“Indians were frequently flogged to death. Cases were reported to me where men or women had died actually under the lash, but this seems to have been infrequent. Deaths due to flogging generally ensued some days afterwards, and not always in the station itself where the lash had been applied, but on the way home to the unfortunate’s dwelling-place. In many cases where men or women had been so cruelly flogged that the wounds putrefied the victims were shot by one of the racionales acting under the orders of the chief of the section, or even by this individual himself. Salt and water would be sometimes applied to these wounds, but in many cases a fatal flogging was not attended even by this poor effort at healing, and the victim, ‘with maggots in the flesh,’ was turned adrift to die in the forest or was shot and the corpse burned or buried—or often enough thrown into the ‘bush’ near the station-houses. At one station—that of Abisinia (which I did not visit)—I was informed by a British subject who had himself often flogged the Indians that he had seen mothers flogged, on account of shortage of rubber by their little sons. These boys were held to be too small to chastise, and so, while the little boy stood terrified and crying at the sight, his mother would be beaten ‘just a few strokes’ to make him into a better worker.
“Men and women would be suspended by the arms, often twisted behind their backs and tied together at the wrists, and in this agonising posture, their feet hanging high above the ground, they were scourged on the nether limbs and lower back. The implement used for flogging was invariably a twisted strip, or several strips plaited together, of dried tapir-hide, a skin not so thick as the hippopotamus-hide I have seen used in Africa for flagellation, but still sufficiently stout to cut a human body to pieces. One flogger told me the weapon he used was ‘as thick as your thumb.’
“After the prohibition of flogging by circular I have referred to, at some of the less brutal or more cautious centres of rubber-collection defaulting Indians were no longer, during the months of 1910, flogged with tapir-hide, but were merely chastised with strokes of a machete. These machetes are almost swords, and shaped something like a cutlass. They are used for gashing the trees in tapping them for rubber milk, and they also serve as weapons in the hands of the Indians. Blows with these laid across the shoulder-blades or back might be excessively painful, but would be unlikely to leave any permanent scar or traces of the beating. At the station of Occidente this form of beating had in June, 1910, been varied with a very cowardly torture instituted by the chief of that section, a Peruvian named Fidel Velarde. This man, who was found in charge of that section when I visited it in October, 1910, in order to still inspire terror and yet leave no trace on the bodies of his victims, since Occidente lay close to La Chorrera and might be visited unexpectedly by Señor Tizon, had devised a new method of punishment for those who did not bring in enough rubber to satisfy him. Their arms were tied behind their backs, and thus pinioned they were taken down to the river (the Igaraparaná), and forcibly held under water until they became insensible and half-drowned. One of the Barbados men related circumstantially how on the 20th of June, 1910, only a few hours after Señor Tizon had quitted Occidente on a visit of inspection proceeding upriver to Ultimo Retiro, four Indian youths had been ordered by Velarde to be taken down to the river, their arms tied together, and to be then held under water until they filled—or, as James Mapp, the Barbados man put it, until ‘their bowels filled with water.’ Mapp had been ordered to perform this task, and had point-blank refused to obey, declaring he would not lay a finger on the Indians, whereupon a racional employee, by name Eugenio Acosta (whom I had met at Occidente), had carried out Señor Velarde’s orders. The four Indians, with their arms tied, had been thrust into the river by Acosta and an Indian he forced to help him and held forcibly under water. The whole station and the kinsmen of the four Indians were gathered on the high bank to witness this degrading spectacle, the Indian women weeping and crying out. One of the young men in his struggles had kicked free from the grasp of the man holding him down, and as his arms were fastened he had been unable to save himself by swimming, and had sunk in the deep, strong current at the spot described.
“Indians were often flogged while confined in the cepo, this notably in the special flogging cepo, with movable extremities, made by order of Aurelio Rodríguez at Santa Catalina, and referred to by its maker, Edward Crichlow, in his testimony to me. Sometimes the most abominable offences were committed upon Indians while held by the legs or leg in this defenceless position (see particularly the statement of James Chase, borne out by Stanley Lewis, as to the crime committed by José Inocente Fonseca at Ultimo Retiro upon a young Indian man). Some of the British subjects I questioned declared to me that they had known Indian women to be publicly violated by the racionales while in this state of detention. As an added punishment, the legs of a man or woman would be distended and confined several holes apart in the stocks—some of the Barbados men asserted that they themselves had been confined with their legs ‘five holes apart,’ a distance, I should say, intolerable to be borne for any length of time. The Ultimo Retiro stocks were the worst I saw, for the leg-holes were smaller, and the beams to have locked on any ordinary sized leg must have forced down into the flesh.
“An individual confined with his legs ‘five holes apart’ would have had them extended almost a yard at the extremities, and if confined for a few hours in this posture, he must have been in acute pain. Indians who spent long periods in the stocks were sometimes confined by only one leg. Whole families were so imprisoned—fathers, mothers, and children, and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their offspring were attached alongside of them to watch in misery themselves the dying agonies of their parents. One man at Ultimo Retiro, himself a living witness to the enforced starvation he denounced, in the presence of Señor Jiménez and his subordinates, related before me and the members of the commission on the 8th of October how, in Señor Montt’s time, a year previously, many of his countrymen and women had been so starved to death or flogged to death in the station cepo that we were then inspecting and experimenting with.
“Some of these agents drew fully £1,000 a year from the rubber they forced by this means and by other lawless methods from the surrounding native population.
“Flogging was varied with other tortures designed, like the semi-drownings of Velarde, to just stop short of taking life while inspiring the acute mental fear and inflicting much of the physical agony of death. Thus, men and lads, rubber defaulters or fugitives from its collection, were suspended by a chain fastened round the neck to one of the beams of the house or store. Sometimes with the feet scarcely touching the ground and the chain hauled taut they were left in this half-strangled position until life was almost extinct. More than one eye-witness assured me that he had seen Indians actually suspended by the neck until when let down they fell a senseless mass upon the floor of the house with their tongues protruding.
“Several informants declared they had witnessed Indians, chained round the arms, hauled up to the ceilings of the houses or to trees, and the chain then suddenly loosed so that the victim fell violently to the ground. One case of this kind was circumstantially related to me where the Indian, a young man, dropped suddenly like this from a height of several feet, fell backwards, and his head hit the ground so violently that his tongue was bitten through and his mouth full of blood.
“Deliberate starvation was again and again resorted to, but this not where it was desired merely to frighten, but where the intention was to kill. Men and women were kept prisoners in the station stocks until they died of hunger.
“These starvations, as specifically related to me by men who witnessed them and were aware of the gravity of the charge they brought, had not been due to chance neglect, but to design. No food was given to the Indians, and none could be given save by the chief of the section. One man related how he had seen Indians thus being starved to death in the stocks ‘scraping up the dirt with their fingers and eating it’; another declared he had actually seen Indians who had been flogged and were in extremity of hunger in the stocks ‘eating the maggots from their wounds.’