The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (40 page)

The stocks of Arana’s company began to fall on the London market. And though this was due in part to competition from new exports of rubber from British colonies in Asia—Singapore, Malaya, and Ceylon—planted there with shoots taken out of Amazonia in an audacious smuggling operation by the English scientist and adventurer Henry Alexander Wickham, the key fact in the collapse of the Peruvian Amazon Company was the bad image it acquired in both public opinion and the financial media because of the publication of Roger’s report. Lloyd’s cut off its credit. Throughout Europe and the United States, a good number of banks followed this example. The boycott promoted by the Anti-Slavery Society and other organizations deprived the company of many clients and associates.

The coup de grâce for Arana’s empire was given by the establishment in the House of Commons, on March 14, 1912, of a special committee to investigate the responsibility of the Peruvian Amazon Company in the Putumayo atrocities. Made up of fifteen members and presided over by a prestigious parliamentarian, Charles Roberts, it met over fifteen months. During thirty-six sessions, twenty-seven witnesses were questioned in public hearings filled with reporters, politicians, and members of lay and religious societies, among them the Anti-Slavery Society and its president, the missionary John Harris. Newspapers and magazines reported in detail on the meetings, and abundant articles, caricatures, gossip, and jokes commented on them.

The most anticipated witness, whose presence attracted an even larger audience, was Sir Roger Casement. He appeared before the commission on November 13 and December 11 of 1912. He described precisely and soberly what he had seen with his own eyes on the rubber plantations: the pillory, the great instrument of torture in all the camps, the backs with the scars of floggings, the whips and Winchester rifles carried by the station overseers and the “boys,” or “rationals,” responsible for maintaining order and attacking the tribes in the
correrías
, and the regimen of slavery, overexploitation, and starvation to which the indigenous people were subjected. Then he summarized the testimonies of the Barbadians, whose veracity, he pointed out, was guaranteed by the fact that almost all of them had acknowledged their own responsibility for torture and murder. At the request of the committee members, he also explained the prevailing Machiavellian system: section chiefs received not salaries but commissions on the rubber harvested, which induced them to demand more and more of the harvesters in order to increase their own earnings.

In his second appearance, Roger put on a show. Before the surprised gaze of the parliamentarians, he began taking out of a large bag, held by two ushers, objects he had acquired in the stores of the Peruvian Amazon Company in Putumayo. He demonstrated how the Indian laborers were swindled: to keep them forever in debt, the company sold them articles for work or home, or decorative trinkets on credit, at prices several times higher than in London. He showed an old one-barrel shotgun whose price in La Chorrera was forty-five shillings. To pay this amount a Huitoto or Bora would have had to work for two years, assuming that they were paid what a street sweeper earned in Iquitos. He showed them shirts of unbleached linen, coarse twill trousers, necklaces of colored beads, little boxes of powder, belts of pita fiber, toy tops, oil lamps, hats of untreated straw, ointments for bites, calling out the prices these objects might fetch in Britain. The eyes of the parliamentarians opened in indignation and astonishment. It was even worse when Sir Roger set out before Charles Roberts and the other members of the committee dozens of photographs he had taken himself in El Encanto, La Chorrera, and other stations in Putumayo: there were backs and buttocks with “the mark of Arana” in the form of scars and sores, the bitten and pecked-at corpses rotting in the undergrowth, the incredible emaciation of men, women, and children who in spite of their skeletal thinness carried on their heads great sausages of solidified rubber, the parasite-swollen bellies of newborns about to die. The photographs were an unassailable testimony to the condition of beings living almost without food and mistreated by greedy men whose only goal in life was to extract more rubber even if to do that entire villages had to be consumed by the exploitation.

An emotional aspect of the sessions was the questioning of the British directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company, when the Irishman Swift McNeill, the veteran parliamentarian for South Donegal, stood out for his pugnacity and subtlety. He proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that outstanding businessmen like Henry M. Read and John Russell Gubbins, stars of London society and aristocrats or independently wealthy men like Sir John Lister-Kaye and Baron de Sousa-Deiro, were totally uninformed about what went on in Arana’s company, whose board meetings they attended and whose proceedings they signed, collecting huge sums of money. Not even when
Truth
began publishing the denunciations made by Benjamín Saldaña Roca and Walter Hardenburg did they bother to find out how much truth lay in those accusations. They were content with the releases Abel Larco or Julio C. Arana himself gave them, which consisted of accusing the accusers of being blackmailers resentful at not having received from the company the money they attempted to extort by means of threats. No one bothered to verify on site if the enterprise to which they gave the prestige of their names was committing those crimes. Even worse, not one of them had taken the trouble to examine the papers, accounts, reports, and correspondence of a company whose files showed signs of those villainies. Because, as incredible as it might seem, until the scandal broke, Julio C. Arana, Abel Larco, and the other hierarchs felt so secure they did not hide traces of the outrages in their books: for example, not paying salaries to the indigenous laborers and spending enormous quantities of money to buy whips, revolvers, and rifles.

A moment of heightened drama occurred when Arana appeared to make a statement before the committee. His first appearance had to be postponed because his wife, Eleonora, who was in Geneva, suffered a nervous breakdown because of the tension in the life of her family, which after having climbed to the highest position, now saw its situation quickly disintegrating. Arana entered the House of Commons dressed with his usual elegance, and as pale as the malaria victims in Amazonia. He appeared surrounded by aides and advisers, but in the hearing room he was permitted to have only his lawyer with him. At first he seemed serene and arrogant. As questions from Charles Roberts and the elderly Swift McNeill kept cornering him, he began to fall into contradictions and make mistakes, which his translator went out of his way to moderate. He provoked laughter among the members of the public when, in response to a question from the head of the committee—why were there so many Winchester rifles on the Putumayo stations, for the
correrías
or attacks on the tribes in order to take people away to the rubber plantations?—he said: “No, señor, to defend themselves against the tigers that abound in the region.” He tried to deny everything but suddenly acknowledged that yes, it was true, he once had heard that an indigenous woman was burned alive. Except that was a long time ago. Abuses, if they had been committed, were always a thing of the past.

The greatest confusion for the rubber king occurred when he tried to disqualify the testimony of Walter Hardenburg, accusing the North American of having falsified a bill of exchange in Manaus. Swift McNeill interrupted to ask if he would dare call Hardenburg a counterfeiter to his face—it was believed he was living in Canada.

“Yes,” replied Arana.

“Do it then,” responded McNeill. “Here he is.”

The arrival of Hardenburg caused a commotion in the hearing room. Advised by his attorney, Arana retracted his statement and said he wasn’t accusing Hardenburg but “someone” of having cashed a bill in a Manaus bank that turned out to be counterfeit. Hardenburg demonstrated that it had been a trap to discredit him set by Arana’s company, using an individual with a criminal record named Julio Muriedas, who at present was in prison in Pará for fraud.

Arana collapsed following this episode. He gave only hesitant, confused answers to all the questions, betraying his uneasiness and especially the lack of veracity that was the most obvious feature of his testimony.

As the parliamentary committee was in the middle of its work, a new catastrophe crushed the entrepreneur. Judge Swinfen Eady, of the High Court of Justice, at the request of a group of stockholders, decreed an immediate halt to the business of the Peruvian Amazon Company. The judge stated that the company obtained benefits “from collecting rubber in the most awful manner imaginable” and that “if Mr. Arana did not know what was occurring, his responsibility was even more serious, since he, more than anyone, had the absolute obligation to know what went on in his domain.”

The final report of the parliamentary committee was no less lapidary. It concluded: “Mr. Julio C. Arana, like his associates, had knowledge of and therefore is the principal party responsible for the atrocities perpetrated by his agents and employees in Putumayo.”

When the committee made its report public, sealing the final discredit of Arana and ruining the empire that had made a rich and powerful man of this humble resident of Rioja, Roger had already begun to forget Amazonia and Putumayo. Irish issues had become his principal concern. After a short vacation, the Foreign Office proposed that he return to Brazil as the consul general in Rio de Janeiro, and at first he agreed. But he kept postponing his departure, and even though he gave the ministry and himself various pretexts for this, the truth was that in his heart he had already decided not to serve the British Crown again as a diplomat or in any other capacity. He wanted to make up for lost time, pour his intelligence and energy into fighting for what would be from now on the exclusive goal of his life: the emancipation of Ireland.

For that reason he followed from a distance, without too much interest, the final incarnations of the Peruvian Amazon Company and its owner. It had been made clear at the committee sessions during the confession of the general manager, Henry Lex Gielgud, that Arana’s enterprise did not possess any title of ownership to the lands of Putumayo and exploited them only “by right of occupation,” which increased the mistrust of the banks and other creditors. They immediately pressured its owner, demanding he satisfy all outstanding payments and commitments (his debts amounted to more than 250,000 pounds in City institutions alone). Threats of seizure and judicial auction of his goods rained down on him. Publicly protesting that, to save his honor, he would pay every last cent, Arana put up for sale his elegant London house on Kensington Road, his mansion in Biarritz, and his house in Geneva. But the money received from these sales was not sufficient to appease his creditors, who obtained judicial orders to freeze his savings and bank accounts in England. At the same time his personal fortune was disintegrating, the decline in his business continued to be unstoppable. The fall in the price of Amazonian rubber because of competition from Asia was parallel to the decision of many European and North American importers not to buy Peruvian rubber again until it was proved by an independent international commission that slave labor, torture, and attacks on the tribes had stopped, salaries were paid to the indigenous harvesters of latex, and the labor laws in effect in Britain and the United States were respected on the rubber stations.

There was no opportunity even to attempt to meet these demands. The flight of the principal overseers and chiefs of the stations in Putumayo, afraid of being imprisoned, threw the entire region into a state of absolute anarchy. Many Indians—entire communities—also took advantage of the situation to escape, which meant that the extraction of rubber was reduced to a minimum and soon ceased altogether. The fugitives left after pillaging stores and offices and taking everything valuable, principally weapons and foodstuffs. Then it was learned that the company, frightened at the possibility that those runaway killers might become prosecution witnesses in possible future trials, gave them large sums to facilitate their escape and buy their silence.

Roger followed the decay of Iquitos through letters from his friend George Michell, the British consul, who told him about the closing of hotels, restaurants, and shops where articles imported from Paris and New York had once been sold, how the champagne that previously had been uncorked with so much generosity disappeared as if by magic along with whiskey, cognac, port, and wine. In the taverns and brothels there was now only the brandy that scratched your throat and poisonous drinks of suspicious provenance, supposed aphrodisiacs that often, instead of inflaming sexual desire, had the effect of dynamite blasts in the stomachs of the unwary.

Just as in Manaus, the collapse of Casa Arana and rubber produced a general crisis in Iquitos as fast-moving as the prosperity the city had enjoyed for fifteen years. The first to emigrate were the foreigners—merchants, explorers, traffickers, tavern owners, professional people, technicians, prostitutes, pimps, and madams—who returned to their own countries and went in search of places more auspicious than this one, sinking into ruin and isolation.

Prostitution did not disappear, but it changed agents. Brazilian prostitutes vanished, along with those who said they were “French” and in reality were usually Poles, Flemings, Turks, or Italians, and were replaced by
cholas
and Indians, many of them girls and adolescents who had worked as domestics and lost their jobs because their employers had left in pursuit of more favorable winds or because, with the economic crisis, they could no longer dress or feed them. The British consul, in one of his letters, gave a pathetic description of little fifteen-year-old emaciated Indian girls strolling along the embankment in Iquitos, painted like clowns, looking for clients. Newspapers and magazines disappeared, even the weekly bulletin that announced the departure and arrival of ships, because river transport, once so intense, decreased until it almost stopped. The event that sealed the isolation of Iquitos, its break from the wider world with which it had such intense commerce for some fifteen years, was the decision of the Booth Line to gradually reduce traffic on its freight and passenger lines. When the movement of ships stopped completely, the umbilical cord that joined Iquitos to the world was cut. The capital of Loreto made a journey back in time. In a few years it again became a remote, forgotten town in the heart of the Amazonian plain.