- Viral images and videos in mid-July showed dozens of isolated Indigenous Mashco Piro people on a beach in the Peruvian Amazon asking for food from a nearby village.
- Campaigners and anthropologists point to the continued pressures of large forestry concessions overlapping with their ancestral territory in the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve where they live.
- The Ministry of Culture, which is responsible for protecting Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation, tells Mongabay they have no authority to suspend logging operations and there are no immediate plans to revise the concessions.
- No agreement on the issue or the proposal to create an Indigenous reserve has yet been reached in talks between the regional government, the forestry and wildlife service SERFOR and Indigenous federations.
As images of dozens of isolated Indigenous Mashco Piro men and boys on a beach in the Peruvian Amazon sparked huge worldwide media coverage, questions remain about whether the government will finally mark off land for them after years of strife.
The images released by the campaign group Survival International in early July show around 50 members of the Mashco Piro tribe asking for food from a village of Indigenous Yine people called Monte Salvado, which sits on the opposite bank of Las Piedras River in Peru’s southeastern Madre de Dios region. The images date from June 26 and 27.
Two weeks later, another group of 17 appeared by the nearby village of Puerto Nuevo, said the NGO, which defends Indigenous rights, in an apparent distraction tactic while other members of the tribe raided plantains from Yine allotments.
Ricardo García Pinedo, director of the general-directorate for the rights of Indigenous peoples at Peru’s Ministry of Culture, told Mongabay the videos were positive in that they provided “reliable evidence that Indigenous peoples in isolation exist” after some attempts to deny their existence in the country.
He added that the group was asking for “plantains and rope” from the Monte Salvado community, with whom they have a “constant relationship.”
The seldom-seen tribe live in the 829,941-hectare (2 million-acre) Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve, a protected area, but experts say their ancestral territory extends beyond it into several nearby forestry concessions. This overlap includes the Maderera Canales Tahuamanu (MCT) concession, which is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, an international NGO that certifies timber extraction is sustainable and ethical.
The proximity raises fears of conflict between loggers and the Indigenous people who are part of what campaigners say could be the world’s largest “uncontacted” group, numbering more than 750 people. Peru’s Ministry of Culture, which is responsible for protecting Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation, held a more conservative estimate of around 400 members.
Beatriz Huertas, a Peruvian anthropologist and one of the world’s leading experts on isolated Indigenous peoples, told Mongabay the principal pressure on the Mascho Piro in this area was the overlapping logging concessions on the territory they roam and the estimated 200 km (120 mi) of logging tracks through the forest. The proximity also presents a threat of disease for the isolated people who have little immunological defense to common illnesses, they say.
But García Pinedo said there were currently no immediate plans to revise the company’s 52,846-hectare (130,585-acre) concession, which adjoins the eastern margin of the territorial reserve that was created in 2002.
He added that the ministry did not have the “authority to suspend or stop the operations of these companies, because they have forest concessions that have been granted and are legally recognized” on land that is neither officially a territorial nor an Indigenous reserve.
The viral diffusion of the images and videos in mid-July prompted some readers of the news to take spontaneous social media action by flooding FSC’s Instagram profile with comments asking them to withdraw the logging company’s certification.
On July 17, the FSC published a response, saying it would “conduct a comprehensive review of MCT’s compliance with duties to respect and protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples living in self-isolation in the proposed Indigenous territory in Madre de Dios.”
It said the company had “protocols in place to avoid encounters with members of the Mashco Piro.” The protocols were designed by the Ministry of Culture in Peru.
The FSC added, “We recognize the complexities arising from the Ministry of Culture’s ongoing proposal to reclassify part of the permanent production forest area, where MCT’s concession is located, as an Indigenous territory.”
In 2015, the Ministry of Culture proposed upgrading the status of the protected area in Madre de Dios from a territorial reserve to an Indigenous reserve to reflect the true extent of the Mashco Piro territory but faced strong opposition from logging interests. The proposed move would have changed its legal status, expanded its borders to include timber concessions and prohibited any logging activity, but the government did not approve it. Two other companies, Maderacre and Maderyja, operate next to the existing reserve, which was originally planned to be more than twice its current size.
The following year, the government of Peru recognized that Mashco Piro and other tribes living in isolation were effectively using territories previously distributed as forest concessions to private actors, such as Maderera Canales Tahuamanu.
“We agree with the completion of the process of upgrading the territorial reserve to an Indigenous reserve, which will strengthen and safeguard the life and integrity of the PIACI [Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact] who are living in the territory of the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve,” García Pinedo told Mongabay.
However, he said that no agreement had been reached in talks that were being held between the regional government, the forestry and wildlife service SERFOR and Indigenous federations about changing the reserve’s status.
Rising tensions and a killing
A 2023 report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples said Peru’s government had recognized in 2016 that the Mashco Piro and other isolated tribes were using territories that had been opened to logging and concessioned to private companies such as Maderera Canales Tahuamanu. The report expressed concern for the overlap, and that the territory of Indigenous peoples hadn’t been marked out “despite reasonable evidence of their presence since 1999.”
The Indigenous federation for Madre de Dios, FENAMAD, and AIDESEP, the umbrella organization for all Indigenous federations in the Peruvian Amazon, have long demanded that the logging concession be withdrawn.
“A logging company continues to deforest the territory of this people who have lived in isolation for years, threatening their survival: the destruction of their forests, unwanted encounters and the spread of diseases that could wipe them out,” AIDESEP said in a statement.
Previous encounters between Mashco Piro and loggers had proved fatal. In August 2022, one logger was killed and another injured by arrows when they were fishing on the Tahuamanu River, in an area that borders a timber concession operated by MCT.
The killing came amid rising tensions between the logging company and the local FENAMAD, which represents 39 Indigenous communities in the Cusco and Madre de Dios regions.
Julio Cusurichi, the former president of FENAMAD, repeatedly warned the authorities that further conflict could occur at any moment if the logging company remained. FENAMAD accused the company of illegally entering the native reserve to log tropical hardwoods. The company denied the claim and sued FENAMAD for defamation.
García Pinedo said workers at the MTC company had been trained to observe protocols to withdraw from areas if there were sightings or signs indicating the presence of the Mascho Piro, whose name means “wild” or “savage” in the Yine language.
He estimated that as many as 200 members of the tribe would have been in the area, including women, children and the elderly who remained under the forest cover nearby. The Yine Indigenous neighbors who can communicate with the tribe refer to them as Nomole, meaning brothers, to avoid causing offense by calling them wild and savage.
Logging interests suppress reserve expansion
“The images show the Mascho Piro looking healthy, which is positive,” Fiona Watson, director of research and advocacy at Survival International, told Mongabay. “They only show the men, so that’s also a sign that they are still wary.”
“The Peruvian government has the legal and moral responsibility to recognize this land urgently,” Watson said. “Instead, it is washing its hands of it.”
The FSC has an obligation to comply with international law and its own standards, she added, by immediately revoking the certification of MCT.
The tribal people, who also live in a separate group in Peru’s Manu National Park, face additional threats from drug and human trafficking, as well as illegal logging and mining, Huertas said.
She added that Christian groups currently seeking to evangelize the “uncontacted” people could also “lead to death from disease” for the vulnerable group.
After facing a massacre and brutality for rubber extraction at the turn of the 20th century, the Mashco Piro retreated, built camp and have been living along Las Piedras River for around 100 years, she said. “This was their territory long before the logging companies moved in,” she added.
In the dry season months of June, July and August, they search for the eggs of yellow spotted river turtles known as tracajá (Podocnemis unifilis) on the river beaches that are exposed as the river waters drop.
Peru is home to 25 groups of Indigenous people in isolation and initial contact living in seven reserves covering more than 4 million hectares (9.8 million acres) of Amazon Rainforest in the regions of Madre de Dios, Loreto, Huánuco and Ucayali.
Pressure on the timber- and resource-rich Indigenous territories continues. A bill in Peru’s Congress that looked to strip uncontacted Indigenous people of lands and protections was officially scrapped in June last year.
In January, however, Peru loosened restrictions on deforestation, which critics dubbed the “anti-forest law.”
Banner image: Dozens of isolated Indigenous Mashco Piro men and boys on a beach in the Peruvian Amazon. Image courtesy of Survival International.
Bill stripping Peru’s isolated Indigenous people of land and protections scrapped
Related Mongabay podcast episode: How the Indigenous Shuar regained their ancestral forest. Listen here:
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