Rare Uncontacted Tribe Photographed in Amazon

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Amazon Indians from one of the world's last uncontacted tribes have been photographed from the air, with striking images released on Thursday showing them painted bright red and brandishing bows and arrows.

The photographs of the tribe near the border between Brazil and Peru are rare evidence that such groups exist. A Brazilian official involved in the expedition said many of them are in increasing danger from illegal logging.

"What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilized' ones, treat the world," Jose Carlos Meirelles was quoted as saying in a statement by the Survival International group.

One of the pictures, which can be seen on Survival International's Web site (http://www.survival-international.org), shows two Indian men covered in bright red pigment poised to fire arrows at the aircraft while another Indian looks on. Another photo shows about 15 Indians near thatched huts, some of them also preparing to fire arrows at the aircraft.

"The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct," said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which supports tribal people around the world.
Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. It says all are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and ravaged by new diseases.

(Reporting by Stuart Grudgings; editing by Sandra Maler)

Oil Exploration in Amazon Threatens "Unseen" Tribes

Kelly Hearn in Jose Olaya, Peru
for National Geographic News
March 21, 2008

Driving along an oil company road in Peru's northern Amazon, Patricio Pinola Chuje looked out the window. He nodded beyond a green wall of rain forest. "I don't know if they are in this area, but I know they are farther south in other places," said Pinola, an Achuar Indian. "They come out by the rivers."

"They" refers to unseen Amazon Indian tribes said to live in voluntary isolation in the western headwaters of the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador. Global energy prices have fueled oil and gas booms across oil-laden Amazonian lands. But supporters of native groups say the boom is a bust for remote Amazon Indians, who suffer both physically and socially when exposed to the modern world. "Isolated Indians are especially vulnerable to any contact, because they have no immunity to outsiders' diseases," said David Hill, a spokesperson for Survival International, a London-based group that defends the rights of uncontacted tribes.

Other groups add that Indians' rights to their traditional lands are increasingly being violated by development-hungry governments. Now civic groups and native organizations are pushing governments and the courts to rein in oil development. In December, a coalition of groups announced it would petition the Organization of American States to protect the Cacataibo, said to be the last uncontacted tribe in the central Peruvian rain forest.

Meanwhile, complicating an otherwise typical development clash, Peruvian officials have publicly asked: Do unseen natives really exist? "It is like the Loch Ness monster," Cecilia Quiroz, lead counsel of Peru's oil and gas leasing agency, told The Washington Post in July. "Everyone seems to have seen or heard about uncontacted peoples, but there is no evidence."

How Many "Unseen" Tribes Are There?

Guevara Sandi Chimboras, an Achuar Indian environmental monitor, wipes sweat from his cheeks in the sweltering heat of an Amazon afternoon, not far from the Ecuadorian border. After traipsing through a grassy field, using donated satellite-positioning tools to help document oil spills, he doesn't hesitate when asked about unseen tribes. "Yes they exist," he said. "I know people who have seen them. They are seen when they go to river banks to find turtle eggs."

The elusiveness of some rain forest tribes, coupled with the threat of infection posed by outsiders, makes getting an accurate census near impossible, activists say. But Survival International estimates that some 15 uncontacted tribes live in the Peruvian Amazon alone.
Spotting them is rare. But in October, a plane searching for illegal loggers managed to photograph 21 natives standing near palm shelters on the banks of the Las Piedras River in Peru's southeastern Amazon.

Days after the photos ran on international news wires, Peruvian President Alan Garcia suggested in a newspaper editorial that unseen tribes were largely a ruse used by groups opposing development. "Against petroleum, they have created the figure of the 'unconnected' wild native, which is to say, something not known but presumed," Garcia wrote in an editorial in the newspaper El Commercio. Officials with Peru's leasing agency and its Ministry of Energy and Mines declined to comment for this story.

"Is There Something Bothering You?"

Despite official doubts that uncontacted tribes exist, oil companies apparently take threats of encounters seriously. Last summer, U.S. oil firm Barrett Resources and Spain's Repsol-YPF submitted plans to Peruvian officials describing how their workers would respond during encounters with isolated tribes. (Barrett Resources was recently acquired by the international oil company Perenco). The two documents, obtained by National Geographic News, advise workers to be on the lookout for footprints, spears, arrows, and other signs of humans.

The Barrett manual advises workers that uncontacted natives might become curious about noises, helicopters, and lights, causing them to leave items that signal a desire to make contact with workers. Such items may include "vessels containing valuable seeds or plantain drinks, necklaces, baskets, snails, gourds, feathers or other objects used for exchange," the document says. Both plans prohibit workers from having any contact with natives or giving them food or other objects.

The documents order workers to treat Indians peacefully, making efforts to protect them from illnesses. If unintended contact is made, the manuals instruct guides to initiate communication with natives in local tongues. If peaceful dialogue cannot be established, according to the Repsol document, workers should attempt to make loud noises with whistles, shouts, and megaphones.
A section of the Barrett manual entitled "sequence of messages of introduction, health and peace," tells guides to say: "We are people like you; We are workers passing through; We aren't going to stay, We have women and children far from here; We have houses and farms far from here."

The document also provides a list of questions field managers should ask Indians through their guides: "Where do you come from? How many moons and suns have you traveled? … Have you seen people like us? … Is there something bothering you?"

Self-Imposed Seclusion?

Padre Ricardo Álvarez Lobo, a Dominican priest who has worked with remote tribes for five decades, said that few if any Amazonian tribes have had no contact with outsiders. More likely, he said, their ancestors had contact with rubber barons who killed or enslaved them in the early 20th century. "The ancestors came into contact with evangelicals or rubber barons and had bad experiences," he said. "So they have built up myths within the group that makes them fear outsiders."

In recent years, extremely isolated tribes in Brazil and Colombia have emerged from the jungle, as developers and armed insurgents came closer to their traditional territories.
In one case, the Nukak, a tribe in southern Colombia, was driven from its extreme isolation by the insurgent group FARC. (Read related story: "Drug Wars Threaten to Wipe Out Amazon Nomads" [April 27, 2007].)

Last June, uncontacted natives made contact with Kayapo natives in central Brazil.
And in recent weeks, across the Peruvian border in Ecuador's Yasuní National Park, Taromenane tribesmen were blamed for spearing an illegal tree logger to death.

Can They Be Protected?

As development continues to encroach on tribal territories, activists are buckling down.
Native-rights groups like Peru's Racimos de Ungurahui note that in recent years fatal illnesses have beset tribes like the Nahua, Nanti, and Kirineri after they came into contact with oil workers. Racimos has threatened to sue oil companies for genocide if they enter areas where isolated groups are said to live.

Meanwhile, a native rights group based in Lima called AIDESEP is calling for the establishment and protection of government-protected parks for uncontacted natives. Last August, AIDESEP petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to intervene to protect two tribal reserves in northern Peru. The commission is an organ of the Organization of American States that monitors and investigates human rights violations and can litigate cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The cases are still pending before the commission.

Pressures Build on Amazon Jungle

Pressures build on Amazon jungle
By Gary Duffy BBC News, Brazil

Inspections are being stepped up to try to stem deforestation. The Amazon is not just a precious resource for Brazil but for the entire world, and the year ahead seems likely to produce important indications of what the future holds for this vast rainforest.
The scale of the challenge is widely acknowledged.

In the past 40 years, close to 20% of the Amazon has been cut down.
Land cleared for cattle is the leading cause of deforestation, while the growth in soya bean production is becoming increasingly significant. Illegal logging is also a factor.
Deforestation and forest fires are now responsible for nearly 75% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions.


In the past three years the Brazilian government has celebrated a 59% cut in the rate of deforestation, but there are now signs of problems ahead. In December, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said there had been a 10% increase in deforestation between August and November 2007 and announced a range of measures to try to stem this.


"I would easily say [2007] was one of the worst years I have seen in 11 years living here." John Carter, director, Alianca da Terra. The president signed a decree imposing fines for buying or trading goods such as beef or soya planted illegally on deforested properties.

Several hundred federal police are to be sent to the area to help combat environmental destruction, joining more than 1,600 inspectors already there.
In recent years the government says it has carried out numerous inspections, seized more than one million cubic metres of wood, cancelled thousands of land registrations and arrested hundreds of people, as well as creating large conservation areas.
At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia, last month, Brazil also announced the creation of a voluntary fund to protect the Amazon, due to be launched in 2008.

On a broader international front, it was also agreed at Bali that forest conservation would be included in discussions about a future agreement on global warming. The new measures may be a sign of growing government concern, and it will only become clear in the months ahead just how effective they will prove to be in the struggle to protect the Amazon.

Greenpeace says more needs to be done to protect the rainforest.
Environmental groups, while welcoming the government's efforts, say the response is simply not good enough. Critics had already warned that recent falls in deforestation could be explained by a drop in market prices for products such as soya and meat, and that once these rose again land clearance would start to increase.

"We have a national plan to fight deforestation that, historically, was a good plan on paper but lacked implementation both due to political will and due to resources," said Marcelo Furtado, campaigns director for Greenpeace in Brazil. "Although the government could celebrate in recent years a decrease in deforestation, the fact is that structurally this didn't change.

"The environment ministry still lacks funding. You still have situations where the police don't have a helicopter to fly over a certain area or there is no fuel in the truck to go to verify if an area is being deforested or not. You still have a problem with availability of maps," Mr Furtado said.

"The tools to decrease deforestation and monitor implementation of the law are still not good enough."

That concern is reflected by John Carter, director of Alianca da Terra, a group that promotes environmental awareness in land management.


"What is important to do is to share out responsibility for illegal deforestation ."
Andre Lima, Brazilian environment ministry

Mr. Carter says, "Most of the environmental groups are concentrating on the law and why the law is not being upheld and they mysteriously forget this is a frontier and no-one ever upheld the law in any frontier in Europe or the United States, anywhere," he says.
He believes giving producers incentives to reduce the impact on the forest will prove more effective than traditional conservation methods. The results of failure can be seen in the thick smoke of forest fires being used to clear land.

"I would easily say [2007] was one of the worst years I have seen in 11 years living here," said Mr Carter, who was born in the US but moved here with his Brazilian wife. "I flew with several different people at several different times in September and October and I couldn't see the end of my wings, I couldn't see the ground. "I tried to land in the Xingu park [in Mato Grosso]... I couldn't... I couldn't see the runway. I was flying 300 ft (91m) above the forest and couldn't even see it."


Andre Lima, a senior official at the environment ministry with responsibility for the Amazon says it will be difficult to keep deforestation in 2008 down to the level achieved in 2007, especially given the growing market pressures.

The rainforest is susceptible to market pressures, but he believes the presidential decree will force a wider range of people to address these concerns. "What is important to do is to share out responsibility for illegal deforestation," he says. "The responsibility is not only with the farmers involved at the forefront, but it is the chain of production that buys from them as well. The big soya companies, the meat storage plants that have set up there and know there is no authorisation for deforestation in the area. "They have to assume a share of the responsibility."
The next few months will be a test of that resolve, but there seems to be a growing recognition on all sides that the Amazon faces another testing period.