A timely reminder why rights of ‘uncontacted’ indigenous people must be respected
Channel 4 in the UK broadcasts news item on the “Chitonahua” in Peru to mark Indigenous People's Day
Picture the scene: about 20 recently-contacted indigenous men, women and children sitting around a long table in the scrubby outskirts of a tiny settlement, Breu, deep in the Peruvian Amazon near the border with Brazil. One of the children wears a Winnie the Pooh t-shirt, another Tweetie Pie. Before contact, evangelical missionaries from the US had thrown clothes, food, tools, mirrors, beads and other things out of small planes in an attempt to establish friendly relations with them, and then following contact, in the early-to-mid 1990s, they had been shot at, kidnapped, decimated by disease and brutally exploited - or perhaps even “enslaved”, as some people termed it. Here the survivors of that contact, initially precipitated by a violent encounter with illegal loggers, were gathered for a humble lunch in Breu after “some kind of disagreement” in a nearby Yaminahua village where they had been living.
Somehow, since contact, they had come to be known as the “Chitonahua”, and two of the men were now going about as “Jorge” and “Juan.”
“We had no clothes then,” Jorge tells me, after lunch, speaking through a Yaminahua translator about life pre-contact. “We were calatos [“naked”]. The loggers gave us machetes, clothes. . . Now we have clothes. Before contact, we didn’t know how to live properly. . . We didn’t even know what a cold was then. . .”
Sustained contact had been, as almost always for indigenous peoples in the Amazon, incomprehensibly confusing and traumatic. Jorge had had one of his eyes shot out by a logger, and numerous of his relatives had died, almost certainly as the result of exposure to new, previously unknown diseases.
“Half of my people died,” he says. “My aunt died, my nephew died. . .”
Juan tells me about pre-contact life too, describing how he used to wear a ring in his nose and a belt around his waist to hold his penis upright, but that after contact he had been forced to take both off. Was it true some people had been kidnapped?
“Yes, the woman behind you,” he says, pointing at a young woman wearing an Alice band in her hair.
What about the other “Chitonahua” - or “Murunahua”, as they were sometimes known too - still living in “isolation”?
“Yes, they’re there,” Juan says. “They’re in the forest, although I don’t know where. . .”
That encounter with the “Chitonahua”, along the upper River Yurua, happened over 15 years ago when I was working for the human rights organisation Survival International, but since then little seems to have changed for them. Remarkably, Jorge was the focus of a five minute Channel 4 News item last week broadcast to mark the United Nations’ Indigenous People’s Day, titled “I want to return to my “uncontacted” Amazon tribe.” According to Channel 4, Jorge and his family currently live on a “small piece of land” given to them by an indigenous community in the region, but finding work is hard, there isn’t enough forest to hunt, he and his family suffer from health problems, support from the government doesn’t arrive, and he wants to return to the rest of his people, still in “isolation”, deeper in the forest, although the government has prevented him from doing so.
Jorge is “trapped between two worlds” and “in limbo”, Channel 4’s Guillermo Galdos reported, “trapped between a life he cannot return to and a world he was forced into.”
Jorge’s mother featured in the broadcast too, climbing onto a doctor’s table and apparently having difficulty breathing, with her body “unable to fight the pneumonia and flu that now plagues” her family.
“My family in the forest lives in another world,” she said. “It’s completely different to here. I wouldn’t like them to come out. They should stay there because if they come out they will suffer like we are suffering now. They will probably get sick and die.”
Channel 4’s broadcast is yet another reminder of the dangers posed by sustained contact to the remaining groups of indigenous people in “isolation” in the Peruvian Amazon, and why it is so important to respect their decision - as well as their right to make that decision - to continue living in that way. It is a particularly timely reminder too: Peru’s government is currently on a major drive to boost oil and gas exploration across the Amazon, and one of the areas it is touting includes, somewhat astonishingly, the southern section of the supposedly intangible Murunahua Reserve. According to Perupetro, there is an amply-sized “lead” lying somewhere underneath it.
But that reserve was established in the late 1990s to protect the rest of Jorge’s and Juan’s people, and then effectively re-established in 2016 under a new legal framework. If a company was permitted to operate there, the consequences for the remaining “Chitonahua” could be, as for Jorge and Juan, desperately tragic too.