Julio César Arana del Águila

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Julio César Arana del Águila (around 1912)

Julio César Arana del Águila (born July 6, 1864 in Rioja , San Martín , Peru , † July 9, 1952 in Magdalena del Mar , Lima , Peru) was a Peruvian businessman , rubber trader and politician during the rubber boom . As head of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company in London , he became internationally known in 1909 through an article by the journalist Walter Hardenburg in the British magazine Truth , in which a brutal exploitation of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region at Putumayu , which was then disputed between Peru and Colombia , was described and the 1910 led to an official investigation by a commission headed by Roger Casement . This led to the result that Arana was responsible for the enslavement and violent death of thousands of indigenous people, but legal prosecution failed at the beginning of the First World War . Arana became senator for the Loreto region and chairman of the local chamber of commerce.

Life

Julio César Arana del Águila grew up as the son of a hatter . At 14 he began trading Panama hats as his father's apprentice , and in 1881, at 16, opened his own shop in Yurimaguas . To do this, he roamed the Amazon rainforest of Peru and traded rubber first for hats and then increasingly for road stuffs for rubber extraction. In the course of the rubber boom , other “rubber barons” such as Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald had already brought various areas of the jungle under their control. During this time he married Eleonora Zumaeta, with whose brother Pablo he opened a base for the rubber trade in Tarapoto in 1888 . In 1889 he moved to Iquitos on the Amazon , from where he expanded his trade to the area of Putumayu , which was then on both banks of Peru . Soon afterwards he sent his wife and children to Biarritz , France .

From 1896, Arana worked closely with rubber entrepreneurs in neighboring Colombia , including Larrañaga, Ramírez y Cía and de La Chorrera, who were active in the areas of the Igaraparaná , Caraparaná and tributaries of the Putumayo and with whom he set up a steam train for rubber transport to Iquitos. In order to get cheap labor and thus to be competitive against competitors, Arana decided in 1899 to exploit the numerous indigenous people living along the Putumayu as labor for rubber extraction. Initially, they collected rubber for the company in exchange for knives, axes and other tools, but they soon recognized the disadvantages and refused to cooperate. As early as 1900, Arana began, in collaboration with the rubber company Calderón on Putumayu , to enslave indigenous people from the Huitoto , Andoque , Bora and Nonuya ethnic groups from the banks of the Cara-Paraná, the upper Cahuinarí and the Igara-Paraná for rubber production. At the same time, the indigenous peoples were prevented from activities to secure their subsistence - hunting, gathering and cultivation.

From 1904, Arana employed two hundred armed men from Barbados with the task of "civilizing the Indians" and recapturing or killing those who had fled . According to eyewitness accounts, the armed guards made sure that the indigenous people worked without a break. There were separate facilities in which forced laborers who did not bring in the required amounts of rubber were tortured. Violence against family members was also used to make slave workers lawful. This meant that indigenous peoples like the Huitoto were gathering a raw material with which they could not do anything and were no longer able to pursue their traditional self-sufficiency.

In 1902 Arana became Alcalde of Iquitos , and soon afterwards he assumed a number of other offices such as chairing the Chamber of Commerce and the Junta Departamental of Loreto. In 1903, Arana opened a branch in Manaus , Brazil to prevent commission agents from seeping in , and founded the trading company JC Arana y Hnos. (JC Arana and brothers), with whom he quickly obtained the rights to eventually 45 collection centers. He also opened offices in London and New York and founded the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company in London in 1907 with a capital of one million pounds sterling , which now replaced his family business. Here he was managing director and was supported by four directors from England.

Its growing economic power enabled Arana to gain control over rubber production and trade on the Colombian side. His former partners complained to the Colombian government that he had secured his rights by naked gun violence, but the government did not respond. So it came about that Arana's competitors also contributed to the spread of his reputation as the butcher of men.

Enslaved Amazon Indians, from Walter Ernest Hardenburg : The Putumayo, the Devil's Paradise (1912)

On August 9, 1907, the journalist Benjamín Saldaña Rocca (or Roca) filed a complaint in the court in Iquitos against Arana and employees of his Peruvian Amazon Rubber Co. for torture, rape and murder of indigenous rubber collectors and their families from the Putumayu region. He published articles regularly in his two bi- weekly newspapers, La Felpa and La Sanción in Iquitos, but Arana was unmolested. Saldaña's son had contacts with the American engineer Walter Hardenburg , who had set out for the Amazon region in 1907 to prepare the construction of a railway line from the Brazilian city of Madeira to Mamoré in Bolivia.

On the way to Brazil, Hardenburg was kidnapped in 1908 in the border area between Colombia and Peru by Arana's armed men who did not tolerate strangers in Arana's area of ​​influence. Hardenburg witnessed the company's practices as a prisoner of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Co. He watched worked hard as indigenous forced labor, raw rubber dragged into the warehouses and hundreds of them due to lack of performance of Aranas Barbadian men flogged were. In early 1909, Hardenburg was released and decided to go to Iquitos to collect evidence, including articles from Saldaña's newspapers. However, Saldaña was lonely with his small newspaper publisher against the other newspapers in Iquitos, which were financially dependent on Arana. According to Hardenburg, Saldaña was last seen in Iquitos in February 1909, when he was beaten to the quay with a battered face , for which Hardenburg blamed Arana's brother-in-law Pablo Zumaeta. His print shop on Morona Street in Iquitos was set on fire the same day. The ship took him to Yurimaguas, from where he traveled to Lima. Saldaña later published two newspapers in Cerro de Pasco , but was shot dead by a killer on April 17, 1912 at the age of 52.

Roger Casement in Putumayo.

In 1909 Hardenburg traveled to London, where he met representatives of the British Anti-Slavery and Aboriginal Protection Society and the British newspaper Truth , which was also supplied with material from Saldaña. Truth then published several articles by her colleague GC Paternoster about Arana and the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, with the talk of more than 40,000 by these murdered indigenous people on Putumayu. The finding that the company responsible was an English company with headquarters in London and with English directors and shareholders caused great unrest in the English public. The public outrage prompted an official investigation by the UK Foreign Office. In 1910 Sir Roger Casement , who had dealt with the so-called Congo Abominations a few years earlier , was sent to Peru and traveled through the Putumayu region. In 1911 he returned to England and came to the conclusion that the situation on Putumayu was even worse than described by Saldaña. Casement sent a copy of his report to the British Society against Slavery, demanding that Arana's crimes be prosecuted. In 1912 Walter Hardenberg's extensive monograph The Putumayo, the Devil's Paradise was published .

It was, after all, World War I that prevented prosecution by British courts. In Peru, he benefited from his country's border conflict with Colombia and Ecuador over the Putumayu region, where he was able to distinguish himself as a representative of Peruvian interests. The Peruvian government first appointed the judge Carlos Valcárcel and then, in early 1911, his colleague Rómulo Paredes to investigate the allegations made against Arana. The result after more than four months was a 1200-page report on human rights violations by the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, whereupon Valcárcel issued around 200 arrest warrants. Arana, on the other hand, offered a bounty for the murder of the judge, which is why Valcárcel had to leave the country and Arana was spared prosecution.

At the end of 1912 there was a six-month investigation by a parliamentary committee, with Arana denying any knowledge of crimes and pointing out the responsibility of his staff. At the same time he emphasized the merits of his company in civilizing the region with its wild Indians. In the investigation report, Arana was accused of "cold indifference" and "culpable knowledge", but this did not result in any action against Arana.

Arana continued his political career: in the 1920s he was elected as senator for the Loreto region in the Peruvian parliament in Lima, where he worked successfully for many years. The focus of his work was the economic progress in the Amazon region of Peru, among other things through the development for oil production or the establishment of the Colegio Nacional de Iquitos by law No. 5100 of May 18, 1925. Arana was one of the fiercest opponents of the from 1922 negotiated contract of Salomón-Lozano , through which the area around the Amazon city of Leticia and thus also possessions of Aranas were awarded to Colombia, and wrote a pamphlet on this in 1927 with the title El protocolo Salomón-Lozano . When the treaty was signed in 1927, it organized local protests, which indigenous peoples in the region were also obliged to participate.

After the end of the presidency of Augusto B. Leguía y Salcedo on August 27, 1930, Arana withdrew from politics. The Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company existed as a company until 1920, but Arana itself operated its rubber business in the region until the Colombian-Peruvian War in 1932, as a result of which Peru had to renounce its claims to land north of the Putumayu in 1934. Arana had to cede his possessions, which had fallen to Colombia, north of the Putumayu and in Leticia to the Colombian government, for which he and his family received US $ 160,000 in compensation.

He died in Lima in 1952 at the age of 88 as a respected man who had rendered service to the national interests of Peru. The payments from the Colombian government to his family, brokered through his agent in Iquitos, Víctor Israel, were completed in 1964.

Literary processing

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa describes Julio César Arana in detail in his 2010 novel El sueño del celta (German 2011 The Dream of the Celt ), at the center of which he was involved in the investigation of the atrocities of Putumayu, but executed in London in 1916 as an Irish independence fighter Roger Casement is standing.

literature

  • Ovidio Lagos: Arana, rey del caucho: terror y atrocidades en el Alto Amazonas . Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires 2005.
  • Charles C. Mann: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York City 2011, pp. 247–249 (cf. excerpt from another edition: Chapter 7: Black Gold . Pp. 329–332).
  • Wade Davis: One River - Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest . Simon and Schuster, New York City 2010. pp. 236-239.
  • Luisa Abad González: Etnocidio y resistencia en la Amazonía peruana . Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Cuenca (España) 2003. pp. 176-179.
  • José Eustasio Rivera: La Vorágine . Edición crítica, Flor María Rodríguez Arenas. Stockcero, Doral (Florida) 2013.
  • Walter Ernest Hardenburg: The Putumayo: The Devil's Paradise; Travels in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account of the Atrocities Committed Upon the Indians Therein . T. Fisher Unwin, London 1912. 347 pages.
  • Michael T. Taussig: Culture of Terror - Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture . Society for Comparative Studies of Society and History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985. 16 pages.
  • Sir Roger Casement : The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Edited by Angus Mitchell. Anaconda Editions, London 1997.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Clements R. Markham (1913): The Putumayu and the Question of Boundaries between Peru and Colombia . The Geographical Journal 41 (2), pp. 145-147.
  2. ^ Mariano Ospina Peña: El paraiso del diablo ( Memento of October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). Caballeros Andantes.
  3. ↑ Wade Davis: One River - Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest . Simon and Schuster, New York 2010. pp. 236-239.
personal data
SURNAME Arana del Águila, Julio César
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Peruvian entrepreneur, rubber trader and politician during the rubber boom
DATE OF BIRTH July 6, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH Rioja , San Martín , Peru
DATE OF DEATH July 9, 1952
Place of death Magdalena del Mar , Lima , Peru