PERU-TRIBE Peruvian government makes contact with isolated tribe

Record ID: 146809

  • Title: PERU-TRIBE Peruvian government makes contact with isolated tribe
  • Date: 17th July 2015
  • Summary: LIMA, PERU (JULY 16, 2015) (REUTERS) ***WARNING CONTAINS NUDITY*** VICE MINISTER AND SPECIALISTS WATCHING VIDEO
  • Embargoed: 1st August 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Peru
  • Country: Peru
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA9DMA75WYKN0ZHJJ05ZOAMKTHQ
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: PLEASE NOTE: THIS EDIT CONTAINS NUDITY
    PLEASE NOTE: PART QUALITY AS INCOMING
    A team of investigators from Peru's Ministry of Culture has begun what it calls 'controlled contact' with a small group of Mashco Piro tribe members from a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon.
    Traditionally living in shelters on river banks, where they dig for turtle eggs, the Mashco Piro are a nomadic hunter-gather tribe with little immunity to modern-day diseases due to their isolation from other humans.
    As such, the team needs to ensure that contact with individual tribe members doesn't lead to an outbreak of illness within the larger Mashco Piro community.
    As a preventative measure, the Mashco Piro members in contact with investigators agreed to a period of voluntary isolation before re-entering populated tribe zones.
    In the past, the tribe has clashed with loggers, poachers and drug traffickers who invaded their jungle enclaves, but anthropologists say the lure of modern tools is now tempting them closer than ever to far-flung villages and tourist camps.
    Earlier this year, a 20-year-old man died from an arrow to his chest as members from the reclusive tribe attacked a village in the Peruvian Amazon.
    Peru's Minister of Interculturality, Patricia Balbuena, explained how in 2014 alone there were 70 Mashco Piro sightings in the region but that the majority involved only a small group from the total population.
    "What we are showing in this zone and with this group is not a generalized situation with the Mashco Piro people, it's with this [specific] group, in this zone where the number of sightings has increased dramatically in the past four years. So much so that we have reports from 2014 - from 2014 alone - of 70 sightings. We have found that what we have isn't a situation, in the sense that we have it under control but we have a particular situation that we need to address and it's that this population or this family or this clan that has come out, it actually seems that they aren't moving and it seems that they are settled in that zone. And what we have to start doing is manage what we call controlled contact," said Balbuena during a news conference in Lima on Thursday (July 16).
    Luis Felipe Torres, an anthropologist who specializes in isolated peoples and initial contact said there could be up to 1000 Mashro Piro members but only a small percentage of them have come into contact with outsiders.
    "Counting all these groups there could be up to 1000 people but it's not a definite number. We believe that the group that comes out from the Alto Madre de Dios region isn't bigger than 30 people. It's a small part of the Mashco Piro people. So those that would have health risks from contact that has already been established, that's to say that have already been exposed to our illnesses from contact, are only from this group," he said.
    Apart from controlled contact, Peru's government prohibits physical contact with the Mashco Piro and a handful of other similarly isolated indigenous tribes, primarily due to their lack of resistance to many diseases carried by people outside the tribe.
    The Mashco Piro have historically rejected outsiders, surviving enslavement during Peru's bloody rubber boom in the late 1800s and rebuffing the advances of Christian missionaries throughout the last century.
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