Hang around long enough in Colonia Angamos, a Peruvian military-post-turned-tiny-town on the Peru-Brazil border in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon basin, and soon enough you’re bound to hear about the indigenous people in “isolation” reported to be living deeper in the forest. Perhaps those to the south in the Yavarí Tapiche Reserve established in 2021 by Peru’s government or, more likely, those to the north moving across a huge area that, to this day, has never been protected.
20 years ago a now-defunct indigenous federation called the Oficina Regional de AIDESEP Iquitos (ORAI) formally proposed the creation of a reserve to safeguard the lives, livelihoods and land of the indigenous people living in that northern area. But two decades later, still no reserve exists. The latest frustration in this long, tortuous struggle came on 31 January when the Ministry of Culture (MINCU) suddenly announced that a meeting scheduled to be held this week by the state’s Multi-Sector Commission responsible for establishing reserves for indigenous people in “isolation” would be postponed until the second half of the year. This was despite the fact that the Commission had been finally expected to vote on whether the Yavarí Mirim Reserve, as it is slated to be called, should be created or not.
MINCU’s announcement was particularly disappointing for the reserve’s backers given that arguably the most significant obstacle to its establishment was removed last year when, in a major human rights victory, dozens of logging concessions in the region were annulled. That happened after many years of legal battling and campaigning by regional indigenous federation Organización Regional de los Pueblos Indígenas del Oriente (ORPIO), which effectively replaced ORAI, and national indigenous federation Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana (AIDESEP), among others.
ORPIO’s president Beltrán Sandi Tuituy has been consistently emphasising the dangers if the state continues to fail to act.
“ORPIO has been fighting for this for years and the Ministry of Culture must establish the reserve,” he tells me. “Doing so is important because of the dangers posed to our uncontacted brothers in that region, and because it opens the door to - or at least permits the entrance of - all kinds of invaders. Oil companies possibly too. That’s why it’s so important to create the reserve. Not doing so is a threat to the rights and lives of our uncontacted brothers and the biodiversity there too.”
So what might be now holding things up? MINCU’s justification for the postponement was that an indigenous community is trying to expand into part of the proposed reserve area, but it is worth flagging that - in addition to the logging industry, an ever-present threat, since new concessions could be established - the oil and gas sector is a potential obstacle too. Although the proposed Yavarí Mirim Reserve is not included in any of the 39 huge blocks across millions of hectares of the Peruvian Amazon which Perupetro has recently been touting to companies and investors, it is clear that it retains a long-term interest in the area.
For example, a map in a Perupetro report dated May 2024 depicts almost the entire area of the proposed Yavarí Mirim Reserve as having “exploratory potential.” In all, six blocks - not yet being overtly offered to companies - overlap it. According to that report, some tentative exploration has been done in the past: a tiny amount of 2D seismic testing in the north of what could be the reserve, and some gravity and magnetic surveys across a large chunk of its centre and west.
Certainly, Peru’s government can’t claim - like various oil and gas firms have done about other parts of Peru’s Amazon - that there aren’t any indigenous people in “isolation” in that region, since it explicitly confirmed their existence there seven years ago. That confirmation came after the Multi-Sector Commission had officially recognised that there are indeed indigenous people in “isolation” in that area - a decision based on a study by the Peruvian NGO Centro para el Desarrollo del Indígena Amazónico (CEDIA).
MINCU’s Ricardo García Pinedo, head of the Multi-Sector Commission, was asked if the logging or oil and gas sectors had been pressuring the Ministry about this, but he refused to respond. “The Ministry will not comment on this issue,” a MINCU spokesperson tells me.