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Authorities are scrambling to establish security in a remote Amazonian frontier region following recent attacks by isolated tribesmen that have left one man dead and another wounded in the wilds of southeastern Peru. The attacks — in October and November of last year  – come amid an upturn in the number of sightings of nomadic Mashco-Piro Indians along major waterways in the dense forests bordering the Manu National Park, posing an increasingly volatile situation for communities, travelers, and the isolated tribespeople.

Isolated Mashco-Piro Indians on Madre de Dios River, Peruvian Amazon, photo by Diego Cortijo/Survival/uncontactedtribes.org

The rights group Survival International released dramatic photographs earlier today of the same group of Mashco-Piro that is believed to have launched the November attack. Witnesses say the victim, a Matsigenka Indian named Nicolas “Shaco” Flores, was killed when struck in the heart with a bamboo-tipped arrow as he tended a garden on an island in the middle of the Madre de Dios River, just outside the community of Diamante on the edge of the Manu Park. Survival described the photos as the most detailed, up-close images ever taken of uncontacted Indians.

The images were taken by Diego Cortijo, a member of the Spanish Geographical Society, while on an archeological expedition along the Madre de Dios River in search of petroglyphs. Cortijo and his colleagues had hired Flores to serve as a guide, said Cortijo in a phone call from his home in Madrid, and Flores later invited the Spaniards to spend a few days at his home, about a two-hour boat ride from the settlement of Diamante.  The Indians appeared on the riverbank across from Flores’s house one morning and called out to him by name. Cortijo said he made the photographs with a long lens and that he and Flores did not approach the tribe members. Six days later Flores was killed.

Who Was Shaco Flores?

Nicolas "Shaco" Flores, a Matsigenka Indian killed in an attack by isolated Mashco-Piro tribesmen. Photo (c) D. Cortijo

“It was a complete shock,” said Cortijo, recalling the moment when he heard the news of the death on two-way radio at a ranger’s control post downriver. “I couldn’t believe my ears.”

Sources familiar with the local dynamics and players involved in the area described Shaco Flores as a kind-hearted “go-between” who had long played the role of intermediary between the nomads and the outside world. Flores had facilitated access to trade goods for the tribe, such as machetes and cooking pots, and was tending crops he may have intended to share with the Indians at the time of his death.

Anthropologist Glenn Shepard, who experienced a hair-raising brush with the Mashco-Piro in the same region 1999, was puzzled by the attack. Flores was an old friend, he said, who had married a Piro woman and spoke enough of her language to make himself understood in occasional conversations shouted from a distance with the Mashco-Piro. He noted various theories that may account for the heightened volatility of the uncontacted Indians in the area, including a growing epidemic of illegal logging and a notable increase in low-flying air traffic linked to expanding oil and gas exploration by multinationals in the zone. Additionally, he said, the Indians — who were decimated by illnesses introduced by outsiders — may have gotten spooked by Flores’s persistent efforts to make contact.

Natives of  Diamante told Shepard they believe that possible discord among the Mashco-Piro — between those who want more contact with the outside world and those who fear it — may have triggered the attack. The faction resistant to contact, Shepard says, “may have cut off the ‘point-man’ who was pulling them closer to decisive contact.”

Dangerous Business

But Cortijo suggested another possibility: that the Mashco-Piro may have reacted in anger to a recent decision by Flores to withhold further trade goods from the tribe.

“They want me to go over there and give them machetes,” Flores told Cortijo as they watched the Indians signaling from the far side of the river. “But I’m not going.” That was because, Flores told Cortijo, he had been advised in recent weeks by the regional indigenous federation to desist from making efforts to contact the Mashco-Piro, warning of the dangers of violence to him and his family on the one hand, and of unwittingly spreading disease to the tribe on the other.

Isolated tribes like the Mashco-Piro have little or no immunity to illnesses, such as influenza, measles, or even the common cold.  Contact with the outside world typically results in high rates of mortality among isolated indigenous groups, one of the reasons why some countries — most notably Brazil — have adopted policies to shield such groups from outside contact.

A Bloody Backstory

With a population estimated in the hundreds, the Mashco-Piro are among 14 or 15 isolated tribes still roaming the Peruvian Amazon. They have long been considered among the Amazon’s most implacable warriors, resisting contact and subjugation. Most of the tribe was slaughtered on the upper Manu River in 1894 by a private army in the employ of the notorious rubber kingpin Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald, lionized in German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s classic movie, “Fitzcarraldo.” The survivors of those bloody engagements retreated into the most impenetrable reaches of the western Amazon’s upland forests. As outsiders pry their way deeper into these last redoubts in pursuit of timber and other riches, the descendants of those previous traumas are now coming under mounting pressure themselves.

“Their history of contact,” says Shepard, “has always been fraught with the fear of violence and exploitation.”

Recent sightings of the Mashco-Piro include an appearance along the Manu River videotaped by tourists and released to the public last October by Peru’s Ministry of the Environment (see “Peru Releases Dramatic Footage of Uncontacted Indians.”) A park guard suffered an arrow wound in the shoulder as he traveled along the Manu River last October, around the time the videotape was released. Authorities have since tried to limit access to outsiders and have embarked on a campaign to educate residents about the dangers of attempting to make contact with the isolated tribes.

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The Peruvian government has released dramatic new footage showing a near-encounter with a group of uncontacted Indians along a riverbank in the Amazon rain forest. The video was taken by travelers on the Manu River in southeastern Peru in recent months, according to officials from Peru’s Ministry of the Environment, who released the images on Monday.

In the video, travelers appear to be playing a game of cat and mouse with the naked tribesmen, drifting close to shore only to flee in panic in their motorboat as the natives approach. Some of the Indians brandish bows and arrows, and at one moment, one of them prepares to launch an arrow at the boat. The travelers are heard debating among themselves whether to approach, whether to back off, and if they should leave gifts of food or clothing on the shore for the Indians to take.

Officials said there have been multiple sightings in recent months of nomadic bands of Mashco-Piro Indians in the area of Manu National Park. Isolated Indians are known to travel extensively by foot during the dry season, now at its height, appearing along the riverbanks as they search for turtle eggs buried in nests along the sandy beaches of the western Amazon. But mounting pressure from logging crews, wildcat gold prospectors, and seismic teams exploring for oil and gas are flushing isolated indigenous out of the forests as well, according to Roger Rumrill, a special advisor to the Environment Ministry. “There is very strong pressure on their territories,” Rumrill said.The video and other accounts of recent sightings and near-encounters prompted officials to issue a stern warning to those traveling along the rivers and backwoods of the Amazon to avoid forcing contact with isolated groups, for the safety of all involved. Travelers were also urged to refrain from leaving behind gifts of food or clothing, which could transmit devastating illnesses to immunologically defenseless isolated Indians.

In releasing the video on Monday, Peruvian officials noted a sharp turn in national policy toward the estimated 4,000-5,000 indigenous people living in near-complete isolation from the outside world, promising to adopt a series of measures aimed at bolstering protection for isolated indigenous tribes and those in the initial stages of contact. The previous government, led by ex-president Alan Garcia, had auctioned off vast tracts of the Amazon to oil and logging concessions. Elected with the broad support of Peru’s indigenous population earlier this year, the government of president Ollanta Humala is moving quickly to distance itself from the policies of its predecessor.

“The policy of this government is one of permanent  inclusion of indigenous peoples, of commitment to their social demands, including territorial demands, education, and health care,” Rumrill said. ”It’s diametrically opposed to the previous government.” Those words mark a dramatic departure from the Garcia administration, whose officials denied the very existence of uncontacted nomads in the pristine rainforest regions opened up to development in the past few years. One state oil executive famously likened the elusive natives to the Loch Ness monster, claiming them to be a phantom concocted by environmentalists to hold back development.

Carlos Soria, the newly appointed secretary general of the National Service for Protected Natural Areas (SERNANP), the agency with jurisdiction over Peru’s national parks, said the government was in the process of updating protocols and recommendations for how best to deal with unexpected contingencies arising from contact with isolated indigenous populations. All new policy decisions would be guided regarding the isolated tribes, said Soria, by a commitment to better environmental management, a respect for human rights, and a “fulfillment of our obligations to our indigenous populations.”

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In a sign of growing indigenous activism and impatience with ineffectual bureaucrats, communities in Peru and Brazil have joined forces in recent days to patrol a volatile border region rife with illegal loggers and heavily armed gangs of drug-runners.

An illegal logging camp deep in the Peruvian Amazon.    Photo by Scott Wallace

Earlier this month, a joint patrol of Ashéninka natives from the Alto Tamaya River in Peru and Asháninka tribesmen from across the border in Brazil encountered multiple sites inside Peru where loggers appeared to be operating outside legally recognized concessions. The Indians also discovered a logging camp just 200 yards from the border, prompting suspicions that the lumberjacks are poised to snatch valuable timber from Brazilian national territory.

“It’s a known strategy,” Asháninka leader Isaac Piyãko told the Pro-Indian Commission of Acre, the Amazonian border state in far western Brazil that includes the native lands of the Asháninka. “They set up a camp close on the border to take away wood from Brazil.” Piyãko said the patrol found trunks of recently felled mahogany and cedar — both endangered hardwoods protected by law — as well as standing trees on the Brazil side marked with blazes by loggers for imminent harvest.

Equipped with hand-held GPS units, indigenous leaders presented the geo-referenced information to Brazilian authorities in a meeting last week in the frontier city of Cruzeiro do Sul. Officials promised to look into the matter and indicated they were willing to undertake aerial surveillance and to bolster their presence in the restive border area.

The Brazilian Asháninka have evolved into a well-organized and influential force in recent years, emerging as a role model for other less fortunate tribes. Their territory has been legally recognized, and tribal members enjoy a relatively high level of educational and public health services. The same cannot be said for their brethren in Peru. They have petitioned for legal title to their land for the past ten years. The government has yet to act, leaving the Peruvian Ashéninka exposed to ongoing invasions from illegal loggers and a cascade of threats that keep everyone on edge when nighttime comes to the forest, and the last cooking fires wink out.

Just last month, members of the Ashéninka community of Saweto found three outboard motors sabotaged after they sustained a confrontation with loggers in the backwoods.

The Asháninka and Ashéninka are closely related indigenous groups, sharing a common language and similar customs.

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While on assignment for National Geographic in Peru this summer, I had the privilege of visiting the Ashéninka indigenous community of Saweto, at the headwaters of the Alto Tamaya River near the border of Brazil. It can take up to eight grueling days of boat travel from the city of Pucallpa to reach Saweto, a quiet village of plank-and-thatch huts set atop the banks of the twisting Tamaya River. But we – photographer Alex Webb, University of Richmond geography professor David Salisbury, and myself – had the luck and luxury to arrive by helicopter, which delivered us as if by magic onto Saweto’s soccer field in the village clearing a mere 40 minutes after lift-off from Pucallpa.

Such are the contradictions of modern life. Forty minutes in the air and you drop in on another reality, people so removed from the outside world that they can scarcely remember the last time they were visited by a government official, other than the school teacher who packed up and left weeks before the end of the academic year with no promise to return.

That doesn’t mean Saweto’s neglected residents have been left entirely to themselves. The law might be absent, but the seamy side of the global economy is very much in evidence. Drug smugglers ply the Indians’ age-old footpaths on their way to Brazil. Poachers slaughter their animals. llegal loggers pillage their forests with impunity.

Ashéninka Indian, Mashansho Creek, Peru 2011 Photo: Scott Wallace

The Ashéninka could easily play the victim, mope around their sun-scorched village, throw their hands up in despair. But the people of Saweto have retained a fighting spirit. Perhaps that was why gales of laughter and hoots of delight so often filled the days and nights as we accompanied them first by canoe and then by foot deep into their upland forest. It’s still a bountiful forest crisscrossed by emerald green streams of astonishing beauty. Catfish dart about the eddies; tadpoles waggle in the sandy shallows. Fresh jaguar and tapir tracks mottle the beaches along the shore.

With Salisbury’s help, the community has spent the better part of the past decade struggling to gain legal ownership to these natural riches. Only with legal title can the Ashéninka hope to throw out the loggers for good and seek more rational ways to develop their woodlands. We did witness a confrontation deep in the backwoods between the Indians and a crew of lumberjacks who had ignored their pleas to stay out. Standing up to those who routinely mock their claims marked a big step forward for the people of Saweto.

But grim tidings have reached us in recent days. The loggers returned to exact revenge, sabotaging the outboard motors of three tribespeople who took us upriver. The small, long-shafted motors – called “peck-pecks” – and the money it takes to buy them represent a small fortune for indigenous people struggling to hold their own against far more powerful forces. It will be very difficult to replace them. The loggers know this. Filling their gas tanks with sand was a calling card, a way to say: “Watch out!” Next time it could be far worse. Especially if the culprits believe that no one is watching.

We will be watching.

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Five Brazilian Indian rights officials are holding out in a remote jungle outpost in a desperate attempt to protect uncontacted indigenous groups from heavily-armed drug traffickers who have moved into the area from Peru in the past two weeks, according to dispatches from the scene. Officials fear the traffickers may have unleashed a manhunt to track down and exterminate the highly vulnerable tribal populations in order to clear the forests for their coca-growing operations.

The drama began last month, when Asháninka Indians three hours upstream from the base warned by two-way radio that a heavily armed band of intruders had crossed the border from Peru into Brazil. Nearly two weeks later, 40 armed men appeared in the dense forests around the control post, which sits on the banks of the Xinane River, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) inside Brazil’s border in the western Amazonian state ocre.

The post is operated by the “Envira Ethno-Environmental Protection Front,” and staffed by the Department of Isolated Indians, a special unit within Brazil’s Indian affairs agency, known as FUNAI. The outpost is intended to stem the flow of intruders into the headwaters of the Envira River, a pristine rainforest habitat where several isolated indigenous communities have taken refuge, shunning contact with the outside world.

While the control post has effectively blocked intruders moving upriver from within Brazil, it is ill-prepared to defend against infiltrations from the Peruvian side of the border, particularly on the scale of the current intrusion.

Outmanned and outgunned, the FUNAI personnel fled the outpost, which the gang overran on July 23. It took a week for Brazilian Federal Police and Army troops to respond to the incursion, dropping in by helicopter to regain control of the Xinane base. But the agents withdrew after a sweep of the nearby forest turned up a lone suspect. Unsatisfied with the failure of the police and military to remain in the area, the FUNAI team reoccupied the outpost this past Friday, August 5,  fearing a massacre of the Indians they are duty-bound to protect.

“This situation could be the one of the gravest blows we’ve seen to efforts to protect isolated Indians in the past decade,” wrote Carlos Travassos, head of the Department of Isolated Indians, in an email to his colleagues from the Xanane base. Travassos is one of the five officials who returned to the base on Friday, despite warnings from the Federal Police that it was not safe to do so. The team has discovered clear signs that the traffickers remain in woods enveloping the base — fresh footprints, trampled underbrush, and a camp, where they found a backpack containing shotgun shells that had been looted from the FUNAI base, and more ominously, a broken arrow most likely seized from one of the uncontacted tribes in the area. Travassos said that interrogation of the suspect convinced him that some kind of atrocity had been committed in the nearby woodlands. “I was left with the strong impression that these guys had killed the Indians, at least a bunch of them,” Travassos wrote.

The FUNAI agents are accompanied by the veteran indigenous rights activist and scout José Carlos Meirelles, who supervised the Envira Front for FUNAI for 23 years. Now retired from FUNAI and working for the state government of Acre, Meirelles writes: “The fact is that we will remain here until someone (in the government) believes that an invasion of Brazilian territory by a group of Peruvian paramilitaries is something that merits attention.”

On Saturday, Travassos reported that Asháninka Indians from upriver had arrived at the outpost to bolster the FUNAI arsenal with much-needed rifles to fend off a possible attack.

The Xinane outpost is in the same region where Meirelles has twice taken journalists by aircraft on overflights to film and photograph a settlement of uncontacted Indians deep in the forest. Images of naked Indians in red body paint electrified much of the world when broadcast by the BBC earlier this year. In the BBC’s report, Meirelles called the Indians in the clearing below “the last free people on Earth.”

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Officials from Brazil’s Indian affairs agency, FUNAI, say they have confirmed the existence of a previously unknown indigenous group in the rugged folds of the western Amazon. The tribe, believed to number as many as 200 people, was initially discovered through the examination of satellite images of rain forest clearings and confirmed by aerial reconnaissance flights earlier this year.

The overflights revealed three separate clearings and four large communal dwellings, known as malocas, clustered in the dense jungles of the Javari Valley Indigenous Reserve in far western Brazil. Specialists in matters pertaining to isolated Indians estimate the population of uncontacted tribes by examining the size and number of dwellings, as well as any gardens the inhabitants might have under cultivation. (more)

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Late last month the Brazilian Congress passed a bill that if it becomes law would ease restrictions on rain-forest clearing and make it easier than ever to mow down the Amazon. That same day, 800 miles north of the parliamentary chamber in Brasilia, assailants ambushed and killed a married couple whose opposition to environmental crimes had placed them in the crosshairs of those who most stand to gain from the new legislation. (more)

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Peru says it will bolster protections for uncontacted tribes roaming the deep Amazon after a public row erupted last week that sent indigenous affairs officials scrambling for cover.

The debate began in recent days after officials from the outgoing administration of president Alan Garcia let slip a series of statements hinting at plans to modify—and perhaps even revoke—protected status for two so-called territorial reserves set aside for isolated indigenous groups and the rain forest that harbors them.

As many as 15 nomadic or seminomadic indigenous groups are believed to inhabit remote stretches of eastern Peru in willful isolation from the rest of the world. They figure among the very last uncontacted tribes on Earth. That’s not an arbitrary number; it’s based on extensive documentation of sightings of furtive tribespeople or the vestiges they leave behind—footprints, spears, ceramic pots, shelters—as they move through the forest.

To safeguard these peoples, in the 1990s Peru began to set aside territorial reserves that made large swathes of the Amazon off-limits to commercial exploitation. Today five such reserves spread across Peru’s Amazon region, totaling nearly 11,000 square miles of pristine forest and an astonishing diversity of flora and fauna. Traveling along a remote river on the edge of the Murunahua Territorial Reserve, I recently saw four different kinds of monkeys, as well as capybaras, river otters, caimans, and countless avian species—toucans, parrots, macaws, and many rare songbirds.

True, the reserves have been invaded frequently (and nearly always with impunity) by the usual suspects: loggers, gold prospectors, drug traffickers, skin hunters. Their location in some of the wildest redoubts of the Amazon makes policing their boundaries especially difficult, the more so because the cash-strapped government devotes little to enforcement. Still, their status has offered a critical margin of protection. Which was why the proposed changes triggered such vociferous protest.

“The changes they propose appear to be motivated by politics, not scientific evidence,” said Arsenio Calle Cordova, director of the Alto Purus National Park, which abuts or overlaps four of the five territorial reserves. The park forms the core of a mosaic of protected areas, known as the Purus Complex, covering 10,500 square miles of dense rain forest in southeastern Peru. Nearly a fifth of that lands lies within the bounds of the Murunahua reserve, a critical buffer for the park that contains some of the very last stands of highly coveted mahogany in all of Peru—and at least two groups of uncontacted Indians. The Murunuhua was one of two reserves slated for review.

Photo by Chris Fagan, Upper Amazon Conservancy. Huts abandoned by isolated Indians inside Alto Purus National Park, Peru.

At a meeting Calle attended last month in the timber hub of Pucallpa, an official from Peru’s indigenous affairs agency, known as INDEPA, said he did not believe there were any isolated tribes left in the reserve. “He said the territory has been so overrun by loggers as to think the isolated [Indians] must have fled to somewhere else,” Calle wrote in an email from Puerto Esperanza, a remote outpost on the Upper Purus River.

Calle said the official, Luís Lacerna, told him that the Murunahua might soon lose its legal protection for lack of recent documentation proving the ongoing presence of isolated Indians in the reserve.

According to Francisco Estremadoyro of the NGO Pro-Purus, Lacerna repeated similar assertions at a meeting two weeks ago in Lima. I was with Estremadoyro in April as he gathered eyewitness testimony among natives on the Huacapistea River confirming the presence of uncontacted tribespeople inside the Murunahua reserve. Lacerna showed little interest in the evidence, Estremadoyro said. “It was completely disappointing to learn how little value the Murunahua reserve represents for INDEPA.”

Photo by Chris Fagan, Upper Amazon Conservancy. Illegal logging camp inside Murunahua Territorial Reserve, Peru.

Officials from the Ministry of Culture, the department that oversees INDEPA’s work and the reserves, deny they are about to do anything to jeopardize indigenous peoples living within the Murunahua territory. Vice Minister of Culture José Carlos Vilcapoma says the government has “no interest” in revising the boundaries or revoking the Murunahua reserve’s protected status. “We categorically denounce and will prosecute all intrusions,” he told me. “We are committed to protecting the isolated tribes.”

The row over the territorial reserves comes just months after the release of sensational television footage of uncontacted Indians filmed by the BBC from an airplane along Brazil’s border with Peru, just opposite the Murunahua reserve. Brazilian officials took the film crew to observe the thatched dwellings of the isolated tribespeople to prove their existence and to prompt Peru to crack down on illegal logging in its protected areas. At the time, Peru promised it would take action, a promise vice minister Vilcapoma repeated last week. He will host a symposium in Lima later this month, he said, to discuss protecting isolated Indians on the border with Brazil.

Indigenous rights activists say both presidential candidates contesting last Sunday’s elections have pro-development agendas for the Amazon that put isolated tribes at risk. “Regardless of who wins, it will be necessary to accelerate actions to protect [the Indians],” said Beatriz Huertas, who consults with indigenous organizations on human rights.