Secrets from Putumayo – Frank McNally on a Brazilian documentary about Roger Casement

A knock-on effect of my recent visit to Rio de Janeiro was belatedly viewing the documentary Secrets from Putumayo, which dramatises Roger Casement’s exposé of human rights abuses in the Amazonian rubber industry.

Little seen in Ireland yet, the film was shot in 2020 by Brazilian director Aurélio Michiles, based on Casement’s Amazon diaries as edited by Angus Mitchell, an Irish academic who has spent years in Brazil.

In it, Stephen Rea channels the voice of the 1910 diarist over archival footage of the period, some of it harrowing.

But Michiles also updates the story via interviews with descendants of abused rubber workers, recalling inherited memories of the horrors while paying tribute to the man who brought them to international attention.

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The unfortunate natives of the Putumayo, a province of Peru named for the river that runs through it, were victims of a global boom in rubber in the early years of the 20th century, when car-making and other new industries created an insatiable demand.

More specifically, they were cheap and easily exploited labour for the Peruvian Amazon Company, a firm registered on the London stock market but controlled by a ruthless rubber baron from Lima, Julio César Arana.

Arana had himself risen from poverty but had no scruples about effectively enslaving indigenous peoples in the cause of ever greater wealth. Scars on the backs of Peruvian Indians were known locally as “the Mark of Arana”.

Abuse of Amazonian rubber workers was first brought to European attention in a 1909 feature by the British magazine Truth. Amid mounting embarrassment that a London-based company was implicated, the British government asked its recently appointed consul in Rio to investigate.

Casement had already done something similar for rubber workers in Belgian Congo. Now, his pursuit of the “devil plant” and its evils sent him on a four-month journey up the Amazon in the summer of 1910.

His subsequent report to a commission of inquiry described systematic punishments including workers being suspended by hands and legs, tied behind their backs from a cross-pole, while bosses lashed them with leather whips.

Those who failed to meet daily quotas were said to routinely prostrate themselves for the abuse they knew would follow:

“Then the chief or a subordinate advances, bends down, takes the Indian by his hair, strikes him, raises his head, drops it downwards on the ground and, after the face is beaten and kicked and covered with blood, the Indian is scourged.”

But there was much worse than that in places. From one station, Casement also reported allegations of “innumerable murders and tortures of defenceless Indians – viz. 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 . . .”.

As portrayed in the documentary, he seethes with anger against those he is investigating, but has to hide his emotions for long-term good. He dines with Arana, “a ruthless murderer”, masking his disgust. He knows his hosts would happily kill him if they could, but then the feeling is mutual.

“I have never shot game with any pleasure,” he declares. “I have indeed abandoned all hunting for that reason, that I dislike the thought of taking life. However, I’d shoot or exterminate these infamous scoundrels more gladly than I should shoot a crocodile or kill a snake. I swear to God, I’d hang every one of the band of wretches with my own hands if I had the power.”

At one point in his diaries, he draws a bitter parallel between the erasers made from rubber and the erasure of whole communities genocidal work practices. The natives’ only prospect of escape, Casement believes, is armed insurrection. He “would dearly love to arm them” and give them the training necessary.

In the event, it was his report that brought an end to the abuses for a time – even if, and again to his disgust, most perpetrators escaped justice. After the scandal caused by publication of the commission’s findings in 1913, the Peruvian Amazon Company was liquidated. Arana retained many of its assets, however, and went to become a senator of Peru a few years later.

Its main aim aside, Casement’s Amazonian journey had also been the continuation of a voyage of self-discovery begun in the Congo.

Once an enthusiastic supporter of the British Empire, he had now become an implacable opponent of imperialism everywhere. “No empire has ever been destroyed without resistance,” he wrote, with a logic that would eventually lead him to the gallows of Pentonville Prison.

The experiences in South American only strengthened his resolve to quit the British foreign service and devote himself to Irish nationalism. By the autumn of 1913, a few months after the Amazonian commission’s report, he was addressing a Home Rule rally in his native Antrim. After a long career in diplomacy, it was his first appearance on a political platform.