This tragic incident underscores the hazards of forcing contact on people who have so adamantly expressed their desire to be left alone, says Glenn Shepard, an old friend of Flores. Shacos death saddens me. He was a generous and courageous man.
Despite this increase in sightings and encounters, the Mashco-Piro show no interest in taking things further.
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Today the Mashco-Piro are nomadic and dependent on hunting and gathering for their food, but until the Rubber Boom hit them they lived in settled communities and practiced agriculture
There were thirteen of them, Cortijo says. Two men, women, adolescents and children. Shaco thought he heard them call him so he went out to see them.
This was made clear in November last year when a Mashco-Piro shot an arrow at a Matsigenka man, Nicolas Shaco Flores, and killed him. Flores had been trying to establish permanent contact with this Mashco-Piro group for more than twenty-five years, and was believed to have known them better than anyone else.
In the large majority of encounters between the Mashco-Piro and non-Mashco-Piro, the Mashco-Piro have reacted by simply watching or moving off slowly, said Cabeceras Aid, an American NGO with extensive experience in Perus Amazon, in a 2007 report about the Purus region.
In 2007 photos of a Mashco-Piro group were taken from an aeroplane, but six weeks later Perus president, Alan Garcia, publicly claimed such unconnected tribes had been invented by environmentalists opposed to oil exploration in the Amazon.
Since the horrors of the Rubber Boom there has been persistent pressure on the Mashco-Piros land: more rubber tappers, drugs traffickers, oil companies, fishermen, and thousands of loggers looking for valuable hardwoods like mahogany and cedar.
Christian missionaries have ventured into Mashco-Piro territory too, hoping to make contact and convert them to Christianity. The US-based Summer Institute of Linguistics targeted them in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and another US organisation, Pioneer Mission, has done the same more recently.
In the last decade the number of sightings of or encounters with the Mashco-Piro has increased, and there have been further, dramatic increases since May last year.
The reasons for this recent increase arent clear, butpressure on Mashco-Piro territory remains. Tourists are a constant in the Manu region, and there are reports of logging activity and oil and gas company helicopters flying low over the rainforest.
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Nicola Peels new film Blood of the Amazon tells the story of the worlds largest environmental lawsuit and investigates how the oil industry threatens a fragile rainforest environment. By Jan Goodey
There arent any oil and gas companies in Manu itself, but Perus biggest gas fields lie immediately to the west and US oil company Hunt is operating to the east.
INVESTIGATION
what is anthropology Who are the Mashco-Piro tribe and can they still hope to stay uncontacted?,Photos of indigenous people in Perus Amazon who have no regular contact with outsiders were made public yesterday by Survival International.
During the Rubber Boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries scores of people poured into the Amazon to source rubber to supply the rapidly growing car and bicycle industries in Europe and the USA. The treatment of the local indigenous people was horrific, their land was invaded, and thousands were worked to death or killed, the Mashcos among them. Those who survived retreated deeper into the rainforest and have lived there in isolation, more or less, ever since.
Anthropologist Peter Gow agrees. The Mashco abandonment of agriculture is a 20th century phenomenon, he stated in a seminal on the Mashco-Piro presented in Brazil in 2006. Only maturing secondary forest cwhat is anthropologyontains enough appropriate vegetation to sustain hunter-gatherers. All accounts place the Mashco in such old regenerated forest, whether on the Manu or on the Purus and Piedras.
Amazon uncontacted tribes at risk from new highway plan
Can they remain isolated?
HOW TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Who are the Mashco-Piro?
That hasnt stopped Peruvian congressman Carlos Tubino Arias Schreiber and a Catholic priest fromcalling for a highway to be built in the Purus region. This would cut right across rainforest used by the Mashco-Piro.
Five reserves for the isolated groups have been established, and another five proposed. The problem has been the reserves mean anything in practice and keeping loggers and oil and gas companies out.
NEWS ANALYSIS
The Mashco-Piro ironically epitomise modernity, having abandoned sedentary life and agriculture at the turn of the prior century to make way for rubber tappers feeding the global demand for automobile tires, wrote Shepard, who has worked in the Manu region for years, in Anthropology News six days ago.
One of the oil companies was Mobil, which explored in the region in the 1990s. Another was the Chinese state company Sapet, which agreed in 2006 not to enter a reserve established for the Mashco-Piro after protests by local indigenous organisation FENAMAD.
TheMashco-Piroare one of an estimated fifteen indigenous groups in Peru living without any regular contact with outsiders. Uncontacted is a short-hand term often used for them, although the evidence suggests they are the descendants of people who had contact in the past.
The biggest concern about encounters with the Mashco-Piro is their lack of immunological defences to outsiders diseases, meaning that even the transmission of a cold could kill them.
HOW TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Survival researcher Rebecca Spooner said they released the photos, taken in mid-November last year, to highlight the ever growing danger for uncontacted tribes from logging and oil and gas exploration.
NEWS
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There have been some exceptions. In the late 1970s and 1980s three Mashco-Piro women were regularly seen by employees at a Manu national park guard post. After years of intermittent contact, they settled in two villages nearby, Diamante and Shipetaeri.
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But the attack on Flores is a rare exception.
Flores had planted a garden on the river bank opposite his house which he allowed the Mashco-Piro to use. The reasons for his death remain unclear.
Politicians deny the existence of isolated tribes like the Mashco-Piro as oil, gas and logging exploration increasingly encroaches on their forest territory
Whats the point in creating a national park in Manu or reserves for uncontacted groups if you dont bother to protect them? says Survivals Rebecca Spooner. Theres nothing unrealistic about this. All it needs is Perus government to demonstrate enough political will and allocate enough resources to protect the Mashco-Piros land.
Over the years the name Mashco-Piro has been the subject of some confusion, but today it is generally used to refer to at least two distinct bands of people in south-east Peru. One of these is in Manu, an area mous for its exotic flora and una, and another in the headwaters of the Las Piedras and Purus rivers.
Just six days before he was killed, a Spanish man, Diego Cortijo, was in Flores house when a group of Mashco-Piro appeared on the opposite side of the river. It was Cortijo, a member of a Spanish Geographical Society (SGS) expedition looking for archaeological ruins and petroglyphs, who took the photos released by Survival yesterday.
Mariela Huacchillo, from Perus National Protected Areas department, says the Mashco-Piro should be left alone. Peowhat is anthropology Who are the Mashco-Piro tribe and can they still hope to stay uncontacted?ple should never attempt to enter into contact with these communities who are trying to remain apart from the outside world, she says.
The Peruvian authorities must ensure their safety, she says.
Perus government took a major step last year by passing a law guaranteeing indigenous people the right to be consulted about and in agreement with any project that affects them, effectively it illegal for Peru to permit any kind of activity on any uncontacted groups land.
Ethnobotanist and anthropologist Glenn Shepard says that makes the Mashco-Piro as modern as anyone.
Initial contact in the Amazon has often wiped out more than 50 per cent of entire groups. In Peru in the last century, the Nahua, the Cashinahua, the Nanti, the Murunahua and the Harakmbut, mistakenly called Mashcos by the Dominican priests who contacted them, were all decimated.
Despite Garcias denials, the plight of Perus isolated indigenous groups has climbed the political agenda in recent years. This has largely been the result of increasing media coverage and vigorous lobbying by indigenous and other civil society organisations.
They are the most intimate photos of Perus isolated groups ever publicised, clearly showing a man, two women and children by the side of a river. They live in the Manu region in south-east Peru and are known by anthropologists and locals as the Mashco-Piro, although that is not the name they call themselves.
