Peru’s reclusive Mashco Piro ethnic group recently used bows and arrows to attack loggers suspected of encroaching on their territory in the Amazon, according to a regional Indigenous organization.
FENAMAD, representing 39 Indigenous communities in the Cusco and Madre de Dios regions, said Monday that it believes illegal logging was taking place on Mashco Piro territory and that one logger was injured in the July 27 attack.
A few weeks ago, photos emerged of the uncontacted tribe searching for food on a beach in the Peruvian Amazon, which some experts say was evidence logging concessions are “dangerously close” to its territory.
“It is presumably illegal because the area where the incident occurred is a forestry concession that belonged to Wood Tropical Forest until November 2022, and we are not aware of a concession that has requested or granted enabling rights in the same area,” said a FENAMAD representative, speaking anonymously out of personal security concerns.
The problem I have with that is the same problem I have with the way people talk about most colonizer-colonizee(?) relationships. In many cases, you don’t have the big bad powerful people going in and doing violence against natives. The powerful sit at home, and force their local poor into a position where they have to do violence in order to survive. Yeah, you had your Christopher Columbus types, but they weren’t/aren’t the majority.
Odds are, those loggers are members of another local tribe, who have been economically forced into illegal logging. Logging is super dangerous, and there’s no way that the people actually responsible, who are the ones making real money off of it, are out there with chainsaws.
Tl;dr, they need glocks and bus tickets
It’s that 100%. There is is long interview with an American that’s been living in the Amazon since he was in his early twenty and mentions this