Isolated group makes contact with local indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon

Images taken recently in southern Peru show members of the Mascho Piro, a group comprising hundreds of people who live in voluntary isolation deep in the Amazon rainforest, on a beach exposed by low water during the region's dry season. The Mascho Piro have mostly shunned contact with outsiders since their ancestors were persecuted by the mercenary army of the Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald at the turn of the twentieth century, but in recent decades contact – and conflict – have been on the rise as loggers, gold miners, and others have steadily encroached on their territory. This most recent sighting at an isolated indigenous Yine village is believed to be related to logging activities in a nearby concession that was granted decades ago to a private company and which overlaps with their ancestral lands. Despite being FSC certified, the concession's hundreds of kilometers of logging tracks, as well as the widespread felling of trees and other activities associated with large-scale resource extraction, are highly disruptive and create a hard barrier to the group's historical movement patterns. While indigenous rights advocates in Peru have been working for years to strengthen the protection of their land, the concession was granted legally and a favorable deal for the Mashco Piro remains elusive.

Read Mongabay's excellent coverage of this ongoing situation here.