American Chica

by Marie Arana

  I found mention of my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana in the first book I looked at—a Latin-American encyclopedia. Peruvian hero, it said, led the last known populist uprising against the military in 1895. Pedro Pablo had been secretary of war in a revolution against the military machine of General Andres Caceres, president of Peru. “The rule of law over the rule of force!” was his battle cry, and he led three hundred rebels on horseback—springing unexpected from the cordillera—in the 1895 insurrection at Huancayo. But the card catalogs led me to far more mentions of another Arana, Julio César Arana—row upon row of references with provocative rubrics attached to them: atrocities, London investors, trials, dungeons, human-rights organizations, Mark of Arana. And so, although I’d never gone looking for Julio César, his ghost beckoned me to the task. I decided to learn why his name never failed to raise eyebrows. Why, every time I asked my family to tell me about Julio César Arana, the answer had been unequivocal: “Oh, there are so many Aranas, Marisi. He has nothing to do with you.”

  The facts, as I came upon them in that Stanford library, were as follows: Julio César had been born in 1864 in Rioja, a town in northern Peru, on the cusp of the cordillera and the Amazon jungle. The year he was born, my great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana was a university student, graduate of a prestigious Lima school, bound for a career in law. In 1882, as my great-grandfather made senatorial declamations from podiums in the southern highlands of Huancavelica, eighteen-year-old Julio César decided to try his hand at fortune in Yurimaguas, a musty little jungle outpost on the Huallaga River. He began forays into the rain forest, searching for cauchos, rubber trees. Rubber was on the verge of a boom—black gold, oro negro, they called it—and the Amazon was thick with it.

  As some accounts have it, Julio César was the son of a jipijapa-hatmaker and spent a barefoot childhood hawking hats from the back of a mule. The real history is far more complicated. His father did own a straw-hat business in Rioja, but the Aranas were a network of pioneers, capitalists, and politicians. Our part of the clan had originated in the historic city of Cajamarca, where Pizarro and the Incas first came face to face. One Arana remained in Cajamarca and started a business in precious metals. Another—Julio César’s father—settled in Rioja and made his fortune in the Panama-hat boom. A third—Benito Arana—went to Loreto, to try his hand in politics. A fourth—Gregorio Arana, my ancestor—went south to the highlands of Ayacucho and Huancavelica, to the silver and mercury mines.

  By the time Julio César was three, an Arana was already cutting a path through the jungle for him. Benito Arana, governor of Loreto, Peru’s Amazon state, opened the way for rubber fortunes by navigating the Ucayali, the Pachitea, and the Palcazu. The governor was not thinking of rubber only. He was on a mission to dispel the notion that the Amazon was unsafe for commercial development. He decided to make a show of that point by going downriver himself.

  There was good reason entrepreneurs were wary of the jungle. Two young sailors by the names of Tavara and West had been lost in the land of Cashibo cannibals, and Benito Arana decided to find out exactly what had happened to them. In the company of a journalist, Governor Arana made his way to the heart of Cashibo territory. He strode into the camp, searched out the largest hut, and called for the fearsome chief, Yanacuna, to come out and say what had become of the boys. Yanacuna’s wife ran out of the hut in a fury, accusing Benito Arana of invading sacred territory. Two intruders had come into Yanacuna’s village, she cried to him. Dos hombres de hierro! Iron Men, toting their iron torches. They had cooked up quite nicely, in thirteen clay pots, over thirteen fires. The chief’s wife flung down two jawbones—two sets of teeth—at Governor Arana’s feet. There are your “boys,” she snarled. Take a look. The same could happen to you.

  When Benito Arana returned to Iquitos, it was as Moses descending from Mount Sinai with commandments: The rain-forest Indians were beasts, not people. They were less than simian, incapable of real, human feeling. Henceforward they would be dealt with as animals. And with that, a road was paved; two decades later, my ancestor Julio César would travel it.

  He was a charismatic man, Julio César: a ringleader, a schemer. He was straight-backed, with powerful shoulders, a high, arrogant forehead, and a weakness for elegant clothes. By eighteen, he’d decided to make a career in rubber. He married Eleonora Zumaeta, a small-town aristocrat, and with her brother established an enterprise called J. C. Arana Brothers, Inc. By twenty, he’d recruited an army of foremen. By twenty-five, he was buying up land from Colombian adventurers, putting rain-forest Indians to work—forcibly—by the thousands, running a business from Iquitos to Manaus, two medullas of rubber that would drive the automobile into the industrial age. By the turn of the century, Julio César had finagled enough leases and staked enough claims to master the rubber-rich Putumayo, a lush stretch of jungle between two tributaries that echoed his name: the Igaraparaná and the Caraparaná.

  Precious rubber, white latex, caucho: The Amazon was pulsing with it, and nowhere in that jungle was it more copious than the Putumayo, the ungovernable border where Colombia faces Peru—the very point at which the cocaine plant now flourishes. The finest rubber—Para fine hard—was to be found in twelve thousand acres of land no flag had laid formal claim to: the territory between Peru and Colombia that Julio César Arana had established as his. His armies of slaves hacked their way into the green, sending caracaras and marmosets screeching back in retreat. The cauchos—“trees that weep white tears,” as the Omagua call them—were slashed, drained, their desiccated trunks left to creak in the wind.

  The entire Putumayo was under the rule of this one man: The “Casa Arana” had a monopoly on Para rubber, and treasure hunters from as far away as Pakistan and Australia streamed to Peru to work for its founder. Julio César had put Iquitos—a jungle outpost that was unreachable by land—on the map of the civilized world. He had made it one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. He had six hundred gunmen scouring the jungle for slaves. Hombres de hierro, the rain-forest Indians called them: Iron Men, for the dread guns they toted. They would sweep into the villages, make bloated promises, lead able-bodied natives away. Julio César had forty-five centers of operation at strategic points along the border with Colombia, an area that was too feral for either country to defend. By the turn of the century, he had the Peruvian military helping him hold on to it. I have six hundred men armed with Winchesters, he cabled the president. Essential you send me a supply of Mannlichers.

  By 1902, when Abuelito, my grandfather, was twenty years old and moving the tassel from one side of his graduation cap to the other at the University of Notre Dame, Julio César had thousands of rain-forest Indians making him rich. They were the Huitoto, the Bora, the Andoke, the Ocaina: from fierce headhunters to doe-eyed forest folk. They would rise at dawn under the vigilance of overseers, head for the trees in the gray light of morning when the latex flows freely, score V channels in the bark, and let the white milk well into little tin bowls. Each tree could yield a hundred pounds of rubber before it shriveled into a husk. When a stand of caucho dribbled all day, a rain-forest Indian might gather enough to roll a cable the size of a human leg.

  Julio César’s henchmen recruited flagelados, scourged ones, fugitives from the great dust bowl of Ceará. Hundreds of thousands were making an exodus from the wasteland of Brazil’s northeast. The streets of Iquitos and Manaus were full of them—gaunt, toothless desperados, willing to board ships for the promise of work and food. By the time Arana got them to Iquitos, they were in debt to him for passage, for food, for buckets, for bullets, for Winchesters. It didn’t take much to get them to drive slaves.

  By 1903, when my great-grandfather was governor of Cusco, campaigning for the vice presidency, dreaming of a fine, democratic republic, Julio César had become one of the wealthiest men in the hemisphere, and his domain—twenty-five million acres of it—stretched from Peru to Colombia. Two years later, he incorporated his business in New York and London, under the name of the Per
uvian Amazon Company. He hired a British board of directors, put the company on the London exchange, and began making the gringos rich.

  In the space of a decade, the Casa Arana had become a towering enterprise. Julio César and his brothers ran it from his palace, a sprawl of red and white magnificence overlooking the Amazon, not far from the point where the river splits. He called his boulevard Calle Arana and lined it with royal palms. From his raised balconies, he could survey his dominion. From his oleander gardens, he could stride out to a triumphant balustrade that abutted the gray-green water and watch his barges approach. Out in the jungle were the armies of four hundred, the overlords, the guards, the weighers, the tappers. Out they would go, on trails they could run blindfolded, knowing instinctively which trees would bleed. Once the bundles were brought into the camps, the workers would weigh them, cure them to a smoky charcoal, then ship them downriver on flotillas of armed barges.

  Some overlords decided to breed their own workers, in shacks where slave girls were kept for that purpose, six hundred women at a time. The Huitoto children born in those camps were taught to kiss the overlords’ hands, worship them as deities. By the time they were seven, the natural Huitoto gentleness was bred out of them: They were an army of diminutive guerrilleros, wielding rifles, shooting trespassers, trained to kill.

  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 co
ntributions 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.