Peru Accused Of Failing To Protect Amazon Tribes

Brazil has 26 confirmed native Indian tribes that live with little or no contact with the outside world, surviving by hunting and gathering as they have for centuries. Survival International, a group that campaigns for tribal people, says there are at least three groups on Peru’s side of the border.

“The (Peruvian) government has made it very clear that it wants to open up large parts of the Amazon — it’s done that for oil and gas,” said Survival’s David Hill. “In this case there is a logging problem in all kinds of areas where it shouldn’t be happening and it’s failing to do anything about it.”
There is also logging on Brazil’s side of the border. The Amazon Protection System that monitors the forest detected in May a deforested area of 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres) in the Kaxinawa Igarape reserve in Acre, 16 percent of its total area. Funai has requested reconnaissance flights in 20 areas where isolated Indians are suspected to live.

Meirelles says that newly built huts he photographed from the air this year about 3 miles (5 km) inside the Brazilian border are further evidence of tribes moving from Peru. Planks of wood, empty fuel containers and other debris found floating down the Envira river past Meirelles’ outpost point to logging activity upstream.

Beatriz Huertas, an official with international indigenous rights group CIPIACI who spent three weeks in the border area in June, said logging had caused conflicts between tribes over scarcer resources in Peru and pushed them into Brazil.

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