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.”

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 carpet 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.

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.

Isolated Indians in the headwaters of the Envira River on the Brazil-Peru border take aim at

a low-flying aircraft with bows and arrows in 2008. Credit: Gleison Miranda/FUNAI

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.”

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. The recently discovered tribe is reported to have planted tracts of corn, banana, and low-to-the-ground bushes that might be peanuts or cassava.

Into the Jungle

Settlement of an uncontacted indigenous tribe in the Javari Valley, Brazil. Photo courtesy of FUNAI.

The Javari — a sprawling rain forest reserve half the size of Florida — is home to the largest concentration of uncontacted tribes in the entire world. There are at least eight uncontacted indigenous communities, and perhaps as many as fourteen, inhabiting the upland forests in the headwaters of the rivers that drain the Vale do Javari Indigenous Land. It’s an area with which I have more than a passing familiarity. In 2002, I accompanied a team from FUNAI’s elite unit, the Department of Isolated Indians, on a three-month expedition through the reserve’s primeval forest to track a mysterious indigenous tribe known as the flecheiros — the Arrow People.

If true, the news would amount to a strong vindication of Brazil’s policy to locate and protect its isolated tribes. Such groups are highly susceptible to communicable diseases and to cultural dislocation unleashed by contact with the outside world. The Javari reserve is especially well protected from intrusions. The territory is overseen by the Javari Valley Ethno-Environmental Protection Front — administratively part of the Department of Isolated Indians. The Front’s director Fabricio Amorim told the Estado de São Paulo newspaper that the settlement appears to have been built within the past year. The Front operates three control posts along major rivers leading into the depths of the reserve, and the Javari Valley remains a bastion of tribal vitality and a rich repository of biodiversity.

Not the Only Ones
FUNAI has now confirmed the existence of more than two dozen uncontacted tribes within Brazil’s national territory, more than any other country in the world. The Department of Isolated Indians has received reports of dozens of others, but they have yet to be confirmed. Peru comes second, with fourteen or fifteen such groups roaming its Amazonian regions. They are under mounting threat from loggers, gold prospectors, and energy companies exploring for oil in the deep jungle. Peru recently announced new measures to protect its isolated tribes.

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.

It’s a nauseatingly familiar story. Over the past 20 years, there have been more than 1,200 murders related to land conflict in Brazil’s Amazon region. Most of the victims, like the married activists Zé Claudio Ribeiro and Maria do Espírito Santo, were defenders of the rain forest—people seeking sustainable alternatives to the plunder-for-profit schemes that characterize much of what passes for “development” in the Amazon.

Photo by Felipe Milanez. Zé Claudio Ribeiro poses last year with one of the ancient Brazil nut trees he defended with his life.

The couple had riled many interests in southeastern Pará. They were expelled from the board of directors of their cooperative after they accused board members of conspiring with loggers and charcoal producers to sell off majestic, centuries-old Brazil nut trees within the reserve. (The cutting of castanha trees is expressly prohibited by Brazilian law.) They filed grievances on behalf of neighbors whose land had been invaded, and they exposed the machinations of land grabbers who used phony identities to conceal their criminal dealings. Yet their denunciations led nowhere. No investigations. No indictments. No police protection. As journalist Felipe Milanez, a former staff writer for the Brazilian edition of National Geographic, puts it: “Those who filed the complaints were left exposed.”

Four days after the double murder, another small cultivator, Herivelto Pereira dos Santos, was shot dead near the same extractive reserve where Zé Claudio and Maria lived and worked. After surviving the initial shooting, dos Santos staggered down the road to find help, when the assassins returned to finish the job.

The government of the new president Dilma Roussef has promised to beef up security for those living under threat of death. The Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic rights agency, says the lives of at least 125 activist forest defenders are in danger. But President Roussef must also decide what to do with the new bill when it lands on her desk. Will she sign it into law? Whether she does or not, some believe Brazil’s Congress has already cast a decisive vote that points toward dark times to come.

“The murder of the married couple could have made them into martyrs for their defense of the forest,” Milanez reported from Pará. “But on that same day, the representatives of the nation signaled a different course for the future, one in which the forest—if it continues to exist—will have no importance for Brazilians, where the biodiversity that so delighted Zé Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and Dona Maria do Espírito Santo runs the risk of being reduced to a patch of pastureland. In a field drenched in blood.”

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.