Two indigenous Yine men were killed earlier this week by isolated Mascho Piro people in Madre de Dios, Peru. Gerardo Gomez Zorilla (pictured here), 54 years old, and Edwin Chu Fernández (28) were felled by Mashco Piro arrows along Quebrada San Juan. Other members of their party were wounded and some remain missing.

Both Gerardo and Edwin came from the Yine village of Diamante along the upper Madre de Dios, where I carried out my first Amazonian fieldwork @princeton in 1986. Gerardo's uncle Victor Zorilla, whom I interviewed extensively at the time, was also killed by the Mashco Piro in 2018 at the age of 72 while on a fishing trip near Diamante village.

The Yine and the Mashco Piro speak what appear to be mutually intelligible dialects of the Yine language, suggesting an historical connection between these peoples. I have proposed that the Mashco Piro represent a sub group of the Yine who escaped from massacres carried out in the late 1800s by the notorious rubber baron Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo. As a survival strategy, they seem to have taken up a nomadic life of hunting, gathering, and avoiding contact with outsiders, though little is known about their actual history.

The region to the west of the Madre de Dios Territorial reserve for the Mashco Piro people is full of extensive LEGAL logging and Brazil nut concessions (see maps attached). From the information I have read, it is unclear whether this group of indigenous loggers (according to media reports) or Brazil nut harvesters (according to my contacts in the region) were actually in the reserve, or just in forests adjacent to it.

Looking at the maps, it seems clear that an arbitrary North-South meridian visible only on a map, and cross-cutting several major rivers, is not an effective means for guaranteeing the safety either of the isolated Mashco Piro people or their settled indigenous and non-indigenous neighbors, who likewise depend on the forest for their livelihood.

Local journalist Cesar Blanco Rocca has interviewed family members of the dead men on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/uUkVKi8B1At3ZpkX/?mibextid=oFDknk

Photo of Gerardo provided by Alejandro Smith Bisso.

#amazonia #Indigenousrights #isolatedindigenouspeoples #uncontactedtribe #Peru

More than 50 members of an uncontacted #IndigenousTribe have been photographed on a riverbank in the remote #Peruvian #Amazon near an area where #logging companies have been granted concessions by the country's government.

The large group from the #MashcoPiro appeared in recent days near the southeastern village of #MonteSalvado, which belongs to the #Yine people. A smaller group of 17 appeared near a neighboring village.

The Yine, who speak a language related to that of the Mashco Piro, have previously reported that the #UncontactedTribe has been angry about the presence of #loggers on their land, according to the #IndigenousRights group #SurvivalInternational.

“This is irrefutable evidence that many Mashco Piro live in this area, which the government has not only failed to protect, but actually sold off to logging companies,” Alfredo Vargas Pio, president of the local Indigenous rights group #FENAMAD, said in a statement from Survival International.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/peru-amazon-rainforest-tribe-uncontacted-unusual-sighting-logging-area-rcna162259

#Indigenous #FirstPeoples #NativeRights #HumanRights #Deforestation #CorporateGreed #GreedKills #GovernmentFailure #Peru #GlobalSouth #StopEcocide #StopIndigenousGenocide #Environmental #SouthAmerica #ClimateCrisis #StopKillingForests #AmazonRainforest #IndigenousLand #NativeLand #EcoJustice