Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A Tightening Noose: Indigenous Workers in the Rubber Economies
The way that the fortunes of natives unfolded as the global rubber economy expanded
canperhapsbestbeunderstoodifwelookatthehistoryofincreasingindigenoussubjec-
tion on the Putumayo, the “river that God forgot” and the site of the Casa Arana's “Brit-
ish Congo,” so named because the atrocities there rivaled those of the Belgian Congo.
The river was initially opened to steam travel in the 1850s by Rafael Reyes, a trader in
quinine.Thiscommoditywasrelatively simplyandbenignlyexchangedformetalgoods
with Huitotos, Andoches, and Boras, who also supplied fuel wood, food, and meat for
the traveling trade.
Later, mulatto caucheiro Crisóstomo Hernández, a Colombian fugitive from justice
(he was a murderer), married into the Huitoto; he loved them and lived among them
all his life. Hernández used tribal interactions and native tribute collection to insert the
Huitoto more firmly and reliably into the commodity exchanges of metal goods for
latexes. He noted both the extensive groves of caucho and the populous world of the
tribes, and indeed the presence of a lot of labor was exactly the allure of these water-
sheds. 80 Eugène Robuchon, who had been sent by the Aranas to reconnoiter on the Pu-
tumayo, estimated native populations in excess of fifty thousand. 81 While Hernández
himself had a different relation to natives and extraction, he paved the way for the first
vicious wave of caucheiro kings like Benjamin Larraniaga, a brute later poisoned by
his workers, and Gregorio Calderón, who carried out the conquistas —a weighted term
involving conquest (by violence) and seduction (by trade goods), and of course sexual
conquest—that forced the tribes into commodity circuits, and developed the early insti-
tutional commercial structures of obligatory peonage that would become the platforms
for the Casa Arana's later “rationalized” system of quotas and maximum labor control
viaterrorslavery. 82 TheWarofaThousandDays,oneofthecivilwarsthathavecometo
define Colombia, distracted national armies away from this interesting economic fron-
tier and the territorial appropriation by Peruvian enterprise, and soon the Arana militia
and unrefusable deals dispossessed the remaining Colombian caucho bosses and made
the vast watershed of the Putumayo drainage de facto Peruvian terrain. This “everyday
imperialism” was of intense interest to Peruvian Amazonian officialdom, who provided
military backup (as Casement noted to his disgust), and was seen as a model worth rep-
licating elsewhere, like on the Purús and Juruá.
ThePutumayooftheCasaAranawasdenouncedasthe“BritishCongo”becauseBrit-
ish finance floated the enterprise, which involved massive torture, sexual abuse, wanton
killing, and literally working Indians to death. Julio Arana, however, imagined, as did
his unfortunately named brother, Lizardo, that the system they devised was rational, in-
dustrial, even “Fordist” in its inspiration and vertical integration, even if labor control
occurred through unmitigated violence and decimation of the machinery (trees) and the
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