page_title: Manuel Córdova-Rios
section_title: Amazon youth and caucho
hierarchical_section_title: Manuel Córdova-Rios / Early years / Amazon youth and caucho
caption_attribution_description: Español: Fotografía antigua de Iquitos que data posiblemente desde 1900, durante la fiebre del caucho.
context_page_description: Manuel Córdova-Rios was a vegetalista of the upper Amazon, and the subject of several popular books.
  As a young mestizo of Iquitos he joined in a company to set up camp in the surrounding Amazon forest and cut rubber trees. He was captured then by a native tribe, among whom he apparently lived for seven years. The elderly chief taught him in intensive private sessions traditional knowledge, e.g., about medicinal plants of the jungle, and about ways of leadership. From the small tribe he learned skills for hunting in the jungle and acquired the name Ino Moxo. The chief also led night-long group sessions under the influence of ayahuasca to sharpen prowess in the hunt. After the chief's death, Córdova was acknowledged as leader of the tribe for some years.
  He then returned to Peruvian life, married and raised a family. Eventually he became well known in the upper Amazon for his success as a curandero, by using the chief's herbal teachings. He also regularly sent medicinal plants to New York.
  In the early 1960s he met an American forester, Bruce Lamb, a veteran of many years in the Amazon.
context_section_description: Until the age of twelve Manuel Córdova-Ríos attended schools in Iquitos his birthplace. The major Peruvian city on the Amazon, it then had about 40,000 inhabitants. His Uru mother came from Moyobamba, a town west of Iquitos in the Andes foothills between the Río Marañón and Río Huallaga. His father worked in the surrounding forest as a tapper (Spanish: cauchero; Portuguese: seringeiros) or cutter of wild rubber trees. His origins lay near Arequipa (a provincial capital far to the south).
  The Amazon trade in rubber (Sp: caucho) had then recently come upriver to Iquitos from Brazil. Eventually his mother let him go with his elder sister Mariana and her husband Lino Vela into the hinterland to learn the booming rubber business. In the small town of Iberia on the Río Tapiche the couple's trading post served rubber tappers, who would bring in their harvest of latex to sell, as well as to buy gear and supplies. Before long young Manuel went further into the bush, by boat with a company of four others under Roque to a remote, makeshift caucho camp by the Río Juruá near the Peru–Brazil border. From here they could fan out into the unexploited forest in search of wild rubber trees.
caption: Iquitos on the Amazon,
  first decade of 20th century
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