The Putumayo Report

This teaching unit was designed by ...

This specific part of the larger instructor’s guide on Roger Casement sets out for students to achieve the general learning aim of distinguishing, contrasting and criticizing different voices that intermingle in the historical narrative on the raw material of rubber, and in specific the Putumayo region of the Amazon and the episode of debt peonage, genocide, and rubber extraction it underwent in the early twentieth century.

Generally speaking, this teaching unit will help students understand that the story which can be reconstructed on this episode is one of fragmentary and clashing perspectives. They will also appreciate how large-scale violence and trauma (such as that inflicted in the Putumayo region) leads to an irrevocable silencing of human voices.