The diaries, which have never been definitively confirmed to be Casement's, had damning evidence against him, as well as detailed accounts of homosexual affairs, which at the time were used to discredit and smear him. Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa begins Casement fictionalized biography in a prison cell, where in 1916 he hoped to receive a pardon, only to learn from his legal team that Scotland Yard had discovered his alleged diaries. His keen understanding of colonialism led him to expose and denounce its crimes, and he became a separatist rebel. The abuses he investigated in the Congo deeply affected him, as did the abuses of Indians extracting rubber in the Putomayo, on the Peruvian border with Colombia. The son of a Protestant, Casement was actually a British consul who was working in Africa for commercial interests in the service of the crown. On August 3, 1916, Irish revolutionary Roger Casement was hanged for treason after being caught trying to run guns from Germany to Ireland.
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