Brazil must provide better protection for the Indian communities living in voluntary isolation

Alarmed by pictures of enraged Indians in the Brazilian Amazon area shooting with bows and arrows at a helicopter, the Society for Threatened Peoples called on Friday for better protection for native communities living in isolation.

"This incident proves that there are Indian groups living in the rain-forest which feel themselves threatened by the outside world and wish for no contact”, said the GfbV consultant for indigenous peoples, Yvonne Bangert. "So measures must be taken to ensure that their territory is hermetically cut off from the outside world.”

The region bordering on Peru is a particularly sensitive area, in which illegal wood-fellers continually break in and drive out by force the small Indian communities which live there in voluntary isolation. If these native inhabitants cannot live in safety and are in constant fear of strangers breaking in or indeed have to flee, then they will soon cease to exist.

There are at least 60 tribes living in voluntary isolation in Brazil , reports the local partner organisation of the GfbV, the Indian Mission Council CIMI. There are others living in Peru , Bolivia and Ecuador . Some of them are acutely threatened by extinction because timber concerns or cattle-breeders force them to retreat. They are threatened by illness and the loss of their way of living and their culture.