Depredador depredado: cacerías y comercio de jaguar en dos cuencas andino amazônicas

Abstract

The indiscriminate hunting of jaguars and other minor felines in the region of Caqueta and Putumayo rivers, especially during the 1940s - 1970s, reflects a much braoder process of colonization and mercantilism, which profoundly affects our Amazon throughout the twentieth century. In this way, rivers and villagers, along with all kinds of documents and relics keep track of a phenomenon of deliberate involvement of Amazonian biodiversity, thanks to international trade in skins which, in the years of the greatest heigh, joined hundreds of thousands of dead cats each year in the Amazon jungles. This phenomenon, as well as the imaginary about largest feline on the American and subsequent measures imposed against the commecial hunt since the 1970s, allows a better understanding of the evolving relationship society -nature in the region Caqueta Japura and Putumayo- ica during the last century