The mystery of the missing Amazonian rubber slaves

[Judi Lynn]

The mystery of the missing Amazonian rubber slaves
Two men brought to the UK to highlight their tribe's fate never made it back home
By Tom Peck
Tuesday, 2 August 2011

Omarino was exchanged for a pair of trousers and a shirt. Ricudo was won in a game of cards.

The British public first met the embattled gazes of the two men 100 years ago when their faces appeared in the pages of the Daily News. The British consul Roger Casement had brought them to Britain from their homes in the Colombian Amazon to highlight the fate of their people.

In the United States, Henry Ford's Model T cars, with their revolutionary vulcanised rubber tyres, were flying off production lines. Thousands of miles to the south, the tribes of the Amazon rainforest were being enslaved, tortured and murdered in the thousands to feed the boom in the rubber that grows on trees there.

Now, Fany Kuiro, from the same Witoto Indian tribe as Omarino and Ricudo, has appealed to the world to find out what happened to her two "indigenous brothers... so that our ancestors' spirits can rest in peace".

More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-mystery-of-the-missing-amazonian-rubber-slaves-2330280.html

[derby378]

1. I'm ashamed to say I thought of something completely different...

...when I saw the phrase "rubber slaves." Did I just stumble into a lost episode of G4's Attack of the Show! where Candace Bailey had the mistress thing going on?

:rofl:

[Judi Lynn]

2. No wonder we've been taught, told so little about what has happened in Latin America.

It has been a nightmare from the first day Europeans set foot on American soil.

More from the article, shocking to U.S. Americans who have had no idea what happened to the indigenous Americans prior to the OTHER hellish slavery:

Mr Casement, an Irishman, had been working as the British consul in Rio de Janeiro when he was sent by the British government to investigate atrocities in the Amazon at the hands of the Peruvian Amazon Company and its British directors. "Alas! Poor Peruvian, poor South American Indian!" he wrote in his diary. "The world thinks the slave trade was killed a century ago! The worst form of slave trade and slavery – worse in many of its aspects, as I shall show – than anything African savagery gave birth to, has been in full swing here for 300 years.

"The dwindling remnant of a population once numbering millions is now perishing at the doors of an English company, under the lash, the chains, the bullet, the machete to give its shareholders a dividend."

Mr Casement wrote in great detail of the horrific treatment of the Amazonian Indians, estimating that at least 30,000 people in the Putumayo region of Southern Colombia had been tortured, murdered or forced into slavery.

"We are sent far, far into the forest to get rubber, and if we do not get it, or if we do not get it quickly enough, we are shot," Omarino told the Daily News, a popular national newspaper founded and edited by Charles Dickens. "London is very wonderful, but the great river and the forest, where the birds fly, is more beautiful. One day we shall go back."

It's not at all hard to believe now that corporate people are more than happy to destroy others in order to enhance their own life "styles."

[Arctic Dave]

3. After reading "Open veins of Latin America",

I'm sure the story does not end well.

[xchrom]

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