Isolated tribe hit by logging emerges in Amazon, amid fears of ‘humanitarian catastrophe’

The Mashco Piro are also exposed to infections, as they have no immunity to many diseases common in the outside world. At the same time, the nomadic tribe’s dependence on vast tracts of rainforest is also recognized under international law.

Various international treaties, including those of the United Nations, prohibit foreigners from establishing contact with the dwindling number of tribes still living in voluntary isolation and even require the creation of vast “buffer zones” around them.

Despite this, successive Peruvian governments have authorized logging concessions on lands long thought to have been used by the Mashco Piro.

In 2007, then-President Alan Garcia – who committed suicide in 2019 while under arrest for corruption – warned that Peru could not be stopped from exploiting the Amazon’s natural resources because indigenous groups “unknown but presumed” to exist.

Alfredo Vargas Pio, president of the local indigenous federation FENAMAD, warned: “This is irrefutable proof that many Mashco Piro live in this area, which the government has not only failed to protect, but has even sold to logging companies.”

Caroline Pearce, Director of Survival International, added: “This is a humanitarian disaster in the making. It is absolutely vital that the loggers are evicted and that Mashco Piro’s land is finally properly protected.”

Traumatic experiences with strangers

The Mashco Piro are estimated to number around 750, spread across the eastern Peruvian Amazon and extending into Brazil.

Anthropologists say that over the years they have voluntarily retreated deeper and deeper into the rainforest, following traumatic experiences with outsiders.

In the Peruvian Amazon, which is about the size of Spain, many indigenous people were enslaved or massacred during the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

More recently, oil companies, including Shell, have drilled on indigenous lands, including within reservations created for uncontacted tribes.

The Mashco Piro occasionally visit isolated indigenous villages, where residents speak Yine, a language related to that spoken by the Mashco Piro, to ask for cassava, bananas, or rope, but they carefully avoid non-Amazonians.

Survival International is also calling on the Forest Stewardship Council, a non-profit organisation based in Bonn, Germany, which certifies forest products as “sustainable”, to stop approving timber from companies operating on Mashco Piro’s land.

The FSC has said in the past that it has no reason to believe the concessions are affecting the tribe. The Peruvian government has also said for years that it is studying the logging concessions, but has provided no timetable for resolving the issue.