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

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 59
foreign markets in 1914, the peasants considered them communal
and inalienable. In fact, they were more like no-man's-lands. Whereas
the highland Indians held communal land under government
sanction, the blacks of the Cauca Valley held commons informally
and, if anything, provoked government disapproval. Pursued by a
hostile gentry, denied political representation, deprived of the security
of land tenure, denied the possibility of any representative village
structure within the official framework of administration, the
black peasants formed a new social class that stood outside society.
Internally, their social organization appeared infinitely flexible and
capable of endless permutations and combinations, as their kinship
structure still attests. As a class, they had not evolved from years of
patrimonial benevolence encrusted in manorial custom ensuring
some minimal guarantees and protection. Thus, the new peasantry
contained aspects of two different traditions: that of the slave and
that of the slave-outlaw (palenquero}. Violently excluded from society,
the peasants were forced to challenge its institutions and
views. In attacking the haciendas, they attacked what they saw as
the cause of their suffering: they knew full well that so long as the
haciendas existed, their owners would persecute them in search of
their labor.
Shortly after abolition, police and "good and patriotic citizens" received
wide powers to arrest so-called vagabonds and to force them
to work on haciendas. As a result, the plains of Cauca became lands
of brigandage and fear (Harrison, 1952:173). In 1858, Miguel Pombo,
a leading government official, described the need for stricter laws to
combat the increase in idleness and the high cost of food. The peasants
were no longer bringing their foodstuffs to the town market and
were neglecting their crops. Pombo suggested forcing them to work
by placing them under the control of the police and the landlords.
These measures, which would include starvation and flogging, were
also to apply to the allegedly idle and drunken day laborers (El Tiempo
[Bogota], Sept. 7, 1858:1,- cf., Lombardi, 1971; Estado del Cauca,
1859)-
The constantly harassed state could not achieve the ends so desired
by the entrepreneurs. Much later, in 1874 f°r example, the
heads of the tobacco industry complained to the town officials of
Palmira, the most important rural town in the valley, that production
was declining because of the lack and disposition of manual labor.
"What is necessary," they urged, "are means that are coercive,
prompt, efficacious, and secure" (Estados Unidos de Colombia,
1875:139).
Merchants, who formed a rising commercial class in the valley