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

CHAPTER 4
Owners and Fences
"We are the owners and our fences are our titles"
Ricardo Holguin—owner of hacienda Perico Negro
he twentieth century ushered in a vast transfor-
Tmation that virtually broke the back of the
icasant class. With the end to the devastating
ivil war, the war of One Thousand Days in
902, the triumphant Conservative party was
able to enforce a climate of "stability and progress," establishing the
security for foreign investment, which entered Colombia on a scale
unequaled for any other Latin American country (Rippy, 1931:152).
Much of this capital was invested in the Cauca Valley. President
Reyes, a close friend of Santiago Eder's, was in great need of funds to
develop the valley where he himself had large holdings (Rippy, 1931:
104.; Eder, 1959:221, 405). In 1914 the valley was opened to the
world market by the rail line across the Andes to the Pacific and by
the canal in Panama. United States advisors instituted a new banking
and tax structure. In the southern part of the Cauca Valley there
was an extremely sharp natural increase in the rural population and
an even larger increase in the urban, increasing the demand for food.
As a result land values soared, and simultaneously, the large landowners
secured the power to dislodge the peasantry and to initiate
large-scale commercial agriculture. Peasants saw their plots expropriated,
first for cattle raising and later for plantation crops, and they
themselves were increasingly forced into wage-labor and the cultivation
of cash crops on their shrunken holdings.
The large landowners now had the opportunity to make money
from land; provided they could secure labor and submission from
the unruly peasants. The ensuing enclosures of land were not only a
bid to add acreage; they were also an attempt to deal with the prob