Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature isn’t the first writer who has tried to rescue the memory of Sir Roger David Casement, the 19th Century Irish nationalist and central character of the Nobel Laureate’s book “El Sueño del Celta” (The Dream of the Celt).
In 1904, Roger Casement exposed the atrocities of the Belgians in the Congo, and later the genocide committed by Peruvians and British against the Colombian indians – the Bora and Huitoto – of the Amazonian Putumayo. Using slave methods, many children and women were chained by the neck and under the threat of receiving a beating, even to the point of exhaustion and death, forced to extract rubber as demand around the world grew for this commodity.
Until Vargas Llosa’s novel, the most celebrated work on the life of the former British diplomat who served as Consul in Angola, Brazil and Mozambique and was knighted in 1911 before being hanged on a scaffold in Pentonville Prison, London, for his involvement in the 1916 Easter Uprising, is Séamans O Siocháin’s Roger Casement: Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary (2008).
But even earlier on, the crimes committed against the indigenous tribes by the prosperous Casa Arana, founded in 1903 in Iquitos, Peru, and which would become the London-based Peruvian Amazon Company Limited, are exposed in the classic Colombian novel “La Vorágine” by José Eustasio Rivera (1924) and today, obligatory reading for students of Latin American literature and modernism. Rivera became interested in the “rubber fever” when working on an investigation with the Colombian Foreign Ministry and was sent to inspect the rubber plantations owned by the Casa Arana deep in the Colombian Amazon.
In 1911, a conflict broke out between Colombia and Peru over the land occupied by this multinational, and after a military expedition sent from Bogotá, 500 Peruvian soldiers were expelled from bases near La Pedrera in the Caquetá department.
In September 1932, another conflict broke out between Colombia and Peru; but this time, it was declared after Peruvian soldiers took Colombia’s main Amazonian port of Leticia. The two nations bombed each other’s hamlets and gunboats, using rudimentary aircraft purchased at the last minute.
After five battles, the war ended in June 1933 with the intervention of the League of Nations and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The 1932-33 Amazon War has been attributed by some historians as a calculated offensive by the Peruvian government to gain control of Colombia’s rubber plantations, yet Colombian President Alfonso López Pumarejo (who governed from 1934 -1938 and 1942-1945), claims that the invasion of Leticia had more to do with a row over a love affair gone wrong involving some low-ranking bureaucrats.
According to López, the intendant for the Amazonas department, Alfredo Villamil Fajardo, and the head of the Peruvian garrison Caballo Cocha, Juan De La Rosa, were both courting an attractive mestiza known as La Pila. The woman seemed to prefer intendant Villamil to De La Rosa. De La Rosa, angered by his rival’s advances, ordered 300 of his men to navigate the 10 kilometers of Amazon River from his base on the Peruvian side to Leticia. His troops took the town and shots were fired in the Colombian port. The border skirmish grew into an all out war and after Roosevelt and the League of Nations intervened, the Colombian flag returned to its rightful place in Leticia. Intendant Villamil was reinstated along with his concubine, La Pila.
In 1906 the British Foreign Office transferred Roger Casement from the Congo to Santos, Brazil, where he assumed his duties as Consul. Shortly after arriving in South America, Casement headed into the Colombian Amazon to investigate charges of human rights abuses committed by the Peruvian Amazon Company. The charges of slavery, mutilation and torture began making their rounds with ambassadors, in gentlemen’s clubs and in newspapers in London. Although Britain nominally abolished slavery in 1807, Casement’s mission was to go further: stop the extermination of Colombian indians by their rubber masters.
Fueled with the same social cause as Dr.Livingston in the sub-Sahara, Casement finished his report on the Putumayo atrocities and named it “The Putumayo Black Book.” The massive manuscript quickly circulated in London and Washington. According to the documentation gathered by Casement, the enslaved indians were forbidden to cultivate their food or pray.
The work groups were made up of peoples with different languages so the indians could not talk amongst themselves and disobedience was punished with mutilation of the tongue, the genitals, ears, or the hands and feet of those who tried to escape.
Casement’s denouncements led the Anti-Slavery & Aborigines Protection Society in London to release news about the Putumayo atrocities committed by the rubber company, whose main shareholder continued to be Julio Cesar Arana, despite the fact that Casa Arana became a British company in 1908.
The horrors of the Putumayo – also known as “The Devil’s Paradise” – led Pope Pius X to condemn the rubber company in 1912 through his encyclical Lacrimabili Statu. The United States government also denounced the horrors with its “White Book of the Putumayo,” and the Colombian government edited its own “Red Book of the Putumayo” – with many of Casement’s notes on the infamous rubber business.
The British Foreign Office opened its file on the Putumayo atrocities in 1909 as a result of reports published in Truth, a financial watchdog magazine. In November 1912, the British Government set up a parliamentary committee to judge the Casa Arana case. The inquiry ruled against the company and condemned it as both “ignorant and negligent.” The company was soon liquidated, yet Julio Arana continued in the rubber zone, maintaining his plantations, trade routes and treating his native subjects worse than animals.
Arana testified in person on the charges filed against him, claiming in the House of Commons that he was a “civilizer of men,” boasting that the indians at his service “had stopped being cannibals,” and had incorporated themselves into the lucrative Peruvian economy.
Sir Roger Casement’s passionate defense of human rights in the Amazon turned him into a central figure of Edwardian reformation. His previous investigations in the Congo helped end Belgium’s cruel dominance and exploitation of that colonial outpost. Casement’s crusade against the equally brutal rubber trade helped abolish much of that industry in the Amazon, and in 1913, tired and with ill health, Casement retired from the diplomatic service at age 48.
At a time in his life when Sir Roger Casement could have reaped the benefits from his journals and reputation as an ardent reformist, he looked to Ireland as his next cause. The Home Rule crisis and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 would be his last stand. Looking to Germany for support of the Irish rebellion against England, Casement became a gunrunner in a dangerous alliance. A shipment of 20,000 rifles, 10 machine guns and several million rounds of ammunition he coordinated was sunk in the Irish Sea and a failed attempt to recruit 52 freed Irish POWs from German prisons also failed to turn the tide in the Irish cause.
On April 20, 1916, Casement was arrested when disembarking on Banna Strand to pick up the sunken stash. Casement’s arrest came as a devastating shock to his colleagues in the Foreign Office, in academia and fellow reformers. He was sent to Pentonville Prison and charged with treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown. Despite pleas of clemency from literary colleagues such as Arthur Conan Doyle, William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, he was condemned to death.
During his trial, the prosecuting team presented copies of diaries alleged to have belonged to Casement that graphically recorded homosexual practices along the Javari river in the Amazon. Controversy still surrounds these Black Diaries and some experts believe them to be forgeries. On August 3, 1916 Sir Roger Casement went to the gallows.
When being weighed before his execution, Sir Roger Casement not only held the title of Knight but also the Order of St. Michael and St. George, bestowed by the Crown in 1905. As the noose slung over his neck, he spoke of his final wish: to be buried in Murlough Bay on the coast of Antrin – “The Bay of Paradise” as he called it. Nonetheless his body was laid to rest in HMP Pentonville next to an anonymous inmate and a serial killer.
Nonetheless, his final request to be buried in “The Bay of Paradise” has yet to be granted. William Butler Yeats, the masterful Irish poet who implored in vain for clemency at Casement’s trial, wrote a verse of protest:
“I say that Roger Casement
Did what he had to do.
He died upon the gallows
But that is nothing new.
Afraid they might be beaten
Before the bench of Time,
They turned a trick by forgery
And blackened his good name.”
1965, the British Government accepted the transfer of his remains to his native Ireland. He was received with a Republican plot in County Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery with full military honors and a crowd of 30,000 onlookers. Many streets, avenues and buildings in Ireland are named after Sir Roger Casement and his memory is revered as a national hero. The story behind the repatriation of his remains is documented in the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series. For the many tribes of who inhabit the Colombian, Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon, however, Casement transcends the written page, and is remembered as the “saviour of the Putumayo”.
