Museo Amazonico

Ref: Museo Amazonico (2025). Iquitos, Peru.

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Rubber Plants

  • There are three varieties from which wild gums are extracted. 

    • Castilloa ulei: Rubber Plant. Trees grow up to 35m tall with elliptical leaves. Its fruit is orange or red. 

    • Couma macrocarpa (‘leche caspi’): Grow up to 35m tall. Its latex is used as a natural medicine and also for making chewing gum.

    • Hevea brasiliensis (‘Shiringa’): Grows up to 30m tall. When its leaves fall during the dry season, the crown of this tree turns reddish. It produces abundant latex for up to 25 yrs. 

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Rubber King

  • Julio César Arana, the Rubber King: Arana was born in Rioja, San Martin. He started out in 1888 as a rubber tapper, then entered into an agreement with Colombian tappers and gradually dispossessed them of their farms in exchange for debts. Finally, his company, known as Casa Arana, established absolute dominion over a territory of >5M hA, in the space between Putumayo and Caquetá rivers. Taking advantage of the fact that this territory was in dispute with Columbia, Arana operated without being subject to the laws of any country and imposed a regime of extreme submission on the indigenous people. In 1906, he became the first Peruvian rubber exporter and the richest man in Peru. In 1908 he founded the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC) in London to protect himself, and his interest would be backed by the British Stock Market. At the same time, Arana used a regionalist and patriotic discourse that made him gain power and political influence in the region. He was mayor of Iquitos, president of its chamber of commerce, and in 1921, he was named Senator for Loreto. 

  • Indigenous people, under the absolute control of Arana and his overseers, had to deliver high quotas of rubber periodically. Those who did not comply with the demanded amounts suffered physical punishments including flogging, torture, mutilation, rape, and indiscriminate murder. Arana also used the indigenous people themselves to perpetuate his abuses, training young men- known as “Arana’s trusted boys”- to monitor and punish those who did not meet their quotas, those who tried to flee, or those who rebelled against the rubber tappers. The presence of the state or any other institution was nonexistent, so abuses were committed with complete impunity and on a massive scale, resulting in a system of widespread terror. 

  • In 1907, journalist Benjamín Saldaña Rocca published a series of articles in the local newspapers La Sanción and La Felpa, and later in La Prensa de Lima, denouncing the abuses. He also filed a criminal complaint against Arana before the Iquitos Court of Justice. However, the local authorities and the Peruvian government, in collusion with Arana, ignored these accusations. Saldaña was subjected to intimidation and threats and had to leave the city. 

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Systems of Indigenous Exploitation

  • Thousands of Amazonian indigenous people were displaced from their place of origin to serve as a labor force during the rubber boom. Of these, the indigenous people of the Putumayo area were the most affected. Belonging to the Bora, Huitoto, Ocaina, Andoque, and Resigaro, Amazonian peoples, they were deceived into production centers. 

  • Exploitation Process

    • 1) Enabling: Foremen delivered industrial products to the natives, and they had to pay with the rubber they collected. The goods delivered were undervalued. This transaction generated an unpayable debt for the indigenous people. 

    • 2) Foreign Debt: Those settlers who had an unpaid debt with the rubber tappers could be transferred as merchandise. This debt was also used as collateral for loans. This abuse extended to the death of the laborer, who, being unable to pay it during his lifetime, passed the debt on to his children. 

    • 3) Harvesting: To extract the latex from the trees, two methods were used. The first consisted of bleeding the tree upright, making diagonal incisions to allow the product to fall into a vessel. The second consisted of felling the entire tree to make cuts and obtain the natural latex.

    • 4) Exportation: After being processed for packaging, the natural rubber was taken to the port of Iquitos, where it was transferred to boats that sailed the Amazon River until it reached the Atlantic. From there, it was distributed to the world’s major production centers, eager for this natural resource.

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Chronology

  • 1887: Belgian John Boyd Dunlop invents the inflatable tire; global rubber production exceeds 45K tons annually (Museo Amazonico, 2025).

  • 1847: Scotsman Robert William Thompson patents the pneumatic tire in France (Iquitos Museum, 2025).

  • 1839: Charles Goodyear invents the vulcanization process. The combination of S and heat caused rubber to become long-lasting (Museo Amazonico, 2025).

  • 1770: Joseph Priestly discovers by chance that rubber could erase pencil markings (Museo Amazonico, 2025).

  • 1495: Columbus brings rubber (‘kwachu’- Quechua), used in Central and South America by indigenous people to make shoes and to seal vessels, from Haiti to Europe (Museo Amazonico, 2025).

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