Roger Casement na Amazônia: exploração, violência e genocídio no interflúvio da tríplice fronteira

Abstract

The infamous Consul Roger Casement had been forgotten, for over a hundred years, by the contemporary world. He had been a very famous figure in the early 20th century, before World War I. It was he who denounced the crimes of King Leopold of Belgium in Congo, he had founded with his friend Edmund Morel the Association for the Reform of the Congo. However, very little is known about his passage in the Amazon from 1910 to 1912. It was precisely in the period when the rubber boom cycle began to collapse. This thesis aims to research this crossing through the Amazon, especially in the Cara-Paraná and Igara-Paraná do Putumayo interfluve, in the Triple Border Brazil, Colombia and Peru. It arrives at the border as a result of a scandal denounced by the Truth newspaper of London, in 1909, whose title said thus: The Paradise of the Devil. It was about a genocide of the indigenous people of Putumayo and abuses against Barbadian subjects. The English company Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company had acquired an immense territory between the Putumayo rivers (Içá) and the Caquetá river (Japurá), in which it explored millions of hectares of rubber, at the expense of the slave labor of the bora, ocainas, andoques, uitotos, muinanes and resígaros. For this reason, Consul Roger Casement, who was dispatching at the Consulate General of the British Empire in Rio de Janeiro, leaves for a commission trip to the Peruvian Amazon, in order to investigate the British firm and file a case for abuses and crimes by the company's personnel. He prepares a report of over two hundred pages, in which he describes the atrocities of the company's caucheiros. (caucheiros are understood to be white employees who head indigenous populations, aided by barbadensis and young indigenous people called "the muchachos" who carry guns and obey orders from the head of the company's headquarters).In order to have a broad view of this space, and for that we thought to do a bibliographic research on the territory of Putumayo, on the original inhabitants of these peoples who inhabit it, to understand about their legends and myths, through the researchers, Eugene Robuchon, Captain Thomas Whiffen, Theodor Koch Grünberg, Richard Schultes in order to compare them with Roger Casement's report, and how he interprets and describes the indigenous to the point of defending them in European society, knowing their records between the lines about the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Putumayo , and what secret or strategies are hiding against the English company Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. Finally, we want to understand how he will denounce what strategy he would use to denounce the Genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Putumayo interfluve, knowing that the corporatism of English capitalism would never condemn the English company for these crimes. Finally, describe how this Amazonian experience provokes an extreme attitude in its struggle for Irish independence. Our thesis will use the essay style for the multiplicity of experiences and conflicts that the consul Roger Casement lived in this Amazon crossing.