An Isolated Tribe Emerges from the Rain Forest
In Peru, an unsolved killing has brought the Mashco Piro into contact with the outside world.
Before
Nicolás (Shaco) Flores was killed, deep in the Peruvian rain forest, he
had spent decades reaching out to the mysterious people called the
Mashco Piro. Flores lived in the Madre de Dios region—a vast jungle
surrounded by an even vaster wilderness, frequented mostly by illegal
loggers, miners, narco-traffickers, and a few adventurers. For more than
a hundred years, the Mashco had lived in almost complete isolation;
there were rare sightings, but they were often indistinguishable from
backwoods folklore.
Flores, a farmer and a river
guide, was a self-appointed conduit between the Mashco and the region’s
other indigenous people, who lived mostly in riverside villages. He
provided them with food and machetes, and tried to lure them out of the
forest. But in 2011, for unclear reasons, the relationship broke down;
one afternoon, when the Mashco appeared on the riverbank and beckoned to
Shaco, he ignored them. A week later, as he tended his vegetable patch,
a bamboo arrow flew out of the forest, piercing his heart. In Peru’s
urban centers, the incident generated lurid news stories about savage
natives attacking peaceable settlers. After a few days, though, the
attention subsided, and life in the Amazonian backwater returned to its
usual obscurity.
In the following years, small groups
of Mashco began to venture out of the forest, making fleeting
appearances to travellers on the Madre de Dios River. A video of one
such encounter, which circulated on the Internet, shows a naked Mashco
man brandishing a bow and arrow at a boatload of tourists. In another,
the same man carries a plastic bottle of soda that he has just been
given. Mostly, the Mashco approach outsiders with friendly, if skittish,
curiosity, but at times they have raided local settlements to steal
food. A few times, they have attacked.
The latest
attack, last May, took the life of a twenty-year-old indigenous man,
Leonardo Pérez, and this time the news did not subside. People from
Pérez’s community wanted revenge, and the governor of Madre de Dios took
the opportunity to rail about federal neglect of the area. The
government needed to be seen to do something.
A few
weeks later, officials announced that they were sending a team to engage
with the Mashco, drawn from the Department of Native Isolated People
and People in Initial Contact, a recently created sub-office of Peru’s
Ministry of Culture. When I spoke to Lorena Prieto Coz, the head of the
department, she emphasized that the government preferred not to
interfere with isolated indigenous people, but the threat of violence
had left no choice. “We didn’t initiate this contact—they did,” she
said. “But it’s our responsibility to take charge of the situation.” She
told me that an outpost had been set up near where the Mashco appeared,
and a team from the department was going soon. She invited me to
accompany them.
Only
about a hundred groups of isolated indigenous people are believed to
still exist, with more than half of them living in the wilderness that
straddles Peru’s border with Brazil. Fiona Watson, the field director of
the tribal-people’s-rights group Survival International, told me that
the situation was dire for the region’s aislados, as isolated
people are called in Spanish. In a cramped London office, Watson laid
out satellite maps to show me their territory, small patches in a
geography overtaken by commerce: arcs of slash-and-burn farmland; huge
expanses where agribusinesses raise cattle and grow soy; mining camps
that send minerals to China; migrant boomtowns. Some of the indigenous
groups were hemmed in on all sides by mining and logging concessions,
both legal and illegal. One tribe in Brazil, the Akuntsu, had been
reduced to four members. Near them, a man known to anthropologists only
as the Man of the Hole lives in a hollow dug in the forest floor,
warding off intruders by firing arrows. He is believed to be the last of
his tribe.
Unless the trends were halted, Watson said, the Mashco Piro and the other remaining aislados
were doomed to extinction—a disquieting echo of the situation of Native
Americans in the nineteenth century, as white settlers forced them to
retreat or die. “There’s so much at stake here,” Watson said. “These
people are as much a part of the rich tapestry of humanity as anyone
else, but it’s all going down the drain.”
In
the late nineteen-seventies, I made several trips into the Peruvian
Amazon, at a time when the jungle was just beginning to open. The
governments of Brazil and Peru had recently agreed to build a
trans-Amazonian highway, linking the Atlantic and the Pacific, but,
aside from some muddy unfinished tracks, the Peruvians’ efforts had been
defeated by the “green hell” of the rain forest. The backwoods remained
inhabited only by animals and by native people, who in those days were
still referred to as “wild Indians.”
On
one such trip, in 1977, I travelled up the Río Callería, near the
unmarked Brazilian border, with a local guide who spoke a few indigenous
dialects. We rode in a long wooden dugout canoe known as a peke-peke,
its name derived from the sputtering noise of its motor, a Briggs &
Stratton outboard. The motor had a propeller that could be
raised—essential in shallow waters. Even so, there were stretches where
we were forced to get out and pull the canoe by hand.
One
day, after hours on the river with no sign of human habitation, we
rounded a bend and saw a dugout canoe, carrying a woman and a child,
both with long black hair and naked torsos. At the sight of us, they
began screaming and paddling frantically toward the riverbank, where a
row of crude shelters sat on a bluff that was cleared of jungle. They
shouted a word over and over: pishtaco.
We
came ashore cautiously, pulling the boat. The camp had been hastily
deserted; I found a fish still roasting on an open fire. The boatman
nervously said that we should not continue upriver, or the Indians might
attack us. When I asked him about the word the woman and child had
shouted, he said that they believed I was a pishtaco, an evil person who had come to steal the oil from their bodies.
Months later, a Peruvian anthropologist explained to me the roots of their fear. The term pishtaco,
he speculated, originated in the sixteenth century, when Spanish
conquistadors such as Lope de Aguirre began exploring the Amazon. These
initial contacts had been so nightmarish as to inspire a cautionary tale
that still endured: some of the Spaniards, frustrated that their
muskets and cannons rusted so quickly in the jungle humidity, were said
to have killed Indians and boiled their bodies in iron pots, then used
their fat to grease the metal.
For the next three
hundred years, the European settlers and their descendants made few
inroads into the Amazon. Then rubber was discovered, and, in the
eighteen-seventies, South American rubber barons began to brutalize the
jungles of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil. In 1910, the Anglo-Irish
diplomat Roger Casement spent three months among rubber traders and the
indigenous people who were forced to work for them, and wrote of the
abuses he had witnessed. “These [people] are not only murdered, flogged,
chained up like wild beasts, hunted far and wide and their dwellings
burnt, their wives raped, their children dragged away to slavery and
outrage, but are shamelessly swindled into the bargain. These are strong
words, but not adequately strong. The condition of things is the most
disgraceful, the most lawless, the most inhuman, I believe that exists
in the world today.”
The caucheros,
as the rubber barons were called, were daring, ruthless men— the
equivalent, in a sense, of modern-day narco-traffickers like El Chapo
Guzmán. The most murderously flamboyant of them was probably Carlos
Fermín Fitzcarrald. Immortalized in Werner Herzog’s 1982 film
“Fitzcarraldo,” he was a man of limitless ambition who bloodily
installed himself as Peru’s Rey del Caucho—the Rubber King.
Fitzcarrald
was born in 1862, the eldest son of an Irish-American sailor turned
trader and his Peruvian wife. By the age of thirty, he had become
wealthy enough to build a twenty-five-room riverside mansion, with
grounds tended by Chinese gardeners. Seeking to expand his operations,
he began looking for an overland route that would connect the Urubamba
River with tributaries of the Brazilian Amazon. Using thousands of
indigenous conscripts to hack through the jungle, he found that the
headwaters were just six miles apart, on either side of a
fifteen-hundred-foot peak, and he conceived a railroad that would unite
the two river systems. The plan was to sail an iron-plated steamboat,
loaded with railroad ties, to the Urubamba’s headwaters. There, native
porters would lay a track over the mountain, disassemble the ship, lug
its pieces across, and put it back together.
In 1894,
he launched an expedition to secure the route, and before setting out
he addressed his followers from a balcony of his great house. “Like a
good and just father, I take you with me,” he said. “I will reward you
with the bounty of the divine mountains that extend from where the Sun
rises, and where abundant hunting awaits.”
Their
quarry ended up being mostly the Mashco, who then dominated the region.
Euclides da Cunha, the Brazilian scientist and explorer, described
Fitzcarrald’s meeting with the Mashco’s leader, in which he mustered his
armed men to intimidate the natives into coöperating. “The sole
response of the Mashco was to inquire what arrows Fitzcarrald carried,”
da Cunha wrote. “Smiling, the explorer passed him a bullet from his
Winchester.” The Mashco leader examined it, amused, and then took one of
his arrows and jabbed it into his own arm, looking on implacably as
blood ran out of the wound. “He turned his back on the surprised
adventurer, returning to his village with the illusion of superiority,”
da Cunha continued. “Half an hour later roughly one hundred Mashcos,
including their recalcitrant chief, lay murdered, stretched out on the
riverbank.”
It was the beginning of a seemingly
endless cycle of destruction. Eight decades after Fitzcarrald’s rampage,
I took another trip, on the Madre de Dios, where a gold boom had
recently begun. Along the river were small camps of prospectors, who had
set up diesel-powered pumps and wooden sluices and were noisily gouging
away the riverbanks. Their arrival had clearly unsettled the local
Amarakaeri people. The Amarakaeri had once been a sizable warrior tribe,
but, by the time I arrived, perhaps five hundred remained, living in
rudimentary hamlets, where they survived by fishing with poison and by
panning for gold. As for the Mashco, who had lived upriver, there was no
sign of them whatsoever. It was as if they had never existed.
The
Ministry of Culture’s team gathered a few months ago in Cuzco, high in
the Andes, where a van was loaded with provisions. The leader was an
anthropologist named Luis Felipe Torres, a slim man in his early
thirties with an aquiline face and the unassuming manner of a
professional observer. He was joined by Glenn Shepard, an American
ethnobotanist. A youthful-looking man of fifty, Shepard had lived for a
year in the nineteen-eighties among the Matsigenka people, who shared
territory with the Mashco; he had learned their language and returned
many times since. Shepard worked at the Emílio Goeldi Museum, an
Amazonian-research center in Brazil, but he travelled to Peru frequently
as an informal adviser to Torres’s department.
Soon
after we set out, the paved road ended, and we began dropping down the
eastern escarpment of the Andes, zigzagging through cloud forest and
into the humid lowland jungle. After seven hours, we reached the end of
the road, at Atalaya, a huddle of rough wooden houses and bodegas on the
upper Madre de Dios River. Atalaya was a destination for adventure
tourists; at the shoreline was a jetty lined with brightly painted river
canoes. But the recent killing had threatened business in the area. A
sign, depicting the silhouette of an aislado with a bow and
arrow, announced, “Beware! This is a zone of transit for Isolated
Indigenous Peoples. Avoid conflicts: Don’t attempt to contact them.
Don’t give them clothes, food, tools, or anything else. Don’t photograph
them; they might interpret the camera as a weapon. In the event of
incidents, contact the Ministry of Culture.’’
Torres
had recently overseen a rendezvous with a group of Mashco Piro: several
families, possibly interrelated, who were led by a young man called
Kamotolo. In photographs that Torres showed me, Kamotolo—tall and
beardless, with alert eyes—was clearly recognizable as the man who
appeared in the Internet video carrying a soda bottle. Other pictures
showed an older man, with wild hair and a scruffy beard, who was likely
Kamotolo’s father. He was rumored by locals to have killed Shaco Flores;
Kamotolo was thought to have killed Leonardo Pérez.
At
the department’s outpost, Torres had left a small team of local Yine
people, who spoke the same language as the Mashco. Their goal was to
discover why they were coming out of the forest, and to get them to stop
their attacks. But the Mashco didn’t like answering questions about
themselves, so Torres’s crew knew little about them. They estimated that
between five hundred and a thousand Mashco lived in four groups in the
jungle of Peru and Brazil, around an expanse of protected land called
Manú National Park. They were related to the Yine, but separated by
history: the Yine were the descendants of Fitzcarrald’s conscripts, and
the Mashco were believed to be the descendants of those who had fled.
Former farmers who had become nomadic hunter-gatherers, they had
forgotten how to plant food, and were the only indigenous people in the
region who didn’t know how to fish. But they hunted efficiently, using
unusually stout arrows, whose heads were attached in a distinctive
manner that allowed anthropologists who found discarded shafts to track
their movements. The community that Torres’s team was trying to contact
was perhaps three dozen people. In their first encounters, it had been
unclear how much they understood of the outside world.
The
Department of Native Isolated People was drastically underfunded and
understaffed, so Torres shuttled between the Mashco outpost and other
assignments in Madre de Dios. He had just returned from an even more
remote area, where he had followed up on reports of aislados
whose territory was being threatened by loggers. He showed me
photographs of the remains of a cookfire and a campsite, evidence that
the department could use to begin the process of having the land
protected. But Torres spoke of his work as almost futile. The
department—tasked with looking out for all of Peru’s isolated indigenous
people—was a tiny office with little political clout. The Ministry of
Energy and Mines, by contrast, was a well-funded agency with the power
to open up the Amazon to development that would bring wealth and jobs.
“In the battle for the government’s ear,” Torres said dryly, “you can
imagine who is more influential.”
For much of the twentieth century, Brazil defined the region’s approach to the aislados:
its National Indian Foundation sent scouts to contact them, with the
goal of assimilation. These efforts were mostly calamitous for the
contacted people, who tended to die out from disease, or to wind up
living in frontier shantytowns, where the men often succumbed to
alcoholism and the women to prostitution. In barely fifty years,
eighty-seven of Brazil’s two hundred and thirty known native groups died
off, and the ones that remained lost as much as four-fifths of their
population. In the nineteen-eighties, officials at the National Indian
Foundation, horrified by the decline, began to enforce a “no contact”
policy: when its agents spotted aislados, they designated their land Terras Indígenas—areas forbidden to outsiders.
Most
of the neighboring countries adopted Brazil’s no-contact policy, which
anthropologists now see as the best way to insure the survival of the
remaining aislados. But, for Peru, land in the Amazon was too
rich to give up. In the past two decades, the country has experienced an
economic boom, based on natural resources. Opening up the jungle has
made Peru one of the world’s largest exporters of gold (as well as the
second-largest producer of cocaine), and the Camisea natural-gas
facility, north of Manú National Park, provides half of the country’s
energy. Politicians have been hesitant to disrupt business. Alan García,
the President from 2006 to 2011, insisted that the isolated tribes were
a fantasy devised by environmentalists to stop development; an official
in the state oil company compared them to the Loch Ness monster. As
loggers, miners, and narco-traffickers moved in, aislados fled across the border into Brazil, seeking sanctuary.
In
2011, though, García was voted out of office, and his successor
overturned his policies. Around the same time, a documentary about the aislados
ran on Peruvian TV. In it, a BBC film crew flew with José Carlos dos
Reis Meirelles, a prominent agent from Brazil’s National Indian
Foundation, over a part of the Amazon where aislados’ land was being invaded by illegal loggers. As the aislados
stared up from the red earth between their huts, Meirelles said, “They
are the last free people on this planet.” For Peru’s city dwellers, who
had thought little about the isolated people, the film was a revelation.
Soon afterward, the country amended its laws to say that the aislados should be left alone.
But, even as Peru embraced the no-contact policy, a new idea was emerging. Last June, the journal Science
published a paper in which two prominent anthropologists, Kim Hill and
Robert Walker, argued that isolated indigenous groups were “not viable
in the long term,” because their environments are too degraded or too
vulnerable to incursions. Instead, they advocated a new policy, built
around “well-organized contacts.”
The article sparked
a furious controversy. “Walker and Hill play straight into the hands of
those who want to open Amazonia up for resource extraction and
‘investment,’ ” Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International,
wrote. “Let there be no doubt: isolated tribes are perfectly viable, as
long as their lands are protected. To think we have the right to invade
their territories and make contact with them, whether they want it or
not, with all the likely consequences, is pernicious and arrogant.”
But
protecting the tribes’ land might be an unrealistic hope. The governor
of Madre de Dios, Luis Otsuka, is the former head of a statewide miners’
association, and he has not changed his loyalties. He has allowed gold
miners to strip large sections of jungle, and, a few months before I
arrived, he sent bulldozers to begin pushing a road through the forest,
which would run along the Madre de Dios River, connecting the
gold-mining areas to the regional capital, Puerto Maldonado. It would
be, in a sense, the fulfillment of Fitzcarrald’s dream. It would also be
the destruction of the area’s wilderness, and of the Mashco.
Indigenous-rights groups sued to stop construction, but Torres had
little doubt that the road would eventually go through. When he met with
Otsuka, as construction was starting, the governor said bluntly that he
thought the Mashco Piro should be contacted, and by force.
Last
year, Glenn Shepard was asked to look into the situation, and he and
Torres spent ten days speaking to local people. Shepard feels that the
best thing for the Mashco would be total isolation. But, by the end of
the trip, he agreed that it had become impossible. “The Mashco Piro are
already talking to us, in a sense, but it’s just one way so far—they’re
coming out and killing people,” he said. “We need to make it a two-way
dialogue. There has to be a next step. The only thing is right now we
don’t know what that is.”
Torres’s
most pressing job was to discourage fighting between the Mashco and the
other indigenous people in the area, so his first stop was Shipetiari,
the village where Leonardo Pérez had been killed, which is almost
exclusively inhabited by Matsigenka. Shipetiari, set back in the jungle,
is composed of family compounds—large huts on stilts—connected by a
labyrinth of footpaths. At the village meeting house, we were greeted by
three “protection agents”: local men whom Torres had hired to patrol
the community and to report any incidents. They had been given
walkie-talkies and khaki vests with the department’s logo. Torres asked
them to gather residents to discuss the latest developments, and in the
next half hour a couple of dozen men and women, some with small
children, wandered in and took seats on the floor.
The
villagers sat with stubborn expressions. Most of them wore cast-off
Western clothing, except for one woman, who had on a traditional cotton
robe with a hand-rendered design of black and white stripes. After
stilted greetings, Shipetiari’s schoolteacher stood to say that the
community was frustrated. On an earlier visit by Torres, people had
aired their views, and there seemed to have been no results. “A brother
was killed here and nothing happens,” the teacher said. “That’s why when
foreigners and N.G.O.s come from outside we don’t tell them anything!”
Torres
listened diplomatically, and then reminded the Matsigenka that his
department had hired the protection agents, who were on constant patrol.
He was paying the village for the use of the meeting house, and had
promised to install toilets and a water filter. “But this roof leaks,”
he said, pointing to the palm-leaf thatching overhead; perhaps, he
suggested, some of the villagers might volunteer to collect palm fronds
to patch it. There was a long silence. Eventually, a woman named Rufina
Rivera said, “But what happens if we go into the forest to get fronds
and the Mashco shoot arrows at us?” Torres said calmly, “O.K.,
understood. We’ll bring the fronds from somewhere else.”
Torres was careful to refer to the Mashco using a term that the department was trying to encourage: nomole,
which means “brother” in the Yine language. The crowd seemed to feel
little affinity. For them, the Mashco were outsiders. Although the
Matsigenka’s traditional home was a couple of hundred miles to the
north, they had long maintained a small outpost in Shipetiari, and in
the eighties a larger group had moved in, eking out an existence by
growing yucca and bananas. According to Shepard, they also worked with
timber buyers, who hired them illegally to log valuable hardwoods.
The
presence of the Mashco, and of the officials tracking them, made it
difficult for the Matsigenka to live normal lives, much less expand
their logging operations. And Pérez’s death threatened to bring about an
open conflict. Following the killing, a squad of Matsigenka men armed
with guns had pursued the Mashco into the forest. After hiking for eight
hours, they found their camp, but it was empty, so they destroyed it
and threw the Mashco’s arrows in the river. It was both a defensive act
and a punishment: the cane that the Mashco use for arrows ripens only
once a year, and they would not be able to hunt until they were
replaced.
Torres pointed to the protection agents,
and said that he hoped to be able to hire more, but until there was more
money in his budget he needed two volunteers to help out. Rivera
insisted that he hire more agents, and give them walkie-talkies. The
schoolteacher said, “The Mashco are going to come back. For sure they
will come back to look for food here when the rains come.”
Rivera
yelled, “The solution is to send all the Mashco across the river!”
Everyone laughed. Torres said, “That’s not possible.” If they returned,
he said, the community should not be aggressive: “If you lose some
bananas, they can always be replaced. If you kill one of them, you’ll
live in a state of war.” Gesturing toward the forest, he said, “The
Mashco are going to continue to live here. So, if they come again, the
thing to do is to stay in your houses and then let us know so we can
come, and we’ll use the contact we are having with them to let them know
it’s not good to attack people.”
Rivera
said, “So you say if the Mashco come we shouldn’t do anything. But, if
they kill someone of mine, I’ll kill them—of course I will! If they come
and kill my husband, I will kill them, and if they ask me why I am in
prison I will say, ‘For killing Mashco.’ ”
After the
meeting, we walked with the protection agents to the edge of the village
and stopped on a broad path shaded by trees. One of the agents walked
into the bush and crouched down. “This is where the Mashco was hiding,”
he said. “Here he drew his bow and fired the arrow that killed Leo.”
Around us, the forest was silent, except for the trilling of a few
cicadas.
Nomole, as Torres and his
crew called their outpost, was two hours farther downriver: a longhouse,
made of crude planks painted green, propped up on stilts on a bluff
above the river. The surrounding forest had been slashed and burned, and
the open land was still dotted with blackened stumps. Visitors pitched
tents outside the longhouse; in the woods, at a discreet distance, a
trench latrine had been dug.
At the edge of the
bluff, a wooden bench offered a view of the rocky shoreline on the other
side, where the Mashco had most recently appeared. The river was
perhaps four hundred feet across, and in the middle was a pair of low
islets that were submerged when the water was high. Heavy rains in the
past few days had turned the river into a swirling gray-green torrent,
erupting into white water around rocks and fallen trees.
There
were five Yine agents at the Nomole post, led by Romel Ponceano, a
husky man in his late thirties, who was a chief in a community several
days’ journey away. His family had a long history in the region, working
as guides for the rubber barons and, more recently, for oil explorers
and mahogany loggers. Like a poacher who had become a game warden,
Ponceano had begun working for Torres, and had made himself
indispensable. He was aided by Reynaldo Laureano, a sturdy man in his
fifties, and Nelly Flores, a plump, reserved woman in her thirties, both
from the nearby Yine settlement of Diamante.
When we
arrived, Ponceano reported that the Mashco had appeared a week earlier,
and said they would return in six days, but they hadn’t shown up.
Ponceano speculated that the rain had flooded the rivers that demarcated
their territory, and the Mashco, who didn’t know how to swim, had been
unable to ford them.
As we waited, a pattern
developed. People took turns as sentinels on the bluff, watching for the
Mashco and listening for a loud hooting whistle, the sound they made to
announce their approach. The watchers kept their hopes in check. In
three decades of visiting the area, Shepard had never seen the Mashco:
he had encountered them only once, as warning whistles in the forest.
Each
morning, we were awakened in our tents by the chattering of tiny titi
monkeys and the plunking call of paucar birds. The days were long and
hot, punctuated by meals of river fish with boiled yucca or rice, or
spaghetti and tuna that Torres had brought from Cuzco. There was an
occasional flurry of excitement. One morning, a tapir appeared in the
reeds of the nearest islet, and Laureano scrambled after it with a
shotgun, returning empty-handed. Another day, a large, hairy tarantula
was killed inches from the door of the longhouse. For entertainment,
people stared at the river, or watched the endless succession of
bright-colored macaws that flew squawking overhead.
The
team spent most of its time at a table in the longhouse, poring over
photographs of the Mashco, speculating about their relationships with
one another. By bringing them bananas, which they loved but didn’t know
how to cultivate, and communicating in basic Yine, the team had
established a tentative rapport. In several short encounters, they had
identified about twenty Mashco by name. For now, they were emerging from
the forest about once a week, but that was all.
One
morning, there was a sound of distant whistling, and several of us ran
toward the riverbank. Flores, ahead of the others, shook her head: the
sound had come from a panguana bird, whose call resembled the Mashco’s
whistle.
Even if we couldn’t see
the Mashco, it was clear that they were nearby. People in Diamante, an
hour downriver, had reported quiet raids, in which the Mashco came
looking for food and for things to steal. Torres hoped that they would
desist now that his team was feeding them, but if the rains kept them
from the meeting point there was a risk that they would start again.
At
a community meeting in Diamante, a woman named Nena, carrying a baby on
her back, stood nervously to say that she had visited her vegetable
patch—a small plot that Peruvians call a chacra—and found
indications that the Mashco had been there. It had happened a week ago,
and she was still afraid to return. Torres wanted to review the
evidence, so we crossed the river in our peke-peke, with Nena
pointing the way. Onshore, we followed her through a maize field to a
spot where she stopped and looked around fearfully. At the entrance to a
barely discernible path into the forest, she pointed at two twigs that
had been bent so that their tips crossed. Ponceano inspected them
closely, then walked on, scrutinizing the path. There were four more
sets of bent twigs: a warning left by the Mashco.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“It means you should not go any farther,” Ponceano said. “If you do, they will shoot you with arrows.”
Nena
led us back to the riverbank, sweating and breathing in nervous gasps.
Her husband worked in a sawmill, far away, and came home only every few
months, so she tended the plot herself, often bringing along the baby
and her three older children. “I keep the baby here,” she said, touching
the bundle on her back. Then she gestured at a shaded area under some
trees. “I usually leave the others there, playing. Now I can’t do that
anymore.” With a distressed look, she said that she didn’t know how she
was going to feed her family now.
As
we approached Nomole, going back upriver, the boat crew began shouting
and pointing to the far shore. A group of people had assembled, their
reddish skin distinct against the scree of white rock. The Mashco had
returned.
Across the river, the Nomole team was
setting out from the shore: Flores and Ponceano, as well as a doctor
named Fernando Mendieta, who sometimes volunteered. To avoid disrupting
their work, Torres steered us toward a long sandbar, a hundred feet from
where the Mashco had gathered. We crept toward a large tree snagged
there, which offered us cover while we watched.
The
Mashco on the shore had very erect posture and moved economically,
seeming always to be in synch. Their leader, Kamotolo, was tall and
square-jawed, with cropped black hair, and was completely naked; so was a
younger man, who looked to be a teen-ager. There were two women, who
had long, thick hair and wore flaps of woven bark on strings around
their waists, which protected their genitals but left their bottoms
bare. Both women were pregnant, and they tended to five children, all of
them naked.
The
Mashco had a ritual greeting: they hugged visitors, put their heads on
their shoulders, and then felt inside their clothing, as if to ascertain
their sex. For perhaps forty minutes, the two groups mingled: the
Mashco touching and probing, and the Nomole team acquiescing, mostly in
good humor. The Mashco women approached Flores and, as she giggled,
touched her breasts and stomach. Kamotolo strode along the shore, sat
down in the Nomole peke-peke, and then returned to the group,
looking excited. The team had brought two large hands of bananas and set
them down near a fallen log. Kamotolo periodically went over, sat on
the log, and ate bananas, one after the other.
There
was little talk, and no sense of urgency; it was as if the Nomole team
had crossed the river to play with a group of largely mute children. A
couple of the younger Mashco swarmed Ponceano and made him race with
them, back and forth from the tree line to the shore. They seemed
delighted by his chubbiness. One of the women approached Mendieta, and
tugged at his shirt, a purple polo. He gently resisted, but the woman
finally got the shirt from him and pulled it on.
When the team climbed into the peke-peke
to leave, the Mashco lined up to watch. As the boat pulled away,
Kamotolo began staring at us and shouting. I had seen him questioning
Ponceano about us, pointing in our direction. Now, without the team
there to distract them, the Mashco began throwing rocks, which splashed
into the river. We hastily followed the Nomole team back to the outpost.
On
the riverbank, the team members were elated, swapping stories about
their interactions. When I asked Flores about the women, she put a hand
to her mouth in embarrassment. “They felt my breasts and stomach and
said to me, ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ When I said, ‘No, I’m not,’
they said, ‘Tell us the truth! Don’t you have milk?’ When I said no,
Knoygonro squirted her milk in my face, to say, ‘I do.’ ” Flores covered her mouth again, giggling.
The
team spent the rest of the day making notes and going over photos,
identifying the Mashco who had appeared, while Ponceano translated their
names. Kamotolo meant “honeybee.” The younger man was Tkotko (“king
vulture”), and the two women were Knoygonro (“tortoise”) and Chawo
(“hoatzin bird”). The children, too, were named for animals, except for
one toddler, Serologeri, whose name meant “ripe banana.”
The
Mashco had carefully examined the Nomole team’s gear and
clothing—looking, Ponceano believed, for weapons, or for anything else
they might find useful. They had removed the drawstring from Laureano’s
shorts and kept it. Kamotolo had been interested in Ponceano’s shorts,
too, but then he noticed a big hole in the crotch and told him to keep
them.
Ponceano
had inquired about the warning signs near Nena’s farm, and Kamotolo had
hinted that the Mashco had been in the area, but offered no details.
Ponceano had let the matter drop; he had learned in previous encounters
that when he asked too many questions Kamotolo rounded up the others and
left.
I asked what the Mashco had said when they saw
us on the sandbar. Flores told me, “They said, ‘Are they bad people?’ I
said, ‘No, they are our friends, but they’re not coming over because
they have colds, and we don’t want you to catch them.’ ” (In fact, the
whole team was healthy; Flores was trying to keep the encounter under
control.) The Mashco, seeming unconcerned, had said, “Tell them to
come!”
Before the Nomole team departed, Kamotolo said
that the Mashco would return in three days. The visits were getting
more frequent, but Torres seemed as concerned as he was pleased. “Right
now, it’s bananas they want,” he said. “But what will they be asking us
for in a few years’ time? What will be the turning point?”
At
sundown, Nomole’s gas-powered generator was turned on for an hour to
pump water into a plastic tank that sat on stilts, so that people could
bathe under a rudimentary shower. Afterward, we met around the table in
the longhouse, eating dinner and talking, almost exclusively about the
Mashco.
One
of the team members, an anthropologist named Waldo Maldonado, was a
voluble presence in the conversation. Maldonado, a short, bearded man
with a fondness for Indiana Jones-style leather boots, was from Cuzco,
and before joining the Department of Native Isolated People he had
worked as a guide for ecotourists in Manú National Park. He was trying
to lose weight, and so, while the rest of us ate dinner, he would unfurl
a piece of embroidered Andean cloth and take out a bag of coca leaves.
As the evenings wore on, he would become more animated, chewing coca and
rolling cigarettes—organic tobacco, he assured me.
One
evening, Maldonado said, “These people are all going to come out. It’s
inevitable. The question is how we manage it to make sure that their
coming out does not result in their extinction.” The anthropologists
agonized over the ethics of their work, with a concern that seemed
nearly parental. They wanted to teach the Mashco to fish, for instance,
but worried that they’d choke on bones. They were especially uncertain
about how to handle the raids on chacras. If they planted
farmland for the Mashco, it would provide them with yucca and bananas,
giving them less reason to invade other people’s property. But they
would have to depend on the state to teach them each step of the
process. “The big question is, can the Mashco remain hunter-gatherers
for another hundred years?” Shepard said.
Maldonado
described the Mashco’s condition as an update of the hunter-gatherer
life style: they had figured out where the villages were, and what they
could get from them, but they seemed uninterested in settled life. His
greater concern was abject dependence. “Will they become beggars now?
Are they going to stay on the beach and call out to the boats and say,
‘I want this and I want that’? In my heart, I don’t know if I’m doing
the right thing.”
The team members agreed that the
Mashco were not really “uncontacted.” Shepard maintained that they had
been contacted a century ago, when Fitzcarrald invaded their territory,
and that the survivors had isolated themselves by choice. Now they
appeared to be seeking contact again, and perhaps it was unfair to stop
them. The anthropologists Hill and Walker argue that the impulse to
engage seems universal. “People want to trade,” they wrote. “And they
crave exposure to new ideas and new opportunities. Humans are a
gregarious species.” By seeking out bananas and tools, though,
Kamotolo’s group might have begun a path toward inevitable assimilation.
The Yine in Diamante still speak their own language, but almost all of
them wear Western clothing, drink beer, and send their children to
schools where they are taught in Spanish.
The Mashco
and their Yine cousins have been increasingly aware of one another. In
the seventies, a Mashco woman and her daughters, who became known as the
Three Marías, wandered out of the woods and camped near a park ranger’s
station. After a few years of dislocation and confusion, they were
taken to nearby villages, and the daughters eventually married local
men.
Nelly Flores herself was half-Mashco. Her father
was a Mashco who had been captured as a small boy by Shaco Flores and
raised by his family, so that he could serve as a translator in
contacts. Nelly referred to Shaco, who was Matsigenka, as her
grandfather. But she also thought of the encounters with the Mashco as a
kind of reunion. “When I go to see them, I tell them I’m a relative,”
she said, and smiled.
The following
Sunday, the Mashco returned on schedule. A routine had set in, with the
Nomole team handing over bananas, running races, and being embraced and
searched. From the sandbar, I watched as Kamotolo squatted by a fire
set among the rocks on the shore, tending to something as it cooked: a
stingray that he had spotted in shallow water and killed with an arrow.
There
were signs of a tentative opening. The Mashco had been fascinated by
Ponceano’s camera, which they called Big-Eye, and, after Ponceano
allowed one of them to hold it, he realized that it was missing. The
Mashco feigned ignorance, but finally a boy named Wasese admitted that
they had brought it to “the older ones, those who stay in the forest,”
and asked if Ponceano wanted to come and get it back. Ponceano asked,
“Will they kill me?” Wasese replied, “I don’t know, maybe.”
On
the shore, I could see Maldonado making faces with the children.
Mendieta scribbled notes and took pictures; at one point, he tried to
inspect the teeth of several of the Mashco. The young man named Tkotko
pulled Flores aside and spoke to her intently. She explained later that
he had asked if she wanted to “lie down” with him and be his woman. She
had dodged his invitation with a universal fib: she already had a
boyfriend.
As they talked, there was the sound of a
motor, and a boat appeared, heading downriver. In the prow, a bearded
white man wearing a kepi-like hat stood with the rigid posture of a
conquistador. Maldonado and the others were startled: they stopped what
they were doing and began shouting and waving at him not to interfere.
The boat sped past, but a moment later it swung back around, pulling
close to the shore, and the man held out six machetes to the Mashco. The
children ran toward him, their arms outstretched.
One of the boatmen with me recognized the man as Father Pedro Rey, a priest from a Dominican mission upriver. He called out, “Padre Burro! Padre Mentiroso! ”—“Father
Donkey! Father Liar!” As Maldonado ran toward the shoreline, yelling
irately, the priest abruptly set down his gifts and headed back down the
river. Before long, he had vanished into the jungle.
The
Nomole team was outraged at the intrusion. “What right do priests have
to go against state law?” Maldonado said indignantly. Rey, he explained,
was a Spanish missionary who had been in Madre de Dios for eighteen
years, and had long promoted contact with the aislados.
Rey
was scheduled to lead Mass that evening in Boca de Manú, a village
downriver, and I found him there having dinner in a saloon. He sat
alone, a wiry man with glasses and salt-and-pepper stubble. At the next
table, Matsigenka rivermen were drinking litre bottles of Cuzqueña beer,
shouting ebulliently and swaying in their chairs. Rey quietly ignored
them. After he finished his meal, I introduced myself, and he invited me
to his church, where he had to prepare for the Mass.
The
church, several hundred feet away along a footpath, was a cinder-block
structure with a simple altar and a dozen wooden pews. Sitting in a pew,
Rey told me that he was happy to see the Mashco defended but skeptical
of the government’s motives. “The state is protecting its interests, not
those of the indígenas,” he said. The Nomole team had
discouraged the Mashco from dealing with anyone but them, missionaries
included, which Rey described as a moral affront: “Those people have
rights, and the right to communication, too, but they are being impeded
from exercising that right.”
He went on, “We in the
Church have a hundred years of experience making contact. But, among
government officials, there are people who have never seen an Indian!”
Rey’s mission had been established in the days of the caucheros,
and in his telling it had rescued many of their victims. “When we came
here, the rivers were clogged with bodies,” he said, grimacing.
By
other accounts, the effect of the mission was disastrous. An Amarakaeri
leader in the region told me that Rey’s contact with the Mashco was
“outrageous,” given the Dominicans’ previous results. “He’s trying to do
what they did with us, in a forced contact,” he said. “We were once
fifteen thousand. Now we’re less than two thousand.” But there was no
question that the missionaries were better established here than the
state was, and Rey described the conflict with Maldonado as an
interruption in an otherwise cordial relationship. “I always give the
Mashco machetes when I pass by,” he said. “The guards at the outpost
have no problem with me.” He was referring, I realized, to the Yine
agents at Nomole. “They say to me, ‘Father, whatever you want, but not
when Waldo is here.’ ”
As it turned out, Flores was a
follower of Mario Álvarez, an evangelical preacher who had been trying
to convert the Mashco. When the government began intervening in the
area, the preacher had been told to cease his contacts, but Flores, his
acolyte, was still able to meet with the Mashco—a situation that Torres
felt was awkward but unavoidable.
Álvarez lived in
Diamante, and one afternoon I found him there. He was sawing wooden
planks in the entry of a half-constructed church, which he was building
atop a concrete slab the size of a basketball court; a sign said
“Asamblea de Dios.” Álvarez, a muscular, goateed man of fifty-five with
prominent teeth, said that for years he had worked as a logger in the
jungle, but at the age of thirty he had found God and renounced his
previous life. He told me, “My work now is evangelism, and God has work
to do here on earth.”
A couple of years ago, a
revelation had led Álvarez to Diamante. “I had a dream—a man told me to
come to the mouth of the Manú River,” he explained. “So I gave a
challenge to God. I said, ‘I will go if you provide me with transport.’
Two days later, a man knocked on my door and offered me a canoe and a
sister as a guide.” Around that time, the Mashco had begun appearing. “I
heard of these naked people, and saw pictures of them,” Álvarez said.
“I decided that I wouldn’t leave this jungle until I embraced them and
was able to tell them that they were not alone in this world.”
His
chance came in March, 2015, when he heard that the Mashco were going to
emerge on the riverbank. “I felt a little scared,” he recalled, smiling
broadly. “There were three of them, men, and I gave them my hand and I
hugged them, too, and at that moment I knew this was God’s mission for
me.” The Ministry of Culture had pressed Álvarez to stop meeting the
Mashco, but he had persisted, bringing them bananas. He also brought
clothes, until he realized that they didn’t wear them. “It seems that
clothing disturbs them,” he told me. “They’ll have to be taught how to
use clothes, I guess.” Waving around at the church, Álvarez said, “Every
day, in my services, we pray for them here. For them, Satan and sin
doesn’t exist. They don’t know about all those things. But God is
merciful.”
Álvarez
complained that the authorities had prohibited others from having
contact, but were conducting encounters themselves. “It seems they have
some kind of concealed plan,” he said confidingly. “One day, it will
come to light.” When I asked where the Mashco would be in five years, he
brightened and replied, “They will be evangelizing on behalf of the
Church, because the Lord’s word is powerful.”
The
team’s greatest concern was the Mashco’s health. Controlled contact is
impossible without intense medical supervision: the societal equivalent,
perhaps, of an organ transplant. In the first encounter, Mendieta had
found that everyone was basically healthy. Now, though, Kamotolo’s
mother, Puthana, was coughing, and so was Kwangonro; Wasese had inflamed
tonsils. The doctor worried that they were developing full-blown flu.
Mendieta
was thirty-eight and single, the son of a public prosecutor and a
teacher who ran a home for orphans. Working for Peru’s Ministry of
Health, he ran a hospital near the Dominican mission, and was also
charged with overseeing most of the upper Madre de Dios region, a vast
area where indigenous groups lived in various degrees of contact with
civilization.
The
Mashco were at the most primary stage, and Mendieta had become
fascinated by their situation. “We realized we had to do something, but
there was no budget,” he told me. When the Ministry of Culture got
involved, he began visiting surrounding communities to educate local
people and to inoculate them against communicable diseases. Still, he
was sure that eventually the Mashco would be stricken with an epidemic,
and their remoteness would make it difficult to treat. He said that
isolated communities struck by viruses were governed by a “three-day
rule”: children invariably began dying on the third day. In Madre de
Dios, he had sometimes arrived too late.
For now,
though, vaccinations were out of the question; the Mashco were still not
entirely comfortable being examined. Even donated clothing carried the
risk of disease, and he fretted about the polo shirt that he had lost to
the Mashco woman. He reassured himself that the shirt had been freshly
washed, and that it probably wouldn’t be worn for long. Wasese had
reported that when they returned to camp the “older ones” took the
clothing away and burned it—perhaps to prevent illness or perhaps merely
to destroy a vestige of the outside world.
The
Nomole team felt certain that more Mashco would come out of the forest.
“In five years, we’re probably going to have forty or fifty people to
deal with,” Mendieta said. “As long as they need things from us, they’re
going to be there, on the riverbanks, exposed to everything that comes
along.” He paused. “The bottom line is, we want their lives to be
respected. The problem is that a lot of people in Peru don’t care about
them at all.”
Peru’s national
government is mostly absent from Madre de Dios, so the future of its
wilderness, and of the Mashco, depends on a few regional politicians in
Puerto Maldonado. The capital is hundreds of miles from the Mashco’s
territory, a daylong trip. I set out by boat early one morning, and
spent hours floating past dozens of illegal logging camps. Finally, I
saw a small tributary rushing into the Madre de Dios, and realized that I
was near the uninhabited stretch where I had made camp decades ago.
Where once there was a deserted riverbank, now pickup trucks roared up
to discharge people into boats, while gaudily painted buses waited for
them on the other side. I boarded a bus, and followed a dirt road
through a forest that was being burned by ranchers; the blaze was so
intense that smoke obscured the horizon. Eventually, a paved road led to
Puerto Maldonado, through an area where hundreds of gold-mining camps
have been carved out of the jungle—home to as many as fifty thousand
miners. There were a few roadside boomtowns, with bars, shops, and
brothels, and as night fell adolescent girls came out to stand on the
verge, ready for the evening’s business.
Puerto
Maldonado was founded by Fitzcarrald, and a main avenue there still
bears his name; guides take tourists downriver to view the wreck of the
iron boat that is said to have carried him to his death. I had not been
to the city in four decades, and in that time it had grown from a
wooden-shack backwater into a sprawling grid of a hundred thousand
people. A bridge now crossed the Madre de Dios, and a road extended all
the way to the border with Brazil; others led south to Bolivia and west
to Cuzco. The only gap in the expanding road system was to the north,
where Governor Otsuka wanted to push the road through the jungle
alongside Mashco territory.
Otsuka had rushed off to
tend to an emergency at a mining camp, where gas cannisters had
exploded, but his deputy at the time, Eduardo Salhuana, was there when I
arrived. A longtime political player in the region, as well as Peru’s
former minister of justice, Salhuana was regarded as the real power
broker in Madre de Dios. He greeted me coldly and led me into his
office.
When
I pointed out that the gold-mining areas seemed totally unregulated,
with miners brazenly using banned chemicals and machines, Salhuana
described it as inevitable. “There’s a lot of gold in Madre de Dios, but
only 6.7 per cent of the region is legally available for mining,” he
complained. Madre de Dios had reserves worth billions of dollars, he
added, and as prospectors poured in they had no choice but to break the
law. Salhuana acknowledged that corruption, prostitution, and other
crimes were rife, and that Puerto Maldonado had become a major transit
point for cocaine. But, in his telling, all the problems were the fault
of the national government, which did nothing to enforce its own laws in
the region.
In any case, Salhuana said, the laws
were already too strict. “Sixty-five per cent of the territory of Madre
de Dios has been classified as protected area, with fifteen per cent
given to indigenous reserves,” he said. (In fact, barely half of the
area is restricted, with about ten per cent set aside for indigenous
people.) “So much land is protected that there is not much left for
people to do anything with. But they are asking us, ‘Where is there left
for us to work?’ ”
When I asked about the road that
would open up the Mashco area, he replied, “The road isn’t defined as an
official project yet. In any event, the people of the area are yearning
to be better connected with Puerto Maldonado.” I mentioned the sordid
roadside settlements north of the city. Was that what he wanted for the
area around Nomole? “Any infrastructure project will obviously have an
impact,” Salhuana replied. “But there’s also a lot of poverty in the
indigenous communities. The other option is to leave them as they are.”
The
nomole team’s mission to contact the Mashco was inspired by killings,
and by the fear that there might be more. In the end, though, the
killers’ motivations remained elusive. When I asked Nelly why Shaco
Flores had been killed, she shrugged; despite her family relationship
with the Mashco, she seemed to find their behavior impossible to
predict. During encounters, she said, “They hold my hands, get into the
boat, and say, ‘Take us to your house.’ But we can’t. They might shoot
us with arrows.”
Shepard thinks that Shaco was killed
because he stopped giving the Mashco things. “They became angry,” he
said. It was unclear why Shaco had changed his habits: perhaps
indigenous-rights groups had encouraged him to leave the Mashco alone,
or perhaps it had become too expensive to continue the handouts. Either
way, the contact had created a dependency that was painful to break. “He
had got them basically hooked on bananas and pots and pans,” Shepard
said.
For the Nomole crew, it was a reminder that
their work entailed real dangers. One afternoon, keeping watch on the
bluff, Maldonado spoke about the history of attacks in Brazil, where
more than sixty contact agents had been killed by aislados in
the past forty years. Apparently, the greatest risk came after a bond of
familiarity had been established. According to one theory, the aislados
were provoked by fears that the outsiders’ gentle approach masked a
plan to log their land, take their women, and kill their men.
As
we talked, we heard the whistling that announced the Mashco, and I
followed Maldonado to the edge of the bluff. Through binoculars, we saw
three men emerge from the forest. None of the women or children were
with them. Maldonado was nervous. “Where are the women?” he asked.
“What’s going on?” He told the team, which had started carrying bananas
down to the peke-peke, to stand by.
As
Maldonado spoke, however, a line of women and children began appearing
from the forest. He whooped with relief and ran down to join the peke-peke.
On the opposite shore, Tkotko roared like a jaguar at him, then laughed
uproariously, explaining in pantomime that his eyes looked as if they
were going to pop out of his head.
There
appeared to be growing trust between the two groups. The Nomole team
had instructed Kamotolo to meet only with them, and he seemed to have
complied, moving his family to a closer camp, about three hours’ walk
away. Maldonado said that the relationship was limited: “Our
conversations are very basic. He asks things like ‘Are you married?’ ‘Do
you have kids?’ ” And he had few illusions about the Mashco’s motives:
“He keeps coming because he knows he can get things.” But he had become
fond of Kamotolo, who was the right age to be his son. Laughing, he
recalled the time that Kamotolo had searched their peke-peke and found a pair of panties left behind by a French journalist as she changed into her swimsuit. He had put them on, backward.
The
Mashco seemed to have a special bond with Ponceano, whom they sometimes
adorned with a crown of leaves. He attributed his influence to a vision
that one of the Mashco women had after taking a hallucinogen derived
from the Amazonian flower floripondio. When they met, he recalled, the
woman had asked him his name. When he told her his Yine name, Yotlot,
meaning “river otter,” she had exclaimed, “Oh, you are Yotlot! I knew
you were coming today.”
After that, he said, the
Mashco had regarded him as their primary link to the outside world. He
told me about standing with them on the riverbank when a logger’s boat
appeared. Kamotolo had asked, excitedly, “Are they good people? Shall we
call them?” Ponceano had said no, and they had let the boat pass. The
Mashco had told the other Yine agents to look after Ponceano and make
sure nothing happened to him. “They’ve invited me to join them,” he
said, laughing. “I just say, ‘Another day.’ ”
As we
readied our boats to cross back to Nomole, Maldonado confessed that he
had chewed too much coca the night before. Unable to sleep, he had lain
awake fretting about the Mashco. “All I could think about was ‘Are they
all right? Are they sick?’ ” But Mendieta found that Puthana’s cough had
abated, and so had Kwangonro’s. Wasese’s sore throat appeared to have
gone away, too. For now, the Mashco seemed safe.
A
few days later, I flew out of Puerto Maldonado, on the first leg of the
trip home. As the airplane banked over the jungle, I could see the
great river, looping like liquid silver below. Then, for several long
minutes, the jungle disappeared, replaced by an expanse of giant
craters. The scale of destruction was breathtaking: it was reminiscent
of aerial photographs of North Vietnam after it was carpet-bombed by
B-52s. I realized that I was looking at the goldfields of Madre de Dios.
In
Lima, the uneven effects of Peru’s new wealth were evident. Around the
city, beggars work the traffic intersections near gaudy casinos, and
rivers brim with trash. Crime is rampant, so most homes are protected by
iron bars on the doors and windows and by walls topped by razor wire;
armed guards abound.
Before
I left, I stopped by the Department of Native Isolated People, in a
massive concrete government building overlooking a noisy highway. Torres
was there, with his boss, Patricia Balbuena Palacios, the vice-minister
of interculturality. I asked Balbuena whether the Mashco would still
exist in five years. “Hopefully they’ll last a little longer than that,”
she said. “Maybe we won’t be able to stop the changes, but maybe we can
slow them down. The changes are going to continue, though, and, in the
end, the ones who are going to survive will be those best able to
adapt.” ♦
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