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.

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.