The indigenous peoples of lowland South America have until recently been marginal to the history of the continent. The Spanish focused on the rich highland regions taken over from the Aztecs and the Inka and regarded the lowlands as frontier areas, difficult of access and lacking the large settled populations that could be put to work to enrich their overlords. The lowlands were therefore largely left to missionaries and those settlers who had failed to make their fortunes elsewhere. These were regions little involved in the major events of the Spanish empire or in the turbulent nineteenth-century histories of the republics that succeeded it in South America. It is true that the lowland peoples of the upper Amazon did give the Spanish authorities a serious fright in 1742, when they rebelled against Spanish rule under their leader, Juan Santos Atahuallpa whom they considered the new Inka. But the rebellion faded out, and the lowland peoples returned to their marginal obscurity until they were brutally dragged into the limelight during the Rubber Boom 150 years later.

In Portuguese America there were no great highland empires to be conquered. The lowland peoples were the native population, and the Portuguese systematically enslaved them. In fact the Portuguese slavers became so ruthlessly efficient that they succeeded in eliminating the indigenous populations of large areas of the hinterland and driving the surviving native peoples into the least accessible parts of the continent. As the availability of forced indigenous labor dwindled in their Brazilian colony, the Portuguese took to importing black slaves from west Africa. By the end of the eighteenth century, Brazil had become a place where a white élite ruled over a large, servile black population, and the Indians were both socially and economically marginal.

This chapter deals with the lowland peoples of northern South America who inhabit the countries surrounding the Amazon Basin (see Map 26.1). These populations are scattered throughout Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, so it will be necessary to say something about the policies and particular circumstances of all of these countries. The approximate numbers of lowland Indians living in each of these nations are given in Table 26.1. Such numbers can be no more than rough estimates for a number of reasons. There is no precise definition of the lowlands and therefore no way to establish the geographical boundaries of such a region.