The Indigenous ‘watchmen’ safeguarding Peru’s isolated tribes

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Balta, Peru – On an overcast afternoon in April, Nolasco Torres and Freddy Capitan navigate their canoe along a jungle-veiled ravine. Along the route, they scrutinise the creeping understory for footprints and broken branches – telltale signs of the imminent return of isolated tribes in this cutoff region.

After rounding a bend, they steer their boat towards Nueva Vida, a tiny Indigenous hamlet hidden within Peru’s eastern Amazon, some 100 kilometres (62 miles) from the Brazil border.

“When this ravine dries, they’ll make contact here,” Torres says. “Summer is coming. We have to make sure our communities are prepared.”

Torres, 47, and Capitan, 33, are Indigenous Huni Kuin fathers and community leaders. They are also friends and neighbours of Nueva Vida’s 30 villagers. But they are not here to pay a social call.

Wearing khaki vests stitched with the letters “PIACI” (Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact), they are among 50 government-contracted, predominantly Indigenous protection agents working for Peru’s Ministry of Culture. Their work has brought them to the Curanjillo Ravine, an epicentre of recent contact.

Protection agents meet distressed villagers in Nueva Vida. The presence of isolated tribes here has caused residents to flee homes [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

It was here, last August, during the annual droughts, when more than two dozen isolated Mastanahua suddenly appeared at the edge of Nueva Vida, naked and clutching bows and arrows. Alarmed villagers stood back as the group approached their homes, grabbing machetes, buckets and food before retreating along the dried-out ravine, back into the forest.

The tense interaction ended without violence. However, in recent years, a series of explosive encounters between isolated tribes and villagers in this remote region has generated an undercurrent of panic. As the annual dry season nears, remote streams will soon recede, setting tribes out in search of resources closer to larger, more populated rivers where contact with villages is increasing.

“We’re begging the state to intervene,” said Nueva Vida’s leader, Rafael Montes, 30, in April. “We sleep in fear at night. Our only defence is our shotguns.”

Torres and Capitan grimace at this allusion to violence. The state’s emergency protocols around these incidents instruct villagers to withdraw, remain calm and make a distress call to protection agents. However, these villages tend to lack secure refuge and means to contact assistance, which makes following the instructions almost impossible.

In June, two months after Torres and Capitan’s April meeting with villagers in Nueva Vida, a group of approximately 30 Mastanahua reappeared along the dry ravine and made a similar incursion into the village. This time, Montes and his entire community fled.

Today, Nueva Vida stands abandoned. Its homes, crops and small primary school are slowly being reclaimed by the jungle.

Protection agents Fredy Capitan (left) and Nolasco Torres arrive in Nueva Vida, where sightings of isolated tribes have caused villagers to flee [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

‘In tremendous crisis’

In the heavily forested province of Purus, in the eastern Amazon rainforest, contact with some of the planet’s most isolated tribes is accelerating. The encounters are transforming the region into a troubling flashpoint of encounters with the Mastanahua and Mashco Piro tribes, which have rejected contact with the outside world for generations.

The situation is creating a powder keg, raising the spectre of deadly confrontation and driving the evacuation of entire villages. It has also prompted questions about the Peruvian state’s commitment to safeguarding the lives of some of Earth’s last isolated tribes amid increased invasion of their territory.

The factors driving the tribes into contact are multifaceted. Experts say extractive industries, criminal economies and climate change are pushing them closer to villages, where they are exposed to various risks, including armed confrontation and contagion.

“The region is in tremendous crisis,” said Beatriz Huertas, an anthropologist who works closely with Indigenous peoples and Amazon organisations. “Illegal logging and drug trafficking is happening in their territory, and the state is not fulfilling its role to guarantee their sovereignty.”

While Peruvian law acknowledges the territorial rights of isolated peoples, it also allows for natural resource exploitation – even within protected areas – if deemed to be a “public necessity.” This allows logging and fossil fuel explorations to operate inside Indigenous reserves, and, in the absence of state protection, drug smugglers move through these areas.

Huni Kuin men and boys ride upriver on a communal hunt [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

Disrupted habitat

Peru is home to the second-largest population of isolated tribes on the planet after Brazil. Approximately 7,500 people from about 25 ethnic groups live in isolation or are in the early stages of contact with settled society.

Often erroneously characterised as “lost” tribes, living lives “frozen in the distant past”, isolated peoples have interacted with outside populations for generations, Huertas explained. As a result, Indigenous people “faced illness, violence and death”, she added. But following enslavement and the decimation of their populations, including during the rubber boom from the 1890s to the 1920s when Peruvian rubber was in high demand, many groups fled to remote headwaters, where their relatives remain today. “These are peoples who isolate themselves as a survival strategy,” she said.

The greater Purus region, which extends eastward into neighbouring Brazil, is considered to be home to the largest concentration of isolated tribes on Earth. The Alto Purus National Park – an area more than half the size of Costa Rica – along with two protected reserves, serves as a migratory corridor for the Mashco Piro, the largest-known isolated tribe in the world, numbering more than 750 people, and about 300 Mastanahua, who share ethnolinguistic ties with the Huni Kuin and other settled tribes in Purus.

During the Amazon summer, the Mashco Piro and Mastanahua trek hundreds of kilometres along Purus’s dry streams to larger riverbanks in search of resources, including protein-rich turtle eggs.

But as climate change contributes to higher temperatures and extreme droughts, vital habitats and food sources are disrupted. In Purus, earlier and more protracted dry seasons are altering the ecosystems that isolated tribes depend upon for survival.

The lowland forests of Purus are thought to be home to the largest concentration of isolated tribes on Earth [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

‘We are like watchmen’

Travelling upstream from Nueva Vida, Torres and Capitan enter another canopied ravine. Water levels are beginning to recede. They wade through the shin-deep water sifting for arrowheads or trails suspiciously blocked by branches. They also listen: Isolated peoples can be masterful imitators of wild game and monkeys.

“We are like watchmen,” said Torres. “We find fire pits, charred animal bones and palm huts they put up along beaches. It’s our job to report the evidence to authorities.”

Increased contact by isolated tribes in remote Amazon regions like Purus has led Peru’s government to recruit local Indigenous villagers like Torres and Capitan to work as protection agents.

Their innate knowledge of the forests, along with an ability to communicate government protocols in their native languages, has made protection agents’ work a vital tool for the state – both to monitor their territories and keep villagers alert should they encounter evidence of isolated tribes nearby.

Patrolling the wilderness for days on end, protection agents trek through dense forests, tread remote streams and regularly camp along desolate beaches, searching for traces of their proximity. With little more than GPS navigators and weather-worn cellphones damaged by the unforgiving elements, they compile their findings in field reports for Peru’s Ministry of Culture, which implements policy on isolated tribes. Their fieldwork provides the state with invaluable intel about what little is known about these reclusive hunter-gatherers, from territorial migrations to population sizes.

Increasingly, their briefings note the indicators of outside invasion by illicit actors. Purus’s forests have become an emerging drug smuggling corridor. Last year, nearly 230,000 acres of coca, cocaine’s raw ingredient, were cultivated in Peru. Of that, more than 43,000 acres (17,400 hectares) were grown in protected areas home to isolated tribes, according to Peru’s National Commission for Development and Life without Drugs (DEVIDA).

Fredy Capitan, an Indigenous protection agent for Peru’s government, surveys a village where isolated tribes are making increased contact [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

Authorities from Peru’s National Service of Natural Protected Areas (SERNANP) confirmed the presence of traffickers moving cocaine paste through Purus’s rivers and forests. Remote jungle airstrips thought to be used for the cocaine trade have also been registered adjacent to and inside of the Mashco Piro Indigenous Reserve, a two million-acre (800,000-hectare) protected area inhabited by the Mashco Piro tribe within the Alto Purus National Park.

Despite the immense size of this territory, invasion by drug traffickers, as well as hunters and loggers, is pushing isolated tribes away from remote tributaries and towards more populated areas, typically near rivers, where there are crops like plantain and cassava. This puts them in dangerous proximity to armed villagers who are increasingly on edge.

As intermediaries between the state and local communities, it is Torres and Capitan’s work to calm rattled nerves and ensure that proper protocol is followed. Beyond monthly patrols searching for the presence of isolated tribes along forested trails, rivers and ravines, they also brief villagers on their findings and inform them of government “action plans”, which include a strict no-contact policy meant to defuse violence in the event of sightings.

“We make sure villagers stay calm and leave the area immediately. Then, we put out an alert to the Culture Ministry and wait for instructions,” Capitan explains.

But the protocols devised in Lima do not often reflect the immediacy of actual threats in Purus’s forests, according to Torres and Capitan. “Government ministers can only comprehend our territory from studies and books,” says Capitan. “They don’t understand our reality on the ground.”

Both men decried a shortage of personnel, poor communication and a lack of dependable boats to usher villagers to safety in the event of raids. And absent more robust state measures to protect isolated tribes’ territories and stem their arrival near villages, the region has turned into a tinderbox.

A family killed

Torres and Capitan hack through the jungle and arrive at a wooden cabin enveloped by forest. Its door and walls have been lacerated by machetes.

Not far from Nueva Vida, the Cetico Outpost, named after a nearby ravine, served as a government base camp for protection agents for more than a decade. Today, it is home to a colony of shrieking bats, and the floors are littered with tattered maps and logbooks.

As isolated tribes emerge in this region, the abandoned outpost serves as a grim testament to their volatile relationship, not only with villagers, but also with groups who, until recently, lived in isolation like them.

The Cetico Outpost was abandoned by Peru’s government in 2020 after a deadly raid by isolated tribes in the Amazon region of Purus [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

“[The] Mashco Piro hacked through the door and took anything they could find,” says Capitan. “No one was here at the time. But after the killings, the government abandoned it.”

In November 2020, following the raid on this outpost, three dismembered corpses of a local Indigenous family living close by were found slashed by machetes and pocked by arrows. The victims were a family of Mastanahua tribespeople who had been lured out of isolation by Christian missionaries in the early 2000s.

Slowly adapting to sedentary life, the family lived alone in a jungle encampment a short trek from the government outpost. Despite cultural and linguistic barriers with their Huni Kuin neighbours, they would make regular visits to nearby communities, including Torres’s.

“My wife would cook them meals. They loved rice and sweet drinks,” Torres says, adding that initial contact tribes did not have previous experience with these foods.

However, following the family’s absence in his community for more than a week, and alerts by neighbours, Torres and fellow protection agents went to investigate. When he was trekking to the family’s home, Torres saw hundreds of large footprints, he recalls.

“We knew they were Mashco Piro footprints. The Mastanahua’s are the size of our own,” says Torres. “As we got closer, we saw vultures.”

When he arrived at the family’s encampment, Torres says he saw the family’s decomposing corpses beside the remnants of their burned home.

The motive for the killings – whether owing to a longstanding tribal feud with the Mastanahua, territorial invasion or other perceived threats – remains unclear, Torres said, but the protection agents suspected the Mashco Piro.

What is evident is that external pressures are driving the Mashco Piro – who inhabit a wide swath of territory beyond Purus – to increased aggression. In late August, two loggers operating within the tribe’s territory were killed by arrows in the southern region of Madre de Dios. Another two remain missing.

In the wake of the family killing in Purus, weeks would pass before a commission led by the National Prosecutor’s Office and Peru’s National Police was sent in to investigate and remove the bodies. The Ministry of Culture, which coordinated the evacuation of nearby villagers, confirmed arrows characteristic of those used by the Mascho Piro at the site of the murders. Official findings from the state’s investigation were not made available.

Following the killings, the Culture Ministry abandoned the Cetico Outpost, and fearful Huni Kuin villagers in the nearby community of Santa Rey fled. Four years later, their village remains empty, its 10 families displaced upriver.

Following a deadly raid by an isolated tribe in 2020, villagers in the Huni Kuin community of Santa Rey fled. It remains abandoned today [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

‘We could be killed at any moment’

The sun sinks below the forest canopy as Torres and Capitan arrive home to their community of Balta. Straddling the Alto Purus National Park, Balta is surrounded by boundless forest. A boat journey here from Purus’s capital of Puerto Esperanza takes about 30 hours. During the dry season, however, the village of 40 is nearly cut off from the outside world.

After a meal of roasted monkey and boiled cassava, Torres and Capitan sway in hammocks, talking with their wives and children.

Capitan, a father of four and former school teacher, became a protection agent a year ago.

“For me, it was a calling. Both to help our communities and understand the reality of our uncontacted brothers,” he says. “I wanted to understand how the state can protect them.”

Fredy Capitan (left) and Nolasco Torres in their village of Balta. As government protection agents, they monitor the remote jungle for signs of isolated tribes [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

After five years of theological studies, Torres led a Huni Kuin evangelical organisation in Purus during the late 2000s while also dedicating himself to a life of agriculture and hunting. Years of friendly relations with the slain Mastanahua family led him to take an interest in isolated tribes. He became a protection agent in 2019.

However, the $275 monthly salary is hardly enough, Torres says, to provide for his eight children and is not enough to compensate for the dangers of their job.

“We go to work knowing we could be killed at any moment,” he says. “But [isolated tribes] have a right to live. They have their culture and customs, that’s why we can’t force them into contact. It’s their decision alone to make.”

It was a decision the Huni Kuin ultimately made themselves after they were brought out of isolation by American missionaries in the 1940s and 50s and settled in Balta. The missionaries eventually left, along with hundreds of Huni Kuin who today live scattered throughout Purus.

The increased arrival of isolated tribes near Balta has caused many more to flee. But Torres and Capitan remain, in part because their livelihoods depend on it. Following the 2020 killings, the Culture Ministry moved its monitoring outpost here.

“We are the brave ones representing our Huni Kuin people,” says Torres. “But this is an emergency zone.”

Both men say that requests to authorities for better communication, including satellite phones and functioning internet, as well as a safehouse in the event of raids, have gone unheeded.

The lack of state resources for protection agents is impeding the success of their work, according to Beatriz Huertas, the anthropologist. While their intended function is “a strong concept in theory,” she said, lacking personnel and proper training, agents here are ill-equipped to manage increased contact and can only coordinate evacuations and community lockdowns. Meanwhile, the state has channelled resources to other regions where isolated groups are emerging, leaving Purus with a shortage of protection agents and neglected monitoring outposts.

Peru’s Ministry of Culture declined an interview with Al Jazeera, but in a written response stated that there were no officially reported sightings of isolated groups in 2023 or 2024, contradicting testimony from more than a dozen villagers interviewed by Al Jazeera. The ministry stated that “contingency plans” to help villagers flee in the event of raid scenarios were being implemented in five communities in the region. The state’s emergency plans include the construction of wooden escape canoes and petrol supplies.

But the boats have not arrived, and residents said the state’s plans were a stopgap fix that would do little to protect villagers or isolated groups.

There is concern that regular sightings of isolated tribes could be a prelude to more sustained contact. If that happens, many here doubt the state could safely bring them into the fold of sedentary life. “There is a harsh culture shock and political destructuring when isolated peoples integrate. The state tends to abandon them to their fate,” said Huertas.

Huni Kuin children in the remote village of Balta carry bush meat from a recent hunt. Their village is a flashpoint of recent contact with isolated tribes in Peru’s eastern Amazon [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

‘We need action’

The following morning, Torres and Capitan gas up their boat and travel two hours downriver to the Huni Kuin village of Colombiana, where villagers said the Mastanahua have made contact twice since 2019, entering homes and taking items.

The agents gather villagers to update them on the Ministry of Culture’s contingency plans, which have been delayed for nearly a year.

Colombiana’s leader, Paco Pinedo, is distressed. With dry season approaching, and after a series of raids in Colombiana, including one on his own home in 2020, villagers are on edge, he said.

“We need action,” said Pinedo. “Every year, the situation is getting more dire. We can’t wait on the state. Our kids and elders are terrified.”

Pinedo muses aloud that perhaps life would be easier if isolated tribes would finally come out of the forest for good, living as neighbours of the Huni Kuin. But then he pivots.

“Our ancestors used to live like them,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s their right to stay in the bush.”

Ultimately, it will require true state commitment to legally defend the territorial rights of isolated tribes and an overhaul of the extractivist policies degrading their forests, according to Huertas. Stronger alliances with local Indigenous communities, she said, would also help call to attention the importance of protecting Earth’s remaining isolated peoples.

“[The state] must double down on work to monitor their territories, their food sovereignty, and environment to protect their integrity, their lives, their health and their future as peoples,” said Huertas.