The Once Isolated Tribes of the Peruvian Amazon Face Annihilation

The jungle, I knew, was dangerous. There were animals throughout southwestern Peru’s Manú National Park that could, if push came to shove, tear my face clean off. The Andean spectacled bear in the highlands; the jaguar in the lowlands. The black caiman splayed out along the riversides; the swarms of toothy piranha swimming within. The trees and the forest floor wriggled with deadly snakes, while even the smaller critters — the spiders and the frogs — had it in them to pack a poisonous punch.

It was entirely conceivable that, during a six-day ecotour of Manú at the end of June, our small group might encounter one type of deadly beast or another. This was the Peruvian Amazon, and, even though we were being led by a profoundly knowledgeable and competent guide, there was peril to a trip like this. Yet, of all the species I knew were out there, unseen in the growth, there was only one I found genuinely unsettling to ponder: humans.

There are, according to estimates by the London-based human rights organization Survival International, at least 20 so-called “uncontacted” tribes — or aislados, as they’re known in Spanish — living in the Peruvian Amazon today, while others roam the rainforests of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and Paraguay. These aislados live traditional, generally nomadic lives, voluntarily preferring to remain isolated in the jungle than to be absorbed into what we call “civilization.”

Today’s aislados are believed to be the descendants of Indigenous peoples who, amid the so-called “rubber boom” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fled into the deepest, most remote parts of the Amazon to escape the brutalities brought by outsiders. This was a period in which technologies such as the automobile were becoming increasingly ubiquitous throughout the industrialized West, so the demand for rubber was surging. There was a great fortune to be made from tapping it.

Waves of immigrants poured into the Amazon region, where the rubber tree grew natively, with the most successful of them becoming known as the “rubber barons.” These were people whose success was built upon the most unthinkable cruelty, as, with the use of private armies, they stole land and condemned Indigenous people to slavery, torture and death.

Roger Casement, an Irish nationalist who was later executed by the United Kingdom for his role in attempts to overthrow British rule in Ireland, was sent to the Amazon region in his then capacity as a British diplomat, where he was tasked with investigating the Peruvian Amazon Company, a rubber business which had been registered in Britain in 1907 and had a British board of directors. There, he witnessed the most horrific violence committed against Indigenous peoples, writing:

“These [people] are not only murdered, flogged, chained up like wild beasts, hunted far and wide and their dwellings burnt, their wives raped, their children dragged away to slavery and outrage, but are shamelessly swindled into the bargain. These are strong words, but not adequately strong. The condition of things is the most disgraceful, the most lawless, the most inhuman, I believe that exists in the world today.”

By the time the Amazonian rubber boom had run its course — thanks, in large part, to the British government planting rubber trees in its colonies in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and tropical Africa — tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples had been annihilated in what is today recognized as the Putumayo genocide. Some of those who survived came to be absorbed into the various nation-states that claimed parts of the Amazon, while a small few, the aislados, remained hidden in the jungle, rejecting the encroachment of an outside world that had almost entirely wiped them out.

The Peruvian government today recognizes the territorial rights of uncontacted tribes, but recognition and action are quite different things. Lured by the immense wealth to be extracted from the Amazon’s natural resources, the government has opened up the jungle to the most brutal forms of exploitation. Where once colonizers and entrepreneurs came for rubber, they come today for oil, gas, gold, coca, and mahogany.

Survival International reports that the government has leased out more than 70 percent of the Peruvian Amazon to oil companies, many of which are headquartered in developed nations such as the United States, Spain, France and the United Kingdom. The consequences for the region have been devastating, with repeated oil spills and gas leaks contaminating the land and waterways, along with less direct damage as well.

In order to accommodate extraction, energy companies must install infrastructure like roads into the jungle, which can then be used by other nefarious actors, such as illegal loggers, miners and farmers. The landscape bears the scars. Huge swathes of forest have been illegally felled to satisfy the world’s demand for quality wood. Illegal gold mines can literally be seen from space. The land has been slashed and burned to create new farms for raising cattle and growing soy, oil palm, and coca, which is used to produce cocaine. Peru is one of the world’s biggest producers of the drug, second only to neighboring Colombia.

As the Peruvian Amazon is destroyed, the lives of the aislados become ever more precarious. With their resources diminished and their territory ravaged, they are forced to move closer to settled communities, where they have been known to conduct raids in search of food and tools. The potential for violence when contact is made is high, with individuals from both the aislados and settled communities having been killed in recent years.

While the possibility of direct violence is a concern, the real issue for the aislados is sickness. Having never developed immunity to infections such as colds, influenza, and whooping cough, the tribes are highly vulnerable to severe illness after contact, as happened during the 1980s, when Shell was in the region searching for oil. Workers for the company ended up encountering the Nahua tribe, which, within a matter of years, lost half its people to illness. The echoes of the past, when up to 95% of the Indigenous population of the Americas was wiped out by infections carried by Europeans, are stark.

Weeks after my trip to Manú, images of the uncontacted Nomole or Cujareño people — the term by which they’re more commonly known, “Mashco Piro,” is actually considered derogatory in their own language — began to appear in global media outlets. The photos, taken at the end of June, showed dozens of tribe members standing at a riverside in the Madre de Dios region, where my tour group had passed through only days earlier. My unease at the idea of contact had not been for nothing.

The tribes are running out of space.

In the name of feeding the developed world’s lust for wealth, the Amazon rainforest will continue to be exploited and the people who live there will pay the price. As was the case more than a century ago, the horrors of civilization continue to come for the aislados.