  The s-wave decay amplitude in the nonleptonic decay of baryons is analyzed
within heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory in the large-N_c limit at
one-loop order, where N_c is the number of color charges. Loop graphs with
octet and decuplet intermediate states are systematically incorporated into the
analysis and the effects of the decuplet-octet mass difference are accounted
for. There are large-N_c cancellations between different one-loop graphs as a
consequence of the large-N_c spin-flavor symmetry of QCD baryons. The
predictions of large-N_c baryon chiral perturbation theory are in very good
agreement both with the expectations from the 1/N_c expansion and with the
experimental data.
