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

60 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
from 1860, began to act as intermediaries in the export of crops
grown by smallholders and of products gathered by contractors.
Many Colombian merchants took part, including Rafael Reyes, later
president of the republic. The type of intermediary most likely to
succeed as both merchant and landholder in the Cauca Valley was
one with sources of foreign credit and accurate market information.
Such was Reyes's close friend Santiago Eder, who as a United States
citizen and consul with close kin in business houses in London,
New York, Panama, and Guayaquil established himself in the southern
part of the valley in 1860 (Eder, 1959). Weaving together a network
of foreign and domestic commerce exporting tobacco, indigo,
quinine, rubber, and coffee and importing finished goods, Eder built
up the largest and most efficient sugar plantation in the valley. Its
success owed much to mechanization. At the same time that the
manager of Japio was forlornly recommending a modern mill from
the United States as a way of alleviating the labor problem, Eder was
installing a "Louisiana No. i" mill, which was far superior to the
one planned at Japio. Aloof from the internecine conflicts between
Liberals and Conservatives, protected from confiscation by his status
as foreigner and United States consul, he and men like him controlled
the region's economy when the valley was opened to the Pacific
in 1914. Immediately following abolition, Sergio Arboleda had
advocated just this sort of development. But the ex-slave owners'
incapacity to engage in foreign commerce, their ideological zeal, and
their continual attempts to maintain an estate agriculture with unmanageable
tenants ruined them.
Religion and Class War
Since the late 18405, violent regional and national civil
wars between the Conservative and Liberal parties have rent Colombian
society, the latest being the "violencia" of 1948-58. Indeed,
the parties seemed less political organizations than "hereditary
hatreds," and the political culture was one that fostered an absolutist
world view in which all controversy was conducted in quasireligious
and moralistic terms (Dix, 1967:211-12). Practically all
explanations of the violencia focus on the competing elites and the
patron-client relationship. The patron as a type of feudal warlord or
caudillo acting through his broker or gamonal mobilizes his clients,
the peasants, to war against another patron-client faction. The intense
feeling of party attachment attributed to the peasantry is explained
as the result of their dependency on their patron, transmit-