Word: arana
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness,” makes explicit allusion to Joseph Conrad’s famous novella, especially apt given the fact that Conrad and Casement met in 1889 in the Congo Free State. Casement’s own description of Arana recalls “the unseen presence of victorious corruption” that Marlow senses in Colonel Kurtz. “There is no doubt the brute has courage—a horrid, fearful courage, and endurance, and a cunning mind too... This is an educated man of a sort...
...height, very lithe and sinewy... A long lean, swarthy Vandyke type of face, graven with power and withal of great gentleness.” Casement emerges as a brave and sensitive campaigner with a strong sense of moral purpose, dogged in his pursuit of Arana, who, having driven out all competition for rubber-production in Iquitos by 1907, had succeeded in “turning the Putumayo region into his personal fiefdom...
Goodman’s account of these events is commendably clear, but he often presents the story and its characters in reductively simple terms. As the book’s title suggests, Goodman frames Casement’s clash with Arana as a battle between good and evil, between defenders and abusers of human rights, between heartfelt humanitarianism and ruthless capitalism. This is, to an extent, justified, given the enormity of the crimes committed against the native population of Putumayo by the Peruvian Amazon Company in the name of Europe’s ever-increasing demand for rubber...