Mahogany Loggers Flock to Amazon In Search of Work
Every week truckloads of farmers desperate for work leave their homes and
begin the grueling journey down the eastern flanks of the Peruvian Andes to
southeastern Peru, deep in the Amazon River Basin. The jobs that await them
are to log some of the most pristine forests left on the planet.
"To see is to believe. I do not have any evidence. No one has come to
me and said, 'Hey, I saw them.' But since I am in forestry, I have ample
knowledge of the forest and the world and they may exist," he said. "Inside
me there is doubt, but they may exist."
Wilson Miranda is president of the Association of Small Loggers of
Tambopata (APEFOT), the group negotiating a truce between the isolated
peoples and the loggers. He told Ortiz and McConnell that it is in the best
interest of loggers to deny the existence of the isolated peoples despite
evidence of several recent encounters.
"The relationship between the isolated brothers and the loggers doesn't
come to the surface because there's a predisposition on behalf of the
loggers that these encounters and possible battles should not be made
public, so as to not alarm the government, because it would, regardless,
have consequences and call for intervention by the authorities," Miranda said.
Indigenous rights groups and conservationists say recent encounters between
loggers and the isolated peoples have resulted in bloody exchanges of shots
between the groups. The isolated peoples have wounded loggers with arrows.
Loggers claim to have killed dozens of isolated peoples with bullets.
Diego Shoobridge, director of the Peruvian division of ParksWatch, a
conservation organization formed to preserve biodiversity within national
parks and other protected areas, says there have been several cases where
isolated peoples appeared on the river shores and encountered loggers who
shot at them.
"One case was in the [Alto Purus Reserved Zone] in February 2001. I was
around and interviewed the shooter who informally assured me he killed
three natives," said Shoobridge. "The others took the bodies back. There
were no corpses when the police went to the place for inspection. So [the]
shooter, a Sharanahua indian, was not detained."
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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0312_030312_invisible3.html
