"Following my return to Iquitos in the 16th of October, an effort was apparently made to arrest some twenty of those still employed by the company on the Putumayo towards the very end of October and in the early days of November. Although the localities where all of them were at work were well known, the _comisario_ or commissioner of the Putumayo, one Amadéo Burga, a paid employee of the company, and a brother-in-law of its managing director, in each case took action just too late, so that all those incriminated were either absent in the forest or said to have gone away only a few hours before the officer's arrival. The vessel reporting this unsatisfactory ending to this, the latest attempt[129] to bring to justice the authors of so many crimes, returned to Iquitos on the 25th of November, bringing only one man in custody, a subordinate named Portocarrero, who was among those implicated. All the rest of the accused were stated to have 'escaped,' in some cases, it was reported, taking with them large numbers of captive Indians, either for sale or for continued forced labour in other regions of the rubber-bearing forests. "Some of those wanted, however, I learned subsequently, had returned to their stations when the officer, who had failed to find them, had left the neighbourhood, and were at work again in the service of the company at the date of my departure from the Amazon. Others of the individuals charged by the judge, I found, were, or had been, actually in Iquitos at the time the police there held warrants for their arrest, and no attempt had been made to put these warrants into execution. "The evidence that I obtained during my stay in Iquitos, coming as it did from many quarters and much of it from the Putumayo itself, induced in me the conviction that the punishment of the wrongdoers was a thing not to be expected, and, from a variety of causes I need not dwell upon here, possibly a matter beyond the ability of the local executive to ensure. Suffice it to say I saw no reason to modify the opinion expressed in my Report of the 17th of March last, that 'custom sanctioned by long tradition, and an evil usage whose maxim is that "the Indian has no rights," are far stronger than a distant law that rarely emerges into practice.'