Arana’s Peruvian Amazon Company was exporting one and a half million pounds of rubber a year from the rain forests. Michelin tire factories were screaming for rubber. Gringos were riding it into the motor age. They were buying it up, laying down highways, racing to factories with machine dreams in mind. And the jungle kept right on trickling. The Amazon River and its one thousand tributaries became thickwith steamships, gorged with barges, packed with black gold. By 1907, it was impossible to enter and exit the Putumayo without a permit from an Arana agent. The monopoly had become complete—and its operations legally sanctioned.
THE REPORTS OF the atrocities began in the early months of 1907. Detailed testimonies from Arana’s former employees appeared in Peruvian newspapers with small circulations. Then, in September of 1907, two articles on the Arana monopoly appeared in The New York Times. The news was largely about money. Peruvian rubber was flowing through Liverpool and New York, according to reporters. The money through London and Park Avenue banks. But the most interesting news was how rich the company foremen were getting: One had earned forty thousand dollars from three months in the jungle. It was equivalent to almost a million today.
Sometime later, further details about the Casa Arana appeared in a memo from the U.S. consul in Iquitos to the American secretary of state. In that longish description was a single scene, chilling for its simplicity. A Barbadian guard employed by the Aranas had reported to the consul personally that he had been fired for not punishing one of the female tappers under his supervision. The ex-employee—a tall, black man who spoke good English—said he had refused to strike the woman when his foreman had ordered him to do so. She had a baby strapped to her back and was paying more attention to it than to her work on the trees. The foreman became angry—at the woman for not attending to the rubber, at the guard for not obeying his orders. He grabbed the baby, dashed its brains out against a tree, and screamed at the woman to go back to work. Then he turned and whipped the Barbadian until the man ran for his life.
Days after the American secretary of state received thatmemo, Walter Hardenburg, a twenty-one-year-old American, pushed his canoe off the banks of the Putumayo. Eight months later, he stepped into a London press office to send news of the carnage into the breakfast rooms of the civilized world. The young adventurer had been gliding downriver from the Colombian frontier, making his way toward Manaus, where he hoped to find work on the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad. What he stumbled into on his way changed the lovely, bosky image of the Putumayo forever. No one could call it a paradise now.
The Putumayo as witnessed by Hardenburg was a cauldron of violence, a human hecatomb: Rain-forest Indians moved through it in shackles. Their lives could be snuffed out at whim.
The Indians were not paid for their work. They were herded together at gunpoint by the Iron Men, at which time each was offered a can of food, a cooking pot, a mirror. Comisiones, these wholesale sweeps were called. In exchange, the captives were told they would have to work to pay off the gifts. Chained to one another, naked, they were led down jungle trails or transported upriver to Iquitos, where they would be sold to overseers for twenty to forty pounds sterling. After that, they were simply working to stay alive.
Slaves who dawdled were made to pull kerosene-soaked sacks over their heads. They were told to wait quietly until the Barbadians set fire to them. Seeing a father burn tended to make a youth work harder. Seeing a little girl run shrieking to the river, her skin melting, tended to make mothers concentrate on the trees.
When slaves ran away, the foremen found ways to track them. One runaway guard told of a tracking party that was trying to locate the whereabouts of a dozen or so fugitive slaves. They
THE REPORTS OF the atrocities began in the early months of 1907. Detailed testimonies from Arana’s former employees appeared in Peruvian newspapers with small circulations. Then, in September of 1907, two articles on the Arana monopoly appeared in The New York Times. The news was largely about money. Peruvian rubber was flowing through Liverpool and New York, according to reporters. The money through London and Park Avenue banks. But the most interesting news was how rich the company foremen were getting: One had earned forty thousand dollars from three months in the jungle. It was equivalent to almost a million today.
Sometime later, further details about the Casa Arana appeared in a memo from the U.S. consul in Iquitos to the American secretary of state. In that longish description was a single scene, chilling for its simplicity. A Barbadian guard employed by the Aranas had reported to the consul personally that he had been fired for not punishing one of the female tappers under his supervision. The ex-employee—a tall, black man who spoke good English—said he had refused to strike the woman when his foreman had ordered him to do so. She had a baby strapped to her back and was paying more attention to it than to her work on the trees. The foreman became angry—at the woman for not attending to the rubber, at the guard for not obeying his orders. He grabbed the baby, dashed its brains out against a tree, and screamed at the woman to go back to work. Then he turned and whipped the Barbadian until the man ran for his life.
Days after the American secretary of state received thatmemo, Walter Hardenburg, a twenty-one-year-old American, pushed his canoe off the banks of the Putumayo. Eight months later, he stepped into a London press office to send news of the carnage into the breakfast rooms of the civilized world. The young adventurer had been gliding downriver from the Colombian frontier, making his way toward Manaus, where he hoped to find work on the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad. What he stumbled into on his way changed the lovely, bosky image of the Putumayo forever. No one could call it a paradise now.
The Putumayo as witnessed by Hardenburg was a cauldron of violence, a human hecatomb: Rain-forest Indians moved through it in shackles. Their lives could be snuffed out at whim.
The Indians were not paid for their work. They were herded together at gunpoint by the Iron Men, at which time each was offered a can of food, a cooking pot, a mirror. Comisiones, these wholesale sweeps were called. In exchange, the captives were told they would have to work to pay off the gifts. Chained to one another, naked, they were led down jungle trails or transported upriver to Iquitos, where they would be sold to overseers for twenty to forty pounds sterling. After that, they were simply working to stay alive.
Slaves who dawdled were made to pull kerosene-soaked sacks over their heads. They were told to wait quietly until the Barbadians set fire to them. Seeing a father burn tended to make a youth work harder. Seeing a little girl run shrieking to the river, her skin melting, tended to make mothers concentrate on the trees.
When slaves ran away, the foremen found ways to track them. One runaway guard told of a tracking party that was trying to locate the whereabouts of a dozen or so fugitive slaves. They
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