Baraboo weekly news. [volume] (Baraboo, Wis.) 1912-197?, 1914-09-24
STRUGGLE FOR
EXISTENCE IN
SOUTH AMERICA

Below is letter from Mrs. Maude
Newell Williams, a former resident of
Baraboo, who with her husband, Rev.
c. S. Williams, is engaged in missionary
work in South America.
Bucaramanga, Colombia.
South America,
Aug. p, 1914
To the Baraboo News
| did promise to write you something
of the life in this isolated city. But it
is not easy to find time here to write
even to ones own family. Perhaps at
some delightful future time I shall find
time in which to fulfill the promise.
Today shall attempt, merely, to tell
you how this lonely city, far away from
the centers of civilization, is already
suffering from the European wars. The
city lies in vale surrounded by high
hills. Back of these rise more and more
mountains, in uncounted profusion.
Thus the chief product of all this region
is coffee, raised on haciendas, dotting
the sides of these mountains. The
coffee sent to the exterior Chiefly
Germany from this one city alone, pours
back into the city over million and a
half of gold every year. The cost of
harvesting and exporting the crop is
heavy. Although peon receives butt
Is or 20 cents a day for his labor, ig
takes thousands of poems, workin
many months, to gather the coffee and
get it ready for sending out. The rent
of a mule is so cents per day and bis
time must be counted, not only when
carrying the coffee to some river port,
but also when returning, unladen, to
his home hacienda. The mule drivers
are paid in the same way and it re-
quires thousands of mules and hundreds
of men, working for months, to get
the coffee to the Lebrija river. From
there it must go long distance to
reach the ocean and must be handled
several times loaded into canoes,
changed into laUn ches, transferred to
the Magdalena river steamers and
eventually landed upon the deck of some
ocean bound steamer.
You may readily see that those who
raise the coffee make only small pro-
fit from all their work, even when they
sell from IL to II cents pound, the
usual price. If the price drops a cent
they make nothing Suddenly Ger
many, the principal buyer of Colombian
coffee, ceases to be considered a fac
tor and coffee drops two cents per
pound in one day. This. just as the
enormous crop of 1914 is ready for ex-
port. Even those men, who have sue
ceeded in getting part of the crop out
of the country before this crisis, can
get no money because the foreign banks
are doing no business here at present.
1t will not be difficult to understand
the situation if you can realize what it
means to large section of country to
depend entirely upon one crop and to
have that fail completely. Naturally
it is not so bad as to have all food crops
fail through drought or flood as they
do at times in China and India. But if
large proportion of the population has
nothing whatever with which to buy
food, of what comfort is it to them to
starve with plenty of food in sight?
The haciendas here are owned by TIE
merchants, doctors and other business
men of this city, each of whom keeps
from 100 to 500 poems at work upon his
farm" You have read much of the
agricultural system in vogue in Mexi-
co since that country has been doing
her little war-dances on the worlds
stage-all you need do TO understand
the situation here is to apply what you
have learned to our country. Here
also, the land is in the hands of few
families. Here, too, the poems work and
exc out miserable, brute lives, on star
walton food and hard treatment at the
hands of overseers. Each Saturday the
duena of the hacienda comes to Buca-
ramanga or whatever the nearest city
may be, and buys by the hundred
weight whatever is necessary to feed
his army on the farm during a week.
These food-stuffs he packs onto mules
and takes out to his farm. Meanwhile,
through clerks, or relatives, he keeps,
keeps up his business in the city where
his family resides. Yet as wealthy as
most of these men are reputed to be,
many of them are in the habit of Dor
rowing freely from the few foreigners
Germans and Danes) to be found
here and repaying the debt from the
proceeds of the harvest. AS these for
eigners can receive no money from
their bills of exchange with the banks