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Tomas Anez Dos Santos was laboring in a small open space within in the Peruvian rainforest when he detected movements coming closer through the thick jungle.

He realized that he stood hemmed in, and halted.

“One stood, aiming with an arrow,” he remembers. “Somehow he detected I was here and I commenced to run.”

He found himself face to face the Mashco Piro tribe. For decades, Tomas—who lives in the modest settlement of Nueva Oceania—had been practically a neighbour to these nomadic people, who avoid engagement with outsiders.

An updated report from a human rights group states there are no fewer than 196 described as “isolated tribes” left in the world. The Mashco Piro is believed to be the biggest. The report states a significant portion of these communities may be eliminated in the next decade if governments fail to take additional measures to safeguard them.

The report asserts the biggest threats come from logging, digging or drilling for oil. Isolated tribes are highly vulnerable to ordinary disease—as such, the report notes a risk is posed by interaction with religious missionaries and digital content creators seeking engagement.

In recent times, the Mashco Piro have been coming to Nueva Oceania increasingly, based on accounts from residents.

The village is a angling village of seven or eight families, sitting high on the shores of the Tauhamanu waterway in the heart of the Peruvian rainforest, half a day from the most accessible settlement by watercraft.

The territory is not classified as a protected reserve for remote communities, and logging companies function here.

Tomas reports that, on occasion, the noise of logging machinery can be noticed around the clock, and the community are witnessing their forest disturbed and devastated.

Within the village, inhabitants report they are divided. They dread the Mashco Piro's arrows but they hold profound respect for their “brothers” who live in the jungle and wish to protect them.

“Let them live as they live, we can't alter their culture. This is why we keep our space,” states Tomas.

Inhabitants in Nueva Oceania are worried about the harm to the tribe's survival, the threat of aggression and the possibility that timber workers might expose the Mashco Piro to sicknesses they have no defense to.

At the time in the settlement, the Mashco Piro made their presence felt again. Letitia Rodriguez Lopez, a woman with a two-year-old child, was in the jungle gathering food when she detected them.

“We detected cries, cries from individuals, a large number of them. As though there were a whole group shouting,” she shared with us.

This marked the first time she had met the group and she fled. After sixty minutes, her thoughts was still throbbing from fear.

“Because exist loggers and companies clearing the woodland they are escaping, perhaps due to terror and they come in proximity to us,” she stated. “We don't know how they will behave to us. This is what scares me.”

In 2022, two individuals were assaulted by the group while catching fish. One was hit by an arrow to the stomach. He lived, but the other man was discovered deceased after several days with multiple arrow wounds in his body.

Authorities in Peru follows a strategy of avoiding interaction with isolated people, rendering it forbidden to start encounters with them.

The strategy began in Brazil after decades of campaigning by tribal advocacy organizations, who observed that early contact with isolated people could lead to whole populations being wiped out by sickness, destitution and hunger.

During the 1980s, when the Nahau tribe in Peru first encountered with the world outside, a significant portion of their population died within a short period. During the 1990s, the Muruhanua tribe suffered the identical outcome.

“Secluded communities are extremely at risk—from a disease perspective, any interaction may introduce sicknesses, and even the basic infections could decimate them,” states an advocate from a Peruvian indigenous rights group. “Culturally too, any exposure or interference can be highly damaging to their life and survival as a society.”

For local residents of {