Perú: Genocide of the last uncontacted indigenous Groups (HIIN=53)

Including The Murunahua, Pananujuri and Nahua Tribes - Vulnerable Human Cohorts

Uncontacted Indians live without significant contact with global civilization. In the Peruvian Amazon, they are being killed off to allow international interests to drill for oil and to take the forest's mahogany and cedar wood.

The Peruvian Government is responsible for the invasion of indigenous tribal lands. Large numbers of foreign workers impact heavily on the tribes. Up to 90% of some of these have been wiped out, by disease, after their first contact with invaders.

Alan Gabriel Ludwig García Pérez served as President of Perú from 1985 to 1990 - and again from 2006 to 2011. Corruption in his régime and increased social conflict over indigenous rights marked his tenure. At one stage, he even suggested that aboriginal tribes did not exist. Indeed, he is not the only Jefe Blanco to ignore genocide.

In 2019, García shot himself in the head as the police attempted to arrest him in connection with a scandal concerning the Brazilian company Odebrecht. The Federal Police of Brazil, in March 2014, called their investigation Operation Car Wash (it having been first discovered at a car-wash in Brasilia). They considered it the largest corruption investigation in the country's history and it made world news. At least eleven other Latin American countries were involved, at the highest levels, so challenging the impunity of politicians and business leaders and revealing the structural corruption in the political and economic systems.

It cannot be said that the ramifications of Operation Car Wash did not reverberate in all centres of high finance and government everywhere. However, reverberations do not fix corruption. So what chance do Indians have, forced out of their homes? Perú went on set up five Indian reservations and, of course, to promote oil exploration in them.

Certain Uncontacted Indians were further forced to move, from Ucayali Province in the South-east, into neighbouring Brazil. There they must compete there with other displaced Indians. International interests violate the laws of Perú, with impunity.

Perenco - an Anglo-French oil company, with production projects across the globe, saw fit to pollute a reserve in the northern Loreto Province, set aside for the Pananujuri and another Indian group. Foreign companies, with untold wealth, get away with extinguishing the lives of innocent, primitive peoples. The Spanish Repsol-YPF: with its net income of €648 million in the first quarter of 2021, has had to 'endure the challenging global panorama'. ConocoPhillips (Alaska's largest oil producer) owns c1.3 million acres for exploration. Ecopetrol the largest petroleum company in Colombia, is one of four principal petroleum companies in Latin America. Petrobras, a state-owned Brazilian multinational, set a world record in 2000 for oil deep water exploration, reaching a depth of 1,877 metres below the sea.

Potential threats:

Viruses: Indians die because they lack immunity from viruses carried by invaders, which cause chicken pox, measles, influenza and many other respiratory diseases. In 1996, around half the Murunahua Indians died after contact with illegal mahogany loggers, who first discovered them, in the mid 1990s. The global frenzy surrounding the Covid-19 virus must wreak terror on Indian tribes, who face death quite alone, and for whom the World has no concern at all.
Shooting: Loggers are often heavily armed: isolated tribes usually carry bows and arrows for hunting. Loggers will shoot Indians on sight and with impunity.
Chemical poisoning: The Nahua, who live in an isolated area in the south-east Peru, suffer from viral respiratory diseases since they were contacted. Mercury poisoning is linked to the killing of c80% of the tribe. Illegal gold mining or the Camisea gas project may have led to this. Total disinterest in Indian lives is the matter.

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