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

Owners and Fences 79
sixty- and ninety-day drafts on the commission houses. Local dealers
had agents, who scoured the countryside. In some cases these local
dealers were independent, but more often they were in close relationship
to the purchasing agents of the foreign houses, many of
which owned a number of plantations that they had taken over for
debts (Eder, 1913:124-25).
By the second decade of this century, the commercial and population
center of the southern part of the valley had shifted to black
territory in the depths of the "dark jungle" (monte oscuro), as it had
been called by outsiders (Sendoya, n.d. :83). Here, at the junction of
two tributaries of the Cauca, the blacks evolved a flourishing market,
linked to the city of Cali by the river system. Municipal status
was granted by the government in 1918. By the late 19203 this center,
called Puerto Tejada, became part of the road network, which allowed
for a freer and different movement of goods, took a good deal
of the transporting away from blacks since they had controlled
riverine transport, and indicated, above all, the region's commercial
coming of age. The annual reports by the governor of Cauca during
the 192,05 mainly concerned the construction of bridges and roads
connecting the Puerto Tejada region to the main centers of commerce.
Built mainly on the money paid over by the U.S. government
as indemnification for the "secession" of Panama, the railway line
between Cali and Popayan had reached within walking distance of
Puerto Tejada by the mid-twenties (Ortega, 1932:198-206). Road
and rail construction became an obsession for enterpreneurs, who
constantly chafed at the high freight costs (Eder, 1913:151).
Plantains were the basis of peasant self-subsistence. Surpluses
were taken by bamboo rafts down to Cali, and during the last decades
of the nineteenth century the region was famous for the abundance
of its plantains. Today, most plantains are imported from faraway
areas. Cocoa became the peasants' mainstay. It flourished under
local soil and climatic conditions as few other crops could, and the
peasants had been used to its cultivation since slavery. It had a good
selling price and formed a natural and legal impediment to landlord
predators greedy for pasture and sugarcane land. Cocoa slowly
emerged as a cash crop in steady proportion to the decrease in the
subsistence crops on which the peasant lived while waiting the five
years for the cocoa to mature. But from the 19305 and 19403 the
planting of cocoa without capital became increasingly difficult, for
the plots were generally too small to achieve such a balance.
It should also be observed that when the land was abundant and
cheap, cocoa was a better-paying proposition than coffee. But when
land became scarce and expensive, coffee became the more lucrative