Little over 100 years in the past, in March 1913, one of many least identified, and most shameful, episodes in British colonial historical past was delivered to an finish in a London courtroom room. The Peruvian Amazon Rubber Firm was wound up within the Excessive Courtroom, the one trace at its darkish secrets and techniques being a quick comment by the choose that ‘it was not possible to acquit the companions of data of the way in which through which the rubber had been collected for the corporate’.
What is thought as we speak because the rubber increase had its origin in the midst of the nineteenth century, with Charles Goodyear’s discovery that cooking and treating latex harvested from rubber bushes turned it right into a product with an enormous vary of potential makes use of. With Henry Ford’s mass manufacturing of the motor automobile just a few a long time later, and the invention of tyres by John Dunlop in 1888, the necessity for rubber out of the blue turned extraordinarily urgent.
The rubber tree grew in profusion within the Amazon, particularly in its western fringes, and shortly a veritable ‘rubber rush’ was on. Entrepreneurs and fortune-seekers set off into the steamy jungle decided to money in. Unaware of the approaching catastrophe, tens of hundreds of Indians for whom the western Amazon was residence had been experiencing their final years of peace.
One of many many chancers and treasure-seekers decided to make their fortunes on this courageous new world was a Peruvian dealer named Julio Cesar Arana. Arana acquired huge estates in a area named after its largest river, the Putumayo, and, as many others had been doing on the time, realized that solely by enslaving enormous numbers of the native Indians to gather the latex might his visions of huge wealth turn out to be actuality. (Slavery had, in fact, been abolished a long time earlier within the US, however openly continued in Amazonia).
Arana and his brother, the aptly-named Lizardo, moved rapidly, bringing to Peru from Barbados numerous overseers well-used to cracking the whip on employees within the British sugar-cane estates. The Bora, Witoto, Andoke and different tribes residing within the Putumayo basin had been rapidly enslaved, and those that escaped the appalling remedy inflicted on them quickly fell sufferer to waves of epidemics introduced into distant rivers by merchants and rubber-tappers.
In just a few brief years, hundreds of Indians had been killed or died from mistreatment or illness. The surface world remained unaware of the horrors the Arana brothers’ empire was perpetrating till 1909, when a younger American engineer, Walter Hardenburg, who had traveled by way of the area the 12 months earlier than and been held prisoner by the Arana brothers, wrote a number of articles for the journal Fact.
Hardenburg’s account of the abuses he had witnessed makes horrifying studying even as we speak. ‘The brokers of the Firm power the pacific Indians of the Putumayo to work day and night time… with out the slightest remuneration besides the meals wanted to maintain them alive. They’re robbed of their crops, their ladies and their youngsters… They’re flogged inhumanly till their bones are laid naked… They’re left to die, eaten by maggots, once they function meals for the canine… Their youngsters are grasped by the ft and their heads are dashed towards bushes and partitions till their brains fly out… Males, ladies and kids are shot to supply amusement… they’re burned with kerosene in order that the workers could take pleasure in their determined agony.’
This got here as an enormous embarrassment to the British institution for, two years beforehand, the Arana brothers had come to London to boost capital for his or her burgeoning empire. Their tales of immense fortunes to be made on this distant nook of the world of which most Londoners knew nothing had discovered a keen viewers. After itemizing on the London Inventory Change and recruiting a British board of administrators, the Arana brothers had headed again to the Putumayo with £1million of contemporary finance of their pockets.
The outcry over Hardenburg’s testimony prompted anxious debate in Parliament, and a rising disquiet which the federal government finally discovered not possible to disregard.
In 1910 a fee was despatched to the Putumayo to research. Considered one of its members was the British consul in Rio, the Irishman Roger Casement. Casement’s subsequent report, after touring extensively all through the Putumayo, upheld Hardenburg’s account, with a very good deal extra surprising element. Hardenburg himself later printed an account of his travels, entitled ‘Putumayo: the satan’s paradise’.
The Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, arrange a parliamentary choose committee to resolve what ought to be accomplished. The committee’s report indicted the administrators of the Firm: administrators ‘who merely attend board conferences and signal cheques… can not escape their share of the collective ethical accountability when gross abuses below their firm are revealed.’ Julio Cesar Arana ‘had information of and was answerable for the atrocities perpetrated by his brokers and staff within the Putumayo.’
The writing was on the wall not only for the Firm, however for the rubber increase itself. Rubber tree seedlings introduced from the Amazon to London and subsequently to Sri Lanka and Malaysia had been lastly being efficiently propagated. Inside a only a few years, huge plantations had been being established in Asia, and the Amazonian empire constructed by Arana and dozens like him had crumbled to mud.
For the Indigenous peoples who had been the increase’s principal victims, the results have been far-reaching. Many tribes had been fully worn out. Others, just like the Witoto and Andoke, survive as we speak, however the atrocities they endured just some generations in the past nonetheless stay vivid of their reminiscence.
Fany Kuiru, a Witoto girl, stated lately to a Survival researcher, ‘So long as humanity fails to acknowledge its faults and errors, or fails to respect the variations between folks, and so long as greed stays the rule for dominating different folks, we’re condemned to repeat historical past.’
And historical past is certainly repeating itself, as the commercial world’s insatiable starvation for pure sources persists unabated. Only a brief distance from the place Arana established his headquarters within the Putumayo, Peru’s Matses tribe have vowed to withstand makes an attempt by a Canadian firm to enter their territory. This time, oil is the lure. And close by, different tribes – the Nanti, Nahua and Matsigenka – see gasoline pipelines and drilling wells mushrooming as they discover themselves in the midst of the Amazon’s greatest gasoline challenge, on the Camisea River.
The ghosts of Hardenburg and Casement would discover it a horrible irony {that a} century on from the holocaust they bore witness to, Amazon Indians proceed to fall sufferer to our rapacious greed, a greed that consumes all in its path irrespective of the human value. Certainly they deserve just a little peace?
