Between Zoo and Slavery: The Yagua of Eastern Peru in their present situation

The purpose of this document is to provide as complete a picture as possible of the current situation of the Yagua by integrating all the sets of constraints to which they are victims. After more than three centuries, and with particular intensity in the last decades, the Yagua are suffering the consequences of the white colonisation of their territory, three centuries of dependence and oppression and of submission to an invador who is striving to reject and destroy them. That presence, particularly felt at the time of the economic "boom" and the frontier wars, is becoming intensified today with the new politics of the "conquest of the Amazon" and the colonisation of frontiers (the concept of "living frontiers"). In the face of the resurgence of violence and oppression, which is taking place today, and after the secular exploit­ation of men by work in lumbering, skin trade and rubber ex­traction, the systematic abduction of Yagua girls for the mestizo market and the deportation of grouos living near tourist lodges, it has become urgent to present a document commenting on and analysing their present situation.