Achagua

The Achagua are an Arawakan people of the Orinoco llanos, whose territory at contact covered the basins of the Casanare, Meta and Apure rivers in eastern Colombia and western Venezuela. They were the most numerous people of those plains, perhaps more than thirty thousand strong.

They lived in large villages where clans shared communal houses, farming bitter cassava and poisoning their arrow points with curare. Their towns formed a wide trading network that ran on its own currency, strings of quiripa shell beads.

Many Achagua were later gathered into Jesuit missions, where they lived until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767; afterward fresh waves of colonists seized their lands and successive epidemics reduced their numbers. Small Achagua communities survive in the Colombian departments of Meta and Casanare.