The most vulnerable indigenous people in the Amazon

The Amazon is the last refuge for human groups that chose to live exclusively off the resources nature has to offer. No other place in the world holds so many groups of indigenous people living in isolation. These are people that resisted the forces of economic pressure of the different jungle colonization processes over time, people that fought against explorers, escaped massacres and that, to this day, refuse regular contact with white men. Brave and fearful, these indigenous people attack and run, finding in the more remote regions of the tropical forest, a place to survive.

There’s evidence of the presence of isolated peoples in six Amazonian countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. Brazil heads the list with 70 location references of groups living in isolation, with 23 of them confirmed and 47 under study. Peru comes in second with 18 identified groups. The majority is concentrated on the bordering regions of these countries and at the heads of tributaries of the Amazon River. A vast mosaic of protected areas on the Brazilian and Peruvian borders are home to the greatest number of isolated peoples.

In these regions of the Amazon Rainforest, it is common to hear stories of such “ill-tempered” indigenous people, as they are oftentimes referred to by the neighboring population. In some cases, just a few kilometers from their wandering territories, villages of indigenous people that interact with the state can be found, together with extractivism communities, logger encampments, farms and urban centers. There are many reports of unfortunate meetings between isolated indigenous people and those already contacted and white men as well, representing a threat to the physical and cultural integrity of those people.

Isolated indigenous people require great areas of jungle in which to find the diversity and abundance of food their diets require. Any impact on their territories translates into serious subsistence problems. Their greatest villain can be the state when it fails to officially acknowledge these people, when it doesn’t implement effective public policies for their protection and when it promotes national and regional development programs that directly affect the land in which they inhabit.

Vale do Javari em perigo

“I found the natives when I was with some 20 other men. Everyone ran scared as hell and I remained alone with them. A major village. The first time I went into their long house was because there were many sick natives with the flu and diarrhea. I spent nine days there. I took many boxes with shots and pills. They were afraid of the flu. At the smallest indication, they would summon me for an injection.” This story took place in the 1980’s and was reported by former logger João Sulamba, in 2007, for a dossier on the Indigenous People Land in the Javari Valley, located in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, where the largest population of isolated indigenous people in the Amazon live.

Today, Javari Valley is the second largest land of indigenous people in Brazil, covering 8.5 million hectares, and holding, aside from the isolated people themselves, others with different levels of contact with national society. The region is known for its serious health problems that impact contacted natives. Outbreaks of malaria and viral infections are constant, aside from a high incidence of cases of child malnutrition and hepatitis A, B, C and Delta. According to a report of December 2010 by the Indigenous Labor Center (CTI) NGO, in the last 11 years, 325 contacted natives died in the region, or 8% of the total population.

“Occasional contacts between isolated peoples and indigenous people that are victims of chronic diseases and the absence of a public health policy for these isolated people, plus a lack of an efficient health system for those contacted, outline an alarming scenario, spelling imminent epidemiological disasters among the groups living in isolation in that area”, explains Ananda Conde, Head of Service of Funai’s Ethnoenvironmental Protection Front of the Javari Valley, a federal office responsible for Brazil’s indigenist policies.

Her other major concerns are the approaching large-scale deforestations for cattle breeding, derived from the municipalities of Ipixuna and Eirunepé, in the Valley of River Juruá, to the south of the protected area. In November 2010, a flyover recorded a deforested area at just 25 kilometers from the long houses of isolated natives. “There’s no control whatsoever. Ipixuna is a most serious case, since it has farms invading the area. Not long ago, this was a region that was difficult to reach, and therefore, a refuge for isolated people, however, gradually the place is feeling the pressure. The trend is for this siege to tighten even more”, concludes Ananda, now in charge of assembling a base for this Protection Front in the municipality of Eirunepé to closely monitor the situation.

Contact

In Brazil, deforesting caused by wood extraction expansion fronts and from farming and livestock breeding activities of the so-called deforesting arc, the most devastated zone of the Amazon in the country, everyday advances towards protected areas. Isolated groups that live close to the meeting of Rivers Purus and Madeira, in the south of the state of Amazonas, are very close to the eastern tip of the arc, running several risks. The situation can be aggravated in case the repaving of BR-319 highway is carried out, a road that connects the capitals of Manaus and Porto Velho – this last in the state of Rondonia.

The announcement of the highway’s reconstruction, which was opened in 1970 by the military government, is already transforming the region, and showing signs of the known “fishbone effect”, a description given to the pattern of deforesting that opens up from a highway in the forest which, throughout time, provokes in turn the opening up of other lesser roads affording even more access into the jungle. “There’s already signs of ramifications with illegal woodcutter encampments at approximately 10 kilometers from the Indigenous Land of Jacareúba Katawixi, still awaiting its proper demarcation, and a territory used by isolated natives of this ethnic group”, mentions indigenist Miguel Aparício, of the Native Amazon Operation (OPAN), who has been working since 1995 with a recently-contacted group in the region.

Having lived for six years with the Suruaha resulted in valuable studies for Aparício on the reactions of post-contacted indigenous people. “In this case, suicide was the collective response in the face of a need of a better destiny for the people”, believes the indigenist, quoting the words he heard from the natives themselves: “There’s no viable future here. Suicide opens the door to a better world.”

The practice of induced death corresponds to 87% of the death causes among adolescents and adults up to 40 years of age in the group. According to Aparício, the wave of suicides among the Suruaha began in the 1930s, after a massacre caused by the rubber tapper fronts of the basin of Purus: “Survivors hid in the jungle, reorganized their existence, and chose this dramatic form of resistance”. After decades, the group could not bear the growing pressure from extractivism workers and, in 1980, the Missionary Council for the Indigenous People (CIMI), an entity connected to the Catholic Church, established contact in an attempt to ensure survival conditions and the autonomy of these people. Today, Funai, through the actions undertaken by its General Coordination of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous People (CGIRC), has been active with the same goal.

Brazil’s Isolated Indigenous People’s Protection System (SPII) began to be developed in 1988, after a meeting among Funai’s interior explorers who manifested their concerns with the results of the policy of attraction practiced in the country in those days. At this point, a new line of action was established in the Brazilian state, which proposed avoiding contact as the basis to protect such isolated groups. “The building of this state policy caused Brazil to be in a leading position of this unique experience in South America”, explains explorer Antenor Vaz, Coordinator of Recently-Contacted Indigenous People for CGIRC, in a Report from IWGIA (International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs), published this month.

Protection without borders

Despite this incontrovertible evidence, not all South-American states officially acknowledge the existence of isolated peoples. Only Brazil and Ecuador have specific agencies for the implementation of public policies with an assigned budget and legislation. In the other countries, information and work on the theme are developed especially by non-governmental organizations and those that deal with indigenous people. “This official omission can lead to one of the cruelest processes of genocide of these isolated indigenous people”, warns Antenor Vaz. In Peru, the situation is even more disturbing, considering the state’s incapacity to control logging activities in the Amazon.

The Survival International NGO disclosed in a note last month a statement saying that the Peruvian government is aware that between 70 and 90% of its mahogany exports are illegally felled. The invasion of woodcutters in Territorial Reservations for groups living in isolation has been causing the displacement of these natives to the Brazilian side of the border. Explorer José Carlos Meirelles, who for 20 years headed the River Envira Ethnoenvironmental Protection Front, on the border of State of Acre with Peru, saw in 2006 that new long houses had been built at the heads of the Xinane Tributary, very close to the border, confirming “the transborder migration of an isolated group in search of a more protected forest”.

In the face of such scenario, there’s a need for an action plan, bilaterally coordinated between the Peruvian and the Brazilian governments to protect peoples in isolation. The only signs in this direction took place in February 2011, when Peru’s Ambassador, cornered by the press that amply disclosed photographs of isolated peoples in danger on the border of both countries, approached Funai’s President to personally discuss the theme for the very first time.



This exchange of views is even more pressing in the face of advancing discussions on yet another project of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South-America (IIRSA) which suggests the opening up of a highway connecting Pucallpa, the capital of the Ucayali department and the main logging center of the Peruvian forest, to the city of Cruzeiro do Sul in Acre. If built, this highway will cross the Reserved Zone of Sierra del Divisor, in Peru, where the Isconahua live in isolation. This month, the governor of Acre stated in a visit to Pucallpa that the state government’s commitment is towards the building of a railway, and not a highway, claiming that a railway line would generate less social and environmental impacts.

Exchanging information

Initiatives to promote the regional debate on the protection of these peoples that know no national borders were unleashed by organized civil society. Since 2006, the Transborder Work Group for the Protection of Sierra del Divisor and Alto Juruá (GTT), made up of several NGOs from Brazil and Peru and headed by the Pro-Indigenous People of Acre Commission (CPI-Acre), conducts meetings and seminars to discuss, among other things, the official policies directed at isolated natives in Brazil and Peru, as well as the impacts of the development projects and illegal activities underway in the region of Acre-Ucayali.

In Javari Valley, located on the triple border Brazil-Colombia-Peru, the Indigenist Labor Center (CTI) NGO signed a cooperation covenant at the end of the decade of 1990 with CGIRC/Funai for the task of protecting isolated peoples within lands of indigenous people. Today, the partnership has been extended to other Ethnoenvironmental Protection Fronts of the Brazilian Amazon. In March this year, the Javari Valley Front held a training course on the methodology to locate isolated groups. A team of nine professionals at work in the National Parks of Colombia were invited for some field work, together with Funai employees.

The exchange of information, experience and ideas to protect isolated indigenous people as well as those recently contacted must also be taken to the higher spheres of national power of Amazonian countries, those that really head the list of political decisions. While talks and actions are restricted to economic development projects, the building of roads, railways, powerplants and oil plants, these extremely vulnerable natives run the risk of being once again exterminated in the history of the Amazon Rainforest.


Further reading:

You can download a map of the indigenous people living in isolation in the Amazon Rainforest.
Credits: Antenor Vaz- Coordination of Recently Contacted Indigenous People – CIRC-Funai


Maria Emília Coelho is a journalist in Rio Branco, Acre (Brazil).