Word: casementã
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...death in 1916, Casement worked tirelessly to bring the man he considered responsible—the Peruvian rubber baron, Julio César Arana—to justice. In “The Devil and Mr. Casement,” British historian Jordan Goodman offers a dispassionate account of Casement??s struggle to expose and put an end to the atrocities wrought by Arana’s company in the Putumayo River Basin of northern Peru. But while Goodman’s chronicle of colonial-era corruption is admirably detailed, Goodman fails to identify the ethical complexities...
...same way that details of the violence committed by and against the employees of the Peruvian Amazon Company surfaced slowly in the British press in the three years leading up to the Casement??s 1912 report, Goodman deploys his sources gradually, amassing eyewitness accounts alongside official reports. Goodman cites descriptions of gang rape, the torture of children (by burning their hands and feet until they betrayed the whereabouts of their parents), and deliberate regimes of starvation—all tactics to maintain an atmosphere of terror in which the Indians would not dare to fall short...
...egregiousness of Arana’s crimes is most bluntly expressed, though, in a single statistic from Casement??s report: between 1906 and 1911 the Indian population of the Putumayo region declined from 50,000 to 8,000. These deaths were not part of a systematic extermination campaign, but were the products of a deep vein of institutionalised violence symptomatic of colonial subjugation...
...Devil and Mr Casement?? succeeds in bringing the principal players of the story to life in brisk, unadorned prose, and with frequent recourse to historical sources. We cannot help but share Goodman’s obvious admiration for Casement, who had established his humanitarian credentials in 1903 with a report exposing the wholesale abuse of the native population—again, in the name of rubber production—of the Congo Free State under King Leopold II of Belgium. “Wherever he went and whomever he met, Roger Casement rarely failed to make a deep...