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

72, Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
like ... a proletarian union. It was common. But today there is
nothing because in this sector the owner peasants remain with nowhere
to work, with nothing to work ... for a minga."
An old man born in 1890 recounts:
Around 1900 there were hundreds of terrazgueros [tenants].
There was hatred between the poor and the rich. The poor had
no titles and the rich with the judges pushed the people off
their fincas [farms]. This became very fierce in the War of One
Thousand Days. Mostly it was done by the Holguins and the
Arboledas. By the time Jaime Gomez came as a hacendado
there were not many tenazgueros left. My father had 150
plazas on the other side of the Palo River [A plaza equals 0.64
hectares]. But the teimzgueios were kicked off into tiny lots of
around half a plaza in the pastures of Los Llanos and became
day laborers for the hacienda. They came with horses and
lassoes and pulled the houses down without warning. I got a
job feeding the horses and getting water. After, I cut cane for
the animals. Then I went to work for Jaime Gomez as a milker
and later on as a muleteer carrying the harvests of cocoa and
coffee to Cali and Jamundi. I would take 12 mules at a time
every two to three months and bring back barbed wire and salt.
When they built the railway I only had to go as far as Jamundi.
Another landlord was Benjamin Mera and he bought land from
the Arboledas too. He was a black and a Liberal, while Jaime
Gomez was white and a Conservative. But it was the same
thing. Lots of Liberals did the same as the Conservatives.
There wasn't much resistance here in Quintero. The rich
brought in the law, the authorities, to get rid of the blacks and
they didn't even pay five cents for the land.
"Man is one thing, law is another; two things very different. One
thing is law and another thing is man," says Tomas Zapata, an old
blind peasant, illiterate, and a poet. "In the War of Independence everyone
fought together, rich and poor, blacks and whites, Conservatives
and Liberals. But after we had triumphed the poor were left
waiting at the door and the land was divided amongst the heavies,
the rich. The poor were left in the street. Nothing. And then the
poor began to revolt. But when the rich understood that the poor
were going to take back the land they imposed the politico [politics]
so that there wouldn't be any union amongst the poor."
The invigorated entrepreneurial class seized the so-called common
lands as well—those large pastures that people used in a type
of communal tenure, the legal status of which was most complex.