I present the person who signs this declaration with me as a witness of my signature.
João Baptista Braga.
Constantinopolis, October 6, 1908.
(Signed in my presence) José R. Brazil.
Letters to Hardenburg—Translation.
Iquitos, June 6,1908.
Señor W. E. Hardenburg,—As you have written to me, I shall give you a full account of all the deeds I have witnessed in the region of the Putumayo in the year 1903.
On the 4th of August of that year I began work on correría service in the section Abisinia, where they sent us to guard the poor Indians and see that they brought in the rubber that the chief demanded.
On the 20th of the same month Agüero committed a most savage murder, cutting off an Indian’s head. He is just the sort of man to commit all kinds of atrocities, such as cutting Indian women’s limbs off, burning their houses, setting fire to their dead bodies, &c. On the 10th of the same month he had some fifty Indians put in stocks, and as he gave them neither water nor food, the poor Indians began to dry up like pieces of wood, until they reached such an extreme as to be quite useless and dying. Then he tied them up to a post and exterminated them by using them as targets for his Mauser revolver.
On the 15th of this month this same man went out on a correría with eight men. At one of the houses where they stopped to rest they found two Indian women who were ill of smallpox. The two poor sufferers begged Agüero for some medicine to cure themselves. Agüero replied that he would see that the fever continued no longer, and so saying, grasped a machete and cut off the heads of the two women.