The Uncontacted Indians Need You

At risk of extinction from disease and land loss

In the depths of the Amazon rainforest in Peru live tribes who have no contact with the outside world.

Oil workers and illegal loggers are invading their land and bringing disease. They won’t survive unless this stops.

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The greatest threats to Peru’s uncontacted Indians are oil workers and illegal loggers.

More than 70% of the Peruvian Amazon has been leased by the government to oil companies. Much of this includes regions inhabited by uncontacted tribes.

Oil exploration is particularly dangerous to the Indians because it opens up previously remote areas to other outsiders, such as loggers and colonists. They use the roads and paths made by the exploration teams to enter.

Shell and the Nahua tragedy

In the past, oil exploration has led to violent and disastrous contact with isolated Indians.

In the early 1980s, exploration by Shell led to contact with the isolated Nahua tribe. Within a few years more than 50% of the Nahua had died.

Several oil companies are now working in areas where uncontacted Indians live, including the territories of the Cacataibo and Nanti tribes.

These companies are Perenco, which has recently taken over Barrett Resources, Repsol-YPF and Petrolifera.

Meanwhile, Peru describes its policy to international companies as ‘open door’. The government is actively encouraging new companies to explore in areas inhabited by uncontacted tribes including the Mashco-Piro and Isconahua.

Mahogany: ‘Red gold’

The other principal threat is illegal loggers, many of them after mahogany. Known as ‘red gold’, mahogany commands a very high price on the global market.

Peru’s rainforest has some of the last commercially viable mahogany stands anywhere in the world, prompting a ‘red gold fever’ for the last of them.

Tragically, these are the same regions where the isolated Indians live, meaning that loggers invade their territory and contact is almost inevitable.

In 1996 illegal loggers forced contact with the Murunahua Indians. In the following years over 50% of them died, mainly from colds, flu and other respiratory infections.