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

5O Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
ther the Conservative or Liberal party banners, feuding elites fought
savagely for state power in a region in which the sullen class hostility
of the newly formed yeomanry tipped the balance of power.
Imprinted with the antagonisms of centuries of slavery, this new
class of peasants found a precarious freedom in the disunity prevalent
among their exmasters in a subsiding economy. The estate
owners vainly strove to commercialize their holdings and to recoup
their wealth during an economic contraction that isolated the Cauca
Valley from the new markets, while the peasants subsisted on a generous
soil.
As the republic became more involved in free trade on the world
market, the national market became fragmented, each segment of
the interior carrying on its principal commerce with Europe. It had
become cheaper to bring goods to the western provinces from Liverpool
than from Bogota (Safford, 1965 : 507-8). While some areas like
the tobacco-producing region of the Magdalena Valley were caught
up in the current of free trade, the Cauca Valley became an economic
backwater.
In 18 5 7, Sergio Arboleda observed that the economy of Cauca was
in far worse condition than it had been at the beginning of the
century. Mines, public buildings, aqueducts, bridges, churches, and
private houses lay in ruins. It was impossible to find artisans for
reconstruction. The debris of neglected haciendas marked the
countryside. Gold mining had collapsed. Prices of agricultural products
had doubled since the definitive end to slavery in 1852, so that
even though wages had also increased, the day laborer was worse off
than before. Yet, "if we have lost our internal trade," he went on to
note, "we have gained an external one. Today foreign imports are six
times as great as before." Local industry could not compete with foreign,
and local capital had been diverted to the purchase of foreign
goods. He exhorted his fellow landowners to invest in agriculture
and tropical exports—"tobacco, vanilla, rubber, sarsaparilla, sugar,
and a thousand other products." But two problems remained: the
shortage of labor and the insecurity of property. The lower classes
disdained wage work, and there was no guarantee for "the sacred
right of private property," which had received its first assault with
abolition (1972:328-31).
Business confidence was also totally lacking. Sergio Arboleda perceived
that slavery had engendered a moral climate antagonistic to
the work ethic. That legacy and the distortions in capital investment
induced by the new imperialism notwithstanding, he emphatically
blamed the social malaise on the weakening of the Christian