Entre o Mítico e o Real: os escândalos do Putumayo e o holocausto amazônico

Abstract

In the period that comprises the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, the Amazon is an important and vast space in formation and dispute. The region’s geographic contours definition is based on, on the one hand, by the newly independent South American republics and, on the other, on the desire to discover, catalog and domesticate a biological heritage of astronomical proportions located in the confines of that “tropical luxury warehouse”, Even though these practices would cost the peoples’ bodies and culture of the region. Therefore, the present investigation aimed to verify the relationship between the archetype exoticized in the Amazonian myth and the peripheral insertion of the region in the modernity of the turn of the 19th century to the 1900's. In addition, episodes of violence, exploitation and resistance collected from the traveler literature produced about the Amazon between the second half of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century were understood as the region's great portrait. Then, the case that would become known internationally as “the Putumayo scandals” was revisited as a manifestation of the portraits of violence, exploitation and resistance that made up the region in that period. Finally, the Putumayo scandals were analyzed as a historical space located between a mythical Amazon and the region's real and violent insertion in the list of international interests.The historical sources that comprised the corpus of the research comprise reports of travelers, newspapers and periodicals local, national and internationally published, House of Commons dialogues and sections discussions transcripts, testimonies, research reports, letters, contracts, pieces of Peruvian and English judicial process, as well as memorials and photographic records.The analysis of the bibliographic and documentary sources collected during the investigation was based on an epistemological framework aligned with decolonial studies.Therefore, concepts such as coloniality, modern rationality and modernity were present throughout the research. In conclusion, were verified the persistence of the Amazon exoticization as a movement initiated in the first colonial contacts and constantly updated, the Amazon myth operates as the foundation par excellence of the secular debris suffered by the region. Since the second half of the 19th century, the Amazon has been experiencing its definitive transformation into a tropical luxury warehouse, whose supposed purpose is to meet the desires and the curiosity of the hegemonic centers of modern rationality. The exotic image of the region fosters its subordination and marginalization, an imaginary and discursive process which is the main referential instance in scientific speech. The violent exploitation of the region, ensured by natural resources extraction, all wealth's main source is the body of indigenous peoples. In the Amazon, an economy of bodies took place from the violent exploitation of a large part of the subjects involved in the processes of nature's predation. In this context, the Peruvian Putumayo can be understood as the Amazonian archetype in which the mythical and the real compose the region's exploratory culture. The internationalization of the Putumayo scandals took place within the framework of exoticizing the Amazon, invoking both the humanitarian character of the imperial spirit and the Monroe Doctrine of an independent American continent in order to ensure the right-duty to investigate and hold the denounced practices perpetrators.