On Tuesday 28th April a public meeting organised by the Dublin-based solidarity with Colombia initiative ‘Grupo Raices (Grúpa Fréamhacha)’ was held in the Pearse Centre on the legacy of Roger Casement and the internationalist dimension of his work in South America. Better known for his denunciation of the atrocities committed in Congo by the Belgian administration, Casement also spent time in the Amazon, in the Putumayo region, shared between Peru, Colombia and Brazil, where he denounced the slavery and appalling mistreatment of the native population by the rubber barons. At the time, rubber was a booming industry, needed for the pneumatic wheels which originated in the factories of Dunlop in Dublin. His report showed the role of British capitalists who were stockholders of the rubber barons and who participated handsomely in the profits of this ethnocide, which saw countless indigenous people perish and their culture gradually disappearing under the advancement of ‘civilisation’.
The main speakers were Angus Mitchell and Andrés Sacanambuy. Angus Mitchell, historian and activist, as well as author of a recent biography of Roger Casement (part of the 16 Lives series, published by O’Brien Press, 2013) and editor of ‘The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement’ (Lilliput Press, 1997) and ‘Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness: the 1911 Documents’ (Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2003), introduced the topic by explaining the work of Casement, the nature of his reports and the political tensions involved in his denunciation. He explained how this universalist approach was part of a global struggle that he felt was expressed in the right of the Irish for self-determination, linking with a firm humanist ethics his commitment to global justice with his support for national liberation in Ireland.
Andrés Sacanambuy, community leader and representative of Putumayo region branch of the main agricultural workers union in Colombia (Fensuagro, affiliated to the national union CUT), who has been in Ireland for two weeks on a tour to coordinate solidarity activities in Leitrim, Sligo and Dublin, spoke of the situation in Putumayo a hundred years later of Casement’s report. He talked about how one extractive industry led to the next, about how violence is not only physical, but also cultural against the indigenous and peasant-farmers’ communities, and how today it is in the name of oil that mass displacement and unspeakable atrocities take place. He also mentioned that Casement’s work has been tried to erase from local memory and that it is a duty of the social movements in Colombia to honour his memory in the centenary of his execution next year.
José Antonio Gutiérrez (Pepe), from Grupo Raíces and member of SIPTU, closed up the debate with some reflections on the role of solidarity as a moral imperative rooted in the very conditions of this globalised system, but also, on the necessity to recover history for the people, a history with a forward-looking approach, a history that serves as compass for the creation of a more humane society.
SIPTU has been very active in support and solidarity to the trade union movement in Colombia. The main union organisation CUT, and the agrarian workers union Fensuagro, have actively opposed the perpetuation of this kind of unsustainable and reckless type of global development fuelled by nothing else but greed. The Irish workers will remain committed to supporting them in this uphill struggle.