Hidden in the Amazon: Economic Exploitation and Erasure of Uncontacted Tribes

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Beyond the thick foliage of the Amazon lies the vibrant yet oft-misunderstood landscape of uncontacted tribes. Sixty of such groups reside in the Amazon basin, and 90% of these groups live in Brazil and Peru. 

These tribes maintain strong ties to the environment, as evidenced by their cultural practices and traditional livelihoods. Possessing vast botanical knowledge, tribes like the Yanomami in Brazil use nearly 500 plants for food, medicine and house building. Elements in nature are also often viewed as spirits, forming the basis of traditional rituals. 

In recent years, however, the no-contact policy, institutionalised by the Brazilian and Peruvian governments, has fallen subordinate to the profit-driven aims of extraction and erasure by businesses. The uncontacted tribes are thus forced to abandon their lives of isolation in a manner detrimental to their safety and identity. 

Who are the Uncontacted Tribes?

It is widely believed that the Mashco Piro are descendants of indigenous groups who faced exploitation by “rubber barons” in the 19th century and sought escape in the Peruvian Amazon. They are closely related to the Yine, an indigenous group that resides in south-eastern Peru and has established contact with the outside world. Unlike the Yine, who rely on fishing and farming, the Mashco Piro have taken on a nomadic and hunter-gatherer lifestyle over the decades. 

Often, the West tends to romanticise the existence of uncontacted groups: the last civilisation resistant to the ill influences of the modernised world. Yet, this ignores the reality that various uncontacted groups have attempted to establish contact with the modernised world before. While there are some, like the Yine, who succeed in establishing contact, many more fail due to the dangerous manner in which contact is pursued. In 1980s Peru, 50% of the Nahua population died within a matter of years after initiating contact, owing to the lack of immunity to common diseases such as influenza, measles and chicken pox. In the 1990s, the Muruhanua people suffered the same fate. 

Experiences of colonial violence also forced many tribes to isolate themselves from the outside world. More recently, however, the 2014 massacre of elderly tribe members necessitated contact between the Acre Indians tribe and a nearby Brazilian village to mitigate the extent of violence by illegal loggers and drug traffickers. The tribe found themselves vulnerable to such attacks ever since a nearby government post was overrun by such loggers and traffickers in 2011. Their choice to initiate contact was borne out of necessity, rather than genuine intent. In both situations, indigenous tribes lacked the agency to establish self-determination on their own terms – merely playing a game of action and reaction to the violence of colonisers and exploitative groups. 

Failures of the No-Contact Policy in Peru and Brazil

The Peruvian and Brazilian governments have pursued a policy of no-contact with uncontacted groups since 2006 and 1987, respectively. It is derived from crucial human rights principles, namely the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), ensuring the tribes’ protection from epidemics, territorial encroachment and forced assimilation. However, the recent displacement of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon has exposed how tenuous this policy is. The territory designated to the Amazonian uncontacted tribes has transformed into a resource battle site between mining and logging groups – undermining the tribes’ territorial rights. 

Despite being awarded with Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification for environmentally responsible practices, several of these Peruvian logging groups have engaged in land encroachment behind closed doors.

Recently, Maderera Canales Tahuamanu, a logging firm with operations covering 52,869 hectares, had its FSC certificate suspended after a violent confrontation with the Mashco Piro. Similarly, in the Brazilian Amazon, overall deforestation within indigenous territories increased by 129% between 2013 and 2021.  

Legal Precedents

With governments being incentivised by economic growth, they often turn a blind eye to violations of the no-contact policy by businesses. In fact, there have been several instances in which the Brazilian and Peruvian governments themselves have deviated from their no-contact policy, in favour of shrinking the demarcation of uncontacted tribes’ territory. 

In 2023, the Brazilian Congress passed the “marco temporal” law, effectively placing a time limit on the recognition of indigenous territories. Under the law, only indigenous territories that had already been occupied on the date of 5th October 1988 – the day Brazil’s constitution was first instituted – would be recognised as legitimate. However, there are several uncontacted groups whose presence on their current lands was confirmed after that date, such as the Rio Pardo Kawahiva, whose territory was only confirmed in 1999 by expeditions in the Pardo River Kawahiva. 

Last September, the Peruvian multi-sectoral committee arbitrarily rejected the proposal for setting up the 1.2 million-hectare (2.9 million-acre) Yavari Mirim Indigenous reserve. This is in spite of the Peruvian government’s official recognition of the isolated peoples of Yavari Mirim via a supreme decree in 2018. An environmental lawyer and board member of Peru’s protected area system, Pedro Solano, contends that decisions about reserves are increasingly being made in favour of influential business groups, involved in logging as well as oil and gas exploration. Ultimately, the law has compromised the process of land demarcation, such that it is no longer rooted in objectivity, but rather, in the subjective realm of political lobbying. 

A Campaign of Extermination and Erasure

In 2007, Peru’s then-president, Alan García, advanced a dangerous claim to the Peruvian public, which encouraged the psychological denial of uncontacted groups: “To stop oil, they have created the ‘uncontacted’ native”. In colonial history, the terra nullius claim, meaning land belonging to no one, was justified by depicting the native’s practices of hunting and communal land use as barbaric. This aligned with the Lockean notion of property rights, where the coloniser possessed a divine right to cultivate land, thereby increasing its productivity. In contrast, the indigenous peoples’ allegedly unproductive practices were perceived by the colonisers as evidence of them forfeiting their claims to land. Yet, Alan Garcia’s view, shared by several other prominent politicians in the region like Juan Carlos Mori, goes a step further beyond simply diminishing the practices of uncontacted groups, and instead denies their existence altogether.  Ultimately, this begs the question of whether governments such as Peru can reconcile championing indigenous rights with development, rather than treating the two as mutually exclusive. 

García’s denialist attitude has also been echoed by groups that harbour economic interests in the Amazon. Coordinadora por el Desarrollo Sostenible de Loreto (CDSL), a development business group in the Loreto region of Peru, recently facilitated a campaign of disinformation through Facebook videos that decry Peru’s Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact (PIACI) Law, effectively denying the existence of uncontacted peoples in north-east Peru.

Indeed, the territorial degradation and psychological denial of uncontacted tribes prove to be a twin threat to their survival.  

A Future of Contact?

Recently, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights placed pressure on Peru for violating the rights of the Mashco Piro, Yor and Amahuaca peoples. Indigenous organisations have also played a crucial role in advocating for their territorial rights. For instance, these organisations have created a binational commission that calls for the creation of two large territorial corridors for isolated peoples, spanning 25 million-hectares (61.7 million-acres). 

The governments of Peru and Brazil require a greater degree of cooperation, particularly after having failed to renew the two-year accord signed in 2014 to protect the rights of the indigenous peoples.

Crucially, it is not the case that uncontacted groups are completely unaware of the presence of outsiders. When the aforementioned Indian tribe in Brazil established contact, they knew the exact location of the Brazilian village they entered. Fiona Watson, the research director for Survival International, confirms this view: “They are experts at living in the forest and are well aware of the presence of outsiders.” 

The uncontacted tribes thus thrive both within and without: within the natural landscape that they love; without the external influences that have proven threatening to their existence. 

Whether they will eventually seek to negotiate contact on their own terms is uncertain. Yet, the current onus on the international community is to not only safeguard their right to no-contact in international law, but turn the tide against widespread exploitation and erasure.

Written by Arissa Binte-Kamaruzaman

Edited by Catalina Pitre