Armando Normand (1880–disappeared May 1915) was a plantation manager of Peruvian and Bolivian descent who had a central role in the Peruvian Amazon Company's perpetration of the Putumayo genocide. For six years in the Putumayo, Normand committed uncounted abuses against the indigenous population.
Normand worked for the company, which extracted rubber with illegal slave labour, between 1904 and October 1910. During those years, he led a reign of terror against local indigenous populations. According to British consul-general Roger Casement, who investigated crime in the Putumayo River basin in 1910, Normand committed "innumerable murders and tortures" during this period. Several of the crimes that Normand was incriminated with include immolation, bashing out the brains of children, and dismemberment.
Reports and evidence of Normand's crimes were first documented by in 1907, Roger Casement in 1910, and Judge in 1915. A warrant for Normand's arrest was issued by Judge on 29 June 1911 along with 214 other men employed by the Peruvian Amazon Company's agency at La Chorrera. Normand was arrested in 1912, however he escaped from prison with Aurelio Rodriguez in 1915 prior to a verdict in their trial.
Early life
Armando Normand was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in around 1880. It is believed he spent the first twenty years of his life in and around Cochabamba. The little information about Normand's early life comes from an interview conducted by Peter MacQueen in 1913, during which Normand said:
Roger Casement wrote that he had seen two of Normand's academic certificates, including one from the London School of Book-keepers dated 1904, which qualified Normand as a bookkeeper.
Career
While in London, Normand became friends with the Bolivian minister and through this connection he became acquainted with influential people from Peru and Bolivia. Normand left London in 1904 and travelled to Pará, Brazil, with a letter of introduction to Carlos Larrañaga, the regional manager for Suárez Hermanos, a famous rubber firm in Bolivia. Because there were no open positions at the firm, Larrañaga advised Normand to travel to Manaus, and Larrañaga also wrote letters of introduction for Normand to Julio César Arana, owner of J. C. Arana and Hermanos Company. Arana's company hired Normand, assigning him as an interpreter on a mission to hire workers in Barbados. This mission managed to contract around thirty five Barbadians to work on the Igaraparana River, a tributary of the Putumayo River.
In November 1904, Normand arrived at La Chorrera with the first contingent of Barbadian men, and was commissioned with those men to set up a settlement near the Caqueta River and engage in "trade relations" with Andoque tribespeople. The group was led by a Colombian named Ramon Sanchez, they established a station that became known as Matanzas. Shortly after the construction of a house, the group began correrias, or slave raids, and what Roger Casement referred to as "punitive expeditions". The J.C. Arana y Hermanos agents at Matanzas were armed with firearms to hunt indigenous people and they intended to force those people to collect rubber. In 1905, Normand was made co-manager of the Matanzas station after the dismissal of Sanchez for physically abusing the Barbadian men, and in 1906, Normand became the chief manager of Matanzas.
By 1907, Normand and his employer Arana were subjects of complaints made by Benjamin Saldaña Rocca, a journalist from Iquitos who was determined to hold them responsible for their crimes. Saldaña used statements and first-hand accounts from former workers of the rubber stations, publishing them in La Felpa and La Sancion, two small newspapers from Iquitos. For three years before Casement's investigation, Normand's crimes were well known in Peru. According to Casement's report:
Enslaved locals were expected to gather between of rubber in a fabrico depending on their assigned quota. The indigenous people marched along with their loads of rubber to Matanzas from areas in the forest that were, in some cases, a ten-to-twelve hours distance by foot. The land route to deliver rubber from Matanzas to La Chorrera was estimated by Casement to be , and could take "four to five days of hard marching" to traverse by the Barbadian men, which escorted the indigenous workers.
Around 1907, a small steamship was launched on the Igaraparana River above the waterfall of La Chorrera, shortening the distance that indigenous people entrapped at Matanzas had to travel in order to deliver rubber to La Chorrera. From Matanzas, they were to travel to Entre Rios, a two-day walk, and then to a place named Puerto Peruano, which was around or more from Matanzas, with little to no food. At Puerto Peruano, the rubber carried by the indigenous people was then loaded onto a boat and shipped to La Chorrera. In 1910, Casement estimated that over the course of the whole march, natives would walk or more to deliver rubber to La Chorrera and he stated the path was "one of the worst imaginable". These marches from Matanzas to La Chorrera usually occurred twice in year, after a collection period referred to as a fabrico. A fabrico referred to the season that rubber was extracted, this time period could last between 75 and 100 days.
When Normand became the station manager in 1906, for every of rubber collected by enslaved indigenous people, he received three soles. At the time of Casement's visit in 1910, Normand was making around 20 soles for every of rubber, which was 20% of the station's generated profit. The manager of La Chorrera told Casement the company owed Normand 18,000 soles before a harvest of rubber in 1910—around £1,800—and Casement believed that Normand would get paid £300 for that collection period based on the output of Matanzas. According to Normand in 1910, 120 men, who could annually bring in around of rubber, were being forced to work at the Matanzas station. The number of people kept captive to work at Matanzas prior to Casement's visit is unknown, however the information given the American Consul in Iquitos, claimed that there were 5,000 indigenous people dedicated to extracting rubber for the Matanzas station in 1907. The manager at La Chorrera, Juan A. Tizón, also told Casement the company had been running the Matanza station at a loss for a few years.
After meeting Armando Normand in 1910, Roger Casement wrote:
Normand left the company a month or two after Casement's visit; he had requested to separate from the firm in a letter the previous year. According to Normand, at the time, he was "often ill and had symptoms of the dread beri-beri". When Victor Macedo, the general manager at La Chorrera, heard about Normand's request for resignation, he asked Normand to stay longer at the Matanzas station because they had no one to replace him. When British consul George Mitchell and American consul Stuart J. Fuller visited the Putumayo in October 1912, they visited every plantation where atrocities had been reported except for Abisinia and Matanzas. By then, the Matanzas plantation was completely abandoned.
Role in the Putumayo genocide
Armando Normand committed numerous crimes in the Putumayo River basin, which members of the Peruvian Amazon Company witnessed. Several witnesses who came forward include , , and Barbadians and . Some of these first-hand accounts were used as evidence in the La Sancion and La Felpa publications that exposed the company in Peru, Roger Casement's report and an extensive report released by the United States relating to slavery in Peru.
Judge Carlos A. Valcárcel initiated an investigative commission in 1911 to find new information; the first-hand accounts from ex-employees who worked under Normand make up the majority of the 'Andoques' chapter in his book El proceso del Putumayo y sus secretos inauditos. Judge Rómulo Paredes conducted the actual investigation around La Chorrera and Matanzas, he collected physical evidence and included numerous eyewitness accounts in his 3,000-page manuscript relating to the atrocities. In 1911, Paredes described Matanzas as "completely annihilated and almost extinguished".
The crimes of Armando Normand Normand starved the indigenous people under his control, giving them no food and little-to-no time to cultivate food. On occasion, Normand used starvation until death as a means of capital punishment. Ildefonso Fachin, a Peruvian Amazon Company employee and deponent to judge Paredes, claimed that Normand had cut down crop fields in order to starve the indigenous people that he could not capture.
Near the end of 1904 or the beginning of 1905, Augustus Walcott was physically abused by Normand and Ramon Sanchez. Normand had Walcott "hung up by his arms tied behind his back for a very long time, and beaten with swords or machetes." Clifford Quintin was also abused by Normand on two separate occasions. The scarring from Normand's flagellation of Walcott was shown to Roger Casement in 1910. Another Barbadian named Percy, or James Francis was also tied up and flogged by swords under Sanchez's orders, however there is very little information regarding that incident. Augustus Walcott provided a depositional statement to Roger Casement in 1910, in that statement Walcott claimed that Normand told the local indigenous people that the Barbadian men were cannibals and that they would eat the people who refused to collect rubber.
The first issue of Benjamin Saldaña Rocca's newspaper La Sancion, published on August 22, 1907, contained an account from Julio Muriedas, who worked under Normand. Muriedas stated Normand administered 200 or more whiplashes to his enslaved workers that did not meet a weight quota of rubber. When the indigenous people tried to flee, J.C. Arana y Hermanos agents took their children and suspended them by their hands as well as feet before torturing them with fire with the intention of extracting information that would expose indigenous families' hiding places. This claim was later corroborated by Westerman Leavine, a Barbadian, in a deposition to Roger Casement in 1910. Leavine stated that punishment was administered often, as well as the burning of children in order to coerce them to reveal the locations of their relatives. Muriedas, Genaro Caporo, Leavine and Adolfo Lopez, all of whom were Normand's subordinates at one time or another, testified that they had seen Normand's dog at Matanzas carrying around severed limbs or other human flesh, which was consumed by the dog. Lopez stated that he saw one of the dogs, "which slept in the same room as" Normand, "bringing her puppies pieces of flesh torn from the buttocks of whipped Indians." In his deposition, Lopez also mentioned that the area of Matanzas had an "unbearable stench emanating from the Indians' wounds." Leavine told Casement that the stench emanating from rotting corpses and festering wounds at Matanzas was so bad that he could not consume food.