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

74 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
The animals were divided by their brands; no bit of land was
divided by fences. There were some comuneios with eighty
families. They were lands where you could place yourself as an
equal with everybody else. Here almost all the land used to be
like that. But after the War of One Thousand Days, the rich
came along and closed off the land with barbed wire. From
then on they began to take ownership of the lands, even
though it was not theirs. If you had your portion of land or
share of land and it was not fenced in, they would come from
afar, and as they had wire, they would close it off and you just
had to get out of there because the law would not shield you.
That's how it started; the rich kept coming and coming,
throwing people off the land, stripping every poor person of
their possessions. Then they planted grass for pastures. That is
why the people who were here had to either leave or go to
work for the rich, because there was no law for the poor. They
felled the poor. Even the mejoras had no value; when they
closed you in, you had to get out. And thus the me/eras that
you had—they ravished them without paying.
The memory of the assault is vivid and lives on in popular legend
as a holocaust. The memory of a Golden Age is equally tenacious,
recalling a time of plenty, self-sufficiency, and neighborliness. An
old woman describing the 19208 recounts this sense of irretrievable
loss. "Before the rich invaded here there were only us peasants. Each
family had its cattle, two or five. There was much milk and meat
and plantings of rice, corn, plantains, and some cocoa and coffee.
There were no machines for pulping coffee. We did it with a stone.
We made very little chocolate because it gives you colic. We grew
tomatoes next to the house, onions and manioc too. But today! No!
Where could we plant?"
Eusebio Cambindo talks about the past as we sit in his one-room
shack in the township of Puerto Tejada fronted by the green slime of
the open sewer. His grandchildren help him roll cigars, his only way
of earning a living now that they have no land. As the candlelight
flickers on the crumbling mud walls, he insists that Don Tomas
Zapata's account needs to be complemented with his own, for Zapata
is a philosopher, whereas he lives for literature.
Before the rich entered with force, the peasants had large flncas.
There were big plantings of cocoa. Now it's all gone, all of
it. Milk was very abundant. Meat was abundant without preparation.
You didn't have to stew it, just a slab on its own. The
plantains; big and more than enough. Fruit; whenever you