The Mashco-Piro or Mascho Piro, also known as the Cujareño people and Nomole, are an indigenous tribe of nomadic

hunter-gatherers A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...

who inhabit the remote regions of the

Amazon rainforest The Amazon rainforest, Amazon jungle or ; es, Selva amazónica, , or usually ; french: Forêt amazonienne; nl, Amazoneregenwoud. In English, the names are sometimes capitalized further, as Amazon Rainforest, Amazon Forest, or Amazon Jungle. ...

. They live in

Manú National Park Manú National Park ( es, Parque Nacional del Manú) is a national park and biosphere reserve located in the regions of Madre de Dios and Cusco in Peru. It protects a diverse number of ecosystems including lowland rainforests, cloud forests and ...

in the

Madre de Dios Region Madre de Dios (, en, Mother of God) is a department and region in southeastern Peru, bordering Brazil, Bolivia and the Peruvian departments of Puno, Cusco and Ucayali, in the Amazon Basin. Its capital is the city of Puerto Maldonado. It is als ...

Peru , image_flag = Flag of Peru.svg , image_coat = Escudo nacional del Perú.svg , other_symbol = Great Seal of the State , other_symbol_type = Seal (emblem), National seal , national_motto = "Fi ...

. They have in the past actively avoided contact with non-native peoples.

Demographics

In 1998, the

IWGIA The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) is an independent and non-profit international human rights-based membership organization, whose central charter is to endorse and promote the collective rights of the world's indigeno ...

estimated their number to be around 100 to 250. This is an increase from the 1976 estimated population of 20 to 100. The Mashco-Piro tribe speaks a dialect of the Piro language. "Mashco" (originally spelled "Maschcos") is a term which was first used by Padre Biedma in 1687 to refer to the Harakmbut people. It is considered a derogatory term, due to its meaning of "savages" in the Piro language; "Nomole" is the name the people apply to themselves.

History

In 1894, most of the Mashco-Piro tribe was slaughtered by the private army of Carlos Fitzcarrald, in the upper

Manú River The Manú is a river in southeastern Peru. It runs down the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains into the Amazon Basin. It runs through what is now protected as the Manú National Park, a vast Biosphere Reserve, home to arguably the highest con ...

area. The survivors retreated to the remote forest areas. The sightings of the Mashco-Piro tribe members increased in the 21st century. According to the anthropologist Glenn Shepard, who had an encounter with the Mashco-Piro in 1999, the increased sightings of the tribe could be due to

illegal logging Illegal logging is the harvest, transportation, purchase or sale of timber in violation of laws. The harvesting procedure itself may be illegal, including using corrupt means to gain access to forests; extraction without permission, or from a pro ...

in the area and low-flying aircraft associated with oil and gas exploration. In September 2007, a group of

ecologists This is a list of notable ecologists. A-D * John Aber (USA) * Aziz Ab'Saber (Brazil) * Charles Christopher Adams (USA) * Warder Clyde Allee (USA) * Herbert G. Andrewartha ( Australia) * Sarah Martha Baker ( UK) * Fakhri A. Bazzaz (USA) ...

filmed about 20 members of the Mashco-Piro tribe from a

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...

flying above the Alto Purús

national park A national park is a nature park, natural park in use for conservation (ethic), conservation purposes, created and protected by national governments. Often it is a reserve of natural, semi-natural, or developed land that a sovereign state dec ...

. The group had established camp on the banks of the Las Piedras river near the

vian and

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

ian border. Scientists believe that the tribe prefers to construct palm-leaf huts on riverbanks during the

dry season The dry season is a yearly period of low rainfall, especially in the tropics. The weather in the tropics is dominated by the tropical rain belt, which moves from the northern to the southern tropics and back over the course of the year. The te ...

for

fishing Fishing is the activity of trying to catch fish. Fish are often caught as wildlife from the natural environment, but may also be caught from stocked bodies of water such as ponds, canals, park wetlands and reservoirs. Fishing techniques inclu ...

. During the

wet season The wet season (sometimes called the Rainy season) is the time of year when most of a region's average annual rainfall occurs. It is the time of year where the majority of a country's or region's annual precipitation occurs. Generally, the sea ...

, they retreat to the

rain forest Rainforests are characterized by a closed and continuous tree canopy, moisture-dependent vegetation, the presence of epiphytes and lianas and the absence of wildfire. Rainforest can be classified as tropical rainforest or temperate rainforest ...

. Similar huts were spotted in the 1980s. In October 2011, the Peru Ministry of Environment released a video of a few Mashco-Piros, taken by some travelers. Gabriella Galli, an Italian visitor to the park, also captured a photograph of the tribe members. In 2012,

Survival International Survival International is a human rights organisation formed in 1969, a London based charity that campaigns for the rights of indigenous and/or tribal peoples and uncontacted peoples. The organisation's campaigns generally focus on tribal peopl ...

released some new photographs of the tribe members. The archaeologist Diego Cortijo of the Spanish Geographical Society claimed to have captured photographs of a Mashco-Piro family from the

, while on an expedition along the

Madre de Dios River The Madre de Dios River () is a river shared by Bolivia and Peru which is homonymous to the Peruvian region it runs through. On Bolivian territory it receives the Beni River, close to the town of Riberalta, which later joins with the Mamore Rive ...

in search of

petroglyph A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions ...

s. However, this claim to the photograph was subsequently disputed by

Jean-Paul Van Belle Jean-Paul Van Belle is a professor of information technology and director at the Centre for Information Technology and National Development in Africa at the University of Cape Town. He was head of the department of Information Technology at the U ...

who claimed to have taken these pictures 3 weeks earlier. His local guide Nicolas "Shaco" Flores, who was found dead six days later with a bamboo-tipped arrow stuck in his heart, is believed to have been killed by members of the Mashco-Piro tribe. In August 2013, the BBC reported that a group of Mashco-Piros had been seen apparently asking neighboring villagers for food. The Peruvian government has banned contact with the Mashco-Piros for fear that they might be infected by strangers with diseases to which the Mashco-Piros have not built up immunity.

References

External links

"Rare glimpse of isolated Peruvian tribe"
BBC News

" ''

The Telegraph ''The Telegraph'', ''Daily Telegraph'', ''Sunday Telegraph'' and other variant names are popular names for newspapers. Newspapers with these titles include: Australia * ''The Telegraph'' (Adelaide), a newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, publ ...

''. August 20, 2013.
Last isolated tribes

NY Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

, August 8, 2015 {{DEFAULTSORT:Mashco-Piro Uncontacted peoples Hunter-gatherers of South America Indigenous peoples in Peru Indigenous peoples of the Amazon

Demographics

History

See also

References

External links