Uncontacted tribe attacks encroaching loggers with bows and arrows in Peru’s Amazon: “A matter of life and death”

Peru’s reclusive Mashco Piro ethnic group recently used bows and arrows to attack loggers suspected of encroaching on their territory in the Amazon, according to a regional Indigenous organization.

FENAMAD, representing 39 Indigenous communities in the Cusco and Madre de Dios regions, said Monday that it believes illegal logging was taking place on Mashco Piro territory and that one logger was injured in the July 27 attack.

A few weeks ago, photos emerged of the uncontacted tribe searching for food on a beach in the Peruvian Amazon, which some experts say was evidence logging concessions are “dangerously close” to its territory. Survival International, an advocacy group for Indigenous peoples which closely follows the Mashco Piro’s issues, said the photos and videos posted showed about 53 male Mashco Piro on the beach. The group estimated as many as 100 to 150 tribal members would have been in the area with women and children nearby.

“It is presumably illegal because the area where the incident occurred is a forestry concession that belonged to Wood Tropical Forest until November 2022, and we are not aware of a concession that has requested or granted enabling rights in the same area,” said a FENAMAD representative, speaking anonymously out of personal security concerns.

The organization says that a lack of protection measures by the Peruvian government and the increased activity of companies and illegal operators on the Mashco Piro territory could produce “devastating consequences,” such as the transmission of diseases and increased violence.

Two loggers were shot with arrows while fishing in 2022, one fatally, in an encounter with tribal members, and there have been several other previous reports of conflicts.

“A permanent emergency”  

Peru’s Ministry of Culture, responsible for the protection of Indigenous peoples, did not immediately respond to a message Monday seeking comment on the attack and their protection efforts.

Survival International, an advocacy group for Indigenous peoples which closely follows the Mashco Piro’s issues, says it is pressuring the Peruvian government to move deeper into these areas of the Amazon to help control the situation.

“This is a permanent emergency. For the last month we have been seeing the Mascho Piro every two weeks at different points, and in all of them they are surrounded by loggers,” Teresa Mayo, a researcher at Survival International, said in a phone call.

“It’s truly a matter of life and death. And only the government can and has the duty to stop it,” Mayo said.

A 2023 report by the United Nations’ special reporter on the rights of Indigenous peoples said Peru’s government had recognized in 2016 that the Mashco Piro and other isolated tribes were using territories that had been opened to logging. The report expressed concern for the overlap, and that the territory of Indigenous peoples hadn’t been marked out “despite reasonable evidence of their presence since 1999.”

In 2018, footage showed an indigenous man believed to be the last remaining member of an isolated tribe in the Brazilian Amazon.