This is the reality. Genocide didn’t just happen a couple of hundred years ago. These Indigenous men of the Amazon were enslaved by rubber extractors in Brazil, 1912. “The rubber boom had a significant negative effect on the indigenous population across Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. The rubber barons rounded up all the Indians and forced them to tap rubber out of the trees. One plantation started with 50,000 Indians and when discovered of the killings, only 8,000 were still alive. Slavery and gross human rights abuses were widespread, and *in some areas 90% of the Indian population was wiped out*.
“Roger Casement, an Irishman travelling the Putumayo region of Peru as a British consul during 1910-1911 documented the abuse, slavery, murder and use of stocks for torture against the native Indians: ‘The crimes charged against many men now in the employ of the Peruvian Amazon Company are of the most atrocious kind, including murder, violation, and constant flogging.’
Tens of thousands died under the severe conditions, forced to work for the international Rubber Development Corporation. “The United States government paid the Brazilian government $100 for every worker delivered to the Amazon. Thousands from various regions of Brazil were transported under force to obligatory servitude. Many suffered death by tropical diseases of the region, such as malaria and yellow fever. The northeast region sent 54,000 workers to the Amazon alone, 30,000 of which were from Ceará. These new rubber workers were called soldados da borracha (“rubber soldiers”) in a clear allusion to the role of the latex in supplying the U.S. factories with the rubber necessary to fight the war. For many workers, it was a one-way journey. About 30,000 rubber workers died in the Amazon, after having exhausted their energies extracting the “white gold.” They died of malaria, yellow fever, and hepatitis. They also suffered attacks by animals such as panthers, serpents, and scorpions. The Brazilian government did not fulfill its promise to return the “rubber soldiers” to their homes at the end of the war as heroes and with housing comparable to that of the military veterans. It is estimated that only about 6,000 workers managed to return to their homes, at their own expense.“
This history underlines again the conditions under which people die en masse of diseases (see the brawl over claims of <you can’t call it genocide, because smallpox couldn’t be helped> two posts down.) Systematic oppression has everything to do with it. — with Bruce Winfield, Voces Multifónicas andMultifónicos Xöömij.
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