Word: putumayo
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...worrying lack of “civilization” in the Putumayo basin crops up repeatedly in Casement’s correspondence and in his 1912 report. Troublingly, though, Casement’s vocabulary goes unremarked upon by Goodman, who appears not to notice that Casement, at least in the early stages of his investigation, did not view Arana’s dealings in the Putumayo in opposition to some universal ethical standard, but to the imperial “mission civilisatrice.” Casement is dismayed, for example, that “there are no civilized authorities...
...present Casement’s story as emblematic of the conflicted, traumatized, and transitional consciousness of colonial operators in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, in attributing to Casement an unalloyed concern for “human rights,” Goodman simplifies where he should have complicated: while the Putumayo revelations contributed much to the burgeoning discourse of human rights, the movement would not gain momentum until the Interwar years and beyond, as a product of the agonized transitions to independence made by many former colonies, and, of course, the fallout from the nakedly imperialist ambitions of the Third Reich...