Pressure bears down around uncontacted tribes at the edge of Brazil’s arc of deforestation

“They’re curious about us, and we’re curious about them.” That’s how Daniel Cangussu describes the recent interaction with a small Indigenous group that had just contacted non-Indigenous society in the depths of the Brazilian Amazon. “We don’t know their language yet, but we communicate all the time. We share food, we fish for them, and they accompany us on hunts,” says Cangussu, an official with Funai, Brazil’s federal agency for Indigenous affairs.

The Indigenous group in question has lived for centuries in one of the Amazon Rainforest’s best-preserved areas, a region known as Mamoriá Grande, named after a tributary of the Purus River — itself one of the main tributaries of the Amazon — that crosses the territory. Their first contact occurred on Feb. 12, when a young man appeared in a nearby river community.

“He came out of the woods because he had lost his fire,” says Cangussu, who coordinates Funai’s Madeira Purus Ethno-Environmental Protection Front, responsible for protecting the isolated Indigenous peoples of southern Amazonas state.

After providing food and medical assistance, Funai agents helped the man return to the point in the forest where he came from. A few days later, the agents realized he was still in the same area, now accompanied by his family: a woman and a baby about a year old. “We realized that not only were they without fire, but they were in difficulty,” Cangussu says.

He adds the family appears to be part of a larger group, one whose existence was confirmed by Funai in 2021. Before the start of the rainy season, they usually migrate to the headwaters region, where it’s easier to hunt, fish and collect fruits when the water level in the river rises. But for some reason, this family was left behind this time around, trapped in the flooded lowlands where less food was available. Given their precarious situation, Funai’s agents moved into the forest to support the group.

“They took the initiative to camp near us because they need support,” Cangussu says. “They were a little thinner, apparently anemic, so a health team is accompanying us, doing tests and giving them vitamins. And our team is helping them with fishing and hunting.”

Mamoriá Grande sits in the middle of a mosaic of conservation areas and Indigenous territories, which serve as a barrier to deforestation. The protected nature of the region means there are at least four other isolated groups living in the southern Amazonas region, according to Priscilla Oliveira, an anthropologist and researcher at the Indigenous rights advocacy organization Survival International.

“Territories with standing, healthy forests and plenty of biodiversity are ideal places for these peoples to thrive,” she tells Mongabay.

For now, the most significant threats to Indigenous peoples living in these areas are the occasional illegal hunters and fishers. However, large-scale land clearing and speculation are closing in on them, with deforestation rates rising during the administration of former president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022).  The advance of the so-called arc of deforestation from the north increases the risk of the Amazon passing a critical tipping point, when the world’s greatest rainforest would transition to a drier, degraded and less biodiverse ecosystem.

“We are the last frontier,”  Zé Bajaga Apurinã, coordinator of the local Indigenous organization FOCIMP, which advocates for groups in this middle section of the Purus River, tells Mongabay. “It’s our belt that protects this region from invasion because they [deforesters] are coming hard. We’re being harassed in every possible way.”

The expansion of cattle ranching is a reason for much of the pressure in the area, and has been fueled by the prospect of the paving of the BR-319 road. The 880-kilometer (547-mile) highway was built in the 1970s to connect Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia state, with Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state and the largest city in the rainforest. However, a 400-km (250-mi) stretch of the road, known as the “middle section,” becomes undrivable for most of the year, making Manaus highly dependent on river transportation for the supply of goods.

The paving of this stretch would result in a fourfold increase in deforestation rates around the BR-319, according to a report from researchers at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Forty conservation areas and 50 Indigenous territories would be affected, including isolated Indigenous groups living in the Middle Purus region.

Bolsonaro promised but failed to pave the stretch during his administration. Now, his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has committed to finish the work, despite criticism from environmental activists and Indigenous rights associations that this contradicts his environmental agenda.

Lucas Ferrante, a researcher at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM), has published several studies about the impacts of fully paving the BR-319. He says the federal government is threatening a vital part of the rainforest to accommodate a few business interests. “There is a lot of pressure to open up these forest blocks, both to favor oil and gas exploration and agribusiness groups, especially cattle ranchers,” he tells Mongabay.

The BR-319 lies some 260 km (160 mi) from the Mamoriá Grande area, but Ferrante says the opening of secondary roads branching off the highway and infiltrating deep into the forest may become a threat for this and other isolated peoples.

Historically, official highways in the Amazon have spawned dozens of unofficial, smaller roads, in a phenomenon known as a fishbone pattern. According to Ferrante, there are already more than 6,000 km (3,700 mi) of unofficial roads in the surroundings of the BR-319 — six times the length of the highway itself.

“Any opening up and pressure on these areas is a threat to these Indigenous peoples,” he says. “This region is the new target area for expansion in the Amazon. What we need to do is permanently close these blocks of forest.”

Traditional communities wouldn’t be the only victims of the advance of deforestation over Amazon. According to Ferrante, this area is the birthplace of the Amazon’s flying rivers — vast volumes of water vapor that rise up from the lush forest below and flow to other parts of the country, accounting for 70% of the rainfall in Brazil’s south and southeast regions.

An influx of non-Indigenous people into these pristine forests would also put them in contact with an unknown variety of viruses and bacteria. As with COVID-19 pandemic, there’s a risk such a transmission could rapidly spread across the rest of Brazil and even the world. “This is one of the largest zoonotic reservoirs on the planet,” Ferrante says.

A turbulent demarcation process

Funai officially recognizes 114 groups of isolated Indigenous peoples all over Brazil, most of them in the Amazon. These communities’ decision to avoid contact with non-Indigenous and settler society is a response to the slaughters they faced in the past — from the time of the European conquest of the Americas centuries earlier up until Brazil‘s military dictatorship that only ended 40 years ago. During the dictatorship, which lasted less than 30 years, more than 8,000 Indigenous people were killed in massacres, land grabs, forced evictions, transmission of infectious diseases, imprisonment, torture, and ill treatment. Most of these deaths occurred during the construction of the major roads that today connect the Amazon to the rest of the country.

Even today, Brazil is the second-most dangerous country in the world for environmental defenders, including Indigenous people. Often, the attackers are the loggers and cattle ranchers invading their territories.

“Here in the Purus area, we used to have more than 1,000 groups, and it’s been reduced to about 10,” Zé Bajaga Apurinã says. “So they’re afraid of the white people killing them because they’ve already killed a lot.”

Since 1987, Funai has abided by a strict policy of not initiating contact with isolated peoples, which respects the decision of those who don’t want to get in touch with non-Indigenous culture. “We don’t promote contact. We always work to understand the area of occupation and then protect this area,” Marco Aurélio Milken Tosta, Funai’s general coordinator for isolated and recently contacted Indigenous peoples, tells Mongabay. “At the same time, we are always prepared if a group seeks contact with us, like in the Mamoriá Grande case.”

Once the existence of a group is confirmed, one of the first measures is the issuance of a protection order stating only people authorized by Funai can enter the territory. This serves as an emergency measure while the process of demarcating the territory is underway. However, Funai agents were prevented from doing their job under Bolsonaro, who promised — and in this case succeeded — to “not demarcate another centimeter” of Indigenous land.

“Since the [Mamoriá Grande] group was confirmed in 2021, we and other organizations have been pushing for the use restriction order to be signed,” says Oliveira from Survival International. “We believed this restriction would come as soon as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office [in January 2023], but unfortunately it took much longer.”

The restriction order was signed in December 2024, protecting an area more than twice the size of the city of Rio de Janeiro (nearly 260,000 hectares or 642,000 acres). In the meantime, Funai created a work group to start identifying and demarcating the territory, so the Mamoriá Grande Indigenous Territory can officially be created.

However, this process may take decades.

“Until we achieve the effective final regularization of the Indigenous land, it is a relatively long, complex process, subject to a lot of pressure,” says Funai’s Tosta. “This worries us a lot because until the area is effectively established as an Indigenous land, the group is vulnerable, even more so within the current political context.”

The first setback to the Mamoriá Grande group came from the Brazilian Congress, where Senators Dr. Hiran Gonçalves and Omar Aziz filed a bill to suspend Funai’s restriction order, arguing it could bring “socioeconomic impacts” to local communities.

They also said the order contradicts the marco temporal bill, a controversial piece of legislation passed by Congress’s agribusiness caucus that set a cutoff date for establishing Indigenous territories. Though ruled unconstitutional by the Federal Supreme Court in 2023, the legislation was approved by Congress just days later, in a legal clash that led to the paralysis of many demarcation processes.

Mongabay tried to speak with Senators Aziz and Hiran for comment, but they didn’t respond by the time of publication.

The protection of the Mamoriá Grande group also faces resistance of some residents of the Médio Purus Extractive Reserve, a 600,000-hectare (1.48-million-acre) conservation area that’s home to around 1,500 riverine families. According to Funai, 20% of the proposed Indigenous area overlaps with the extractive reserve, whose residents make a living from sustainable harvesting of forest resources.

“The community can no longer enter the forest to tap rubber, harvest nuts, fish, hunt, or do anything. They’re even preventing students from going to school,” José Maria Carneiro de Oliveira, former president of the Association of Agro-Extractive Workers of the Middle Purus (ATAMP), tells Mongabay by phone.

In response to these complaints, Tosta says Funai is working closely with local communities and ICMBio, the federal agency responsible for Brazil’s conservation areas. “We can’t do any work without a partnership with the communities because we need to work together,” he says. “We are working to try to find a balance and do the work that needs to be done to protect these Indigenous people’s area.”

On March 9, Funai had a meeting in the Bela Rosa community, the most affected by the restriction order, to respond to residents’ grievances and reach agreements on the progress of work.

Funai’s next steps in the Mamoriá Grande area will depend on what the Indigenous group does next, says Daniel Cangussu. “If the river dries up and they go back to their relatives — perfect. We’ll continue to protect the territory. If in the future they remain in the area and their relatives come down [to join them] in the summer, we’ll have a larger group to protect.”

Banner image: The first Indigenous man from the Mamoriá Grande area to contact non-Indigenous society received medical assistance at a Funai base in early February. Image courtesy of Funai and Sesai (Indigenous Health Secretariat).

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Latoya Abulu Editor

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