Can the Amazon's last tribes survive? The rainforest may no longer be a refuge for South America's most isolated peoples.

• Author: Lawler, Andrew
• Position: Opinion

The man known as Epa is familiar to the villagers who live along Peru's Curanja River, which flows through some of the densest rainforest of the nation's vast Amazon region.

Most of Epa's tribe, the Mastanahua, remains deep in the jungle, still living like the native peoples did before Europeans arrived hundreds of years ago: unclothed, hunting with bows and arrows, and picking medicinal plants to ward off illness. But such isolated tribes, which have long avoided outsiders, can no longer depend on the forest as a refuge. In the past year, throughout the Amazon, tribe members have begun to emerge into settled areas in unpredictable and occasionally violent ways--often because of hunger or desperation.

Epa, who I met on a reporting trip last spring, lives with a foot in each world: He has lived most of his life among the jungle's most isolated people and he boasts of his hunting prowess. But he also wears a soccer shirt and nylon shorts and spends time among the settled villagers on the river.

Last year, Epa's tribe was accused of raiding several of those villages, taking machetes, clothes, and food. In other parts of the rainforest, violence by and against once-isolated people is on the rise. In May, just outside the Manu National Park, a man from the Mashco Piro tribe shot an arrow that killed a 20-year-old villager. Last year, several members of Peru's Xinane tribe waded across a river to seek help at a Brazilian settlement. A few of their relatives, they said, had died when they were attacked, possibly by drug traffickers.

In some ways, these conflicts are the last, lingering echoes of the collision of cultures that began in 1492, when Christopher Columbus landed in the New World. Since then, tens of millions of native people have perished--many from European and African diseases--and entire cultures have vanished.

At Risk of Extinction

There are other native tribes living beyond the reach of the global economy--in places like the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, the mountains of New Guinea in the South Pacific, and elsewhere (see box). But the planet's largest and most diverse isolated cultures are centered in the Amazon, primarily in eastern Peru and western Brazil. They still lack immunity from many Western diseases. And they have no modern weapons to defend themselves from armed intruders like drug smugglers and illegal loggers. They also have no voice in national politics.

Experts and aid groups warn that drug trafficking, logging, mining, and oil drilling, along with a changing climate, vanishing species, and a shrinking forest, put these tribes at risk of extinction. Even TV crews searching for "uncontacted" natives pose a threat; according to a 2008 report by a Peruvian anthropologist, one crew that strayed beyond its permitted area has been implicated in the deaths of some 20 native people from the flu.

The indigenous people who remain appear to be fighting...