After Warnings, Isolated Tribe Goes on the Attack

After an isolated Amazonian tribe attacked loggers who got too close to their Peruvian territory this summer, Indigenous rights group FENAMAD warned that, without government intervention, more violent clashes could come. Now, two loggers have been shot dead with arrows, another has been injured, and two others have disappeared from the Mashco Piro tribe's ancestral territory, the Guardian reports. "There are people wounded, dead, missing. We don't know what's happening or what has happened," says Eusebio Ríos, an exec with FENAMAD, which represents 39 Indigenous groups in Peru's Madre de Dios and Cusco regions.

The loggers were attacked Aug. 29 while opening a trail in the forest near the Madre de Dios region's Pariamanu River, FENAMAD says, per Reuters. "This is a tragedy that was entirely avoidable," says Caroline Pearce, executive director of Indigenous rights group Survival International, per the Guardian. "The Peruvian authorities have known for years that this area that they chose to sell off for logging was actually the Mashco Piro's territory." She says authorities are "not only endangering the very survival of the Mashco Piro people, who are incredibly vulnerable to epidemics of disease brought in by outsiders, but they've knowingly put the lives of the logging workers in danger."

A day after the attack, the Forest Stewardship Council suspended the sustainability certification of Canales Tahuamanu, the logging company accusing of encroaching, for eight months. "How terrible that people have to keep dying ... for action to be taken," Julia Urrunaga, director of the Peru program at the Environmental Investigation Agency, tells the AP. FENAMAD has called for all loggers to be evacuated from the area. Peru's Ministry of Culture acknowledged on Monday a clash that "may have caused deaths, injuries, and disappearances," saying an investigation was underway, per Reuters. But FENAMAD said that, as of Tuesday, authorities hadn't responded to the area. (More Indigenous peoples stories.)