Putumayo Rubber Terror
British capital and Amazon forced labor
In the Putumayo rubber boom, the Peruvian Amazon Company (British-registered) and its agents enslaved Huitoto and other peoples through debt peonage, flogging, mutilation, and massacre. British consular investigation exposed the system while London capital had already taken the surplus.
Damage
The British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company ran a slave-labor rubber regime of torture and massacre in the Putumayo.
Lives lost
Tens of thousands Indigenous dead (Roger Casement-era estimates, order-of-magnitude)
Value lost
Rubber profits to London finance and company shareholders
Record Points
- Company posts used hostage-taking and terror quotas to force rubber delivery.
- Casement's reports documented killings, starvation, and sexual violence.
- Shareholders and directors sat in Britain while the killing fields ran on the Amazon frontier.
- Indigenous populations in the Putumayo collapsed under the rubber regime.
- The scandal forced parliamentary attention without restoring the dead.
Perpetrator(s)
Victims
Putumayo Indigenous peoplesPeruColombia