Panatahuas

The Panatahuas are an Arawak-speaking rainforest people of the Rupa-Rupa high jungle in central Peru, holding the valleys of the Monzón and Chunatahua rivers and the mouth of the Chinchao. Their language, also called Panatagua, is poorly recorded and extinct.

Chroniclers such as Guamán Poma de Ayala relate that, rather than submit to the Inca armies of Pachacútec, the Panatahuas withdrew deeper into the forest, and kept their independence in the mountains above the Huallaga valley when the Spaniards arrived. From the 1630s Franciscan missionaries founded reducciones along the Huallaga, and in 1754 the friar Alonso Abad used the Monzón river to push into Panatahuas and Cashibo country.