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O irlandês Roger Casement esteve duas vezes na região do Rio Putumayo para investigar denúncias de desrespeito aos direitos humanos. (Foto: Reprodução/Biblioteca de Nova York)
Irlandês foi ao Peru em 1910 para investigar torturas e assassinatos. Roger Casement concluiu que 30 mil indígenas haviam sido mortos.
Um caso brutal de exploração de indígenas amazônicos é o tema central de um novo livro lançado nos EUA. "The Devil and Mr. Casement" (“O demônio e o sr. Casement”, numa tradução livre), do historiador John Goodman, conta a história real do diplomata irlandês Roger Casement.
Em setembro de 1910, ele foi mandado pelo governo britânico para a região do Rio Putumayo, que hoje define a fronteira entre Peru e Colômbia, para averiguar denúncias de desrespeito aos direitos humanos nos seringais do empresário peruano Julio César Arana.
Casement então concluiu que mais de 30 mil índios haviam morrido para produzir 4 mil toneladas de borracha na região. Arana era proprietário da Peruvian Amazon Company, com sede em Londres, que negociava a matéria-prima na Europa.
Segundo informações do “New York Times”, Casement esteve duas vezes na área do Putumayo e coletou evidências de tortura, estupros em massa, mutilações, execuções e perseguições aos índios locais, que tiveram sua população, de acordo com os cálculos do britânico, reduzida de 50 mil para 8 mil pessoas entre 1906 e 1911.
Quando publicou o relatório sobre seu levantamento, em 1912, Casement fez com que Arana tivesse que se explicar às autoridades inglesas. A Peruvian Amazon Company acabou sendo liquidada, num dos primeiros grandes casos de indignação da opinião pública contra os abusos dos direitos humanos.
"The Devil and Mr. Casement - One Man’s Battle for Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness" é da Editora Straus & Giroux.
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Empire of Savagery in the Amazon
The 19th-century doctrine of progress held slavery and capitalism to be incompatible. Coercion, liberals believed, violated the ideals of natural rights and free labor. Wage work, Marxists thought, was more profitable than forced work, and that alone would doom slavery. Then in 1904, nearly four decades after Appomattox, Roger Casement, an Irish-born career diplomat in the British Foreign Office, wrote his Congo report, revealing that King Leopold of Belgium had enriched himself by presiding over a rubber trade founded on pure cruelty. “What has civilization itself been to them?” Casement asked of Leopold’s Congolese victims, 10 million of whom, by some estimates, had perished in but two decades. He himself had the answer: “A thing of horror.”
“The Devil and Mr. Casement,” by Jordan Goodman, the author of several works of history, reconstructs the Casement investigation in the Putumayo region of the Amazon rain forest that followed the Congo report. There, the Peruvian Julio César Arana ruled over a rubber empire of 10,000 square miles, and from 1910 to 1913, Casement exhausted himself trying to force the British government to take action against Arana and his London-incorporated Peruvian Amazon Company. He twice traveled to the Amazon, collecting evidence of whipping, torture, mass rape, mutilation, executions and the hunting of the region’s Indians, whose population Casement calculated had fallen to 8,000 in 1911 from 50,000 in 1906.
Goodman’s book adds to Casement’s reputation as a pioneer of the human rights movement’s tactics, including the on-the-spot investigation, the gathering of victims’ testimony and the leveraging of public outrage to spur reform. Casement was one of the first to use the phrase “crime against humanity,” and he judged Arana to be guilty of “not merely slavery but extermination” — what later would be called genocide.
But Casement’s moral trajectory ran opposite to that of many modern human rights activists. France’s current foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, for example, dropped his youthful support for national liberation movements to embrace what some have criticized as “humanitarian imperialism.” Casement tried at first to use the services of a foreign office to ease suffering. Yet he veered off what he called the “high road to being a regular Imperialist jingo.” His time in Congo and the Amazon deepened his sense of anticolonial solidarity. “I was looking at this tragedy,” he said of Congolese slavery, “with the eyes of another race” — the Irish — “a people once hunted themselves.” Knighted in 1911 for his humanitarian work, he was hanged by the British five years later for conspiring with the Germans on behalf of Irish independence.
Casement’s execution is not the climax of Goodman’s story, because this book doesn’t have a climax. It tapers off without resolution. The British directors of Arana’s company are interrogated by members of Parliament. Reports are issued, sermons are preached, politicians are outraged. Arana appears before Parliament’s committee on the Putumayo, after which he boards a steamer back to Peru untouched. The reader is left to ponder the fate of his indigenous victims.
This is an apt ending to a fine and meticulous book, for a kind of slavery still remains in force in the Amazon. Thousands of workers, for instance, trapped in conditions nearly as dismal as those documented a century ago in the Putumayo, make the charcoal used to forge pig iron, which is then purchased by international corporations to produce the steel used in everyday products, including popular makes of cars.
Arana ultimately lost his company and died broke. Yet the devil continues to get the better of Mr. Casement.
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