Uncontacted Mashco Piro tribe affected by logging emerges from Amazon

Members of the Mascho Piro tribe appear outside the forest to gather supplies for shelters. Photo / Survival International

Rare images of members of the world’s largest uncontacted tribe show them emerging from the Peruvian Amazon – kilometres from where companies are controversially logging pristine rainforest.

The photos and videos show about 50 men, women, and children from the Mashco Piro tribe on a sandy bank of the remote Las Piedras River in the jungle region of Madre de Dios, near the border with Brazil.

With long hair and wearing nothing but loincloths, the elusive hunter-gatherers can clearly be seen from a distance picking up branches to build temporary shelters.

The images were released by Survival International, an indigenous rights group, which is warning that the logging is illegal and poses an existential threat to the extremely vulnerable tribe.

It says that the companies’ trucks, chainsaws, and other heavy machinery are terrifying the Mashco Piro and could provoke them into responding with violence. In 2022, members of the tribe killed one company worker with an arrow roughly 1.8m-long.

The Mashco Piro are also at risk from infections, with no immunity to many illnesses common in the outside world. The nomadic tribe’s dependence on wide swathes of the rainforest is also recognised under international law.

Various international treaties, including United Nations agreements, bar outsiders from initiating contact with the dwindling number of tribes still living in voluntary isolation and even require vast “buffer zones” be set up around them.

Yet despite that, successive Peruvian governments have authorised logging concessions on land long thought to be used by the Mashco Piro.

In 2007, the president at the time, Alan Garcia – who shot himself dead in 2019 as he was being arrested on corruption charges – warned that Peru could not be barred from exploiting natural resources in the Amazon because of “unknown but presumed” to exist indigenous groups.

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

Caroline Pearce, Survival International’s head, added: “This is a humanitarian disaster in the making. It’s absolutely vital that the loggers are thrown out, and the Mashco Piro’s territory is properly protected at last.”

Traumatic experiences with outsiders

The Mashco Piro are thought to number about 750, spread out across the eastern Peruvian Amazon and spilling into Brazil.

Anthropologists say they have deliberately retreated deeper and deeper in the rainforest over the years following traumatic experiences with outsiders.

In the Peruvian Amazon, which is almost the size of Spain, many natives 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 land, including even inside reserves set up for uncontacted tribes.

The Mashco Piro do occasionally visit isolated indigenous villages, where locals 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 based in Bonn, Germany, that certifies forest products as “sustainable”, to stop approving timber from companies on Mashco Piro land.

The council has said in the past that it has no reason to believe the concessions affect the tribe. The Peruvian Government has also claimed for years that it is looking into the logging concessions but has provided no timeline for resolving the problem.