- Survival International, an indigenous rights NGO, has released rare pictures of the Mashco Piro tribespeople, one of the world’s 100-odd uncontacted tribes.
- The photographs of tribespeople on the banks of a Las Piedras River near a logging site surfaced recently.
- The Mashco Piro, possibly numbering over 750, are nomadic hunter-gatherers living in the Amazon jungles of the Madre de Dios Region, near Peru’s border with Brazil and Bolivia.
- The Peruvian government has forbidden all contact with the tribe to prevent disease spread.
- The tribe is reclusive, occasionally contacting the Yine indigenous people, from whom much of the known information about the Mashco Piro comes.
- In 2002, Peru created the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve to protect the Mashco Piro territory.
- However, large parts of their traditional land lie outside the reserve.
- The Mashco Piro have expressed their disapproval of the logging companies to the Yine. They feel increasingly pressured and upset due to assaults by these companies.
- This is not the first invasion of Mashco Piro territory. During Peru’s rubber boom in the 1880s, they were forcibly displaced, enslaved, and killed.
- Survivors moved upstream on the Manu River, living in isolation since.
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