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

68 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
ing them anything except their food—nothing more. This is
what is called to Conserve-, to conserve the evil law of the
Spanish. From that comes the word "Conservative." The Conservatives
wanted to make us into slaves again. That's why
there were so many wars. The word "Liberal" is the word
"free" [libre] that Jesus Christ spoke when he came into the
world; freedom for everybody, Jesus Christ brought that when
he came; freedom for all the world. This is what is called "Liberal"—a
world of freedom and thought. . . . The Negro can
never be a Conservative,- neither can he humiliate himself.
The Negro can only be a Patriot; never a Conservative. But it's
not the rich who lead us. Here it's poverty. Here, in this region,
it's the poverty that moves people, whether they be Liberal or
Conservative, it's the poverty.
The fear of reenslavement, or worse, was still a factor in the violencia
of 1948-58. On being read the letter from Alfonso Arboleda
to his father, another elderly man commented: "Until today this exists.
In a letter Dr. Laureano Gomez [the Conservative leader seen as
instigator of the violencia] said he would finish off the blacks because
most of them were Liberals. He would kill them or make
them into Conservatives. That's why the violencia occurred and
why it hit the black race hardest. Thus till today this letter of Arboleda's
is significant."
The relationship between religion and politics, with the emphasis
on free inquiry and the inalienability of land, emerged in a conversation
in 1971 with another old peasant, now a cigar maker, Eusebio
Cambindo:
Here the Bible was "artistocricized" or wicked and excommunicated
as those people say. The Bible was good, but only
for them; only for the priests. Anybody else who had a Bible
was excommunicated; they went to hell. Listen! From where
came the ignorance of the people, and the lack of understanding
between pueblos, the hatred between blacks and whites,
the big against the small? From where comes this egoism? It
comes from the exploitation that one side doesn't want the
other to know the truth about things—the truth in the Bible,
the truth about life. . . . Well, God gave the land in common to
all the world, to everybody ... it says that God said, My land
can be neither sold nor bargained for.
An eighty-four-year-old man, Tomas Zepata, a poet and now
blind, who worked all his life on his small plot, commented on the