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

Owners and Fences 77
out of prison was celebrated around here like the birth of a
newborn child.
He knew the law. He knew how to defend himself, and he
defended all the rest of us. They chased him and chased him.
Another time they got him but he wouldn't let them keep
him. He wouldn't let them. He just slipped away all the time.
It was the rich who got him in the end. They paid a friend to
poison him at a fiesta.
A granddaughter of the Holguins who were supervising the estate
at that time relates that in retaliation for the fencing in of land and
the sowing of pasture, Mina and his followers killed cattle and left
the carcasses with a sign stating, "Mina did it." Such men had risen
to fame and proven their mettle as guerrilla commanders during the
War of One Thousand Days, nearly always on the side of the Liberal
party.
In 1915, some two years after the Holguins returned to the region
to reclaim their patrimony, the alarm at Mina's activities was so
great that the government dispatched a permanent body of National
Police to remain in the Puerto Tejada area in an attempt to track him
down (Gobernador del Cauca, 1915 :2).
In his 1919 annual report the governor of the department of Cauca
complained bitterly about the degree of social instability in the
Puerto Tejada area, which he ascribed to the "economic abnormality"
of the times, the difficulties people faced in feeding themselves,
and the lack of a penal colony. He urged the formation of a special
corps of police that "would give guarantees to the hacendados and
the business of cattle dealing" (Gobernador del Cauca, 1919:4).
During the provincial elections of 1922, (according to government
reports) the police narrowly averted a slaughter of white Conservatives
by black peasants in the district of Guachene, some five
miles to the southeast of the township of Puerto Tejada. In the same
year the police were directed to contain the attacks against landlords
in the Tierradura district, six miles to the east. The peasants were
intent on invading and occupying lands that had been fenced off
(Gobernador del Cauca, 1922:4, 6). The land in question had been
taken by the Eders' company, La Compania Agricola del Cauca, and
today this land is one of the largest sugar plantations in the entire republic,
El Ingenio Cauca—owned by the Eder family. The peasants
claimed (and still do) that the land belonged to the local smallholders
because it was an indiviso, and since 1922 the area has
known repeated land invasions by these peasants and their descen-