This is the truth of what passed and of what I have witnessed, and I appeal to the authorities of my country, who will, I trust, demand an explanation from the Government of Peru of the abuses and crimes committed upon Brazilian citizens and those of other nations by the employees of the J. C. Arana and Hermanos Company.
I present the person who signs this declaration with me as a witness of my signature.
(_Signed in my presence_) JOSÉ R. BRAZIL.
SEÑOR W. E. HARDENBURG,--As you have written to me, I shall give you a full account of all the deeds I have witnessed in the region of the Putumayo in the year 1903.
On the 4th of August of that year I began work on _correría_ service in the section Abisinia, where they sent us to guard the poor Indians and see that they brought in the rubber that the chief demanded.
On the 20th of the same month Agüero committed a most savage murder, cutting off an Indian's head. He is just the sort of man to commit all kinds of atrocities, such as cutting Indian women's limbs off, burning their houses, setting fire to their dead bodies, &c. On the 10th of the same month he had some fifty Indians put in stocks, and as he gave them neither water nor food, the poor Indians began to dry up like pieces of wood, until they reached such an extreme as to be quite useless and dying. Then he tied them up to a post and exterminated them by using them as targets for his Mauser revolver.
On the 15th of this month this same man went out on a _correría_ with eight men. At one of the houses where they stopped to rest they found two Indian women who were ill of smallpox. The two poor sufferers begged Agüero for some medicine to cure themselves. Agüero replied that he would see that the fever continued no longer, and so saying, grasped a _machete_ and cut off the heads of the two women.
On the 20th of September I began work at the section Morelia, where Jiménez was the chief, and on the 30th a commission arrived, bringing fifteen Indian prisoners, who were put in stocks. When on the point of dying of hunger, one of the victims told the chief that it would be better to kill them at once and not make them suffer such cruel agonies, whereupon he took a _machete_, cut off the man's leg, and then ordered him to be dragged away, killed, and burned.