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

Owners and Fences 83
Within days the army quelled the riot and military law provided
the cover with which the plantations appropriated peasant farms.
With the aid of World Bank and U.S. financing the plantations have
continued their remorseless expansion across the flatlands (Fedesarrollo,
1976:344). Whereas only 2,000 tons of sugar were produced in
the region in 1938, some 91,000 tons were produced by 1969.
Local land sales and tax records (supported by peasant oral history)
show that the modal peasant holding decreased from 4.8 hectares in
1933 to 0.32 in 1967. This fifteenfold decrease was accompanied by
no more than a doubling of the local population. Land shortage cannot
be blamed on the "population explosion" as the Rockefeller
Foundation experts try to claim (e.g., Wray and Aguirre, 1969).
Government censuses show that by 1970, whereas some 80 percent
of the cultivable land is owned by four sugar plantations and a
few large farms, 8 5 percent of the holdings are less than six hectares
and ownership is becoming increasingly concentrated. The majority
of the holdings are so small that their peasant owners are forced to
work on the large estates. According to my own census in 1971, 8
percent of the rural inhabitants are virtually landless, and another
63 percent have less than the two hectares necessary for subsistence.
A local agronomist pointed to the economic function of this pattern
of land distribution in which the peasant mode of production
coexists with that of the large-scale capitalist. "The poor peasants
supply the labor closest to the plantations. As they possess their
own houses they save the plantation the cost of constructing housing
and the transport of a very large number of people. Moreover,
their economic necessities tie them indefinitely to the plantation
outside of which it would be difficult to obtain work (Mancini,
1954:30).
The Dual Nature of the Proletariat
Unlike conditions in most sugar-producing areas of the
world, the climatic and soil conditions of the Cauca Valley permit
year-round aseasonal production. The notorious instability of the labor
situation cannot be ascribed to ecology but to the political action
of the plantation owners taking advantage of the fact that many
of the workers also have small plots of their own.
In the early 19603 the militant trade union structure was broken
by the growers, who established a dual system of labor recruitment
and employment. This was accompanied by a switch from growing
all their cane themselves to buying more than half of it from inde-