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Report: Amazon tribe may have fallen victim to drug traffickers
Suspected Peruvian drug traffickers have destroyed a guard post protecting a recently discovered indigenous tribe in Brazil's Amazon rain forest, the aid group Survival International reports.
Aerial film and still images of the tribe were first shown to the world in February. The Brazilian government's National Indian Foundation established the guard station near the tribe's territory along Brazil's border with Peru to protect the Indians from outsiders.
Survival International said Monday that Brazilian authorities can now find no sign of the tribe.
"We think the Peruvians made the Indians flee. ... We are more worried than ever. This situation could be one of the biggest blows we have ever seen in the protection of uncontacted Indians in recent decades. It’s a catastrophe," Carlos Travassos, the head of Brazil's isolated Indians department, said in a Survival International statement.
Survival International reports the tribe's lands are near the Envira River, which Peruvian cocaine smugglers reportedly use as a route into Brazil.
Brazilian authorities report groups of men armed with machine guns and rifles are in the nearby forest, according to the aid group.
Authorities had recovered a drug trafficker's rucksack with a broken Indian arrow in it, Survival International reported.
"This is extremely distressing news. There is no knowing how many tribal peoples the drug trade has wiped out in the past, but all possible measures should be taken to stop it happening again. The world’s attention should be on these uncontacted Indians, just as it was at the beginning of this year when they were first captured on film," Survival International Director Stephen Corry said in a statement.
I guess the drug dealers are too ignorant to realize what they are destroying.
If they were smart...they wouldn't be drug trafficers...
@Babs If America was smart, we wouldn't enable drug traffickers.
@Babs
How so? It is good money, less work, and better job security then the majority of the jobs open to the people.
@Neeneko, but the benefits packages suck! Seriously, most people are deterred from jobs like drug trafficker because of the high likelihood of premature and violent death. Those who do engage in this activity are therefore likely to be mentally unstable or stupid.
interesting looking tribe.
Fake photo! This was taken on a Hollywood set, I mean, look really close!
The man on the right is painted up like an old school spiderman!
The man in the middle is painted up like an Uruk-hai of Mordor!
And the one on the left with the spear looks like the Djinn from Wishmaster!
Didn't this picture first show up as a Tribe Found in Central Park?
One set of barbarians doing in another set. Pretty much par for the course.
Barbarians were in Europe. And based on your response, they may have traveled to the US.
That was the same mentality that destroyed the all but wiped out the Native American tribes in America. I thought that ignorance was long gone, but from your comment evidently not.
Actually, I thought barbarians were from Cimmeria.
I was always a fan of the Vandals. I really respect the street art they pioneered in Rome.
Why would it be to drug traffickers' advantage to kill native tribes?
Oh–they needed the river.
Darwin.
I have always found that the humans most concerned with preserving native tribes in the jungle were drug traffickers. They really care.
If traffickers are using that section of the forest to transport shipments, the indigenous tribes probably were not very happy with people tramping around their territory and started shooting arrows at them. Drug dealers being drug dealers, they probably responded to that like they would anyone else shooting at them... with machine guns. Poor Indians never stood a chance.
It could be Peruvian drug traffickers hiding as a tribe and fled when they got unwanted attention.
Is that Spider-man?
One would think that cultural anthropologists, actually the whole lot of the scientific community, would leave these people alone. Maybe it's not that they were "discovered" as opposed to "CHOSE" to live isolated from the rest of the world. If this is the case, I applaud their decision, however hold great contempt for the lecherous media who "outted" this tribe for money and/or fame. Now that they've suffered the probable fate of so many in a nation stepped in violence, kudo's to the media: add this tribe the list as they've undoubtedly gone the way of the dodo!
I highly doubt that drug traffickers who were already intimatly familiar with the area found out about a tribe via the news and decided to go do something about them. Since this group was discovered years ago, they probably eventually got in the way of a route or a route shifted to cross their land.
Spiderman? Is that where you've been hiding?
Are these people for real ? With all that is going on in OUR world (unemployment, economy, gas prices, etc) the world should turn all attention to this ? These people survived all this time on their own. And I am sure that these drug trafficers have been using this area for a long time as well. So if they are colliding now then it's natural selection time
are you for real? things do happen outside of the states, and not everyone needs to be focused on us. no where in the article are any US resources being mentioned to address this issue, so unless you are complaining that brazil and peru aren't trying to help us resolve our economic problems then you are making no sense.
Wait, isn't it supposed to be offensive to use the word 'Indians' to refer to native / indigenous people? Obviously Brazil has not reached the level of politically correct nirvana that the United States has...
Who knows... I think these days, they actually find the term "Native American" more offensive, since it implies they were the first Americans, when to them it was never America in the first place. I've heard Indians refer to themselves as Indians, so I don't think it's offensive to them.
They speak Portugese in Brazil. I guarantee they don't say "indians." If they were speaking Spanish, they would have said "indigens" which means indigenous people.
Must have been a bad translation then.
One of those guys looks like Spiderman. If he's on the case what's the worry?!
What a sad, horrible development.
I remember when this story first happened, but wasn't there a follow-up story like 2 weeks or so later that proved this particular photo and people were a hoax? Or was the follow-up story a hoax to keep people away? Not that the media or any government would ever lie to us.
I thought this photo was proven to not be of an uncontacted tribe a year or two ago, and was thought to be a hoax be less-than-scrupulous environmentalists.
I would think a totally uncontacted group of humans would run in fear of a helicopter flying low and circling them.
Actually it was the 'hoax' follow up that was a hoax or at minimal a piece of bad reporting that was quickly retracted. though like all retracted reports, the original 'it is all a hoax!' piece got a lot more attention then the 'oops we screwed up' one and has lived on.
It should also be noted that 'uncontacted' does not mean they are not aware of outsiders... aircraft pass overhead routinely and they were known to trade via other tribes for modern goods like guns and machettes. Uncontacted means the tribe has not had any direct contact with outside groups.
Just because they're uncontacted doesn't mean they're not aware of the number of mechanical vehicles flying around above them. They may not have an understanding of what they are, but they know they're there.
The Sentinelese certainly have no fear of helicopters. They shoot at them.
I want to know where they got the paint or is that their natural color?
They ordered it through their local Avon Lady.
They got their paint from the same places our ancestors got their paint long before the advent of Home Depot, from the forest.
its blood