The Jaguar Dies in a Defensive Position

The Jaguar Dies in a Defensive Position is a fable that weaves together mythology, urban culture, and the remnants of the Rubber Boom era in Peru’s principal Amazonian city into a hybrid imaginary where jungle, eros, myth, and modern life converge.

If a jaguar were to arrive in the city of Iquitos, it would make no sound. It would walk as if it had always been there, along Pasaje Paquito, past the cables piled up on utility poles, the mototaxis that pass by leaving a trail of grease and gasoline. It would smell the corners, the garbage dumps and their vultures, the doors of the bars. It would search for something it does not know how to name, but recognizes as akin to itself.

The jaguar would walk through the streets like a tourist without a map. Its instincts, shaped by the jungle, would encounter a different order: straight streets, techno-cumbia blaring from broken speakers, a frame that encloses the Itaya River. The jaguar would keep walking. It would not understand the city, nor would it try to understand it. It would simply move forward, as if each corner concealed either a revelation or an ambush.

This city was once the epicenter of a boom forged at the expense of exploited bodies, of names erased in the midst of the rubber fever. A prosperity built upon the enslavement of Indigenous communities.

Now the city is still there. It lingers in the smell of damp earth, in the engines that roar all day long, in the bars where twilight shelters their patrons and desire seems like sediment clinging to the walls.

The jaguar would pass through there as well, without stopping, as if everything were part of the same jungle. And no one would notice its presence until its desire and instinct become our own.

Musuk Nolte

The Jaguar Dies in a Defensive Position is a fable that reconstructs and

interweaves elements of mythology, urban culture, and the historical

processes that shaped Peru’s principal Amazonian city. In 1915, Iquitos

witnessed the end of the Rubber Boom—a period of great economic prosperity,

but also one marked by oppression and the enslavement of Indigenous

communities throughout the Amazon region. What followed was a decline, later

reimagined through layers of cultural encounters and dissonances.

The presence of the Indigenous, the mythological, and the urban gave rise to a

singular imaginary, in which the erotic and the natural merge with

contemporary sensibilities in an ongoing process of hybridization. The images

unfold from natural landscapes to the city’s bars, where erotic décor infused