History
Many archeologists think that the initial spark for the evolution of Peru's high cultures came from the jungle. Evidence from Chavin , Chachapoyas and Tantamayo cultures seems to back up such a theory - they certainly had continuous contact with the jungle areas - and the Incas were unable to dominate the tribes, their main contact being peaceful trade in treasured items such as plumes, gold, medicinal plants and the sacred coca leaf. At the time of the Spanish Conquest , fairly permanent settlements seem to have existed along all the major jungle rivers, the people living in large groups to farm the rich alluvial soils, but the arrival of the Europeans appears to have begun the process of breaking these up into smaller and scattered groups (a process exacerbated by the nineteenth-century rubber boom). Yet the Peruvian jungle still resisted major colonization. Although Alonso de Alvarado had led the first Spanish expedition, cutting a trail through from Chachapoyas to Moyabamba in 1537, most incursions ended in utter disaster, defeated by the ferocity of the tribes, the danger of the rivers, climate, and wild animals - and perhaps by the inherent alienness of the forest. Ultimately, apart from the white man's epidemics (which spread faster than the men themselves), the early conquistadores had relatively little impact on the populations of the Peruvian Amazon. Only Orellana , on his intrepid explorations along the Rio Amazonas, managed to glimpse the reality of the rainforest, though even he seemed to misunderstand it when was attacked by a tribe of blond women, one of whom managed to hit him in the eye with a blow-gun dart. These "women" are nowadays considered to be men of the Yagua tribe (from near Iquitos), who wear straw-coloured, grass-like skirts and headdresses. By the early eighteenth century the Catholic Church had made serious but vulnerable inroads into the region. Resistance to this culminated in 1742 with an indigenous uprising in the central forest region led by an enigmatic character from the Andes calling himself Juan Santos Atahualpa. Many missions were burnt, missionaries and colonists killed, and Spanish military expeditions defeated. The result was that the central rainforest remained under the control of the indigenous population for the next 90 years or so; in fact, as recently as 1919 the Ashaninka Indians were blockading rivers and ejecting missionaries and foreigners from their ancestral lands. As "white-man's" technology advanced, so too did the possibilities of returning to Amazonia. The 1830s saw the beginning of one hundred years of massive and painful exploitation of the forest and its population by rubber barons . Many of these wealthy men were European, eager to gain control of the raw material desperately needed following the discovery of the vulcanization process, and during this era the jungle regions of Peru were better connected to Brazil, Bolivia, the Atlantic and ultimately Europe, than they were to Lima or the Pacific coast. The peak of the boom, from the 1880s to just before World War I, had a prolonged effect. Treating the natives as little more than slaves, men like the notorious Fitzcarrald made overnight fortunes, and large sections of the forests were explored and subdued. In 1891, for example, the British-owned Peruvian Corporation was granted the 500,000 hectare "Perene Colony" in the central rainforest in payment of debts owed by the Peruvian state. That the land so granted was indigenous territory was ignored - the Ashaninka who lived in the area were considered a captive labour force that was part of the concession. The process only fell into decline when the British explorer Markham took Peruvian rubber plants - via Kew Gardens - to Malaysia, where the plants grew equally well but were far easier to harvest. Nineteenth-century colonialism also saw the progression of the extractive frontier along the navigable rivers, which involved short-term economic exploitation based on the extraction of other natural materials, such as timber and animal skins; coupled to this was the advance of the agricultural frontier down from the Andes. Both kinds of expansion assumed that Amazonia was a limitless source of natural reserves and an empty wilderness - misapprehensions that still exist today. The agricultural colonization tended to be by poor, landless peasants from the Andes and was concentrated in the Selva Alta, on the eastern slopes of that range. From the 1950s these colonos became a massive threat when, supported by successive government land grants, credit and road building, subsistence farmers and cattle ranchers inflicted large-scale deforestation. In the 1960s, President Belaunde saw the colonization of Amazonia as central to his political platform, a verdant limitless and "unpopulated" frontier that was ripe for development, offering land to the landless masses. New waves of colonos arrived and, once again, indigenous inhabitants were dispossessed and yet more rainforest cleared. Things quietened down between 1968 and 1980, during the Military Regime, but when Belaunde returned to power in 1980, peasant colonization continued, by and large along tenuous penetration roads built by the government, but also with further state sponsorship and funding by international banks. Between 1985 and 1995, new factors began to threaten the cultures and environment of the Peruvian Amazon - the rise of terrorism and the illegal cocaine industry.
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