Highlighting a lesser-known series of human rights violations in the Amazon, Pragda’s Secrets from Putumayo is a brutal look into the Peruvian Amazon River Company’s ongoing dehumanization of indigenous peoples in the region. It is a harrowing, yet profound film.
In 1906, British diplomat Roger Casement was sent to Brazil to investigate the company (while the company was based in Peru, its board was British and even appeared on the British stock exchange). Casement exposed the company for trapping indigenous workers in cycles of debt, while also subjecting them to rape, torture, and murder. Casement, who also reported human rights violations in the Congo free state, firmly believed the Company’s intent was to wipe these people off the map entirely. The film relies heavily on Casement's findings.
The film is unrelenting in its depiction of these atrocities. Casement’s reports are narrated with great effect by British actor Stephen Rea and are complemented with modern investigations and interviews with present-day indigenous peoples. While Rea’s narration of Casement’s findings is in English, the film relies mostly on interviews conducted in Portuguese and Spanish with English subtitles. However, this doesn’t impact the film in any way, as the stories being told would resonate in any language.
Using Casement’s findings as a guiding text is a brilliant move by director Aurélio Michiles, as his eyewitness account helps viewers realize the extent of the Company’s wickedness. The atmosphere throughout is empathetic, and the film does well to capture the plight of these people. What happened over 100 years ago isn’t as well-known as what occurred in the Congo Free State, yet Michiles does well to bring Casement’s brutal story to life. The film would be a great addition to a course in the history of Native peoples, Latin American studies, political science, and 20th-century history. It may also work well in a library presentation about the history of oppressed peoples and genocide.