American Chica (8 page)

Eventually, Arana decided to import black men from Barbados to consolidate his empire. He needed disciplinarians, punishers. The Caribbeans were tall, imperious, dark as onyx, and they terrified the rain-forest people. He hired two hundred of these colossuses, put whips in their hands, and promised to pay according to how much rubber their Indians could haul. It was a masterful plan. The Barbadians were British subjects, hired into a firm he was making increasingly British: incorporated in England, traded in London, paid for in sterling, ruled by him in the heart of a no-man’s-land. When he saw that the British directors did not object to having British blacks involved, he sent representatives back to Barbados to hire several hundred more.

By 1905, Arana’s Peruvian Amazon Company was exporting one and a half million pounds of rubber a year from the rain forests. Michelin tire factories were screaming for rubber. Gringos were riding it into the motor age. They were buying it up, laying down highways, racing to factories with machine dreams in mind. And the jungle kept right on trickling. The Amazon River and its one thousand tributaries became thick
with steamships, gorged with barges, packed with black gold. By 1907, it was impossible to enter and exit the Putumayo without a permit from an Arana agent. The monopoly had become complete—and its operations legally sanctioned.

THE REPORTS OF
the atrocities began in the early months of 1907. Detailed testimonies from Arana’s former employees appeared in Peruvian newspapers with small circulations. Then, in September of 1907, two articles on the Arana monopoly appeared in
The New York Times.
The news was largely about money. Peruvian rubber was flowing through Liverpool and New York, according to reporters. The money through London and Park Avenue banks. But the most interesting news was how rich the company foremen were getting: One had earned forty thousand dollars from three months in the jungle. It was equivalent to almost a million today.

Sometime later, further details about the Casa Arana appeared in a memo from the U.S. consul in Iquitos to the American secretary of state. In that longish description was a single scene, chilling for its simplicity. A Barbadian guard employed by the Aranas had reported to the consul personally that he had been fired for not punishing one of the female tappers under his supervision. The ex-employee—a tall, black man who spoke good English—said he had refused to strike the woman when his foreman had ordered him to do so. She had a baby strapped to her back and was paying more attention to it than to her work on the trees. The foreman became angry—at the woman for not attending to the rubber, at the guard for not obeying his orders. He grabbed the baby, dashed its brains out against a tree, and screamed at the woman to go back to work. Then he turned and whipped the Barbadian until the man ran for his life.

Days after the American secretary of state received that
memo, Walter Hardenburg, a twenty-one-year-old American, pushed his canoe off the banks of the Putumayo. Eight months later, he stepped into a London press office to send news of the carnage into the breakfast rooms of the civilized world. The young adventurer had been gliding downriver from the Colombian frontier, making his way toward Manaus, where he hoped to find work on the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad. What he stumbled into on his way changed the lovely, bosky image of the Putumayo forever. No one could call it a paradise now.

The Putumayo as witnessed by Hardenburg was a cauldron of violence, a human hecatomb: Rain-forest Indians moved through it in shackles. Their lives could be snuffed out at whim.

The Indians were not paid for their work. They were herded together at gunpoint by the Iron Men, at which time each was offered a can of food, a cooking pot, a mirror.
Comisiones,
these wholesale sweeps were called. In exchange, the captives were told they would have to work to pay off the gifts. Chained to one another, naked, they were led down jungle trails or transported upriver to Iquitos, where they would be sold to overseers for twenty to forty pounds sterling. After that, they were simply working to stay alive.

Slaves who dawdled were made to pull kerosene-soaked sacks over their heads. They were told to wait quietly until the Barbadians set fire to them. Seeing a father burn tended to make a youth work harder. Seeing a little girl run shrieking to the river, her skin melting, tended to make mothers concentrate on the trees.

When slaves ran away, the foremen found ways to track them. One runaway guard told of a tracking party that was trying to locate the whereabouts of a dozen or so fugitive slaves. They ran across an old woman who hadn’t been able to keep up with the others. When she refused to tell them in what direction her people had gone, they tied her hands behind her with a rope. They cut a post, secured it between two trees, hauled her up and
hanged her from it, so that her feet hovered above ground. Then they set dry leaves on fire under her. Even as her feet cooked and her thighs blistered, the woman refused to talk. Finally, the foreman, disgusted with the smell, kicked the pole down and hacked off her head.

In the camps, on airless, mosquito-clouded afternoons when work was finished and foremen were feeling good, the rum would come out, then the Winchesters and the Mannlichers, and target shooting would begin. This, just for fun: Send an Indian running to the river, riddle him with bullets before he gets there. High points if you kill him. Higher still if he never gets wet. Stand a woman out in the clearing with her baby; make her hold out the child while you aim for the round little bull’s-eye of cranium. Brag about it, take a swig, stagger around cackling, until you pull the trigger, explode the skull, splatter the trees with brain.

The first worldwide report on what was really going on in the Casa Arana was issued by a London magazine called
Truth.
The headline read:
THE DEVIL’S PARADISE—A BRITISH-OWNED CONGO.
The reference was to the genocide twenty years before in the Congo, where ten million Africans had been slaughtered under the watch of the Belgian King Leopold. In the text, Walt Hardenburg was quoted:
“Now that the civilized world is aware of what occurs in the vast and tragic forest of the Putumayo, I feel that I have done my duty before God.”
The article in
Truth
was followed by a lightning streak of revelations across world newspapers from Europe to the Americas, North and South.

It was in this very year, 1907, that Pedro Pablo Arana, my great-grandfather, was made governor of Cusco. He had campaigned fervently for a civilian government, certain that the country had invested its army with too much power. He despised the tin-pot tyrannies that self-satisfied generals were prone to, and he believed they were likely as not corrupt. He had fought militarists on
horseback, been elected senator many times over, had run for the vice presidency of the land on the basis of those convictions. The civilian president, Manuel Pardo—the very same man who, ironically, was approving shipments of Mannlichers for Julio César—wanted to reward my great-grandfather for his contributions to the cause of the
civilistas
and so made him the prefect of Cusco. Just as my sixty-year-old great-grandfather was setting his inkpot on his desk in the Cusco prefecture, just as he was ready to reap the rewards of an illustrious political career, a
New York Times
piece about the Arana atrocities was printed, and British pulpits began to resound with his name. When his twenty-five-year-old son unfurled a newspaper in a faculty room in Maine one morning and read about the Mark of Arana, a chill must have mounted his spine.

I imagine my great-grandfather, Pedro Pablo, reeling, stunned, back and forth from Lima to Cusco to his estate in Huancavelica, trying to get a grip on his life. He had been a patriot, a warrior, a hero, a public servant, no more than a cousin to the rubber baron; he had not been prepared for the blot on his family name. He had not anticipated the jungle splatter. Not on his perfect shirts, shiny spats, satin sashes. Not this. His son was writing him desperately from America:
Why don’t you answer my letters?
Querido Papa,
what is going on? Where is the money?
Finally, Pedro Pablo sent his son a telegram.
Come home,
it said.
On the next ship. Money is gone.

Pedro Pablo began trying to salvage what good name he had. He cut off all contact with his extended family in Iquitos. He stepped down from the Cusco governorship and retreated to Huancavelica. He refused to take questions about the “Devil of the Putumayo.” When asked, he responded simply: I have no siblings or ancestors. Not one.

“Judge
me
as you
see
me,” he’d say from that moment forward, “not as you see others who bear my name,” and all attempts to
learn of parents, siblings, or a larger family would be stopped at the first question. But to divorce himself from his clan made him an aberration—a spontaneous generation in a society that nurtured family histories as if they were precious instruments, radar nimble, eggshell fragile, unfailing in their power to triangulate the truth about a man.

The jungle poison seeped through his circle anyway. Pedro Pablo’s wife—my great-grandmother—who had worked tirelessly to help improve the lot of the
indígenas
in the mountains of Huancavelica, had a heart attack and died. Peru’s newly elected president, Augusto Leguía, a landed capitalist who was a personal friend of my great-grandfather and a defender of Julio César Arana, was wounded in an attempted assassination. He slipped off to London to convalesce.

WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER
summoned his son home and quit the governorship of Cusco, he descended from the Inca omphalos in a state of high anxiety, spinning into Lima with a double vertigo: It wasn’t only his name that made him feel like a criminal—he’d been inspired by Julio César. As the rubber baron’s empire had grown, Pedro Pablo had tasted ambition: He’d tried his hand at capitalism, too.

He owned a good stretch of land in the highlands, including a vein of mercury that cut along the cordillera of the Andes. They were rich mines, old mines, with a wretched history he hoped to amend. The largest was the Santa Barbara, an ancient deposit the Spaniards had mined since the late 1500s.
Las minas de muerte.
The mines of death.

Just as Julio César was consolidating his power, Pedro Pablo published a book called
The Mercury Mines of Peru,
in which he proposed that the old mines of Santa Barbara—which now lay on his land—be reopened, so that the country would no longer
be dependent on foreign imports. It was a proposal for investors, a ticket to the Arana boom, and he was ready to create an empire of his own. His book did not shrink from the truth about the abuses Indian workers had endured in earlier centuries. His own venture, he insisted, would be a model for the enlightened world, a leap into gringo modernity. He posed the program to the president of the country and got no reaction. Then he posed the question to his cousin in Iquitos and got the encouragement he desired.

He had fully expected to enter the mercantile world when his duties in Cusco were over. He had not expected the chaos that ensued: the news about the atrocities; the freeze on all Arana bank assets; the realization that beneath his own ambitions, speeches about progress, and attempts to mimic a gringo efficiency, there lurked a terrible, inescapable truth: The mercury would leave his mines the way rubber had left the jungle, the only way hard labor ever got done in the Americas—as when the Incas enslaved the Chimu, the Spaniards enslaved the
cholos,
the half-breeds enslaved the
negros
—on the backs of the darker race.

Pedro Pablo did not need to look far to see that he would never mine Santa Barbara, that he would not match the lucre the northern family had in abundance, that if he could just hold on to his good name, it was all the wealth he would ever want.

His good name. The world was telling him he couldn’t have even that. Imagine a family, the gringos intoned, who put
Indians to work without payment, without food, in nakedness; with women stolen, ravished, and murdered; with Indians flogged until their bones are laid bare, left to die with their wounds festering with maggots, their bodies used as food for their dogs.
Imagine what lower hell those monsters might dig, unchecked.