In 1742, the national liberation movement led by Juan Santos Atahualpa forced the Franciscan missionaries, their military back-up, and the Spanish colonists they brought, out of central Peru and allowed the Amuesha and Campa peoples of the area to continue determining their own destinies independent of the Spanish and later Peruvian occupational forces. In 1881, after 139 years of absence, the Franciscan Order returned to the area, entering the Chorobamba valley, inhabited exclusively by Amuesha peoples, where they founded the mission post "Nuestra Senora de la Asuncion de Quillazu". After 80 years of "protection" by the Franciscans, 8 years of legal battles with the mission and its tenant farmers, and 5 years of social and economic justice as administered by the Agrarian Reform program, the Amuesha in Quillazu are finding themselves in a continually more precarious economic situation. By usurping their lands and renting them to outsiders and then selling all the lumber from their forests, the mission has eliminated the Amueshas' traditional means of satisfying their economic needs. Although they are now dependent on manufactured goods and on the monetary system for acquiring them, they have been left with no means for participating in the money economy. They are trapped in a situation of permanent poverty, dependent on the production of their small plots of coffee and on selling their labor to local hacienda owners for any money income. At the same time, their lands continue to be colonized by outsiders. (Author/NQ)