🔗 Share this article

Tomas Anez Dos Santos toiled in a modest clearing far in the Peruvian Amazon when he heard movements coming closer through the thick jungle.

He became aware that he had been surrounded, and halted.

“A single individual was standing, pointing with an arrow,” he remembers. “And somehow he detected I was here and I commenced to run.”

He ended up encountering members of the Mashco Piro. For decades, Tomas—who lives in the small community of Nueva Oceania—had been almost a neighbor to these itinerant people, who reject interaction with outsiders.

A new document from a rights group states remain at least 196 termed “remote communities” left worldwide. The Mashco Piro is believed to be the most numerous. It claims 50% of these tribes could be decimated in the next decade should administrations fail to take additional actions to defend them.

The report asserts the most significant dangers come from deforestation, mining or exploration for crude. Remote communities are exceptionally vulnerable to common disease—therefore, the study says a risk is posed by interaction with evangelical missionaries and online personalities in pursuit of attention.

In recent times, the Mashco Piro have been coming to Nueva Oceania with greater frequency, as reported by locals.

This settlement is a fishing hamlet of seven or eight households, perched elevated on the shores of the Tauhamanu waterway in the heart of the of Peru Amazon, half a day from the closest settlement by watercraft.

The territory is not designated as a safeguarded area for isolated tribes, and deforestation operations operate here.

Tomas says that, at times, the noise of industrial tools can be detected around the clock, and the Mashco Piro people are observing their woodland damaged and ruined.

Within the village, residents state they are divided. They dread the projectiles but they also possess deep admiration for their “relatives” dwelling in the forest and wish to safeguard them.

“Let them live as they live, we can't modify their way of life. For this reason we maintain our space,” states Tomas.

Inhabitants in Nueva Oceania are anxious about the harm to the community's way of life, the risk of aggression and the possibility that timber workers might expose the tribe to sicknesses they have no defense to.

During a visit in the settlement, the Mashco Piro made their presence felt again. A young mother, a resident with a young daughter, was in the jungle gathering fruit when she detected them.

“There were calls, sounds from others, a large number of them. As though there were a whole group yelling,” she informed us.

This marked the first instance she had encountered the group and she fled. After sixty minutes, her mind was still pounding from anxiety.

“Because there are timber workers and operations destroying the woodland they're running away, maybe due to terror and they come close to us,” she explained. “We don't know how they might react towards us. That is the thing that frightens me.”

Recently, a pair of timber workers were attacked by the group while catching fish. One was struck by an projectile to the stomach. He lived, but the other person was located lifeless after several days with multiple puncture marks in his body.

The Peruvian government has a approach of no engagement with remote tribes, making it prohibited to start interactions with them.

The policy was first adopted in a nearby nation following many years of lobbying by community representatives, who saw that initial contact with secluded communities resulted to entire communities being decimated by illness, poverty and hunger.

In the 1980s, when the Nahau people in the country first encountered with the broader society, a significant portion of their population perished within a short period. In the 1990s, the Muruhanua tribe faced the same fate.

“Isolated indigenous peoples are highly at risk—from a disease perspective, any interaction might introduce sicknesses, and including the most common illnesses may eliminate them,” explains a representative from a Peruvian indigenous rights group. “Culturally too, any interaction or intrusion could be extremely detrimental to their life and survival as a society.”

For the neighbours of {