The world has gathered at the city of Belem in the Brazilian state of Para for the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The meeting will be held from November 10-November 21.
This year’s COP comes at a time when the planet has passed a critical climate tipping point, with warm-water coral reefs facing long-term decline, endangering millions of livelihoods.
But even more poignant is the venue of the event. Belem is the entry point to the Amazon biome. It is something Brazilian President Luz Inacio Lula da Silva himself emphasised when he told world leaders gathered at Belem that the city’s symbolism ran deep as the Amazon is both the planet’s greatest climate stabiliser and its most endangered ecosystem.
Christopher Columbus reached the mouth of the Orinoco river on August 1, 1498, during his third voyage, further west from the Amazon’s mouth where Belem is. Later, Francisco de Orellana travelled the length of the Amazon river, from the Andes to its mouth, reaching the latter on August 26, 1542. He gave the river its name.
These ‘explorations’ triggered the colonisation of the Amazon and the South American continent, which proved to be disastrous for its indigenous peoples.
But time and again, there were people who protested against the ill-treatment of the ‘Indians’ of the Americas. There was the Dominican friar, Bartolome de las Casas, who famously advocated indigenous American rights back in the 1500s itself.
Cut to the 20th century and there was Roger Casement. Though far removed in time from las Casas, he nevertheless similarly advocated for indigenous Amerindians of the Amazon. What is more, he served in Belem, where COP starts from tomorrow.
Casement had already successfully campaigned for the rights of black Africans in the Congo, another great rainforest like the Amazon, in 1905. Then ruled by the Belgians under King Leopold II, the Congolese were subjected to terrible atrocities, being used as slave labour to extract rubber.
In 1908, he was stationed at Belem as British Consul. Casement used his time in Belém to go right into the heart of the Amazon by river. He observed and developed a deeper empathy for the indigenous communities who were being exploited by the extractive rubber industry, like in the Congo.
His empathies for the Indians of the Amazon were soon tested.
In 1910, reports emerged of alleged human rights abuses of indigenous people by the Peruvian Amazon Company in the Putumayo region, a disputed border zone in North West Amazonia.
Since the company was registered in London and many of its employees in the Putumayo were Barbadians and thus British citizens, the British Government formed a commission to probe the matter.
“The commission left Southampton on 23 July 1910. They arrived to the Brazilian rubber port of Belem do Pará on 8th August…The group arrived in Iquitos on 31 August and soon after left for La Chorrera,” Javier Farje writes in his 2003 dissertation, Roger Casement and the Putumayo atrocities.
On September 22, 1901, Casement and the rest of the team arrived in La Chorrera, the headquarters of the Peruvian Amazon Company in the Putumayo region to investigate.
What Casement saw was damning. Indigenous tribes such as the Huitotos, Andokes, and Boras were forced to collect rubber under a brutal debt peonage system.
Not just that, he recorded widespread use of floggings, torture and shootings. Many indigenous women were raped by employees of the Company.
The atrocities are estimated to have caused the deaths of 30,000 to 40,000 indigenous people
Casement’s findings were published in a British government Blue Book in 1912. It led to a global scandal. It also led to the British Government knighting Casement.
His work in the Congo and later in the Putumayo made Casement a firm anti-imperialist. His writings are full of references to the Indians of the Putumayo, who he says, have been thoroughly wronged, as have been the indigenous peoples of South America.
In his 2010 article, “Indians, you had life – your white destroyers only possess things”: Situating Networks of Indigeneity in the Anti-Colonial Activism of Revolutionary Ireland, researcher Angus Mitchell notes:
Mid-way through his Putumayo investigation in 1910 he wrote how the tragedy of the South American Indian is, I verily believe, the greatest in the world to-day, and certainly it has been the greatest human wrong for well-nigh the last 400 years that history records.
Again, in his 2016 article Histories of Red Rubber Revisited: Roger Casement's Critique of Empire, Mitchell points out:
By 1912, during his cross-examination by the Parliamentary select committee inquiry, he used the term again: “These people have absolutely no human rights much less civil rights. They are hunted and chased like wild animals … They cannot own their own bodies …” (Casement’s Report 2845-6).
Farje, in his dissertation, also points to another quote by Casement which shows his sympathy for the Indians of the Amazon.
“In an article published in the Contemporary Review in the autumn of 1913, he wrote: ―Is it too late to hope that by means of the same humane and brotherly agency, something of the goodwill and kindness of Christian life may be imparted to the remote, friendless, and lot children of the forest?”
Interestingly, Casement also praised the Amazon biome in his writing, something that is so commonplace in this age of climate change.
Irish academic Séamas Ó Síocháin in his 2003 paper 'More power to the Indians': Roger Casement, the Putumayo, and indigenous rights, notes:
In the Putumayo, his phrase ‘truly a civilising company’ (applied to the Peruvian Amazon Company) was used with irony. Elsewhere, he talked of an invasion of ‘barbarism’. And, in typical language, wrote: ‘The forest, with its wild creatures, is happier far than the “centres of civilisation” these Peruvian and Colombian miscreants have created and floated into a great London Company’.
In 1914, he travelled by ship from Scotland to Canada and thence to the United States. Mitchell notes that it was then that Casement made an extraordinary observation about indigenous Americans:
Poor Indians, you had life – your white destroyers only possess things. That is the vital distinction I take it between the “savage” and the civilized man. The savage is – the white man has. The one lives and moves to be; the other toils and dies to have. From the purely human point of view the savage has the happier and purer life – doubtless the civilized toiler makes the greater world. It is “civilization” versus the personal joy of life.
Within a few years of the Putumayo affair, Casement’s life turned upside down. His anti-imperialist views led him to solicit the help of Germany, Britain’s rival in World War I, in order to gain freedom for Ireland. He was arrested. Also, at this time, his personal papers revealed him to be homosexual, something illegal at the time in Britain.
Casement was executed in 1916 in London after being executed for high treason.
But even as he awaited death, Casement did not forget the Indians for whose rights he had fought and argued. In a letter to his friend Richard Morten while awaiting trial in the Tower of London in 1916, Casement wrote:
“The poor Indians … The whole world is a sorry place, Dick, but it is our fault, our fault. We reap what we sow, not altogether but we get our deserts – all except the Indians and such like. They get more than they deserved – they never sowed what ‘civilization’ gave them as the price of toil”.
The story of Casement was immortalised by Peruvian Nobel laureate in literature Mario Vargas Llosa in his 2010 novel, The Dream of the Celt (Spanish: El sueño del celta). Today, Casement is not only an icon for indigenous but also gay rights.