Todo es inmenso en esa región, empezando por nuestra ignorancia respecto a ella’ [Everything about that region is immense, beginning with our lack of knowledge about it]. Little seems to have changed since this observation was included in Luis Antonio Toro Osorio's 1960s book on the Putumayo. Today most people outside Colombia are more likely to associate the Putumayo with the popular multicultural record label than the Amazonian region which lends it its name. Nevertheless, the Putumayo figures significantly in Colombia and beyond, politically, socially, economically, and culturally. The 1,000–mile long Putumayo River (the Iza in Brazil), which rises in the Andean foothills just outside Pasto in Colombia, has been described as ‘one of the most important in the American continent’ – its significance borne out by its inclusion alongside only the Orinoco and Amazon rivers in depictions of the northern half of South America in a number of early twentieth–century atlases. The region crossed by the river has, likewise, been called ‘one of the richest in the world’. During the tropical booms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Putumayo supplied first quinine and then rubber to markets across the globe, not only owing to its rich natural resources but its strategic location as a gateway from the Andes to ports across the Amazon, the Atlantic, and beyond. The height of the Putumayo's fame – or notoriety – came a century ago following sensational revelations about the horrific abuses of a British–registered rubber company, the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC), which decimated the region's indigenous population. Today oil and cocaine have eclipsed the earlier booms in gold, quinine, rubber, tropical hardwood, and animal skins, with equally destructive consequences for the region's beleaguered indigenous communities. In the 1990s residents had a greater chance of being murdered than of dying of natural causes and the Putumayo had the highest level of coca production in Colombia. Once renowned for its powerful shamans and hallucinogenic plants such as yagé (known in the Peruvian Amazon as ayahuasca), these days the Putumayo has few medicine men left and much of its native flora and fauna are under threat.