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

64 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
servatives is to make a new revolution in order to re-enslave
all the blacks. The Conservatives are believed to be saying
"Slavery or the gallows for all Blacks." What is more, they
state that the Conservatives are not true believers but feign
Catholicism in order to deceive; the only true Catholics are
the Liberals. In passing by one of the small shops ... I heard a
black saying "There in Mondomo we'll put the noose to their
necks, apply the lash (making a gesture towards the sky) and
then leave them to hang." ... I fear greatly for you. You cannot
return.
The Liberals stood to the true meaning of God, as the Conservatives
stood to the devil. Religious ideas and mystical sentiment
formed the essential nucleus of other political ideals. It could hardly
be otherwise in this society saturated with religion and magic, and
with the wounds of slavery still smarting in the souls of the now relatively
independent but constantly persecuted yeomanry.
The letter from Japio was, after all, sent to the most popular Conservative
leader in Cauca, commander of the Conservative troops
and one of the most ardent, intelligent, and scrupulous devotees of
the Church—the "caudillo of the Divine Cause," as pronounced at
his funeral oration in 1888. The letter reflected the moral crisis in
society, begat by anti-Catholicism and the ideals of the French Revolution
and spurred by economic stagnation and political turmoil.
Earlier, Sergio Arboleda had argued against the Liberal economic
theory of the "invisible hand." He saw nothing in it except, as he put
it, an egoistic bond incapable of constraining the violence of passion.
The only hope lay in the Church's exercising dominion over a hierarchically
organized society. Divine origin and infinite wisdom
would prevent the Church from becoming tyrannical. True, Arboleda
agreed, the Church's constitution was monarchical and despotic,
but the Church's law was moral and thus protected and regulated
democracy. "In short," he concluded in perhaps his most
famous oration, delivered in Popayan in 1857 in response to the
economic crisis, the Church "is the founder of liberty in the world.
For her there are neither races nor classes, vassals nor kings, free nor
enslaved. She recognizes them all and leaves them in their place. All
are considered equal before God. Such is the Catholic clergy. The
clergy can save us and nobody can save us but the clergy" (1972,:
364).
The Cauca slave owners had used this sort of Christian doctrine as
an argument against abolition. "Slavery is supported by the Holy
Scriptures" began a particularly revealing passage in a broadsheet