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

56 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
main, stolen our arms, and is now taking on the oligarchy." The
blacks in the Arboledas' lands along the Palo River were armed and
righting on the side of the Hurtadistas, but hardly as puppets. "The
blacks around the Palo River," wrote Alfonso in 1879, "are constantly
in arms. If they continue doing just whatever they please,
and because here there are no forces to protect the landowners and
no other way of making them see reason, then we will have to appeal
to the Liberal government to see if they will apply force. For
these blacks who are attacking the oligarchs are also a threat to the
present government."
The blacks had a personal reason to arm and fight, for the Arboledas
were trying to drive them out of their refuge along the Palo
River. From the eighteenth century, runaway slave camps in this
area had been an irritation to the Arboledas. With the hacienda's
production slowing to a halt, the Arboledas now turned to these fertile
lands in a forlorn attempt to break the independence of the
smallholders and to sell their lands, as well.
The blacks constantly feared reenslavement. When Alfonso set by
some stores of rice and plantain, a rumor spread that he and the government
were about to take the blacks' children and sell them in another
country, as Julio Arboleda had done in 1847. "From this," he
wrote to his father, "you can calculate the hatred there is against
us and you can infer that the stealing of the cocoa from the deposits
comes from nowhere else than the cocoa buyers who propound
these lies. The worst is that the blacks believe these tales and are
alarmed."
Alfonso wanted to reequip the mill with modern machinery from
the United States, but the constant threat of revolution paralyzed
business. In 1882, with the collapse of the boom in quinine, the region's
only export, money stopped circulating. The few workers that
he could get for the mill enraged him because of their laziness and
constant fiestas. "It's impossible to get workers even though one
trips over idlers every day."
Contradictions of the Transition Period
The Cauca Valley now found itself at the margin of the
commercial world as the market split the national domain into selectively
discriminated satellites. Despite the hacienda's commercial
success relative to others in the valley, it too eventually succumbed.
Mercantilism and slavery had given way to attempts to
create a free market. Yet, the exslaves could not be forced into wage