In the lands of the coffee, from the book, Searching for treasures
Panama City, Panama
To compensate for the shortage of a workforce to take care of the mining, they began to import labor from Africa. The slaves were sold by the dozen in the immense slave-markets in Cartagena.”
The first hundred years were favorable to the conquistadors. They would dig it up, load the frigates, and haul out all the good stuff, yessiree! During the next hundred years, things began to fall apart. Having decimated the plentiful Indigenous population, they complained about the cost of the slaves to replace them. They didn’t come out for free, you see, so business was not as vibrant as before. What a sin, having to pay for slaves instead of just working them off till they dropped… By the end of their third hundred years of reigning, it was pure misery. All that wealth had been finished off.”
Hardly any machinery to be found in all that time. Work was done by backbreaking labor and pure human muscle. Too late, they tried to bring in technology. The situation was too overdue for those last-minute remedies. To the south of Medellin, most of the lands were idle, never been worked since their arrival. There were vast, countless tracts of lands with fertile, rich, productive soil waiting for the grabbing. All those immense extensions of idle, undeveloped terrain were owned by a handful of families from Spain, who did good when everything was split up and handed out among the few chosen ones in power. They had no interest in working all those estates they had obtained. They held on to them as a symbol of their status, and that was about it! Can you imagine, my man, all those uncountable areas of untouched, fruitful, virgin lands just lying there…”
What happened later was unavoidable, my dear neighbor. With so many unemployed people and poverty becoming worse day by day, a situation developed in which many desperate families packed up their scant belongings and broke out to find their fortunes, searching for a field where they could grow the corn for their arepas, together with some beans and yucca to enjoy them with. So, people started migrating to the south, searching for a holding to call their own. Look here, when the mining crashed, Medellin, as you saw it, wealthy and proud, was one of the poorest cities of the Viceroy of Spain. Believe me, ’cause that’s the way it was back then! A tough bone to munch, ain’t it?”