A Forgotten Ethnocide

In a godforsaken patch of northeastern Peru, the Putumayo jungle area between the Igara-Parana and Putomayo rivers, sources of the Amazon, lived some 50,000 indigenous Indians, mostly Huitoto tribesmen, in 1904. By 1912, only 7,500-10,000 were alive. Most had been murdered by agents of the rubber-harvesting London-based Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC); many had been kidnapped and enslaved; and the rest had succumbed to deliberate starvation. In all, a long-forgotten ethnocide.

But returning from India a few weeks ago, my son Orian brought an eroded copy of The Putumayo, the Devil’s Paradise, Travels in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account of the Atrocities Committed Upon the Indians Therein, published in London in December 1912. (Partly) written and compiled by American engineer Walter Ernest Hardenburg, the book – now available as an e-book and in reprint editions - consists of Hardenburg’s description of his perilous 1907-1908 riverine and overland journey and the atrocities he heard about or witnessed; contemporaneous newspaper reports on the atrocities that sporadically appeared in Lima; and extracts from two reports by British diplomat, early human rights activist and investigator Sir Roger Casement submitted in 1911-1912 to the British Foreign Office. (Later, a few words about Casement, who was hanged as a traitor four years on.)

Hardenburg described the Huitotos as “timid, peaceful, mild, industrious and humble.” His description countered the portrayal of the tribesmen by PAC – which Hardenburg defined as a “syndicate of crime” - as ferocious cannibals. In the book’s Introduction, British engineer and geographer C. Reginald Enock wrote that the Indians were “docile … naturally free from immorality and disease; they have strong affection for their women and children and a regard for the aged.” This “docility” had, in effect, facilitated, indeed invited, the well-armed Peruvian and European PAC agents, backed by black enforcers recruited from the Caribbean, to enslave the Indians as perpetual rubber harvesters, to kidnap their women and children for concubinage and domestic servitude, and to torture, dismember and kill the lazy, the slow and incapacitated, the recalcitrant, and the rebellious. Some tribesmen were simply killed in “frivolous diversions,” as objects in target practice. Enock comments: “This love of inflicting agony for sport is a curious psychic attribute of the Spanish race.”

Hardenburg published his report with the aim of rescuing “the few we can and mete out punishment to the fiends who are filling their pockets with the gold produced by the … the agony of these unfortunates. … Think of the nine-year-old girls torn from their homes, ravished and afterwards tortured or flogged to death; of suckling infants snatched from their mother’s arms and their heads smashed against a tree; of a wife having her legs cut off merely for refusing to become one of [their] concubines … or of old fathers shot to death before their sons’ eyes merely because they were too old and could work no longer ... Heathen and Indian they are, but they are human, just as we are …”

The Huitoto workers were sent into the jungle to extract the rubber from the trees and each was assigned a quota of kilograms to deliver at the end of each ten- or twenty-day period. In effect, they were worked to death. If they delivered the full amount, they were given a little food, a “mirror, a handkerchief, an ounce of beads.” But, as often happened, if they fell short, they were “mercilessly flogged, being given from five to two hundred lashes, [each] according to the enormity of his crime [the flogging often meted out “by the Barbados negroes … who only for this purpose … have been brought here.”] As the poor wretches receive absolutely no medical treatment, within a few days these wounds putrefy, maggots make their appearance, and the miserable victims of this form of Peruvian ‘civilization’ die a lingering and repulsive death. Their bodies are left to rot where they fall, or else the well-trained dogs of their ‘civilizers’ drag them out into the forest.”

Other punishments inflicted included mutilations, “such as cutting off arms, legs, noses, ears, penises, hands, feet, and even heads. Castrations are also a popular punishment for such crimes as trying to escape, for being lazy, or for being stupid, while frequently they employ these forms of mutilation merely to relieve the monotony of continual floggings and murders and to provide a sort of recreation,” wrote Hardenburg.

If the worker, knowing he is short, fails to appear, his children are detained and tortured “until they disclose the whereabouts of their unhappy father.” If the father and his family all flee, the PAC agent collects “ten or twelve Indians of a tribe hostile to the fugitives and sets out in pursuit of the poor wretches … [Once the hut] where they have taken refuge is found … [The pursuers] set fire to [the hut]. The Indians … dash out and the assassins discharge their carbines … The men killed, the bandits turn their attention to the rest, and the old, the sick, and the children … are either burned to death or are killed with machetes.”

Or the now orphaned children are sold “as slaves in [the nearby town of] Inquitos … at from 20 pounds sterling to 40 pounds sterling each.” Every steamer conveying a rubber harvest to Inquitos, wrote Hardenburg, also “carries from five to fifteen little Indian boys and girls” to be sold in the marketplace. Casement’s reports, usually phrased in less vivid language, echoed Hardenburg’s findings.

Hardenburg wrote that “at least” two of the seven members of the London PAC board of directors – Henry M. Read, Sir John Lister Kaye (baronet), John Russel Gubbins, Baron de Sousa Deiro, M. Henri Bonduel, J.C. Arana and Abel Alarco - were “far better informed than I am of the murders, the robberies, the flagellations, the violations of little eight and ten year old girls, the tortures, the incredible mutilations … committed by this company and its employees in the terrible Putumayo.”

The Irish-born Casement’s employment in Africa in the 1880s and 1890s as a surveyor and railroad manager had familiarized him with the evils of colonialism and in 1904, after joining the Foreign Office, he was commissioned to write a report on conditions in eastern Congo. He described “the enslavement, mutilation and torture of natives on the [Congolese] rubber plantations.” Brandished by the British government, the report led to improvement of conditions in the misruled Belgian Congo. Subsequently, Consul Casemenbt was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG).

Casement was then commissioned by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to investigate the Putumayo atrocities. His eventual report largely rested on the testimony of Barbadian islanders employed (and also mistreated) by the PAC but also on his sojourn in Peru in 1910. (The Barbadians were British subjects which gave Casement the legal standing to investigate.) In his report, Casement quoted from the “Annual Report of the [Peruvian] Minister of Justice” presented to the Peruvian Congress in 1907. That report spoke of the “abuses … against the Indians (los infieles), whom they maltreated and murder for no reason …, seizing their women and children.” But the minister’s report – and the occasional, critical newspaper articles - had little effect; the Lima government continued to deny that anything untoward or criminal was happening in the Putumayo while its officials in the region in effect served PAC and materially benefited from its depredations.

Casement wrote that “before my visit ended more than one Peruvian agent admitted to me that he had continually flogged Indians, and accused more than one of his fellow-agents by name of far greater crimes … This man’s evidence … was amply confirmed by one of the British subjects I examined … [who had flogged an Indian girl who was then] shot, when her back after that flogging had putrefied, so that it became ‘full of maggots’.”

“The crimes alleged against [PAC executive] Armando Normand … from 1904 to … October 1910 … included innumerable murders and tortures of defenseless Indians – pouring kerosene oil on men and women and then setting fire to them, burning men at the stake, dashing the brains out of children, and again and again cutting off the arms and legs of Indians and leaving them to speedy death,” wrote Casement.

The savaging of the Indians appears to have eased up in 1910. The PAC agents reverted to inflicting harm that left no visible traces. Casement wrote that a Barbadian told him that in June 1910 four Indian youths had been “taken down to the river, their arms tied together, and … held under water … until ‘their bowels filled with water’.” The spectacle was watched by the youth’s kinsmen from the bank, “the Indian women weeping and crying.” One of the four drowned.

Throughout the period, a routine PAC punishment was the incarceration or constraining of prisoners in stocks (cepo), often in painful positions for days on end. “Some of the British subjects I questioned declared to me that they had known Indian women to be publicly violated by the [agents] while in this state of detention … Whole families were so imprisoned – fathers, mothers and children … Deliberate starvation was again and again resorted to … where the intention was to kill … The wonder is that any Indians were left in the district … [by] 1910 … Every one of these criminals kept a large staff of unfortunate Indian women for immoral purposes … 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.” Casement was knighted for his Putumayo report.

The Hardenburg and Casement reports and the international diplomatic pressures they generated at last resulted in action by Peruvian officials and an end to the atrocities. A number of PAC agents were briefly jailed, though most fled the country or went to ground. Indeed, one of PAC’s owners, Arana, eventually returned to Peru where he was elected a senator. He died aged 88.

As for Casement, after Peru he turned his sights to affairs back home and became a prominent proponent of Irish independence. In 1914 he traveled to the US to raise support and money for the cause and, during the First World War, sojourned in Germany to promote a German-Irish alliance and Irish rebellion. He tried to recruit Irish PoWs who had soldiered in Britain’s army to fight for Germany. In 1916 a German submarine clandestinely ferried him to Ireland. But he was apprehended by the police and tried for treason in a London court. Convicted, in August 1916, aged 51, he was hanged and buried in London’s Pentonville Prison. He was the only “Sir” executed in Britain after 1746. In 1965 his remains were repatriated and interred “with full military honors” in Dublin, the republic’s president and 30,000 in attendance.