Oil Exploration in Amazon Threatens Unseen Tribes

The elusiveness of some rain forest tribes, coupled with the threat of infection posed by outsiders, makes getting an accurate census near impossible, activists say.

But Survival International estimates that some 15 uncontacted tribes live in the Peruvian Amazon alone.

Driving along an oil company road in Peru’s northern Amazon, Patricio Pinola Chuje looked out the window. He nodded beyond a green wall of rain forest.

“I don’t know if they are in this area, but I know they are farther south in other places,” said Pinola, an Achuar Indian. “They come out by the rivers.”

“They” refers to unseen Amazon Indian tribes said to live in voluntary isolation in the western headwaters of the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador.

Global energy prices have fueled oil and gas booms across oil-laden Amazonian lands. But supporters of native groups say the boom is a bust for remote Amazon Indians, who suffer both physically and socially when exposed to the modern world.

“Isolated Indians are especially vulnerable to any contact, because they have no immunity to outsiders’ diseases,” said David Hill, a spokesperson for Survival International, a London-based group that defends the rights of uncontacted tribes.

Other groups add that Indians’ rights to their traditional lands are increasingly being violated by development-hungry governments.

Now civic groups and native organizations are pushing governments and the courts to rein in oil development.

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