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

82 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
erupted, but Puerto Tejada was the only rural settlement to react in
the same way. An uncontrollable mob sacked the stores in the afternoon
and evening, but there was little personal injury. Nevertheless,
the report that reached the outside was grotesque. Supposedly nuns
were raped, and Conservatives (generally whites) were decapitated
and the blacks played football with their heads in the plaza. Such
fantasies of Puerto Tejada complement its portrayal as an inferno of
violent thieves and vagabonds—an increasingly compacted reservoir
of black malcontents in a political geography dominated by
white rulers. The fantasies perpetrated about the violencia of Puerto
Tejada stem from the fear generated by exploitation and racism.
An eyewitness relates:
I was preparing adobe when I heard on the radio that the leader
of the people, Doctor Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, had been assassinated.
At that time Nataniel Diaz (a black leader from Puerto
Tejada) was in Bogota, and with a group of students they took
the national radio station. That was when Nataniel Diaz said
on the radio, "Alert macheteros [people of the machete] of
Cauca! Take vengence on the blood of the caudillo Jorge Eliecer
Gaitan." Almost all the stores were owned by white Conservatives,
who fled or barricaded themselves. Within moments
rockets were lit calling the peasants from around the
town. They left wherever they were. From all the rural neighborhoods
they came. They took the official liquor store at four
in the afternoon. They drank aguardiente, rum, and all that.
Everyone got drunk. Everyone took a bottle and had a couple
more in their pockets and then began sacking the stores. It was
incredible. Mainly they went for the stores of the political
chiefs who ran the town. They took sugar, rice, candles, soap.
. . . But here the people didn't want blood like in other places
where they killed Conservatives. No! Here they wanted to rob;
nothing more. They also robbed the rich Liberals.
This was not an organized uprising. It was a spontaneous outburst
of the people, led by years of humiliation and outrage. This was anarchy,
but it was founded on generations of oppression and clearly focused
morally. The pueblo was always ruled from the outside and
from the top down. There were no formal organizations that the
people could call their own. Small wonder that when the levees
of state control gave, the flood that had been mounting for years
poured wildly, taking with it the goods that not so many years before
the people had prepared on their own plots: "They took sugar; they
took rice,- they took candles,- they took soap."