Desangrar. Violencia y relaciones inter-étnicas en algunos relatos de la Amazonía peruana

The Peruvian Amazon region is the scenery where a terrifying figure, known as sacacara, pelacara or sacaojos, lives and acts. This "mythical" character, perceived by the inhabitants of the region as an alternative symbolic reality, exhibits certain characteristics that connect him to the “black tiger” or yanapuma, protagonist of other tales of oral tradition, which spread more prevalently after the so-called “rubber boom" (between the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th). In this article, through the analysis of some oral tales and some written literary sources, themes of exploitation and unbalanced power relationships between native and western populations will be exposed. These topics are synthesized in the parallelism between the rubber trees' sap extraction and the practice of bleeding, the black tiger's unusual killing method.