Huge new indigenous reserve in Peru’s Amazon threatened by logging concessions
Indigenous peoples in "isolation" face potential catastrophe if concessions aren't annulled or relocated as agreed
Some years ago I found myself along the River Yaquerana in the remote Amazon travelling with two indigenous Matsés men and visiting Matsés villages. Over and over again - both in formal meetings as well as more informally - I heard about other, unidentified indigenous peoples living further upriver who had no regular contact with anyone else, not even the Matsés. Various names were thrown around to refer to them: “los aislados” (literally, the “isolated ones”), “los no contactados” (“the uncontacted ones”), “los calatos” (“the naked ones”).
“A little while back I heard someone shouting,” elder Abel Binan Shabac told me in Puerto Alegre village. “It was along the Paraguay Stream, on the Brazilian side of the border. Many times when I’ve gone into the forest I’ve heard sounds like that and then the isolated people have stolen our meat.”
In that region the River Yaquerana acts as the border between Peru and Brazil. There are Matsés villages along both banks - Puerto Alegre the most remote one on the Peruvian side.
“I saw various signs of the aislados,” Aaron Nacua Teca told me, having gone on an expedition a few months earlier that had been coordinated with the Brazilian state. “There was evidence of people there.”
Other Matsés men I spoke to during that trip reported similar signs of the aislados, some on that same expedition, others on other occasions while out hunting. These included someone somewhere off in the forest shouting and imitating a monkey, someone else talking quietly, paths cleared through the forest, broken branches, more shouting, more stolen meat. . .
Over the years, enough evidence of the indigenous peoples living in “isolation” in that part of Peru has been documented for the government to have established a 1.1 million hectare reserve intended to protect them and their territories, as I reported last year. The Yavari Tapiche Reserve, as it’s known, is now the biggest reserve for indigenous peoples in “isolation” in the country. The indigenous federations ORPIO, based in Iquitos, and AIDESEP, in Lima, took the lead in what became an almost 20 year struggle to establish it.
However, there is an unusual, ugly twist. Despite the fact that reserves for indigenous peoples in “isolation” are supposed to be intangible, according to a 2006 law, an estimated 10 logging concessions that were created by the regional government, GOREL, overlap approximately 18% of it.
The consequences could be catastrophic. Not only does logging result in the forest that the indigenous peoples in “isolation” depend on being cut down, or game and other wildlife they rely on being scared away by all the machinery and other commotion, but contact between them and the loggers could expose the former to fatal diseases and epidemics against which they have little or no immunity. If the history of the Amazon reveals anything, it is that sustained contact between otherwise “isolated” indigenous peoples and “outsiders” is often disastrous.
In January 2021, three months before the reserve was established, it was agreed at a meeting of the state’s Multi-Sector Commission on indigenous peoples in “isolation” that six of the concessions would be relocated, but that has not happened. This has led to GOREL coming under intense pressure from ORPIO and AIDESEP as well as various other state entities - not just to relocate those six concessions as agreed, but also to annul the remaining four concessions, established in 2016 and 2017, which blatantly violate a forestry regulation that came into force in October 2015. According to that regulation, no concessions can be created in reserves for indigenous peoples in “isolation” or areas where such reserves are in the process of being established, as was the case at the time.
Among the state entities involved are the Ministry of Culture (MINCU), which has filed a lawsuit with the Loreto region’s Superior Court of Justice against GOREL, and the national ombudsman, the Defensoría del Pueblo.
“As we’ve pointed out on previous occasions, contact is one of the main threats to the lives and health of indigenous peoples in isolation and initial contact (PIACI),” the Defensoría wrote to GOREL’s head, regional governor Elisban Ochoa Sosa, and others last year. “The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has indicated that people entering their territories to extract natural resources - as in industrial-scale logging, whether legal or illegal - constitutes a serious threat to their survival and their physical and cultural integrity. Our institution considers that the coexistence between PIACI and logging concessions is not viable because it contravenes the principles of no contact and the intangibility of their territories.”
SERFOR, the national forests authority, has been under intense pressure too to annul the four post-2015 concessions, under powers granted to it by a 2017 law. In addition, SERFOR has also come under serious pressure to “re-dimension” the huge area out of which GOREL is able to create concessions in the first place, known as the Bosque de Producción Permanente (BPP), given that Loreto’s BPP overlaps roughly 21% of the reserve. As with the four post-2015 concessions, it was agreed at the Multi-Sector Commission meeting in January 2021 that would happen too, but that agreement hasn’t been fulfilled either.
Indeed, the Protection Plan for the reserve, approved by MINCU just two months ago, applies yet more pressure on SERFOR to re-draw the BPP so that the reserve is excluded. The Plan’s argument is effectively: now that the reserve has been established “the objective for which the BPP was created, juridically speaking, can’t be met.”
“This serious issue has been communicated by AIDESEP and our regional affiliate ORPIO to SERFOR, the Public Prosecutors’ Office and GOREL on numerous occasions,” AIDESEP’s president Jorge Perez Rubio wrote to SERFOR just before Christmas, not long after I ran into him during the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland. “However, we’ve never received any response.”
For people such as Roberto Tafur, president of the local federation and ORPIO affiliate FECORITAYB representing 24 indigenous and campesino communities in the River Tapiche and River Blanco regions, “it doesn’t make any sense” for logging concessions to overlap the reserve.
“It took 17 years to establish it - such a struggle!” he tells me. “That’s where our brothers in isolation are. Our grandfathers, our fathers, our uncles all saw the aislados, especially in the summer when they would appear along the riverbanks looking for turtle eggs. You can see their footprints. I haven’t seen them myself - those who have done so live closer to the reserve than me.”
Are GOREL and SERFOR going to take effective action? Peru is currently engulfed in a political crisis but that shouldn’t matter to any of this. SERFOR’s acting director Levin Rojas Meléndez didn’t respond to my emails.