A controversial champion for justice: Irishman Roger Casement gained notoriety in his quest to end the mistreatment of indigenous rubber workers in the Putumayo region of Peru during the early 20th century.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The centennial of the Putumayo Scandal will probably not be remembered by many people this year, either on the banks of the Putumayo River, where the trouble began, or at the London Stock Exchange and the British House of Parliament, where it grew into an international cause célèbre . Yet for colonial historians and corporate lawyers alike, for advocates of both indigenous people and gay rights, even for Irish nationalists and Vatican theologians, it is a story worth retelling. All of them. and many others, may still be interested in what happened one hundred years ago deep in the Amazon Basin.

The scandal first began to unfold in 1907 when a crusading newspaperman in Iquitos published reports of atrocities committed against indigenous rubber gatherers working between the Putumayo and Caquetá Rivers on land belonging to the Peruvian Amazon Company, a London-registered business whose sole product was natural rubber exported from Peru to Britain. American railroad engineer Walter Hardenburg was passing through Iquitos at the time and by chance had witnessed evidence of these atrocities. He later gave testimony to the muckraking London magazine Truth in a series of articles published in 1909.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The London-based Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society quickly took up the cause and pressured the British government to investigate on the legal grounds that the Company was also mistreating its Barbadian employees, colonial subjects of the British Crown. The government in turn pressured the Company to conduct an inquiry by sending a team of corporate investigators to the Putumayo. The government's representative was Roger Casement, the Irish-born British consul in Brazil who seven years previously had found fame as the investigator of similar mistreatment of African rubber workers in the Belgian Congo.

C asement's nemesis, in both the moral and the legal sense of the word, was Peruvian Amazon Company president Julio César Arana, who started his career at age nine selling his father's Panama hats. Years later, he founded the Company and, in 1907, he became its chief shareholder when he sold stock certificates on the London exchange. The certificates were valued at one million pounds sterling and he kept seven hundred thousand for himself. A wealthy man, who spent money freely in London, Paris, and Biarritz, Arana believed he could reign over the...