Backyard Empire: The U.S. in Latin America · Episode 7 of 14 · 45 min
Blood and Marble: The Amazon Rubber Boom's Forgotten Genocide
Around 1900 the world ran on Amazon rubber, which built marble opera houses upriver and produced a great atrocity on the Putumayo, where Julio César Arana's British-registered company enslaved, tortured, and killed Huitoto and Bora people. Three witnesses exposed it, and smuggled seeds then collapsed the boom around 1912. Henry Ford's Fordlandia closes the story, and the worst actors were British-registered Peruvian capital, not American.
Who's who
- Julio César AranaPeruvian rubber baron who controlled the Putumayo operation
- Benjamín Saldaña RoccaPeruvian journalist who published survivor testimony
- Walter HardenburgAmerican engineer whose exposé reached the British public
- Roger Casement+1 more episodeBritish consul who investigated and confirmed the atrocities
- Henry WickhamEnglishman who smuggled rubber seeds out of Brazil in 1876
- Henry FordAutomaker who built Fordlandia to grow his own rubber
Where it happens
- Putumayo River, PeruScene of the enslavement and killing of Indigenous peoples
- Manaus, BrazilBoom city with a marble opera house
- Iquitos, PeruOpulent Amazon rubber city
- Fordlandia, BrazilFord's failed rubber plantation
Timeline
- 1876Wickham ships rubber seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens
- 1907Saldaña Rocca publishes survivor testimony in Iquitos
- 1909Hardenburg's allegations appear in the London magazine Truth
- 1910-1911Casement investigates; his report confirms the atrocities
- 1912Asian plantation rubber overtakes the Amazon and prices collapse
- 1928Ford begins building Fordlandia
Still debated
The Putumayo death toll is genuinely contested, with estimates ranging widely and records deliberately poor. Scholars also debate whether to call it genocide or an extreme labor regime of terror.
