Return to the forest sounds like a call for indigenous species of animals to return to their traditional habitat. That is true of this story from Peru, with the uncommon caveat that the species in question is human.
According to Survival International, an NGO, there are more than a hundred known tribes in the world that live mostly or entirely apart from wider society. This does not count those that many people think still exist, undiscovered, in the forests of the Amazon Basin, Papua New Guinea, and maybe elsewhere.
The Mashco Piro tribe live in the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios, and have had limited contact with the outside world. When they have, the events that have not always ended well. Jerson Del Aguila, a logging employee, came across naked members of the tribe twice in 2021. Jerson and his colleague turned back immediately. A year later, Jerson’s brother, Gean Marcos, who was working on the same timber concession, was shot with two arrows and killed. Since then, there have been eight more recorded bow and arrow attacks, resulting in more deaths and people missing.
Calls are now being made for the Peruvian Government to expand the reserve that was created to protect the Mashco Piro, as well as the people who might come in contact with them.
It is interesting that anthropologists think that the Mashco Piro used to be less isolated but that their ancestors decided to return to the forest as a result of the violence they suffered during the rubber boom that started in the 1890’s. There is also speculation that they may be the descendants of slaves of the notorious rubber baron, Carlos Scharff, who was killed in a slave revolt in 1909. Those experiences might well also explain the tribe’s aggressive reactions to new contacts today.
Romel Ponceano, the chief of one of the villages located near the Mashco Piro, and one of the few people to have had a dialogue with them and survived, has said they have told him they have no interest in leaving the forest. He said they made him strip naked before they would talk to him because they believe “only bad people wear clothes”. (A complete non-sequitur here, it made me think of Vladimir Putin wearing Savile Row suits).
The area is home to large mahogany trees, and logging interests have exploited this very profitable resource since the boom of mahogany logging in the 1990s. When the Peruvian Government created the current reserve for the Mashco Piro in 2002, it was at the expense of the many timber concessions, and compensation cost the Government coffers a lot of money. The current reluctance to increase the size of the reserve results partially from that experience, as well as from the intense lobbying of the timber companies.
Contact can also be extremely dangerous to the Mashco Piro themselves, and not only from timber concessionaires defending their profits. Isolated tribes tend to have very little resistance to diseases that are common in the outside world. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Dominican missionaries made contact with another isolated tribe in the same region, and started dropping bags of machetes, food and blankets out of planes. The diseases carried in those goods almost wiped out the entire tribe – the priests also abused the tribe by forcing them to fell trees and pan for gold.
The current Peruvian administration is taking up the case again, planning to expand the reserve by 350,000 hectares. Money is still an issue with estimates of timber concession compensation running to US$88 million.
There is also the question of security in the area. Between 2020 and 2022, 14 environmentalists and indigenous leaders have been killed by illegal gold-miners, loggers, drug traffickers and the like. Any government plan would have to include programs to curb these incidents, and that will cost more money.
For the time being the situation seems to be dictated by the Mashco Pico, who only make contact when they come to remote villages to look for pots and machetes, and then return to the forest. How much longer they can continue this control is anyone’s guess but, long-term it is doubtful.
