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

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 63
"Bishop of Pasto." In the most famous of all the battles at Los Chancos
in the north of the valley, which left about 400 dead out of 7,500
combatants, the Conservatives were commanded by Sergio Arboleda
(Briceno, 1878 :241). His soldiers bore banners with pictures of
Pope Pius XI and of Christ (Eder, 1959:267-86; Shaw, 1941:597; Briceno,
1878:228).
Accounts of the sacking of the principal town of the Cauca Valley,
Cali, by Liberal troops in December 1876 provide a revealing
glimpse of class, party, and religion (Eder, 1959:283-99). About twothirds
of the twenty thousand inhabitants were described as a vagabond
population of blacks and mestizos imbued with intensely
communistic doctrines. Unlike this rabble, the remaining one-third,
whose property was devastated, was principally of Spanish origin
and belonged to the Conservative party. The leader of the Liberal
troops, David Pena, was said to be a communist visionary, a mystic
lunatic, and an assassin blindly devoted to the maxims of the French
Revolution and the Colombian Democratic Clubs founded in the
18405. He allegedly initiated the movement to exile the bishops.
Yet, he was a devout Catholic. He fought, he supposedly said, for
glory and to exterminate all the Goths (Conservatives), who were
to be swept out of his natal city in a flood of vengeance. His troops
and the aroused mob destroyed Liberal as well as Conservative property—a
lack of discrimination that turned the Liberal government
against him. But there was little that it could do, for he commanded
an enormous force and the loyalty of the lower classes. Armed bands
of blacks were still roaming the streets eight months later. He led a
lower-class populist upsurge with chiliastic overtones, which was
directed against the property-holding class and the government machinery
that supported it.
A Swiss professor, who taught for some years in Bogota, visited
the Cauca Valley in 1884, the same year in which Santiago Eder informed
the United States ambassador that the "Valley was drowning
in political and religious sectarianism" (Ibid.: 304). To the professor,
the typical Caucan was "a fanatic for his religion and will sacrifice
everything, family, life and possessions, just for triumph. Because of
this they are cruel in all conflicts and know no compassion. Here is
the cradle of all revolutions, and here they generally end" (Rothlisberger,
cited in Eder, 1959:265).
In 1875, Sergio Arboleda received a letter from his son, then managing
Japio.
In the last session of the local Democratic Club, mainly attended
by blacks, they were saying that the aim of the Con-