(C) Common Dreams
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An Isolated Tribe Emerges from the Rain Forest [1]

['Condé Nast', 'Jon Lee Anderson']

Date: 2016-08-08

As it turned out, Flores was a follower of Mario Álvarez, an evangelical preacher who had been trying to convert the Mashco. When the government began intervening in the area, the preacher had been told to cease his contacts, but Flores, his acolyte, was still able to meet with the Mashco—a situation that Torres felt was awkward but unavoidable.

Álvarez lived in Diamante, and one afternoon I found him there. He was sawing wooden planks in the entry of a half-constructed church, which he was building atop a concrete slab the size of a basketball court; a sign said “Asamblea de Dios.” Álvarez, a muscular, goateed man of fifty-five with prominent teeth, said that for years he had worked as a logger in the jungle, but at the age of thirty he had found God and renounced his previous life. He told me, “My work now is evangelism, and God has work to do here on earth.”

A couple of years ago, a revelation had led Álvarez to Diamante. “I had a dream—a man told me to come to the mouth of the Manú River,” he explained. “So I gave a challenge to God. I said, ‘I will go if you provide me with transport.’ Two days later, a man knocked on my door and offered me a canoe and a sister as a guide.” Around that time, the Mashco had begun appearing. “I heard of these naked people, and saw pictures of them,” Álvarez said. “I decided that I wouldn’t leave this jungle until I embraced them and was able to tell them that they were not alone in this world.”

His chance came in March, 2015, when he heard that the Mashco were going to emerge on the riverbank. “I felt a little scared,” he recalled, smiling broadly. “There were three of them, men, and I gave them my hand and I hugged them, too, and at that moment I knew this was God’s mission for me.” The Ministry of Culture had pressed Álvarez to stop meeting the Mashco, but he had persisted, bringing them bananas. He also brought clothes, until he realized that they didn’t wear them. “It seems that clothing disturbs them,” he told me. “They’ll have to be taught how to use clothes, I guess.” Waving around at the church, Álvarez said, “Every day, in my services, we pray for them here. For them, Satan and sin doesn’t exist. They don’t know about all those things. But God is merciful.”

Álvarez complained that the authorities had prohibited others from having contact, but were conducting encounters themselves. “It seems they have some kind of concealed plan,” he said confidingly. “One day, it will come to light.” When I asked where the Mashco would be in five years, he brightened and replied, “They will be evangelizing on behalf of the Church, because the Lord’s word is powerful.”

The team’s greatest concern was the Mashco’s health. Controlled contact is impossible without intense medical supervision: the societal equivalent, perhaps, of an organ transplant. In the first encounter, Mendieta had found that everyone was basically healthy. Now, though, Kamotolo’s mother, Puthana, was coughing, and so was Kwangonro; Wasese had inflamed tonsils. The doctor worried that they were developing full-blown flu.

Mendieta was thirty-eight and single, the son of a public prosecutor and a teacher who ran a home for orphans. Working for Peru’s Ministry of Health, he ran a hospital near the Dominican mission, and was also charged with overseeing most of the upper Madre de Dios region, a vast area where indigenous groups lived in various degrees of contact with civilization.

Nelly Flores, a protection agent at the government’s Nomole outpost, in Mashco territory, stands on the shore of the Madre de Dios River. November 6, 2015. Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim for The New Yorker

The Mashco were at the most primary stage, and Mendieta had become fascinated by their situation. “We realized we had to do something, but there was no budget,” he told me. When the Ministry of Culture got involved, he began visiting surrounding communities to educate local people and to inoculate them against communicable diseases. Still, he was sure that eventually the Mashco would be stricken with an epidemic, and their remoteness would make it difficult to treat. He said that isolated communities struck by viruses were governed by a “three-day rule”: children invariably began dying on the third day. In Madre de Dios, he had sometimes arrived too late.

For now, though, vaccinations were out of the question; the Mashco were still not entirely comfortable being examined. Even donated clothing carried the risk of disease, and he fretted about the polo shirt that he had lost to the Mashco woman. He reassured himself that the shirt had been freshly washed, and that it probably wouldn’t be worn for long. Wasese had reported that when they returned to camp the “older ones” took the clothing away and burned it—perhaps to prevent illness or perhaps merely to destroy a vestige of the outside world.

The Nomole team felt certain that more Mashco would come out of the forest. “In five years, we’re probably going to have forty or fifty people to deal with,” Mendieta said. “As long as they need things from us, they’re going to be there, on the riverbanks, exposed to everything that comes along.” He paused. “The bottom line is, we want their lives to be respected. The problem is that a lot of people in Peru don’t care about them at all.”

Peru’s national government is mostly absent from Madre de Dios, so the future of its wilderness, and of the Mashco, depends on a few regional politicians in Puerto Maldonado. The capital is hundreds of miles from the Mashco’s territory, a daylong trip. I set out by boat early one morning, and spent hours floating past dozens of illegal logging camps. Finally, I saw a small tributary rushing into the Madre de Dios, and realized that I was near the uninhabited stretch where I had made camp decades ago. Where once there was a deserted riverbank, now pickup trucks roared up to discharge people into boats, while gaudily painted buses waited for them on the other side. I boarded a bus, and followed a dirt road through a forest that was being burned by ranchers; the blaze was so intense that smoke obscured the horizon. Eventually, a paved road led to Puerto Maldonado, through an area where hundreds of gold-mining camps have been carved out of the jungle—home to as many as fifty thousand miners. There were a few roadside boomtowns, with bars, shops, and brothels, and as night fell adolescent girls came out to stand on the verge, ready for the evening’s business.

Puerto Maldonado was founded by Fitzcarrald, and a main avenue there still bears his name; guides take tourists downriver to view the wreck of the iron boat that is said to have carried him to his death. I had not been to the city in four decades, and in that time it had grown from a wooden-shack backwater into a sprawling grid of a hundred thousand people. A bridge now crossed the Madre de Dios, and a road extended all the way to the border with Brazil; others led south to Bolivia and west to Cuzco. The only gap in the expanding road system was to the north, where Governor Otsuka wanted to push the road through the jungle alongside Mashco territory.

Otsuka had rushed off to tend to an emergency at a mining camp, where gas cannisters had exploded, but his deputy at the time, Eduardo Salhuana, was there when I arrived. A longtime political player in the region, as well as Peru’s former minister of justice, Salhuana was regarded as the real power broker in Madre de Dios. He greeted me coldly and led me into his office.

A villager looks on during a community meeting led by Torres. His most pressing job is to discourage fighting between the Mashco and the other indigenous people in the area. November 6, 2015. Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim for The New Yorker

When I pointed out that the gold-mining areas seemed totally unregulated, with miners brazenly using banned chemicals and machines, Salhuana described it as inevitable. “There’s a lot of gold in Madre de Dios, but only 6.7 per cent of the region is legally available for mining,” he complained. Madre de Dios had reserves worth billions of dollars, he added, and as prospectors poured in they had no choice but to break the law. Salhuana acknowledged that corruption, prostitution, and other crimes were rife, and that Puerto Maldonado had become a major transit point for cocaine. But, in his telling, all the problems were the fault of the national government, which did nothing to enforce its own laws in the region.

In any case, Salhuana said, the laws were already too strict. “Sixty-five per cent of the territory of Madre de Dios has been classified as protected area, with fifteen per cent given to indigenous reserves,” he said. (In fact, barely half of the area is restricted, with about ten per cent set aside for indigenous people.) “So much land is protected that there is not much left for people to do anything with. But they are asking us, ‘Where is there left for us to work?’ ”

When I asked about the road that would open up the Mashco area, he replied, “The road isn’t defined as an official project yet. In any event, the people of the area are yearning to be better connected with Puerto Maldonado.” I mentioned the sordid roadside settlements north of the city. Was that what he wanted for the area around Nomole? “Any infrastructure project will obviously have an impact,” Salhuana replied. “But there’s also a lot of poverty in the indigenous communities. The other option is to leave them as they are.”

The nomole team’s mission to contact the Mashco was inspired by killings, and by the fear that there might be more. In the end, though, the killers’ motivations remained elusive. When I asked Nelly why Shaco Flores had been killed, she shrugged; despite her family relationship with the Mashco, she seemed to find their behavior impossible to predict. During encounters, she said, “They hold my hands, get into the boat, and say, ‘Take us to your house.’ But we can’t. They might shoot us with arrows.”

Shepard thinks that Shaco was killed because he stopped giving the Mashco things. “They became angry,” he said. It was unclear why Shaco had changed his habits: perhaps indigenous-rights groups had encouraged him to leave the Mashco alone, or perhaps it had become too expensive to continue the handouts. Either way, the contact had created a dependency that was painful to break. “He had got them basically hooked on bananas and pots and pans,” Shepard said.

For the Nomole crew, it was a reminder that their work entailed real dangers. One afternoon, keeping watch on the bluff, Maldonado spoke about the history of attacks in Brazil, where more than sixty contact agents had been killed by aislados in the past forty years. Apparently, the greatest risk came after a bond of familiarity had been established. According to one theory, the aislados were provoked by fears that the outsiders’ gentle approach masked a plan to log their land, take their women, and kill their men.

As we talked, we heard the whistling that announced the Mashco, and I followed Maldonado to the edge of the bluff. Through binoculars, we saw three men emerge from the forest. None of the women or children were with them. Maldonado was nervous. “Where are the women?” he asked. “What’s going on?” He told the team, which had started carrying bananas down to the peke-peke, to stand by.

As Maldonado spoke, however, a line of women and children began appearing from the forest. He whooped with relief and ran down to join the peke-peke. On the opposite shore, Tkotko roared like a jaguar at him, then laughed uproariously, explaining in pantomime that his eyes looked as if they were going to pop out of his head.

Nena walks through her vegetable patch in Diamante. She found a series of twigs that had been bent across each other: a warning left by the Mashco. November 7, 2015. Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim for The New Yorker

There appeared to be growing trust between the two groups. The Nomole team had instructed Kamotolo to meet only with them, and he seemed to have complied, moving his family to a closer camp, about three hours’ walk away. Maldonado said that the relationship was limited: “Our conversations are very basic. He asks things like ‘Are you married?’ ‘Do you have kids?’ ” And he had few illusions about the Mashco’s motives: “He keeps coming because he knows he can get things.” But he had become fond of Kamotolo, who was the right age to be his son. Laughing, he recalled the time that Kamotolo had searched their peke-peke and found a pair of panties left behind by a French journalist as she changed into her swimsuit. He had put them on, backward.

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[1] Url: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/08/an-isolated-tribe-emerges-from-the-rain-forest

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