Control post to protect uncontacted tribes
July 16, 2009
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Peru’s government has announced that a control post protecting uncontacted tribes will start operating next month.
The post has been built on the remote Las Piedras river in south-east Peru. Twenty-one uncontacted Indians were photographed on the banks of the Las Piedras in September 2007.
The aim of the post is to stop loggers and other outsiders from entering the Madre de Dios Reserve, which was created specially for uncontacted tribes in 2002. The Las Piedras Rivers is one of the main access routes into the reserve.
The post will be manned by local Indigenous people and will be equipped with radios connecting them to police in Puerto Maldonado, the biggest town in that part of the Peruvian Amazon. It is the result of a collaboration between Peru’s Indigenous affairs department, INDEPA, and the Frankfurt Zoological Society.
‘Local Indigenous people have been trained to sound the alert if illegal loggers or other people performing illicit activities enter the reserve,’ said INDEPA’s president, Mayta Cápac Alatrista. ‘The aim is to build a total of four posts between the Acre, Las Piedras and Tahuamanu Rivers, which act as ‘highways’ into and out of the reserve.’
The reserve is 850,000 hectares and is inhabited by at least two uncontacted tribes, one of them known as the Mashco-Piro.
