This Company has not got the means of paying for anything in its Provedura or Store, and yet it daily imposes onerous tasks (apart altogether from ru… - Roger Casement

During the several years that the Arana syndicates have been controlling the Putumayo, and using the government forces in the furtherance of their lawless ends against either Colombian settlers or native Indians the local value of the services rendered by this so-called trading company to the Peruvian Government must have amounted to many thousands of pounds in the matters of passage and victualling alone. The agreement no doubt worked to the satisfaction of both parties. Messrs. Arana and Co (it is really absurd to use the name of the ineffectual London Company at any stage of the business) obtained the military help and prestige of Peru in attacking, murdering and pillaging the Colombian settlers on the Cara-Paraná in securing their rubber and enslaving fresh tribes of Indians, while the government through 'this patriotic action' of the Aranas extended the frontiers of the 'national territory' and became possed of regions to which it had not any moral or lawful claim.

I should dearly love to see these things with my own eyes - to be able to record the methods used there in this "commercial" and "industrial reclamation" of the Indians, but how can I? The Commission will hardly go to Matanzas, they say, or to Abisinia, the roads are long and full of water. To me, personally, it would be a real pleasure, but I am gravely alarmed for the results - the possible results. It might mean the murder of the Barbados men, under our eyes almost. Of course, it would be the "cannibals" or the "Savages" who had done it, or it would be the "injured husband" or something of that kind. No evidence possible of a crime. Besides, these men have never been punished for the most awful offences against humanity. Not one. They have been here for years committing the most hellish crimes, as we all now believe, and they were openly denounced in Iquitos three years ago, with many witnesses walking the streets of that capital asking to be brought before a court. And what followed? Nothing, absolutely nothing. They have either retired with a small fortune like Mr Rodriguez of Iquitos, or are still active agents of the Company, drawing very handsome incomes from their sections. Barnes says this man, Velarde, who is not worth £5 a year to any house of business, gets, he believes, fully £600 a year, and he has 4 or 5 "wives" free, a house built by the Indians, everything save European supplies, levied by crime from the surrounding defenseless population.

Nevertheless the Barbadians were all engaged by Arana as "agricultural labourers" or "labourers", and if Arana gave them to Colombian "criminals", whose "properties" he has since entirely acquired, and whose system he has maintained, if not indeed developed. I cannot see but that he is responsible quite as much as these Colombian "ruffians", and to the British Government he is solely responsible for the use to which he has put the labourers recruited in a British Colony.