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A man named Tomas Anez Dos Santos worked in a modest clearing deep in the Peruvian jungle when he heard sounds approaching through the lush jungle.

It dawned on him he was surrounded, and froze.

“One stood, pointing using an arrow,” he remembers. “Somehow he detected I was here and I began to flee.”

He ended up face to face the Mashco Piro. Over many years, Tomas—residing in the modest community of Nueva Oceania—had been almost a local to these itinerant individuals, who reject engagement with outsiders.

A new report issued by a human rights organisation states remain no fewer than 196 of what it calls “isolated tribes” remaining globally. The Mashco Piro is believed to be the largest. The study says half of these groups may be eliminated in the next decade should administrations neglect to implement further actions to defend them.

The report asserts the biggest threats stem from timber harvesting, extraction or exploration for crude. Uncontacted groups are exceptionally vulnerable to ordinary illness—as such, the report states a danger is presented by exposure with religious missionaries and digital content creators looking for engagement.

Recently, Mashco Piro people have been venturing to Nueva Oceania increasingly, according to inhabitants.

Nueva Oceania is a angling community of seven or eight households, located atop on the shores of the local river in the center of the Peruvian Amazon, a ten-hour journey from the closest village by watercraft.

This region is not classified as a preserved reserve for remote communities, and logging companies operate here.

Tomas says that, sometimes, the noise of industrial tools can be heard around the clock, and the tribe members are observing their jungle disrupted and destroyed.

Within the village, inhabitants say they are divided. They are afraid of the Mashco Piro's arrows but they also have profound admiration for their “brothers” dwelling in the woodland and wish to protect them.

“Let them live according to their traditions, we can't alter their culture. For this reason we maintain our space,” explains Tomas.

The people in Nueva Oceania are anxious about the harm to the tribe's survival, the threat of conflict and the chance that timber workers might expose the tribe to illnesses they have no resistance to.

While we were in the settlement, the Mashco Piro made their presence felt again. A young mother, a young mother with a toddler child, was in the jungle collecting food when she heard them.

“There were cries, sounds from others, many of them. Like there were a crowd yelling,” she shared with us.

This marked the initial occasion she had encountered the Mashco Piro and she ran. An hour later, her thoughts was still pounding from terror.

“As there are timber workers and operations clearing the forest they are fleeing, possibly because of dread and they arrive close to us,” she stated. “We are uncertain how they will behave to us. That is the thing that frightens me.”

Recently, a pair of timber workers were confronted by the Mashco Piro while catching fish. One man was hit by an bow to the gut. He survived, but the other person was found deceased after several days with several arrow wounds in his body.

The administration follows a approach of avoiding interaction with isolated people, rendering it forbidden to start contact with them.

This approach began in Brazil following many years of lobbying by community representatives, who observed that initial contact with remote tribes resulted to whole populations being decimated by illness, destitution and malnutrition.

During the 1980s, when the Nahau community in the country came into contact with the outside world, half of their people died within a matter of years. In the 1990s, the Muruhanua people suffered the identical outcome.

“Secluded communities are highly at risk—epidemiologically, any exposure might spread sicknesses, and even the basic infections could eliminate them,” says a representative from a Peruvian indigenous rights group. “In cultural terms, any contact or intrusion could be extremely detrimental to their existence and well-being as a group.”

For local residents of {