In Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees, Michael Stanfield sets out to provide an in-depth account of local, regional, national, and global factors that led to campaigns of forced labor, indebtedness, widespread cruelty, and even genocide among indigenous Amazonian peoples of the Putumayo and adjacent river basins of northwestern Amazonia. A secondary goal is to show how the dynamics of this historical tragedy were to some extent fashioned by local actors, including indigenous people, in addition to exponentially increasing demands for latex in the industrializing economies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book is quite successful at achieving these goals.
Red Rubber is remarkably effective at demonstrating the extent to which Rubber Boom terror and genocide were products of instabilities within and competition among three nation-states: Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador. Numerous local rebellions in the Iquitos area and lack of strong lines of transportation and communication with the Peruvian capital in Lima gave rubber barons such as Julio César Arana a strategic power vacuum in which to build mafia-like pyramids of power. Civil war in Colombia (1899-1902) and bickering between church and state officials in Ecuador provided additional space for Casa Arana to develop its stranglehold over the Putumayo’s indigenous inhabitants. These regional and national frailties and contestations are documented in chapters on “Regional Administrations,” “Peruvian Consolidation,” and “International Connections” (chaps. 4, 5, and 6). The themes of weak nationalism and border skirmishing continue to crop up in the detailed accounts of the Putumayo scandal (chaps. 7 and 8) and subsequent busting of the Rubber Boom during World War I and later years (chaps. 9 and 10).
Stanfield is a careful historian. His assertion that “hearsay, politically inspired allegations, and fear do not suffice as a burden of proof” (p. 223 n. 61) is sound advice for any historical researcher aspiring to reach high standards. Stanfield also includes useful charts on such topics as the simultaneous decline of rubber gathering in Amazonia and increase in rubber production on South Asian plantations. This attention to global economic trends is important, since the worst atrocities against indigenous laborers and their families coincided with the decline of wild Amazonian rubber’s market value.
Red Rubber is a valuable resource not only for historians of Latin America but also for anthropologists, economists, and other social scientists. Stanfield is to be commended for his efforts to integrate anthropological knowledge of indigenous social organization, myth, ritual, and history into his historiography. Anthropologists will no doubt want more complete treatment of the delicate subject of ritual cannibalism (e.g., recent studies of Yanomami, Araweté, and Tupí-Guaraní practices). On myth and oral history, Stanfield writes that “myth defines, teaches, and preserves culture and historical consciousness” (p. 7) but omits any reference to a volume I edited entitled Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past (Urbana, 1988), which contains several indigenous histories of the Rubber Boom in upper Amazonia. Stanfield’s treatment of hierarchy and warfare in Putumayo societies could be strengthened by a broader reading of anthropological studies on ranked hierarchies in northwestern Amazonia. Moreover, it is historically inaccurate to suggest that the pre-Rubber Boom “exploitative practices” among Huitoto, Carijona, and other indigenous peoples were pristine, or precontact cultural practices. Instead, hierarchy and warfare of the pre-Rubber Boom period must be understood as the result of missionization, depopulation, slavery, and other colonial processes of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries as they intersected with indigenous forms of hierarchy and violence.
These criticisms point to the need for stronger collaboration between the disciplines of history and anthropology. Red Rubber is a fine, meticulously researched treatment of one of the most infamous campaigns of forced labor in modern history.