Victor Macedo
Victor Macedo was a Peruvian administrator involved in the operations of the Peruvian Amazon Company during the early 20th century. Between 1903 and 1911, Macedo held a leadership role at La Chorrera, a major rubber station in the Putumayo region, a remote area infamous for the exploitation and abuse of indigenous peoples during the rubber boom. He became a central figure in the Putumayo genocide, a series of atrocities that saw the enslavement, torture, and mass killing of indigenous groups by rubber barons seeking to maximize profits from rubber extraction.
Macedo's role in the atrocities, along with that of his employer, Julio César Arana, has been widely documented, with multiple reports and investigations implicating him in forced labor, starvation, and brutal punishments. These actions were part of broader company practices incentivized by commission-based payments, leading to widespread human rights abuses under Macedo's management.
Arrest warrants were issued for Macedo and other company officials following investigations into the atrocities, particularly those conducted by British diplomat Roger Casement. However, despite being briefly arrested, Macedo evaded significant legal consequences, partly due to political influence and corruption within Peru, and his later whereabouts remain uncertain. He later fled to Bolivia and continued his involvement in rubber extraction, escaping further prosecution.
Role in the Putumayo genocide
and his rubber firm employed Victor Macedo as an administrator at La Chorrera, Colombia, during the Putumayo genocide. The rubber firms that controlled La Chorrera were dependent on an enslaved workforce to extract raw rubber, which would then be sent to the port at La Chorrera. Years before the Peruvian Amazon Company came into existence, rubber patrons like Macedo would expand their workforce by trading metal tools like axes or machetes for a year of work or a ten-year-old child. Another method frequently employed at La Chorrera's agency were correrías, slave raids in which many natives were either captured or killed. Macedo organized several of these correrías between 1903-1910. According to Pedro Flores speaking in 1975, while at La Chorerra, Macedo implemented the weight quota of rubber that was imposed against the native workforce. During Macedo's management, the agency at La Corerra exploited indigenous groups, including Huitotos, Andoques, Ocaina, Yurias, Resígaro and Boras.Macedo was implicated in a massacre of Ocaina natives at La Chorrera in 1903; this incident became the subject of a criminal complaint journalist Benjamin Saldaña Rocca filed, which eventually led to the issuing of more than 215 arrest warrants against employees of the La Chorrera' agency in the Putumayo River basin. In July 1911, judge Carlos A. Valcárcel issued an arrest warrant against Macedo for his role in the atrocities that occurred in the Putumayo between 1903 and 1911 under his management.
Rómulo Paredes, a judge who investigated the Putumayo genocide in 1911, believed the first massacres in the region began under Larrañaga's leadership and continued under Macedo's administration. In the ninth chapter of his 1915 book El Proceso del Putumayo y sus secretos, Valcarcel examines the culpability of Macedo, Arana, Pablo Zumaeta and Juan B. Vega for the conditions in the region, the evidence collected by the 1911 commission that incriminates the senior managers with the atrocities, and Paredes's explanation for why they were not prosecuted. Paredes became convinced crimes in the Putumayo were committed with Macedo's knowledge and approval, and that Macedo had personally perpetrated crimes and abuse against the natives.
The British Foreign Office sent diplomat Roger Casement to investigate the role of Barbadian men employed at La Chorrera in the atrocities in the Putumayo and reports of abuse against Barbadians. Macedo organized multiple armed excursions against Colombians and natives during his management of the agency. Barbadian men took part in several of these raids and later gave depositions to Casement reporting crimes they had witnessed and perpetrated against the natives. Casement interviewed thirty Barbadians, many of whom had worked around the La Chorrera agency for years; two of them told Casement Macedo was aware of the crimes occurring in the region. Casement wrote: "Macedo was one of Arana's longest serving Chiefs of Section and had an established history of brutality".
The Peruvian Amazon Company paid Macedo and the managers based on how much rubber was collected in their respective sections. Casement believed the company paid Macedo around £2,000–£3,500 annually, and possibly more. According to the payroll at La Chorrera in 1910, Macedo's salary was £30 a month along with a commission of six percent on the profit made from his agency. Hardenburg said the company paying its employees by a commission incentivized them to collect and export as much rubber as possible in a short time, and this could either be done by paying the natives or terrorizing them into submission. He said because Arana's company did not believe in paying natives for their labor, the "rule of terror" had been applied throughout the company's estate.
Paredes made a similar conclusion to Hardenburg regarding commissions paid to the managers. He believed these contracts incentivized the managers to exploit and extort natives into collecting as much rubber as possible in a short time. Indigenous men, women, children and elderly people were compelled to work for Arana's firm, and were subjected to cruel punishment or death when they failed to meet the obligations imposed upon them. Paredes wrote: "unger has been perhaps the most terrible scourge which has fallen on the Putumayo" and that station chiefs did not allow natives enough time to cultivate food to sustain themselves.
In 1906, during Macedo's management, there were around forty stations between the Igara-Paraná River and the Caqueta River that delivered rubber to La Chorrera. The natives under La Chorrera's agency suffered systematic starvation during Macedo's administration. Several of Chorrera's stations suffered from famine due to the conditions imposed by the managers, notably at the stations at Atenas, Matanzas, Abisinia, and Ultimo Retiro. The managers Elias Martinengui and Armando Normand both gave their natives little-to-no time to cultivate food. While at Entre Rios in 1910, Casement wrote in his journal: "Macedo is alleged to have said: 'The Indians are not here to plant chacaras . They are here to get rubber.'" Saldaña Rocca, Casement, Hardenburg and Paredes had also collected information on several cases at La Chorrera where starvation was used as a means for capital punishment. The use of cepos, a device similar to a pillory, was reported at La Chorrera, Matanzas, Entre Rios, Atenas, Ultimo Retiro, Abisinia, Occidente, Santa Catalina and other stations that were under Macedo's administration.
At the end of a list titled "Names of the worst criminals on the Putumayo when I was there", Casement wrote: "All the above were chiefs of section ie. principal agents in full authority over a certain district acting under the general supervision of Victor Macedo—the principal agent at La Chorrera".
J.C. Arana y Hermanos
The date on which Victor Macedo arrived in the Putumayo region is unknown. Macedo was working with the Larrañaga family and Julio César Arana as early as 1903 at an important settlement located below a waterfall named "Colonia Indiana", which was later known as La Chorrera. In 1903, Arana hired French explorer Eugène Robuchon to map his estate in the Putumayo; a map of this territory is shown in Robuchon's book En el Putumayo, y Sus Afluentes, where it is written that the map was drawn up for Macedo, manager of the J.C. Arana y Hermanos firm at La Chorrera. The founder of La Chorrera, Benjamin Larrañaga, died at La Chorrera on December 22, 1903, and Arana acquired Rafael Larrañaga's share of the estate shortly afterward. Juan B. Vega and Arana continued their partnership and established Arana, Vega y Compania, which employed Macedo as a manager at La Chorrera.In late 1904, the first group of Barbadian men hired by Arana's firm arrived at La Chorrera and were dispatched from La Chorrera on November 17, 1904, to establish the station at Matanzas near the Caqueta River in a territory inhabited by the indigenous Andoque people. There were twenty-five Barbadian men and ten other men of different nationalities, including their Colombian manager Ramon Sanchez, and Armando Normand, who was hired as an agent and translator for the firm.
Normand and Sanchez physically abused two of these Barbadians. El Proceso includes a letter Macedo wrote to a manager regarding two Barbadians who attempted to run away after they were tied up and mistreated. Macedo wanted this manager to make it clear to the Barbadians Ramon Sanchez was responsible for their abuse, and said it would be detrimental if these Barbadians proceeded against the La Chorrera agency. Sanchez was dismissed due to reports of the mistreatment of Barbadians but the agency continued to employ Normand, who eventually became the chief manager of Matanzas.
In 1906, Robuchon disappeared in the Putumayo near Ultimo Retiro in territory managed by the La Chorrera agency; it was rumored Arana had him disappeared because he had taken incriminating photographs of abuse that was occurring in the region. All of Robuchon's photographs were taken around La Chorrera and several of the pictures were used as evidence of slavery and physical torment under Arana's firm. Macedo conducted a census with the aid of an agent named Manuel Torrico; the estimate of 50,000 natives living in the Putumayo River basin, as recorded in Robuchon's book, may have come from this census.
In 1906, Macedo ordered Normand to organize a correría against a group of Colombians who were attempting to establish a rubber station near the Lower Caqueta. This attack resulted in the capture of Aquileo Torres and around ten other Colombians who worked for the rubber company Urbano Gutiérrez. Some of the captured natives were clubbed to death. Eight of the Colombians were sent to La Chorrera, which was under the management of Macedo. These Colombians were later taken on a company steamship and left near the Brazilian border with a canoe. One of the Colombians Roso España testified to authorities in Manaus that after Normand's group killed 25 natives, the group proceeded to murder women and children in the area. Torres and two of the senior employees who worked for Urbano Gutierrez were kept as prisoners at Abisinia and suffered maltreatment. Torres eventually agreed to work for the company. According to Hardenburg :
Macedo was first publicly implicated in the Putumayo genocide by Benjamin Saldaña Rocca on August 9, 1907, through a criminal petition filed against eighteen members of the J.C. Arana y Hermanos firm. Macedo's name was the first on the list compiled by Saldaña. Saldaña later decided to establish his own newspaper publications, which he would use to publicly campaign against Arana's firm. On August 22, the first issue of La Sancion included content from Saldaña's original petition and a letter from Julio Muriedas, an ex-employee of La Chorrera's agency. This letter detailed Muriedas' employment at Matanzas under Normand, and some of the methods of abuse he employed against the natives in his district, as well as the killing of these natives for not meeting a weight quota of rubber. Saldaña claimed that Macedo and his counterpart Loayza were responsible for the crimes of "swindling, robbery, incendiarism, poisoning and assassination" that was aggravated by "tortures by fire, water, the lash and mutilation" occurring under their management. The first issue also provided an account of the 1903 Ocaina massacre, claiming that Macedo and Loayza had orchestrated the killings.
Juan Castanos, a Saldaña deponent and manager of Porvenir, wanted passage to Iquitos so he could leave the Putumayo. Macedo opposed this because Castanos did not have enough money to pay for his passage on the steamship Liberal. Castanos later obtained enough money for the journey but the captain refused to have him on the ship. Afterward, Castano's wife was dragged away and Macedo allowed Bartolomé Zumaeta to take her as a concubine.