© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Indigenous rights NGO Survival International has released rare pictures of the Mashco Piro tribespeople, one of the world’s 100-odd uncontacted tribes.
The photographs taken late in June show more than 50 tribespeople on the banks of a river, close to where logging companies have been granted concessions.
“These incredible images show that very large numbers of uncontacted Mashco Piro people are living just a few miles from where loggers are poised to start operations… This is a humanitarian disaster in the making,” Caroline Pearce, director of Survival International, said.
Almost all of them live in the jungles of Amazon and Southeast Asia. The Mashco Piro, possibly numbering more than 750, are believed to be the largest of such tribes. These nomadic hunter-gatherers live in the Amazon jungles of the Madre de Dios Region, close to Peru’s border with Brazil and Bolivia.
Peru’s government has forbidden all contact with the Mashco Piro, fearing the spread of a disease among the population to which it has no immunity. The tribe is very reclusive, only occasionally contacting the native but contacted Yine people. Much of what is known about the Mashco Piro comes from Yine accounts
In 2002, the Peru government created the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve to protect the territory of the Mashco Piro. But large parts of their traditional ground lie outside the reserve. Swathes of land have since been sold off as logging concessions, giving companies the right to fell the evergreen forests for timber and other produce.
The most prominent logging company, Canales Tahuamanu, has been allotted an area of 53,000 hectares in the forests of Madre de Dios to extract cedar and mahogany by Peru’s Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Canales Tahuamanu has aggressively defended its logging rights, and clamped down on critical voices in courts.
The Mashco Piro themselves have expressed their disapproval of the logging companies to the Yine. “… Since there have been logging concessions, they [the Mashco Piro] feel increasingly pressured and upset because the companies have assaulted them,” a Yine person told Survival International.
This is, however, not the first time that Mashco Piro territory has been invaded. In the 1880s, during Peru’s rubber boom, the Mashco Piro were among the many tribes who were forcibly displaced from their land, enslaved, and killed en masse. The survivors moved further upstream on the Manu river, where the Mashco Piro have lived in isolation ever since.
Now, as logging companies encroach into their territories, experts say they have nowhere left to go. That is why the number of sightings has risen in recent years, with the Mashco Piro coming out of their forested havens not only to find food and supplies, but also to “flee” the outsiders.
They have even been sighted across the border in Brazil. “They flee from loggers on the Peruvian side… They are a people with no peace, restless, because they are always on the run,” Rosa Padilha, of the Brazilian Catholic bishops’ Indigenous Missionary Council, told Reuters.
