Amazon Forest Logging Sucks Peru and Brazil into Fight over Uprooted Indian Tribes

Peruvian and Brazilian authorities are trading accusations that uncontrolled logging on the Peruvian side of the Amazon Forest is uprooting isolated Indian tribesmen forcing them to flee across the border into Brazil in search of untampered land and food.

Indigenous rights groups and Indian tribes researchers in Brazil now believe the uprooting may be a recipe for renewed inter-tribal conflicts over the resource that may suck governments of both nations into a row over the other’s responsibility in the affair, Reuters reports.

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Jose Meirelles, a researcher with Funai, Brazil’s Indian affairs agency, is quoted as claiming Peru is allowing the loggers to kill and expel isolated tribes people from within their boarders while clearing forest cover for oil and gas exploration.

As a Brazilian government official, Meirelles, together with a colleague, have been attacked by Peruvian Indians crossing into his country who used arrows of a different type from those used by Brazilian tribes, reinforcing his evidence.

But Peruvian officials denied the allegations, and even further questioned the existence of uncontacted Indian tribes still inhabiting the Amazon if any, a stance that draws the ire of indigenous rights groups.

A couple of the rights organizations working in the area, Survival International and CIPIACI accuse the Peruvian authorities of doing little to protect the tribes and avert the emerging conflicts, particularly in the Ucayali region.

Already, an area measuring 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres) in the Kaxinawa Igarape reserve has recently been deforested, translating into a 16% loss of its total area.

Meirelles and the Brazilian government outpost that monitored the exodus activity were in the news in May when photographs of supposedly previously uncontacted Indian tribes were circulated worldwide showing pigment-covered villagers.

Image credit: P.C. Loadletter at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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