The first time I heard about the indigenous “Cacataibo” people living in “isolation” in the remote Peruvian Amazon was exactly 20 years ago, while poring over a map in a Lima café with an anthropologist named Beatriz Huertas Castillo. Out of all the other groups of indigenous people in isolation in Peru, the Cacataibo, as they were widely known at the time, were unique: a national highway running between the towns of Tingo Maria and Pucallpa cut right through the area where they were believed to live.
They were known about because so many other Cacataibo had seen or found evidence of them, Huertas Castillo told me. As a result, national indigenous federation AIDESEP and a Cacataibo federation called FENACOCA had been trying to protect their land - initially in 1999 when a 110,000 hectare reserve was proposed, then in 2005 when two reserves of 81,000 and 62,000 hectares to the north and south of the highway were put forward. The biggest threats were considered to be logging and an oil and gas concession licensed to a Canadian company, Petrolifera, which was superimposed over approximately 50% of the proposed reserves.
It was a particularly interesting time to be learning about the Cacataibo in isolation because just a few weeks earlier two other anthropologists, both Peruvian, had authored a somewhat incendiary report questioning their existence. Shortly after that, the president of CONAP, another national indigenous federation, which had allegedly received funds from Petrolifera, had echoed such claims in a publication of his own.
When I met those two anthropologists, elsewhere in Lima, they had doubled down on their report’s conclusions. The evidence was unconvincing, they argued, because there were too few recorded sightings and some of them happened too long ago, among other reasons. How come the Summer Institute of Linguistics - a notorious US-based Christian missionary organisation - only made successful contact with one man when it had searched for them many years ago, whereas with the Matsés, across a much bigger area and with no help from any locals, they had found a group of about 20 or 25 people?
The proposed reserves for the Cacataibo were merely “political proposals”, they told me, and “a means to simply gain control of more land for indigenous people.”
Others, particularly those from the Lima-based NGO Instituto del Bien Común - which had been supporting FENACOCA with its reserve proposals - dismissed such claims. IBC co-founder Margarita Benavides told me she had no idea how many Cacataibo in isolation there were but almost 100 testimonies of them had been recorded, and it was people like her colleague Margarita Vara, who showed me a map effectively illustrating those testimonies, who had been out in the forest painstakingly collecting them.
“The state does not give a shit,” was how their colleague and IBC co-founder Richard Chase Smith, a US anthropologist who had lived in Peru since the 1960s, memorably put it to me. “You can try and stop the oil or the logging, but there are other problems too: drugs, mineral concessions. What’s the common factor? That the state doesn’t care. These people are so low down on the social hierarchy that they simply don’t matter.”
Two decades on some things have changed for the better, but the “Kakataibo” - as they’re now known, although obviously that isn’t what they call themselves - in isolation are arguably more in danger than ever. Although the oil and gas concession is no longer and the government officially recognised their existence in 2017 before finally establishing a 148,000 hectare reserve four years later, it is not actually protected on-the-ground.
Indeed, things have got so bad and the government’s failure to take effective action has been so obviously egregious that indigenous federations have appealed for help from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in Washington DC. This month the Commission concluded that the Kakataibo in isolation are at serious risk and therefore decided to issue what are known as “precautionary measures”, urging Peru’s government to implement a series of actions to protect them.
“The unauthorised occupation of their territory through irregular settlements, campsites, ongoing deforestation, access roads, illegal logging, coca cultivation, pasture for grazing animals, the construction of simple buildings, the creation of clandestine airstrips, the possible contamination of soils, and the discovery of water not fit for human consumption in an adjacent community, as well as reports of threats, violence and murders in the surrounding area,” was how the Commission summarised what has been going on in the reserve and its environs.
If there’s one threat in particular that stands out in the Commission’s report, it’s the cocaine trade. That not only explains some or even most of the deforestation in the reserve and the increasing amounts of coca being grown there, or the clandestine airstrips, but it involves alleged environmental contamination and the entry and exit of large numbers of “possibly armed narco-traffickers”, in addition to the murders, violence and other social problems in nearby communities. As the Commission notes, the reserve’s official Protection Plan describes coca cultivation as the “main activity” inside it, while in 2022 the state-run National Commission for Life and Development without Drugs (DEVIDA) had identified it as a “particular threat” to the reserve.
To an extent, this tallies with the already well-known impacts of the cocaine trade on the Kakataibo people more widely, which has been reported by media like The Guardian and the US’s National Public Radio. Indeed, figures suggest that in recent years more Kakataibo have been murdered as a result of narco-trafficking than any other indigenous people in Peru - and that’s not including any of those in “isolation” who may also have been killed.
The Inter-American Commission’s conclusions are clear. The lives, livelihoods and land of the Kakataibo in isolation are in immediate danger, and therefore Peru’s government must take a series of concrete measures to protect them, including removing the people associated with the cocaine trade from the reserve, and “redoubling” efforts to effectively implement the Protection Plan.
In response, AIDESEP has issued a statement calling the Commission’s decision to issue “precautionary measures” the “fruit of lobbying by us, ORAU [a regional indigenous federation] and FENACOKA [as it is now called], which for years have been warning about the critical situation” of the Kakataibo in isolation.
“In our country the same ministries which receive funding from Norway, Germany, the UK and other countries to protect forests also vote against the creation of new reserves for indigenous people in isolation or efforts to protect them,” says AIDESEP’s Julio Cusurichi. “We’re calling for greater coherence and for the Peruvian state to really work in favour of the country’s most vulnerable people, such as the indigenous people in isolation.”
The Commission gave Peru 20 days - i.e. by this Saturday, 21 March - to provide details about what it now intends to do for the Kakataibo in isolation, but it won’t say whether it has received a reply yet.