Salt and the Colombian State

Salt, essential for life, mined and traded since prehistoric times, has long been a valuable commodity and medium of exchange over which governing officials have exerted their authority. This monograph focuses on the dynamics of the salt monopoly in Colombia’s Cordillera Oriental as a way of understanding how Colombia as a nation-state was built in the course of the nineteenth century. The Cordillera climbs up between the Magdalena River to the west and the Llanos to the east as it sweeps northeast past Bogotá, then bifurcates as one spur continues into Venezuela. Within the Cordillera Oriental salt production was significant in three different areas. The first and by far the most important was just outside of Bogotá at Zipaquirá, which Alexander von Humboldt brought to the world’s attention in his published writings subsequent to his visit there in 1801. The second and least important was farther east at Chámeza, Receptor, and Pajarito, at a lower elevation, and more geared towards serving the cattle industry of the Llanos. The third was La Salina de Chita, the main focus of Joshua Rosenthal’s research. He effectively integrates the scholarly work done by others on Zipaquirá and Chámeza into his more broadly focused study of Colombian state formation.La Salina was tucked away near the headwaters of the Casanare River, much closer than Zipaquirá to the Llanos, Pamplona, and Venezuela and therefore better positioned to serve those areas east and north of the Chicamocha River. This distance and separation enabled La Salina to resist the administrative control of Bogotá at the national level and of Tunja at the regional level. Nevertheless, in the period 1873 – 74 La Salina sold only 15 percent of the more refined caked salt and 14 percent of kettle salt, mainly east and north of the Chicamocha in present-day Santander, Santander del Norte, and Boyacá, while the Zipaquirá operation handled 82 percent and 86 percent of the sales west and south of the Chicamocha in Cundinamarca, Boyacá, and Santander.In the pre-Columbian period, “el pueblo de la Sal,” as the Spanish called it, had been under the control of the indigenous Lache. Over time, as the Spanish asserted their dominion, it became attached to the encomienda of Chita and became known as La Salina de Chita. The Lache paid their tribute in salt, and their tribute rolls show that their population increased in the course of the seventeenth century. However, toward the end of the colonial period conflict between indigenous and nonindigenous groups led to the loss of the former’s communally owned lands to the more Hispanized subjects, who also displaced the Lache in their traditional role in the production of salt.The Spanish state had been complicit in these developments and gradually asserted greater control over the salt monopoly as well as over other monopoly rents. But with different interest groups vying for control, it is not clear whether the Comunero Revolt of 1781 really hastened or impeded these changes. During the nineteenth century the republican state maintained a quasi-monopoly over salt production, sometimes renting the monopoly out to the highest bidder and at other times administering it directly. Even the Radical Liberals justified the salt monopoly on the grounds that it guaranteed their survival, since the state had to have a steady source of income relative to the admittedly much more important but highly uncertain custom revenues especially during periods of political unrest.In reality the salt monopoly was no monopoly of the state. Individuals, locals, national and regional officials, entrepreneurs, and contractors siphoned off resources attached to the monopoly for their own advantage. Over time it was the local inhabitants who lost the most. Rosenthal chronicles the gradual economic decline and irrelevance of La Salina in the course of the nineteenth century. It is not clear whether this marginalization resulted from decisions made by national, regional, or local authorities or a combination of all three, or even from larger overriding structural factors, such as the economic development of other regions of Colombia. This is not a criticism but rather a mark of where much of the research on nineteenth-century Latin America stands today, especially in those geographically challenged countries. What the real levers of control and power were, and who exercised them at the national, regional, and local levels still have to be sorted out. Rosenthal draws no definitive conclusions in this regard, but he does frame the questions appropriately.In closing Rosenthal writes, “The salt monopoly still provided revenue for the government in the first decade of the twentieth century, but La Salina’s lack of fuelwood, as always, undercut attempts to revitalize production. Over the next decade the town faded from prominence and the national stage” (p. 138). Like Gabriel García Márquez’s mythical Macondo, it too would have disappeared, if a caring and thoughtful writer had not rescued it

Ancient history · Archaeology · Economics · Geography · Monopoly · State (computer science) · History · History and Politics in Latin America