienda. Just before abolition, some 40 percent of the adult slaves
had become conceitados.
A neighboring slave owner, Joaquin Mosquera, who had been president
of Colombia in 1830, wrote in 1852: "Up till now the general
abolition has not produced any serious commotion; but I do see
alarming difficulties because agitators have been advising the blacks
neither to make work contracts with their former masters, nor to
leave their lands, but to take them over" (Posada and Restrepo Canal,
1933:83-85).
Such incidents were common. Gilmore states that in the mining
province of the Choco, well to the northwest of the Cauca Valley,
"property owners feared communistic expropriation of their property."
Concerning the mines of Barbacoas, to the southwest, the
famous geographer Augustin Codazzi reported that "perverted or ill-