“The entire absence of government, which has not kept pace with the extension of revenue-yielding communities, has left the weaker members of those communities exposed to the ruthless greed of the stronger. The crimes of the Putumayo, horrible as they are, have their counterpart, I am assured, in other remote regions of the same lawless forest—although possibly not to the same terrifying extent.
“In this instance the force of circumstance has brought to light what was being done under British auspices—that is to say, through an enterprise with headquarters in London, and employing both British capital and British labour—to ravage and depopulate the wilderness. The fact that this British company should possibly cease to direct the original families of Peruvian origin who first brought their forest wares (50,000 slaves) to the English market will not, I apprehend, materially affect the situation on the Putumayo. The Arana Syndicate still termed itself the Peruvian Amazon Company (Limited) up to the date of my leaving Iquitos on the 7th of December last. The whole of the rubber output of the region, it should be borne in mind, is placed upon the English market, and is conveyed from Iquitos in British bottoms. Some few of the employees in its service are, or were when I left the Amazon, still British subjects, and the commercial future of the Putumayo (if any commercial future be possible to a region so wasted and mishandled) must largely depend on the amount of foreign, chiefly British, support those exploiting the remnant of the Indians may be able to secure.
“A population officially put at 50,000 should in ten years have grown by natural increase to certainly 52,000 or 53,000 souls, seeing that every Indian marries—a bachelor or spinster Indian is unknown—and that respect for marriage is ingrained in uncivilised Indian nature and love of children, probably the strongest affection these people display. By computations made last year and the year before, by officials and by those interested in the prosperity of the Peruvian Amazon Company, the existing population of the entire region is now put at from 7,000 Indians, the lowest calculation, to 10,000, the highest. Around some of the sections or rubber centres whence this drain of rubber has been forced, the human sacrifices attained such proportions that human bones, the remains of lost tribes of Indians, are so scattered through the forests that, as one informant stated, these spots ‘resemble battlefields.’ A Peruvian officer, who had been through the Putumayo since the date of my visit in 1910, said that the neighbourhood of one particular section he had visited recalled to him the battlefield of Miraflores—the bloodiest battle of the Chilean War. Moreover, these unarmed and defenceless people, termed, indeed, in the language of prospectuses, the ‘labourers’ of this particular company, were killed for no crime or offence, and were murdered by the men who drew the highest profits from that company. They comprised women and children—very often babies in arms—as well as men and boys. Neither age nor sex was spared; all had to work rubber, to perform impossible tasks, to abandon home and cultivation of their forest clearings, and to search week by week and month by month for the juice of rubber-yielding trees, until death came as sudden penalty for failing strength and non-compliance, or more gently overtook them by the way in the form of starvation or disease. With all that it has given to the Amazon Valley of prosperity, of flourishing steamship communications, of port works, of growing towns and centres of civilisation, with electric light and tramways, of well-kept hospitals and drainage schemes, it may well be asked whether the rubber-tree has not, perhaps, taken more away.
“However this be, it is certainly in the best interests of commercial civilisation itself, and of the vital needs of the trading communities upon the Amazon River, that the system of ruthless and destructive human exploitation which has been permitted to grow up on the Putumayo should be sternly repressed. Peru herself can only greatly benefit from the establishment of a civilised and humane administration—a task of no great magnitude—in those regions hitherto abandoned to the cauchero and the vegetable filibuster. The healthy development of the Amazon rubber industry, one of the foremost of Brazilian needs, calls for that humanity of intercourse civilisation seeks to spread by commerce, not for its degradation by the most cruel forms of slavery and greed.
“All that is sensible of this among those interested in the rubber industry, whether of Europe, the United States, or Brazil, should heartily unite in assisting the best elements of Peruvian life to strengthen the arm of justice, and to establish upon the Putumayo and throughout the Montaña, wherever the rubber-seeker seeks his profits, a rule of right dealing and legality. It may be long before a demoralisation drawing its sanction from so many centuries of indifference and oppression can be uprooted, but Christianity owns schools and missions as well as Dreadnoughts and dividends. In bringing to that neglected region and to those terrorised people something of the suavity of life, the gentleness of mind, the equity of intercourse between man and man that Christianity seeks to extend, the former implements of her authority should be more potent than the latter.
“I have, &c.,
“Roger Casement.”
CONCLUSION
THE foregoing are but a few portions of the accounts published in Consul Casement’s Report given by the Barbados men whose statements were taken. They have been here selected to show that the worst stories of almost incredible barbarity were more than confirmed. No apology is needed for setting them forth in this book. It is in the interests of truth and justice that one half of the world should know how another, remoter half lives. The history of the affair throws a light on the curious character of people of various nationalities connected with it. The Latin Americans, even those who committed the most appalling deeds, are such people as would under ordinary circumstances receive the traveller with high-sounding phrases of hospitality. Away from the restraining power of civilisation and public opinion, it is seen that men of certain character easily revert to primitive instincts of cruelty and oppression, and hold human life the cheapest thing on earth. The terrible indictment that has been made of Peruvian methods away from the influence of their cities shows how far from the principle of self-government the people of Latin America still are. It is to be recollected, moreover, that these poor forest Indians differ very little from the people who have formed the basis of Peruvian and Latin American nationality generally: whilst the Indians and Cholos of the uplands, who are still subjected to oppression and civic negligence, are those from whom Peru and others of the Andine republics draw, and always will draw, unless a strong tide of immigration sets in, the bulk of their citizens. The governing Peruvians and Bolivians of to-day are formed from that race. They bear its stamp upon their faces and cuticle. This brown race, which has, in Mexico and Peru, produced statesmen and law-givers, is nothing to be ashamed of, yet the mestizos, or people of mixed race, forming the bulk of the Latin American nations, are harsher in their conduct towards the Indian than are white men. Comparatively few women from Spain have entered the New World. The Indians have formed the mothers of the Peruvians and their neighbours, from Presidents and Cabinet Ministers downwards. These poor women, who have been outraged, starved, murdered, or burnt alive, are of their own flesh. What reparation will Peru make to expiate these terrible outrages against man and Nature? How will it compensate the relatives of the murdered, or the scarred and ruined survivors? Furthermore, what reparation will the European shareholders of the now liquidated company make?
The pressing necessity for Peru—as for every other land and nation—is to awaken to the necessity for a new doctrine and science regarding the disposal of the resources of the earth and the enjoyments of its fruits by those who have their being upon it. Until this is done, commercialism and oppression will continue to go hand in hand.