The Horrors of “Rubber Fever” in the Amazon Rainforest

One of the greatest tragedies to impact biological and cultural life in the Amazon rainforest occurred at the end of the 19th century and lasted until the end of World War II. “Rubber fever” is the name given this period of intensive rubber extraction and exportation to the United States and various European countries. During this period, indigenous communities were used as a cheap workforce and subjected to slavery and torture. Some affected communities remain today, including the Uitoto, Nonuya, Muinane, Andoke, Bora and Miraña people.

The 19th century saw the rapid invention of machines and transportation systems in Europe and the US that created a rising demand for natural resources, which were exploited in different parts of the world. The excessive demand for rubber incentivized the exploration and establishment of extraction companies in areas where the rubber tree thrived.

Charles Goodyear’s development of the vulcanization process and John Boyd’s invention of an empty chamber inside rubber tires introduced a new period where rubber was intensively used to produce early cars as well as mechanisms for different machines. Rubber’s excellent elasticity led it to become an essential material for manufacturing objects that European and American families were more dependent on day by day. This increased the value of rubber worldwide and attracted the attention of local and foreign merchants looking for a promising business.

The exploitation of rubber in the Amazon rainforest occurred between 1879 and 1945 in two separate periods: the first between 1879 and 1912 (known as the “rubber fever”) and the second shorter one during the last three years of World War II, between 1942 and 1945. Rubber was transported on rivers and exported to Europe from two main ports: Iquitos in Peru and Manaos in Brazil.

The precious white liquid could be extracted from different tree species, including the Hevea Brasiliensis, Castilla Ulei, and Sepium Verum in the Amazon rainforest. Commercial development in the forest required a workforce that could easily adapt to the hostilities of the forest and so relied on the local indigenous communities that inhabited the territory when the rubber merchants started to arrive. Locals were forced to submit to horrific conditions of slavery and exploitation. The techniques used to inflict pain were violent and resulted in the deaths of thousands. Some scholars even call this period the “rubber holocaust.”

In the Amazon rainforest, the rubber tree has been known by indigenous communities for centuries as “Cahuchu” or “Cauchu,” meaning the “crying tree.” The tree first began to be exploited around 1789 when the demand for rubber in England, France, and the US increased rapidly. However, it was not until the end of the 19th century, with Henry Ford’s founding of the Ford Motor Company in 1903, that rubber tree exploitation skyrocketed. In 1928, Ford tried to establish a rubber district in the Brazilian Amazon, called “Fordlândia.” The government granted his company 10,000 square kilometers of land, which was expected to be inhabited by more than 10,000 people, to maintain the rubber business.

Before rubber, the Amazon rainforest was the site of commercial extraction of cinchona, a therapeutic plant used to treat malaria. After the cinchona business died out, the first rubber houses were built in the forest around 1885. The commercial networks and workforce exploitation techniques that first began during the period of cinchona exploitation allowed for the rapid establishment of the new rubber business. Rubber extraction facilitated fast colonization of the Amazon rainforest by merchants attracted by private exploitation of empty fields and improved river transportation networks.

The rubber houses established specific quotas of rubber amounts to be extracted daily and transported to bigger collecting houses. This required large groups of rubber tappers, up to 100 workers, to walk extensively in search of the trees scattered around a challenging landscape.

Rubber is still extracted using the techniques developed during this period. Multiple cuts are made on the tree’s trunk to allow the latex to ooze out, traveling through different channels that spiral down until reaching small collecting pots attached to the tree trunk. Due to the slow speed of the latex, the collection process lasted for several days and required great attention and care.

Indigenous peoples were forced to work over the course of their entire lives through a system of debt. Rubber tappers could trade for different goods by collecting and offering specific amounts of rubber to the overseer. However, most of the time, the amounts of rubber that had to be paid were immense, as the rubber merchants used to inflate the prices, and some people were not able to pay off debt during their lifetimes, so they would agree to transfer the debt to their children after death.

The Peruvian Amazon Company and Julio César Arana

Julio César Arana was a Peruvian businessman and politician who became one of the biggest rubber producers in the Colombian-Peruvian Amazon rainforest. His business, located on the banks of the Igará Paraná River, began in 1886 and was named the Peruvian Amazon Company in 1907.

Arana’s business was financed by England, which provided Arana with workers from Barbados. His power became so great that he managed to control an entire region around the Putumayo River between Colombia and Peru, with the support of the Peruvian army. Arana displaced smaller owners who were settled in the area and restricted free access to Colombian boats. As a result, years later, a dispute between the two countries over land ownership exploded between 1932 and 1933, when the Colombian army tried to reclaim the areas taken over by Arana.

The first person to denounce the atrocities committed by Arana was an American railway engineer named Walter Hardenburg, who traveled to the region in 1907 and published a book called The Putumayo, the Devil’s Paradise in 1912. His complaints were heard in England, and, the same year, the English government sent an Irish diplomat named Sir Roger Casement to investigate what was happening. Casement had already denounced the horrendous treatment of Congolese people under the rubber exploitation carried out by Belgian King Leopold II.

After meeting Arana at his house, Casement returned to London, where he denounced the brutalities committed against the indigenous people of the Putumayo River as a “work system based in terror.” Casement published his diaries under the name The Putumayo Black Book. However, Arana was never convicted of his crimes, and paradoxically, he continued his career as a successful politician in Peru.

The Decline of the “Rubber Holocaust”

The rubber market in the Amazon rainforest started to decline by 1912 due to growing rubber tree plantations in Africa and Malaysia created by English settlers with seeds stolen from the Amazon. These places offered excellent quality rubber with lower costs because of more efficient infrastructure and the smaller distances the material had to travel to its commercial destinations.

However, World War II created another short period in which the rubber market in the Amazon was reactivated. Japan had occupied a number of zones where rubber was produced, restricting the Allied Powers’ access to the material. Once the war ended, the rubber market died, and the extraction houses were finally abandoned.

Today, the region is a national park where different local communities have been granted the right to rule over the land as part of their traditional territory. The Arana House is now a school that benefits kids from the communities.

By 1912, more than 40,000 people had been killed due to the atrocities of the “rubber fever.” The lack of interest from the Colombian government in these Amazonian areas and the refusal to recognize indigenous communities’ sovereignty over the land facilitated the horrors committed against the locals. Today, many people still remember the stories told by their parents about these times. The violence committed was so significant that many opt to remain silent, as the pain and cultural consequences of Arana’s cruelty are still present.

One of the most critical accounts of this history was authored by Colombian writer José Eustacio River in his book La Vorágine (The Vortex) in 1924. The story narrates a couple’s escape to the plains of Colombia’s Casanare region and their later arrival in the forest. Through this tale, Rivera created a work of fiction intended to denounce the crimes committed against the indigenous communities.

The “rubber fever” is another of the thousands of stories about the disastrous consequences of the exploitative relationships Northern countries have established with places rich in the world’s natural resources. Unfortunately, history continues to repeat itself today in different parts of the Amazon, where deforestation caused by soybean plantations and extensive cow farming are reducing biodiversity and displacing indigenous communities.