Pacahuara

The Pacahuara are a Panoan people of the northern Bolivian Amazon, whose forest homeland runs from the Beni lowlands toward the Brazilian border between the Negro and Pacahuaras rivers. They were traditionally divided into the Sinabu and Capuibo, and lived by shifting farming, hunting, fishing and gathering Brazil nuts and palm hearts in small, mobile family groups.

Their unwritten language belongs to the Panoan family and is close to that of their neighbours, the Chácobo. In 1767 the Jesuit scholar Lorenzo Hervás recorded a Pacabara language spoken in the San Borja mission on the Beni, showing that Pacahuara bands had entered the Jesuit mission world of the Mamoré.