“Wholesale murder and torture endured up to the end of Aurelio Rodríguez’ service, and the wonder is that any Indians were left in the district at all to continue the tale of rubber-working on to 1910. This aspect of such continuous criminality is pointed to by those who, not having encountered the demoralisation that attends the methods described, happily infrequent, assert that no man will deliberately kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. This argument would have force if applied to a settled country or an estate it was designed to profitably develop. None of the freebooters on the Putumayo had any such limitations in his view, or care for the hereafter to restrain him. His first object was to get rubber, and the Indians would always last his time. He hunted, killed, and tortured to-day in order to terrify fresh victims for to-morrow. Just as the appetite comes in eating so each crime led on to fresh crimes, and many of the worst men on the Putumayo fell to comparing their battues and boasting of the numbers they had killed.
“Every one of these criminals kept a large staff of unfortunate Indian women for immoral purposes—termed by a euphemism their ‘wives.’ Even péons had sometimes more than one Indian wife. The gratification of this appetite to excess went hand in hand with the murderous instinct which led these men to torture and kill the very parents and kinsmen of those they cohabited with.
“The Indian communities had been everywhere deprived of their native weapons. Perhaps a greater defence than their spears and blow-pipes even had been more ruthlessly destroyed. Their old people, both women and men, respected for character and ability to wisely advise, had been marked from the first as dangerous, and in the early stages of the occupation were done to death. Their crime had been the giving of ‘bad advice.’ To warn the more credulous or less experienced against the white enslaver and to exhort the Indian to flee or to resist rather than consent to work rubber for the new-comers had brought about their doom. I met no old Indian man or woman, and few had got beyond middle age. The Barbados men assured me that when they first came to the region in the beginning of 1905 old people were still to be found, vigorous and highly respected, but these had all disappeared, so far as I could gather, before my coming. At Entre Rios I learned of an Indian chief named Chingamui, who at Señor O’Donnell’s arrival in 1903 had exercised a widespread influence over all the Huitotos in that district. This man had fallen at the hands of a Colombian named Calderon, who then directed the neighbouring district of Atenas, but not before he had shot at and wounded his murderer. So, too, I learned of an ‘old woman’ who was beheaded in the station of Sur by order of its chief, and whose crime had been the giving of ‘bad advice.’ Her head had been held up by the hair in the presence of my informant as a warning to the assembled Indians of the fate they too would incur if they did not obey the white man.
“Perhaps the bravest and most resolute opponent the murderers had encountered had met his death only a few months, or even weeks, before my arrival in the district. This was a Boras cacique, or capitán—often referred to in the depositions of those I examined—named Katenere. This man, who was not an old man, but young and strong, lived on the upper waters of the Pamá, a small stream that empties into the Cahuinari not far from its mouth in the Japurá. My interpreter, Bishop, had seen this chief in 1907, when Normand had gone to find him in order to induce him to work rubber. He had, from necessity no doubt, consented to bring in rubber, and for some time had worked voluntarily for Normand, until, through bad treatment, he, like so many others, had fled. He had been captured later on, along with his wife and some of his people, and confined in the stocks of the Abisinia district, to undergo the taming process. While thus himself a prisoner, his wife, so I was informed by a Peruvian white man holding a well-paid post in the company’s service, had been publicly violated before his eyes by one of the highest agents of the Syndicate, a Peruvian whose name and record was frequently brought forward in the course of my inquiry. This man had been obliged to fly from the Caraparaná agency on account of his crimes in that region in 1908.
“As a rule, the criminals who controlled the Indian population of the Putumayo were chary of robbing an Indian husband of his wife. The harems were maintained mainly by orphans, generally girls whose parents were ‘dead.’ Asking once why it was that the wives of the Indians seemed usually to be spared this contamination, a reliable witness answered me: ‘Because, sir, if they takes an Indian’s wife, that Indian don’t work rubber.’ I urged that since these men stuck at no act of terrorisation to make Indians work rubber, a husband could be forced, even if robbed of his wife, to go and get rubber. ‘No, sir,’ my informant said, ‘the Indians loves their wives, and if she is taken they won’t work rubber. They can kill them, do anything they like to them, but the Indian won’t work rubber.’
“This assertion was made more than once by men who, like this man, had taken an active part in making Indians work rubber, and I believe that this obstinate prejudice of the Indian preserved a native marriage from invasion more surely than any respect the cauchero has for its sanctity. An Indian marriage is not a ceremony, but a choice sanctioned by the parents of the bride, and once a child or children result from the union there is rarely infidelity or separation. The very conditions of Indian life, open and above board, and every act of every day known to wellnigh every neighbour, precluded, I should say, very widespread sexual immorality before the coming of the white man. Certain it is that immoral intercourse among Indians, leading their natural lives, is rare, and as polygamy scarcely existed, only a few of the bigger men having more than one wife, the affection that grew up between an Indian man and his wife was very often sincere and deep-rooted, just as the love of parents for their children was.
“The Indians often displayed a fortitude in the face of impending torture and death that speaks for itself of the excellence of some of their qualities. Thus, it will be seen in the depositions accompanying this Report how, on more than one occasion, men had refused to betray the hiding-place of fugitives under terrible threats of torture if they did not point out the retreat of the runaways. Normand is charged with having cut the arms and legs off a chief he captured and questioned, who preferred to suffer such a death to betraying the refuge of those who had fled. I learned of more than one case of the kind, and have no doubt of the truth of the accusation against the white man as of the fortitude of the Indian. The tribes of the Putumayo in the hands of good men could be made into good men and women, useful and intelligent workers under an honest administration. Trained to be murderers, with the worst example men ever gave to men daily held up for imitation, with lust and greed and cruelty so often appealed to, I daily wondered that so much goodness still survived among the remnant we encountered. That that remnant itself would soon be gone I became convinced. A Peruvian who spoke good English, having spent some years in England, confessed as much to me two days before I left Chorrera. I said to this man that under the actual régime I feared the entire Indian population would be gone in ten years, and he answered, ‘I give it six years—not ten.’
“The unrelieved barbarity of this Report does not rest alone on the testimony of the Barbados men whose depositions accompany it. I had other evidence to go by at the outset, and this was found to be in more than one instance amply confirmed by the independent statements of the British witnesses and again and again borne out by the evidence of our own eyes and the general conditions of the Indians. Could these people have been themselves fully interrogated, the weight of testimony would have been far greater, but could not have been more convincing.
“A magistrate was said to be residing at one of the company’s stations on that river, but I never heard him once referred to, and when peculiarly atrocious crimes were dragged to light, admitted, and deplored, the criminal charged with them would be sitting at table with us, and the members of the company’s commission and myself were appealed to to give no indication of our disgust lest this man ‘might do worse things’ to the Indians or provoke an impossible situation with the armed bandits under his orders. The apology for this extraordinary situation was that there was ‘no authority, no administration, no one near to whom any appeal could be made,’ and that Iquitos was 1,200 miles away. Every chief of section was a law unto himself, and many of the principal agents of this British company were branded by the representative of that company, holding its power of attorney, in conversation with me as ‘murderers, pirates, and bandits.’”
A considerable part of Consul Casement’s Report is taken up with the depositions, sworn before him, of the Barbados men; one of these, by name Stanley Lewis, stated:—