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The Zapara people live in the Amazon forest on both sides of the border between Ecuador and Peru. They live by hunting, fishing,
collecting wild fruits and planting small, traditional gardens.
The Zapara have suffered a long history of violence. First, rubber companies enslaved them and forced them to work until
they died. They were sold in the ports of Iquitos and Putumayo. Those that resisted were raped and killed.
Diseases to which the Zapara had no immunity caused thousands more deaths. As their numbers dwindled, settlers moved
into their traditional territory, using violence to force them off of their lands. By 1980 the Zapara had been declared extinct;
wiped off of the face of the Earth in less than a century by violence, disease and assimilation.
In 1998 the Zapara came out of the forest to tell the world that they were still alive. That they
Before the last great Zapara Shaman died in 1998, he
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