Peru to Consider New Reserve for Uncontacted Indigenous People

This week, Peruvian officials are set to consider the creation of a sprawling reserve in the country’s Amazon basin to protect groups of Indigenous people living in isolation from the rest of society. 

Establishing the reserve would represent the latest step in a decades-long effort to protect thousands of such isolated Indigenous people across Peru’s Amazon region from increasing incursions by loggers, miners, oil companies and drug traffickers.

The proposed Yavarí Mirim reserve would encompass an area larger than Connecticut. It lies within some of the least-disturbed parts of the Amazon rainforest, but some business groups have sought to open the area to logging, oil and gas drilling and other extractive industries. The region, along the border with Brazil, has also seen increased drug trafficking and illegal coca production in recent years.

Advocates of the reserve say its creation is critical to securing the survival of the people living within it, who because of their isolation are highly vulnerable to disease and conflicts with outsiders.

“We could be talking about people who could be extinguished,” said Beatriz Huertas, a Peruvian anthropologist who is the isolated peoples policy senior adviser at the Rainforest Foundation Norway.

Speaking in Spanish, Huertas said the establishment of a reserve would prohibit any incursions by outsiders and would obligate the government to patrol the area and create a plan to protect its inhabitants.

The Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of the Eastern Amazon, a federation of native groups in Northeast Peru known by its Spanish acronym ORPIO, has been appealing to government agencies and foreign embassies in recent weeks to campaign for the reserve’s creation. A commission of government ministries and local representatives is set to meet on Thursday to vote on the proposed reserve.

The vote would formally recognize an “Additional Categorization Study” for Yavarí Mirim. While the establishment of the reserve would still require a decree from government ministers, Huertas said such a step is generally considered a formality once the final study is approved.

According to a spokesman, ORPIO’s leaders are worried that officials may fail to approve the study at this week’s meeting due to pressure from extractive industries.

In recorded comments shared with Inside Climate News, the group’s leader, Pablo Chota Ruiz, said government officials have ignored illegal mining and logging activity in Indigenous lands.

“They know that our brothers in isolation exist,” he said in Spanish, but added that some officials and business interests want to dispossess those people of their lands to clear the way for logging and mining.

In a written response to questions, a spokesperson for Peru’s Culture Ministry, which is responsible for protecting the rights of Indigenous people, said the state is obligated to guarantee the protection of people in isolation and noted that the coming meeting was a culmination of that process. The spokesperson said the technical secretary of the committee in charge of the process had “not received any information” about opposition by extractive industries.

The forests that straddle the borders of Peru, Brazil and Bolivia have the world’s highest concentration of Indigenous people living in isolation, sometimes called uncontacted people, according to Survival International, which advocates for their protection.

Peru’s Culture Ministry estimates there are about 7,000 such people belonging to 25 groups across the country, mostly along the border region. Some of these groups have limited contact with outsiders. Their history there dates to the turn of the 20th century, when rubber barons invaded the Amazon through a horrifically violent campaign.

While many native people were killed or died from disease, and others were forced to work cultivating rubber, some retreated deep into remote and inaccessible parts of the forest. Anthropologists and Indigenous groups say these people then effectively cut themselves off from the rest of society as a survival strategy.

As a result, people living in isolation have not developed immunity to many common infections. Previous incidents of forced contact, initiated by missionaries, loggers and oil companies, have been disastrous, often decimating populations.

Uncontacted groups also live in a state of interdependence with the forests around them, Huertas said, relying on them for food, shelter—everything they need.

“To the extent that their territories are invaded, occupied, contaminated, destroyed,” Huertas said, “their lives will also suffer a deterioration.”

Peru has established eight reserves in its Amazon region to protect isolated Indigenous groups. The reserves cover more than 17,000 square miles, or about 3.6 percent of the country, according to the Culture Ministry. Five proposed reserves, including Yavarí Mirim, would encompass an additional 11,700 square miles of forest. 

Along with similar reserves in Brazil and other neighboring countries, these territories encompass some of the most ecologically diverse and intact parts of the Amazon.

A United Nations report concluded in 2021 that forests across Latin America that were controlled by Indigenous or tribal people were better protected and stored more carbon than comparable forests elsewhere. This was due not only to the fact that these lands tended to be more remote, less useful for agriculture and less developed, but also to the practices and knowledge of the people who managed them. 

ORPIO said illegal logging has been occurring within the proposed Yavarí Mirim reserve. While the total amount cleared is relatively small—the group said about 1.7 square miles of forest have been lost since 2001—ORPIO said incursion by loggers poses a grave threat to people living in the area.

Logging plagues reserves throughout Peru. Last week, Survival International warned that members of the Mashco Piro, an isolated group in Southern Peru, have been emerging from the forest, a possible sign that they are under pressure. A logging company has been building a bridge near their territory that would increase access to the area, according to the advocacy group.

As protections for isolated Indigenous groups have expanded in recent years, business interests in Peru, including the country’s state-owned oil and gas company, have pushed back.

A number of oil and gas concessions overlap with existing and proposed reserves. While Yavarí Mirim does not have any concessions within it, the state-owned enterprise responsible for promoting development, Perupetro, advertises to potential investors that the area lies over an “under-explored” sedimentary basin.

Perupetro did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

A bill introduced last month in Peru’s Congress would weaken protections for the reserves, according to Indigenous groups. Similar bills have been introduced in recent years but failed to pass.

The Coordinator for Development in Loreto, which represents business interests in a region encompassing several existing and proposed reserves, including Yavarí Mirim, has opposed their creation, arguing that they limit economic opportunities.

A spokesperson for the group declined an interview request for this article.

Huertas likened the opposition by business groups and allied politicians to the initial invasion by rubber barons that sent people into isolation in the first place. Both efforts, she said, paired an ambition to acquire natural resources with discrimination against Indigenous people.

“History is repeating itself,” Huertas said.

On Thursday, she added, the state has the opportunity to change course.