indigenous communities into Jesuit reductions in order to facilitate religious indoctrination and protect them from enslavement by the Portuguese, but smallpox devastated the population, leaving the region of the upper Solimões uninhabited. In 1745 Charles Marie de La Condamine wrote in his Relation abrégée d'un voyage fait dans l'intérieur de l'Amérique Méridionale, that of the 30 Omagua villages marked on Fritz's 1707 map, he saw only ruins, adding that "all the inhabitants, frightened by the incursions of a group of bandits from Pará, who came to enslave them in their own lands, dispersed into the forest and the Spanish and Portuguese missions." Throughout the eighteenth century and until slavery was officially outlawed in Brazil in 1888, forced labor programs destroyed indigenous communities, compelling the natives to abandon their ethnic traditions and adopt the identity of caboclos (settlers of mixed race). By the late 1980s, it was assumed by many ethnographers such as Betty Jane Meggers that the Cambeba were extinct. Modern-day populations are divided between Peru and Brazil. In 1994 there were approximately 3,500 Omaguas living in the area near Lima, Peru. In Brazil, Omaguas live in several villages on the middle and upper Solimões in Amazonas, in lands predominately occupied by the Ticunas, with smaller groups in Manaus. The Brazilian population is estimated to be around 1,500 people, but an official 2002 census identified only 325 individuals, possibly due to poor census techniques and because those Cambebas living on the Ticuna reservation were counted as Ticunas. Linguistic controversy Some linguists argue that the Omagua language is derived from Tupi-Guarani and became a distinct language in relatively recent times, however there is evidence that Omagua and the closely related Kokama language already existed in a form similar to their modern forms by the time European missionaries arrived in Maynas in the 17th century. The use of the language has declined due to schooling of young people, and Cambeba is spoken fluently only by tribal elders on formal occasions, in meetings and in some school classes. Early Jesuit missions Missionary interactions with the Cambebas began with an expedition led by the Jesuits Simón de Rojas and Umberto Coronado to the Upper Napo River in 1620. The expedition spent almost a year with the Cambebas of the Aguarico River area, and by virtue of a bilingual Quechua-Cambeba translator, produced a number of ecclesiastical texts in Omagua, including a catechism. In 1687, Samuel