(Above: Photo of an uncontacted tribe near Peru-Brazil border in 2010; photo credit: Survival International)
Ahead of the visit of Peru’s President Ollanta Humala to Germany for a climate conference this week, Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, has written to the President urging him to protect the lands of highly vulnerable uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest from illegal logging and drug trafficking.
The Kugapakori Nahua Nanti Reserve on the border of Manu National Park, Peru
(Note: the author of this blog lived in this area of Peru with the recently contacted Nahua (Yora) in the late 1980s. The uncontacted Nahua’s land was originally invaded in the early 1980s by Royal Dutch Shell Oil, which detonated explosive charges in their territory. The invasion ultimately led to the Nahua’s contact with the outside world. Roughly 30% of the Nahua population died within two years of the contact, due to an epidemic of whooping cough, for which they had no natural defense.The Peruvian government created the Nahua-Kugapakori Territorial Reserve in 1990 to protect the territorial rights of the Nahua, Nanti (uncontacted Machiguenga) and other uncontacted or recently-contacted peoples living in the area. The reserve also serves as a buffer to Peru’s enormous Manu National Park and Biosphere Reserve, one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world. Now, thirty years after their first contact, the Nahua and other groups of isolated indigenous peoples are once again under assault, this time by a new group of oil companies, facilitated by the Peruvian government–KM).
January 27, 2014
Peru Approves Gas Project, Spells Disaster for Uncontacted Tribes
Survival International
Uncontacted Nanti could be decimated by plans to detonate thousands of explosive charges and allow hundreds of workers to flood onto their land.
Peru has approved the highly controversial expansion of the Camisea gas project onto the land of uncontacted Amazon tribes – despite international outrage, the resignation of three ministers, and condemnation by the United Nations and international human rights organizations.
Peru’s Ministry of Culture, tasked with protecting the country’s indigenous population, has approved plans by oil and gas giants Pluspetrol (Argentina), Hunt Oil (US) and Repsol (Spain) to detonate thousands of explosive charges, drill exploratory wells and allow hundreds of workers to flood into the Nahua-Nanti Reserve, located just 100 km from Machu Picchu.
The expansion could decimate the uncontacted tribes living in the reserve, as any contact between gas workers and the Indians is likely to result in the spread of diseases or epidemics to which the Indians lack immunity.
Pluspetrol itself recognizes the devastating impact the expansion could have. In its ‘Anthropological Contingency Plan’ the company states that any diseases transmitted by workers could cause ‘prolonged periods of illness, massive deaths, and, in the best cases, long periods of recovery.’
Protests were held around the world against the plans to expand the Camisea gas project in Peru’s Amazon rainforest.
When oil giant Shell first started explorations in the area, it led to the death of nearly half the Nahua tribe. One Nahua man recounted, ‘Many, many people died. People dying everywhere, like fish after a stream has been poisoned. People left to rot along stream banks, in the woods, in their houses. That terrible illness!’
Raya, a Nahua elder who survived contact.
The project violates Peruvian and international laws which require the consent of any projects carried out on tribal peoples’ land.
Last year, protests were held around the world to stop the expansion of Camisea, and more than 131,000 Survival supporters have sent a message to Peru’s President Humala demanding a halt to the oil and gas work on uncontacted tribes’ land. Today, Survival handed the list of the thousands of petition signatures to the Peruvian embassy in London.
As a result of the high profile campaign by tribal rights organization Survival International, local organizations AIDESEP, FENAMAD, COMARU and ORAU, and others, to stop the expansion, seismic testing has been averted from riverways and the location of one well was moved from the land of an isolated tribe.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘Thirty years ago workers prospecting for the Camisea deposit penetrated deep into the territory of the Nahua people – and soon after, half the tribe were wiped out by flu and similar diseases. Has the Peruvian government really learnt nothing from history, that it is prepared to risk this happening again for the sake of a few more gas wells?’
New Amazon Highway ‘Would Put Peru’s Last Lost Tribes At Risk‘
Eco-campaigners clash with developers over plan to build 125-mile road through rainforest
June 30, 2012 The Observer
Members of the uncontacted Mashco-Piro tribe photographed through a telescope late last year
A fierce row has broken out over a controversial plan to drive a road through pristine Amazon rainforest, imperilling the future of some of the world’s last uncontacted tribes.
The 125-mile (200km) road would pass through the Alto Purús national park in Peru, connecting a remote area to the outside world but opening up the most biologically and culturally important area of the upper Amazon to logging, mining and drug trafficking. Opponents of the plan fear it will threaten the existence of uncontacted tribes such as the Mashco-Piro. The first detailed photographs of members of the tribe made headlines around the world earlier this year after they were spotted on a riverbank.
Peru Struggles To Keep Outsiders Away From Uncontacted Amazon Tribe Mashco-Piro Indians have been spotted on the banks of a river popular with tourists after increasing logging in the area
Jan 31, 2012
guardian.co.uk
Peruvian authorities say they are struggling to keep outsiders away from a clan of previously isolated Amazon Indians who began appearing on the banks of a jungle river popular with environmental tourists last year.
World pays Ecuador not to extract oil from rainforest
Governments and film stars join alliance that raises £75m to compensate Ecuador for lost revenue from 900m barrels
The Guardian
An alliance of European local authorities, national governments, US film stars, Japanese shops, soft drink companies and Russian foundations have stepped in to prevent oil companies exploiting 900m barrels of crude oil from one of the world’s most biologically rich tracts of land…
URUAÇU, Brazil — When the Chinese came looking for more soybeans here last year, they inquired about buying land — lots of it.
Officials in this farming area would not sell the hundreds of thousands of acres needed. Undeterred, the Chinese pursued a different strategy: providing credit to farmers and potentially tripling the soybeans grown here to feed chickens and hogs back in China…
(Note: An estimated 100 uncontacted tribes still exist in the world, with the majority of them inhabiting Brazil (with an estimated 67 uncontacted tribes) and Peru (with 15). Most are located not far from the Peru-Brazil border in the Amazonian portions of those countries. Meanwhile, more than 180 oil and gas blocks now cover most of the western Amazon, the most species rich area on earth and home to many uncontacted or extremely isolated tribes. Many of these oil and gas concessions currently overlap indigenous territories, that is, land that has either been titled to native groups or else is currently lived upon by isolated tribes. Recently, a BBC film crew flew over an uncontacted village of what are probably Panoan natives in Brazil’s remote jungle near the Peruvian border. The following is a film clip of that footage from Survival International):
The 3,400-mile Transoceanic Highway from Brazil to Peru has long been a pipe dream, but as it finally nears reality many along its long path worry that a way of life and livelihoods are in danger.
October 31, 2010
Los Angeles Times
Puerto Maldonado, Peru
The road crashes through the jungle like the fevered dream of the indomitable Fitzcarraldo, who schemes to transport a steamship overland through the Peruvian tropics in a cult film celebrating demented ambition…
Scientists Find Evidence Discrediting Theory Amazon Was Virtually Unlivable
The Washington Post
September 5, 2010; 7:57 PM
SAN MARTIN DE SAMIRIA, PERU – To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial – from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines…
