Between the 1880s and 1913 the rubber enterprise built by Julio Cesar Arana in the Putumayo basin, incorporated in London in 1907 as the Peruvian Amazon Company, extracted rubber through the compulsory labour of Huitoto, Bora, Andoke, Ocaina and related peoples, held by debt, hostage-taking of women and children, and armed overseers, many of them Barbadian labourers recruited by the company. The system was exposed by the American engineer Walter Hardenburg and the Iquitos newspaper La Sancion, and investigated in 1910-1911 by the British consul Roger Casement, who described it in his report to the Foreign Office — published as a parliamentary Blue Book in 1912 — as a system not merely of slavery but of extermination, documenting floggings, mutilation, starvation, rape and mass shootings. A House of Commons Select Committee on Putumayo reported in 1913. Estimates of Indigenous deaths across the period run to 30,000-40,000, with the Huitoto population reduced by around nine-tenths; the company was wound up but no perpetrator in Peru was convicted. The atlas had nothing on the Amazon rubber boom.
The Peruvian Amazon Company under Julio Cesar Arana held Huitoto, Bora, Andoke, Ocaina and neighbouring peoples in debt bondage on rubber stations, enforced by armed overseers
No census was taken; the figure of roughly 50,000 Huitoto, Bora, Andoke, Ocaina, Resígaro and Muinane derives from Roger Casement's 1911 investigation and Peruvian Amazon Company station registers, and later scholarship estimates that around nine in ten of the targeted populations were destroyed. Individual data points support the scale of collapse: the Resígaro numbered fewer than thirty by 1911, and the Último Retiro station's workforce fell from about 2,000 to about 200 by 1912.
The commonly cited range, derived from Casement's population estimates and from later anthropological reconstruction of Huitoto and Bora numbers; higher figures circulate in Colombian accounts but rest on the same thin base. Deaths came from shooting, flogging, starvation and disease under the labour regime, in proportions that were never recorded.
Roger Casement's 1911 report to the British Foreign Office and the depositions of thirty Barbadian company employees taken by him document the floggings, mutilations, shootings, starvation, rapes and hostage-taking of women and children.
Colombia