Members of an “uncontacted” Indigenous group used bows and arrows to attack loggers in the Peruvian Amazon in a confrontation that left at least one person injured, according to a local Indigenous organisation.
The incident came just weeks after more than 50 men and boys from the isolated group known as the Mashco Piro made a rare appearance on a beach in the Peruvian Amazon.
Campaigners warn that the Mashco Piro are under siege from logging activity – both illegal and legal – and the latest clashes are likely to increase calls for the government to finally demarcate their ancestral territory after years of conflict.
“This is a permanent emergency,” said Teresa Mayo, Peru researcher for Survival International, an NGO that promotes Indigenous rights, which released images of the Mashco Piro last month. “It is very tense in the zone. Everyone there is afraid,” she said of the area where logging concessions border the 829,941-hectare (2m-acre) Madre de Dios territorial reserve, a protected area where the tribe lives.
They likely have little idea of what being governable means.
They’re an uncontacted tribe. All they know is some strange people showed up on their land and started wrecking the place.
If some people showed up at your house, wearing strange clothes and speaking a language you don’t understand, started tearing down your walls and throwing out your food, wouldn’t you resort to some kind of violence to defend yourself and your home?
This must be terrifying for them, especially because a lot of uncontacted tribes have oral histories about being forced out of their original lands by what we know to be mercenaries.