Roger Casement and his defense of Colombia’s Putumayo

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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.

Indians in the Amazon
Casement’s expository writings helped end a little-known era of horrendous human rights violations in the Amazon.

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”.

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