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

Owners and Fences 81
restimulated by the Chardon mission and the opening of the Palmira
agricultural school in the Cauca Valley in the early 19305 (Chardon,
1930). The Rockefeller Foundation gave further stimulus to capital
and energy intensive agriculture by establishing the national government's
institute of agronomy in 1941.
A local black schoolteacher wrote an impassioned appeal to the
government in 1945:
Since a long time now many people are being forced off the
land here. Most people have only two to ten acres and nearly
all grow cocoa exclusively. Most of the peasants are illiterate
and only know how to work their plots. During the first decades
things went well because the soil was so rich and there
were no plagues. But now there are too many people. Minifundia
and mono-production have emerged with all their dreadful
consequences. The occupants of each plot doubled and tripled
in a short time and the plots became smaller. In the past 15
years the situation has changed threateningly. Today each crop
gets smaller and smaller and the harvest is preceded by a long
wait; thousands of physically active people are forced into idleness.
. . . Usury increases, stealing increases; life is now a pendulum
oscillating between misery and forlorn hopes. The
peasants of Puerto Tejada are suffering a situation without parallel.
It is obvious that it is not possible to limit this situation
as more and more people are deprived of their patrimony.
The Violencia
The horrendous Colombian civil war from 1948 to 1958,
aptly known as the violencia, further accelerated the enclosure of
peasant lands by the burgeoning plantations as their owners took advantage
of the frightful insecurity of those times. Peasants claim
that the large landowners used the aerial spraying of herbicides to
destroy their cocoa, a tactic used in other parts of Colombia in the
19603, as well (cf., Patino, 1975 :181-83). Peasant plots were flooded
as large landowners manipulated irrigation and drainage canals, and
access to plots was blocked by sugarcane. As a result, the production
of cocoa, the mainstay of the peasant income, dropped by 80 percent
from 1950 to 1958 (Wood, 1962).
The spark that set the violencia flaming throughout Colombia
was the assassination of the Liberal party caudillo, Gaitan, in Bogota
on the famous Ninth of April, 1948. Cities like Bogota and Cali