Brothers within the Woodland: The Battle to Protect an Remote Amazon Tribe

A man named Tomas Anez Dos Santos was laboring in a tiny clearing deep in the Peruvian Amazon when he heard movements coming closer through the thick forest.

He realized that he had been hemmed in, and froze.

“One person positioned, directing with an projectile,” he remembers. “Unexpectedly he noticed of my presence and I commenced to flee.”

He ended up face to face the Mashco Piro. For decades, Tomas—residing in the small village of Nueva Oceania—had been almost a neighbor to these wandering people, who reject engagement with outsiders.

An updated report by a human rights group indicates there are a minimum of 196 of what it calls “remote communities” left in the world. This tribe is believed to be the most numerous. The report states 50% of these groups could be decimated within ten years should administrations neglect to implement more to protect them.

It claims the greatest threats are from logging, extraction or operations for oil. Isolated tribes are exceptionally vulnerable to basic sickness—therefore, the study notes a risk is posed by exposure with religious missionaries and digital content creators seeking clicks.

Recently, the Mashco Piro have been venturing to Nueva Oceania increasingly, based on accounts from residents.

The village is a fishermen's village of several households, sitting elevated on the edges of the local river in the heart of the Peruvian jungle, a ten-hour journey from the closest settlement by watercraft.

The territory is not recognised as a preserved area for uncontacted groups, and logging companies work here.

Tomas reports that, on occasion, the racket of industrial tools can be detected continuously, and the Mashco Piro people are observing their forest disturbed and destroyed.

Among the locals, inhabitants state they are divided. They fear the Mashco Piro's arrows but they also have profound respect for their “brothers” who live in the woodland and wish to defend them.

“Permit them to live according to their traditions, we are unable to alter their traditions. For this reason we keep our distance,” states Tomas.

Inhabitants in Nueva Oceania are concerned about the damage to the tribe's survival, the danger of aggression and the likelihood that loggers might expose the community to diseases they have no immunity to.

At the time in the settlement, the Mashco Piro appeared again. Letitia Rodriguez Lopez, a woman with a two-year-old child, was in the jungle picking fruit when she heard them.

“There were calls, shouts from people, many of them. Like there were a crowd calling out,” she informed us.

This marked the first time she had encountered the Mashco Piro and she escaped. Subsequently, her head was persistently racing from anxiety.

“As there are deforestation crews and operations cutting down the woodland they're running away, perhaps out of fear and they arrive close to us,” she said. “We don't know how they will behave with us. That's what terrifies me.”

In 2022, two individuals were confronted by the group while angling. One was hit by an arrow to the stomach. He recovered, but the other man was found deceased after several days with multiple puncture marks in his physique.

The Peruvian government maintains a policy of no engagement with secluded communities, establishing it as prohibited to commence contact with them.

The policy was first adopted in a nearby nation after decades of campaigning by indigenous rights groups, who observed that initial exposure with remote tribes could lead to whole populations being decimated by disease, destitution and malnutrition.

During the 1980s, when the Nahau tribe in Peru made initial contact with the outside world, half of their people succumbed within a short period. A decade later, the Muruhanua community suffered the similar destiny.

“Isolated indigenous peoples are extremely vulnerable—epidemiologically, any contact may introduce sicknesses, and even the most common illnesses might wipe them out,” says a representative from a Peruvian indigenous rights group. “Culturally too, any interaction or intrusion could be highly damaging to their life and survival as a community.”

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