Mutations of imperialism

In October, Colombia's president apologised to indigenous communities in the Amazon for deaths and destruction caused by the Peruvian Amazon Company around 100 years ago. However, Jeremy Seabrook reveals, an apology is also due from Britain as the company in question was a British-based one.

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IN October, British Prime Minister David Cameron refused to ratify the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169, which is the only international law protecting tribal and indigenous peoples, recognising their right to self-determination and protecting their human rights by involving them in developmental projects that affect them and their way of life. Cameron's reasoning was that 'Britain has no indigenous people', even though this has not prevented Spain or the Netherlands from supporting the Convention.

Perhaps Cameron is anxious to protect British-based companies against harassment from those whose ancestral lands they wish to ravage, and whose sacred territories they intend to trample for the treasures that lie beneath. Perhaps he is thinking of the plight of Vedanta, whose aluminium works in Odisha in North-East India has had to suspend production due to objections to its tearing up land which has been immemorially a site of worship for the Dongria-Kondh tribal people of the Niyamgiri Hills.

Chains of exploitation

It is unlikely that Cameron is aware of the long, disreputable tradition of British-based companies which have despoiled the lands and ways of life of indigenous peoples. Exactly 100 years ago Roger Casement's investigation was published into conditions of the employees of the Peruvian Amazon Company, then a major producer of the new wonder material in the world, rubber.

Although Casement went with the support of the British government ostensibly to determine the fate of 200 Barbadian workers employed by the Company - since these were British citizens - it was the plight of the forest people that captured his attention and became the object of his rage. The Indians had been reduced to debt peonage, a form of slavery; compelled to bring fixed amounts of rubber from the wild trees which were scattered throughout the forest. If they failed to yield their quota, they were beaten, raped, placed in the cepa, the stocks, or simply shot for sport, either by their Barbadian overseers or by the heads of station of the Company in the depots in the Putumayo region. The photographs of the mistreatment still horrify - figures reduced by hunger to skin and bone, long scars across the back inflicted by the whips of overseers, rubber-gatherers chained to each other by the neck; an iconography eerily prescient of the forced labour of later 20th century labour and concentration camps.

The Company flourished in the early 20th century, particularly after the invention of the pneumatic tyre: by 1910, 70% of the world production of rubber was absorbed by the automotive industry - cars, buses, trucks. Before competition from the colonial plantations of Malaya, Indonesia and Indochina, the latex of the rubber trees from the Amazon commanded rising prices in the USA and Europe. Rubber from the disputed Colombian/Peruvian border was taken by British ships to Liverpool.

In this unpoliced frontier region, the Company, headed by the bandit-entrepreneur Julio Cesar Arana, had the immense advantage of labour that cost nothing. All he and his employees had to do was to round up the people of the forest and force them to collect latex from the trees, for which they received no money - they were 'paid' in cloth, beads, fish-hooks and other trifling commodities, since there was no cash economy in the places where they had lived for millennia. They were compelled to carry loads of the raw material - sometimes equal to their own body-weight - to the stations, from where it was shipped to the growing town of Iquitos and along the Amazon to Manaus, following the river into the Atlantic. Men, women and children were drawn into this forced labour; and such was the death-rate that the population of the Huitoto, Bora and Andoke tribes - which had never encountered outsiders until the end of the 19th century - dwindled from about 40,000 to less than 10,000 in a mere 20 years.

The Company, which Arana had registered in London, had several British board members, including its chairman, none of whom knew anything about the Amazon, the rubber trade or the conditions in which the substance was procured from the jungle. But they lent the undertaking an aura of respectability, which effectively dissimulated the chains of exploitation, and concealed the way in which the exciting new commodity was brought to market.

Roger Casement had documented the abuses of Africans in the Congo Free State, a vast territory ceded to King Leopold II of Belgium at the Berlin Conference of 1885, a period characterised by forced labour, depopulation and displacement of the indigenous peoples. When news of the atrocities in Peru reached London (which came originally from a young American traveller, Walter Hardenberg, who came by chance upon scenes of slaughter in the Amazon perpetrated by employees of the Company), it was published by Truth, a London-based magazine, and taken up by the Anti-Slavery Society. As ever, disbelief and denial were the initial response of Authority, but through the labyrinthine channels in Britain through which governments acknowledge that Something Must Be Done, Casement was eager to go to the area to find out for himself the true nature of the 'empire' constructed by the buccaneering Arana. It might be observed that even now, while imperial adventures have long been deprecated, the only realm in which empires are still applauded is in the more abstract topography of 'business'.

Although limited by the absence of jurisdiction of any British official over non-British subjects, Casement found a number of Barbadians who willingly testified to their own forced role in the Company's punitive subjugation of the Indians - their own lives were in danger if they failed to carry out the instructions of those who had employed them, often under false pretences and with promises of rewards that had failed to materialise. Casement was outraged by the impunity with which the Peruvian heads of station were able to work their savagery, often through Barbadians, against those Hardenberg described as a docile and inoffensive people.

The story of Casement's pursuit of the monarch of the rubber empire is told in the meticulously reconstructed world of lawless enterprise by Jordan Goodman's book, The Devil and Mr Casement (Verso, London, 2009). When Arana's empire was threatened, he disposed of the company's assets, and was appointed by the board liquidator of his own company. This gave him the opportunity to continue trading, with the help of extensive relatives and associates. Eventually a Select Committee of the House of Commons heard evidence from all the principals in the drama. Arana was stripped of his position overseeing the dissolution of the Company, and the British directors, who claimed complete ignorance of labour conditions and the mode of extraction of the commodity of the company over which they presided, were shamed for their 'innocent' complicity and their failure to exhibit any curiosity as to the stories in which their company was implicated. The disgrace of these directors was a derisory forfeit, compared to the 30,000 lives which had paid for a mere 4,000 tons of rubber transported by the Company to Liverpool between 1900 and 1911.

Under publicity and pressure, the personnel of the company, including Arana, protested that theirs had been a 'civilising mission' in the Amazon. Hardenberg, in his account, records the frequency with which he had been told 'Son animales, Senor, no son gentes' (they are animals, not people). Arana appealed to Peruvian nationalism and blamed the reports of ill-usage in the Putumayo on Colombia, which 'sought to smirch the good name of Peru and to wound the honour of her sons'. Interest in the affair was eclipsed by the outbreak of War, and the vagrant attention of the public was readily deflected towards issues closer to home.

Casement, although he had been knighted for his work on behalf of the people of the Amazon, had been radicalised by his experience in the Congo and the Amazon, in which he saw an analogy with Ireland, and the inadmissibility of the overlordship of one race by another. He resigned his consular post, and went to Ireland where, appalled by an outbreak of cholera in Tralee, he sided with Germany, from where he planned to support an uprising in Ireland. The plan was disrupted by British intelligence. Casement was arrested, taken to London, tried and hanged as a traitor less than four years after receiving the acclaim of the British ruling classes for his humanitarianism.

Arana did not disguise his triumph over the fall of his old enemy. He continued to take rubber from the Amazon until prices fell in the Depression; impoverished, he moved to Lima, and died only in 1952.

Continued injustice

The story has a contemporary vibrancy. The elimination of indigenous peoples through alcohol, firearms or smallpox was no isolated event. And despite the growing political organisation and strength of indigenous peoples, anyone who follows the work of Survival International can learn of daily injustices, discrimination and violence against indigenous peoples.

In recent weeks - October and November alone - there have been reports that the main water source of the Guarani people had been contaminated by a rancher in Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sul state; the US company  Bunge was accused of sourcing sugarcane from farmers who illegally occupied the ancestral lands of the Guarani; the leader of the Arhuaco tribe in the Sierra Nevada in north Colombia narrowly survived an assassination attempt in the frontier town of Pueblo Bello, an area in which no one has ever been punished for the murders of Arhuaco leaders in 1990; members of the Awa, the Earth's most threatened tribe, travelled to Brasilia to protest at the destruction of their land by illegal loggers, who have surrounded their dwindling territory and left them too little to survive; thousands of Guarani, evicted from their land, are living in overcrowded reserves. The Guarani have one of the highest suicide rates on earth - one a week for the past 10 years.

Nor is developmental aggression confined to South America. Tribes from the Omo Valley in Ethiopia are still being forcibly 'resettled' in a 'villagisation' programme. Their cattle have been confiscated, their food stores destroyed.

In spite of everything, how little changes, in a world where the rights of threatened peoples are cancelled by the superior rights of the powerful to pursue their extractive violence. For half a millennium, all attacks on indigenous peoples have been in the name of 'progress', and its more recent offspring, 'development'.  All the advantages of the modern world have been forcibly brought to indigenous peoples, that is, the freedom that will enable them to grieve and die for their lost ways of life, and the consumption of alcohol, tobacco, drugs and guns, to console them for the lost liberty of their extinguished identity.   

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 266/267, October/November 2012, pp 66-67