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

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 67
The skirmishes, beatings, riots, and open wars that pulsed throughout
the valley during the second half of the nineteenth century all
seem to have been animated by such ideas and visions of the world.
These conflicts between two multiclass parties, riddled with the factionalism
of competing caudillos and their clients, were also genuine
class conflicts, persistently channeled into unstable interclass
alliances. Both the socioeconomic conditions and the ideology sustained
the vigor of the underlying class antagonism. The black peasants
were continually forced to defend what they saw as their rights
to the land against a white elite that fought desperately to develop a
commercialized estate agriculture based on wage labor and tenancy.
The landed elite could force no more than a small minority of the
peasants into peonage. The battle raged unremittingly.
Folk religion and class hatreds, if not class consciousness, had become
symbiotically fused. The hatred of racial and class privileges
was nourished by a radical reinterpretation of Catholicism in which
the peasants' fight for land was sanctified by a complex cultural tradition
evolved from the experience of slavery, the palenque, and the
peasant-outlaw class sheltering in the jungles alongside the failing
estates. The relation of God to the underworld remained forever
fraught with the violence of the master-slave bond. When the blacks
broke that bond, they recruited God to their side and let their masters
go to the devil.
Ethnographic Postscript: 1970
Even today, peasants in the southern Cauca Valley, the
descendants of the Arboledas' slaves, talk about the political parties
and the Church in terms of the structure of sentiments beaten
out on the anvil of contending social formations, when history provided
a glimpse of alternate possibilities and transformations. "The
priests? Some are less repellent than others." Christ gave liberally
and founded the Liberal doctrine. The Conservatives wished to conserve
evil and reenslave the blacks. An old peasant, Felipe Carbonero,
on being asked in 1972, to explain the differences between
the two parties responded in accents parallel to those of the radical
Liberal intellectuals of the mid-nineteenth century.
The Conservatives wished to conserve the Law of the Spanish
... to kill and enslave ... to catch Negroes and sell them . . .
to sell them from one hacienda to the other ... to catch the
Negro slaves and make them work night and day without pay-