50 Scientific American, February 2019wing paramilitaries and drug labs hidden
within its jungles rendered them too dan-
gerous to many of the forces most likely to
try and exploit them. In November 2016,
however, the government and the insur-
gents signed a peace accord. Stability
could bring economic boom times—and,
many fear, the kinds of development pres-
sures that have jeopardized efforts to pro-
tect isolated tribes in neighboring coun-
tries. The peace accords have also spawned
an array of more immediate perils in the
form of new splinter groups and hard-line
rebel holdovers that are looking to set up
novel routes through the vast unexplored
interior and fund their efforts with clan-
destine drug facilities and illegal mining.
Now the race is on to implement a na-
tionwide policy hammered out among
non governmental organizations (NGOs),
Colombia’s indigenous leaders and its
Ministry of Interior and signed by the na-
tion’s outgoing president Juan Manuel
Santos and his cabinet ministers last
summer. The new protocols guarantee the rights of isolated
peoples to self-determination and spell out the procedures for
defending these rights for new groups identified across the
country. Although the Tiger People are the only uncontacted
tribe whose presence has so far been confirmed, evidence sug-
gests that as many as 17 other tribes may be living in isolation
elsewhere in the Colombian Amazon.
As international NGOs gather the proof they need to demon-
strate the presence of new tribes deserving of federal protec-
tion, the efforts of Perea and others in Curare are serving as an
important model that is showing doubters that such security is
even possible.THE NGO SURVIVAL INTERNATIONAL estimates there are more than
100 uncontacted tribes around the world, groups it defines as
“tribal peoples who have no peaceful contact with anyone in the
mainstream or dominant society.” In Colombia, as in the rest of
the Amazon, most live in isolation by choice. Many originally
fled the colonists of the 18th to early 20th centuries, rubber bar-
ons who brutalized and enslaved indigenous workers and mis-
sionaries who attempted to “civilize” and convert natives by for-
bidding the practice of long-held traditions.
More recent “first contacts” have proved catastrophic in oth-
er ways. The most common contacts in recent decades have oc -
curred across Colombia’s border in Brazil, home to the largest
tracts of virgin rain forest. Throughout the 20th century, the
Brazilian government sought to open up the region, sending a
core of explorers into the wilderness to establish small airstrip
outposts in the jungle and later cutting new roads, allowing civ-
ilization to creep ever deeper into the interior. To contact the
tribes living there, first the nation’s Indian Protection Service
and later the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) sent scouts
known as sertanistas ahead of the explorers, with the mission of
luring natives out and assimilating them into society.
Those initial encounters provided a catalog of the devasta-
tion that would later be visited on other native peoples across
the rest of the Amazon. Lacking immunity to many modern dis-
eases, many villages have lost 50 to 90 percent of their popula-
tions in the wake of contact. The survivors have often ended up
in squalid jungle settlements or on the streets, alienated from
traditions and community, living as alcoholics or prostitutes and
losing any semblance of self-sufficiency.
In the early 1960s a pair of famed sertanistas, the brothers
Cláudio and Orlando Villas-Bôas, succeeded in leading efforts to
create a vast reserve, known as the Xingu National Park, the first
in a mosaic of closed sanctuaries where indigenous peoples
could, in theory, live unmolested. Xingu would become a model
for other such indigenous reserves across the Amazon, includ-
ing Curare. Even so, in the years that followed, first contacts
often continued to prove calamitous, with disease devastating
tribes even before relocation could be considered. Colombia saw
its own share of tragic tales, perhaps most famously that of the
Nukak-Maku, a hunter-gatherer tribe that was ravaged by dis-
ease after official contact was established in 1988 and is fighting
extinction today.
In Brazil, by the 1980s, the ill effects of contact had come to
seem so inevitable that some sertanistas, led by a dynamic Vil-
las-Bôas protégé named Sydney Possuelo, had begun to equate
contact with genocide and to advocate for a radical strategy. In
1988 Possuelo won support for a new “no contact” approach:
mapping indigenous lands and keeping out loggers, miners and
other interlopers—and thus, many believe, saving countless
lives. Brazil’s no-contact policy has since remained the standard
for how to approach indigenous rights in nations across the
region, favored by indigenous groups and NGOs alike. It was
used as a model by Peru and officially incorporated into its
national policy in 2006.
Even so, ever since, the hands-off approach has been under
virtually constant attack from would-be colonists and powerful
mining, ranching and timber interests, who have long sought1© 2019 Scientific American