The Putumayo, The Devil's Paradise/Chapter 3

The first result of the publication of the Putumayo atrocities in the London Press was denial. The Peruvian Amazon Company denied the truth of the matter: the Peruvian Government denied the existence of such conditions; whilst the Peruvian Consul General and Charge d'Affaires in London denied them even more emphatically. In the minds of those acquainted with Latin American methods denials would not carry much weight. To deny is the first resource of the Latin American character and policy. It is an "Oriental" trait they possess, the curious obsession that efficient and sustained denial is the equal of truth, no matter what the real conditions. The Peruvian Consul in London wrote vehement letters of denial and re-denial to the London Press, among them the following, published by Truth in September, 1909:

"'This Legation categorically denies that the acts you describe, and which are severely punished by our laws, could have taken place without the know- ledge of my Government on the Putumayo River, where Peru has authorities appointed direct by the supreme Government, and where a strong military garrison is likewise maintained.' *"

Unfortunately, the statements of the representatives of certain of the South American republics in London cannot always be regarded as disinterested. Their Governments in some cases pay them no salary, and they are concerned in promoting and earning commissions from the flotation of rubber and mining companies in the particular regions they represent. Such a condition is often discreditable to the Latin-American republics. Officials who are shareholders in and recipients of commission from rubber company promoters with whom they are hand-in-glove are not likely to take an impartial view of the unfortunate native workers.

The Secretary of the Peruvian Amazon Company wrote in September, 1909, to the Anti-Slavery Society and Truth as follows:

"'The Directors have no reason to believe that the atrocities referred to have, in fact, taken place, and indeed have grounds for considering that they have been purposely mis-stated for indirect objects. Whatever the facts, however, may be, the Board of the company are under no responsibility for them, as they were not in office at the time of the alleged occurrences. It was not until your article appeared that the Board were aware of what is now suggested.'"

The publication of the Putumayo occurrences has revealed once more that tinge of hypocrisy in the British character of which other nations have accused us. Or, rather than hypocrisy, it should perhaps be termed an intensive shopkeeping principle. Due to this spirit the exposure was greatly delayed. No one would publish the Hardenburg account, because as a book it might not have been a paying venture. Only when the way had been prepared for a successful book, by the public scandal which resulted after attention had been drawn to the matter, was it resolved to publish it. The London Press at first was equally negligent or timorous, with the exception of Truth. It showed little disposition to take the matter up, until that paper, whose business it is to expose scandals and abuses, exposed the horrors to public gaze. Then, when the matter had reached the stage of useful "copy", it appeared in all the papers, in some cases with startling headlines. The daily papers feared that they would incur risk of libel proceedings in attacking what was regarded as a powerful London Company, with a capital of a million pounds and an influential Board of Directors, and at first hesitated to take the matter up.

Had it not been for the work of the philanthropic society already mentioned, the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society,* in London, and the courage of the Editor of Truth, to both of whom Hardenburg went, followed by the prolonged publications in Truth the sinister occurrences of the Putumayo might have remained unrevealed, and the unspeakable outrages on the Huitotos Indians have gone on unhindered. The Anti-Slavery Society showed that "nothing reported from the Congo has equalled in horror some of the acts alleged against the rubber syndicate", and the reader of the present work will not dispute the truth of the statement. The Society brought the matter with such insistence before the Foreign Office that questions were asked in the House of Commons and inquiries set on foot by Sir Edward Grey, to whose everlasting credit it is that vigorous action was at length taken.

The Peruvian Amazon Company protested that the allegations were made by blackmailers. This was denied by Hardenburg, and by Truth on Hardenburg's account. There were, however, accusations of blackmail against others.* The first reply to the letters of the Anti-Slavery Society, from the Foreign Office, was in December, 1909, when it was stated that the Foreign Office had the subject under consideration. In July, 1910, a British Consul, Mr. Roger Casement, well known for his investigations into the Congo atrocities, was instructed to proceed to the Putumayo, his locus standi being secured on the grounds that a number of British subjects, colored men of Barbadoes, had been employed by Arana and the Peruvian agents of the company as slave drivers. The securing of Mr. Casement for the work was due to the endeavour of the Anti-Slavery Society. The directors of the company, aroused at length by public opinion, or the representations of the Foreign Office, sent out a commission of inquiry at the same time.* Both the consul and the company's Commission faithfully carried out their task, and Mr. Casement handed in his report to Sir Edward Grey in January, 1911, The conclusions reached were terrible and damning. The worst accounts were confirmed in the words of Consul Casement: ''"The condition of things fully warrants the worst charges brought against the agents of the Peruvian Amazon Company and its methods on the Putumayo." ''

The great delay in publishing this report, which was only laid before Parliament in July, 1912, a year after being made, caused some protest by the Press. The Foreign Office had withheld it out of a desire to afford the Peruvian Government an opportunity of taking action to end the abuses, but, as this was not done, the report was made public as a means of arousing public opinion. The press of the whole civilised world then took the matter up.

It may well be asked how it was possible that such occurrences could take place in a country with a seat of government such as Lima, where dwell a highly civilised and sensitive people, whose public institutions, streets, shops, and churches are not inferior to those of many European cities. The reply is, first, in the remoteness of the region of the Putumayo, as explained, and secondly, political and international matters. Peru is constantly torn by political strife at home, and between the doings of rival factions, the outlying regions of the country are overlooked. But Peru was largely influenced by its own insecure possession of the Putumayo region; and it had greatly welcomed the establishing of the Peruvian Amazon Company, a powerful organisation, in the debatable territory. Under such circumstances few questions were likely to be asked about such matters as treatment of the natives.

The existence of the company was a species of safeguard for Peruvian possession of the region. Furthermore, a central Government such as that at Lima might be well intentioned, but if distances are vast and without means of communication, and distant officials hopelessly corrupt, the situation was extremely difficult for the Government. Another circumstance affecting the action of the Peruvian Government is that, in the republican form of government, the judicial authorities are independent of the Executive, The educated people of the Peruvian capital and coast region must, in general, be exonerated from knowledge of the occurrences of the Putumayo.

The difficulties of Peru in the government and development of their portion of the Amazon Valley, known as the Oriente, or Montana, must not be lightly passed over. The physical difficulties against what has been termed the Conquest of the Montana are such as it is impossible for the European to picture. Nature resists at every step. Hunger, thirst, fever, fatigue, and death await the explorer at times, in these profound, unconquerable forests. Peru has sent forth many expeditions thereto; brave Peruvians have given their lives in the conquest. The authorities at different points have frequently organised bands of explorers, and the Lima Geographical Society has done much valuable work in sending out persons to explore and map these difficult regions.

Yet the possession of the Montaiia is a heritage of incalculable value to Peru. It is a region any nation might covet. The Peruvians are alive to its value and possibilities, but they are poor. Days, weeks, months of arduous travel on mule-back, on foot, cutting trochas, or paths, through the impenetrable under- brush, by raft and by canoe, suffering all the hardships of the tropics, of torrential rain, burning sun, scarcity of food. All these are circumstances of venturing off the few trails into the vast and almost untravelled trans-Andine regions of Peru, divided by the lofty plateaux and snowy summits of the Andes from the temperate lowlands where the Europeanised civilisation of the Pacific flourishes.

It is not to be supposed that the Indians are all pacific or docile in the Peruvian Montaila. Whole villages which were established in earlier times by the Spaniards and afterwards enlarged by the Peruvians, with buildings, plantations, and industries, have been wiped out by attacks of the Indians, probably in reprisals. In some districts the danger from savages prevents settlement, and the blow-pipe and the spear greet the traveller who ventures there incautiously. Tales of savagery have been told in which the white man has been the sufferer ; and there has always existed an animus against the Indian, although less acute than that which the white settler in North America displayed against the "redskin" in earlier times, and without the same cause.

In the Peruvian Montana, in its upper regions, Nature has been lavish of her products and oppor- tunities. The rancher who should take up his abode there, with a small amount of capital, can rapidly acquire estates and wealth. Abundant harvests of almost every known product can be raised in a minimum of time. It is sufficient to cut down and burn the brush and scratch the soil and sow with any seed, to recover returns of a hundred for one. Sugarcane, vines, maize, cocoa, coffee, and a host of products can be raised. The sugarcane, once planted, yields perpetual, some existing plantations being more than a hundred years old. The cane frequently measures thirty feet in height, and is cut seven to nine months after sprouting. The whole Amazon Valley, when it shall have been opened up, will prove to be one of the most valuable parts of the earth's surface.

Apart from topographical considerations, the sinister occurrences on the Putumayo are, to some extent, the result of a sinister human element, the Spanish and Portuguese character. The remark- able trait of callousness to human suffering which the Iberian people of Portugal and Spain — themselves a mixture of Moor, Goth, Semite, Vandal, and other peoples — introduced into the Latin American race is here sho\vn in its intensity, and is augmented by a further Spanish quality. The Spaniard often regards the Indians as animals. Other European people may have abused the Indians of America, but none have that peculiar Spanish attitude towards them of frankly considering them as non-human. Today the Indians are commonly referred to among Spaniards and Mestizos as aiiimales.

The present writer, in his travels in Peru and Mexico, has constantly been met with the half-impatient exclamation, on having protested against maltreatment of the Indian, of "Son animales, Senor; no son gcnte's. ("They are animals, Senor, they are not folk"). The torture or mutilation of the Indian is therefore regarded much as it would be in the case of an ox or a horse. This attitude of mind was well shown in the barbarous system of forced labour in the mines in the times of the viceroys of Peru and Mexico, where the Indians were driven into the mines by armed guards and branded on the face with hot irons. When their overtaxed strength gave way under the heavy labor, which rapidly occurred, their carcasses were pitched aside and they were replaced by other slaves. These operations of the time of the Spaniards have their counterpart in the Amazon Valley today.

There is yet a further trait of the Latin American which to the Anglo-Saxon mind is almost inexplicable. This is the pleasure in the torture of the Indian as a diversion, not merely as a vengeance or "punishment". As has been shown on the Putu-mayo, and as happened on other occasions elsewhere, the Indians have been abused, tortured, and killed por motivos frivolos — that is to say, for merely frivolous reasons, or for diversion. Thus Indians are shot at in sport to make them run or as exercise in tiro al bianco or target practice, and burnt by pouring petroleum over them and setting it on fire in order to watch their agonies. This love of inflicting agony for sport is a curious psychic attribute of the Spanish race. The present writer, when in remote regions in Peru and Mexico, has had occasion to intervene, sometimes at personal risk, in the ill treatment of Indians and peones, who were being tortured or punished to extort confession for small misdemeanors, or even for purely frivolous reasons. The Indians of Latin America are in reality grown-up children, with the qualities of such, but the Spaniards and Portuguese have recognised in these traits nothing more than what they term "animal" qualities.

The indictment of Peruvian officials in the Hardenburg narrative is extremely severe, and they are contrasted unfavorably with the Colombians. In reality there is little to choose between the methods of the representatives of any of the South American republics as regards the administration of justice in remote regions. Power is always abused in such places by the Latin American people, be they Peruvians, Colombians, Bolivians, Brazilians, Argentinos, or others. Tyranny is but a question of opportunity, in the present stage of their development. Justice is bought and sold, as far as its secondary administrators are concerned. The otherwise good qualities and fine latent force of the Latin American character are overshadowed by its more primitive instincts, which time and the growth of real democracy will eliminate.*

Furthermore, there are other rubber-bearing regions in the Amazon Valley where hidden abuses are committed, in the territory of other South American republics; and Peru does not stand alone, and atrocities are not confined to the Putumayo. It was shown that many of the murders and Hoggings at the rubber stations were committed by the Barbadian negroes at the order of the Peruvian chiefs of sections. These negroes were forced at their own peril to these acts. But probably the savage depth of the negro is easily stirred, as all know who have had dealings there with. There can be little doubt that the Peruvian rubber-agents knew the negro character and secured them for that reason. On the other hand, it is shown that some of these Barbadian negroes rebelled against going to the Putumayo — protested to the British Consul at Manaos, but were ordered on board by, that official under police supervision.*

When they reached the rubber stations on the remote Putumayo it was difficult to rebel against the orders of the Peruvian agents or chiefs of sections. In some cases, when they did so, they themselves received ill-treatment and were subjected to torture, for which they do not appear to have received any compensation as British subjects. The lack of advice and investigation into the conditions of their contract and service which appears to have befallen them at the hands of the British Consul at Manaos is a matter for reflection. The investigation carried out by the Consular Commission showed that some of these Barbadian negroes committed terrible crimes at the instigation of their superiors. The first contingent of these men, imported by Arana Brothers, reached the Putumayo at the end of 1904. These Barbadoes men generally term themselves "Englishmen" rather than "British subjects." They are good workers generally, and to their labour it is that the work of the Panama Canal owes its speedy execution.
 * See Consul Casement's Report.