Peru: Uncontacted Mashco Piro dangerously close to resumed logging operations in their territory
August 26, 2025
An Indigenous Yine community in the Peruvian Amazon is reporting that uncontacted Mashco Piro people, who live nearby but rarely emerge from the forest, have recently come into their village. The reports come as logging operations resume in the area.
“It is very worrying; they are in danger. We can hear the engines. The isolated people are also hearing them. Heavy machinery is once again clearing paths, and crossing our river and cutting down our trees. Something bad could happen again,” said Enrique Añez, president of the Yine community, which is distantly related to the Mashco Piro.
© Survival
Invasions of uncontacted peoples’ territory typically result in fatal epidemics of diseases to which they have no immunity. The logging is destroying the Mashco Piro’s territory, and has led to violent clashes as it moves further into their home. In 2024, four loggers were killed by the Mashco Piro in several fatal encounters. There is no information about how many Mashco Piro were killed or injured.
Following these tragedies, and pressure from Indigenous organizations and Survival International, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) suspended the sustainability certification of the most problematic company operating on Mashco Piro land, Maderera Canales Tahuamanu (MCT). This suspension is in force until November. But logging has now resumed, and MCT recently built a bridge across the Tahuamanu river to allow access for bulldozers and logging trucks.
© Google
Some part of the Mashco Piro’s territory has been protected since 2002, when the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve was created to protect the forest of uncontacted Mashco Piro, Yora and Amahuaca peoples.
But the Peruvian government left out large sections of the Mashco Piro Territory, which were sold by the government as logging concessions, including to MCT. After much pressure from local Indigenous organizations, they agreed to expand the reserve in 2016, which has still not been done.
The FSC-commissioned evaluation of the situation concluded that the suspension could be lifted with MCT establishing and policing its own ‘conservation areas’ inside the concession.
Caroline Pearce, Executive Director of Survival International, said, “This is the Mashco Piro’s ancestral forest, and it is their home. The suggestion that logging companies could continue to operate with full FSC approval as long as they promise to establish limited ‘conservation areas’ in their concessions is both an assault on the rights of Indigenous peoples and dangerously naïve.”
Añez, the Yine leader, agreed. “The wood they harvest says, ‘certified forest’, but it should say ‘sacrificed people,” he said.
Pearce added, “There can be no effective ‘honor system’ from a company that has shown itself all too willing to risk the lives both of uncontacted Indigenous people and of its own workers.
“The Peruvian government must demarcate and protect the whole territory of the Mashco Piro and end all logging concessions. Indigenous land must be in Indigenous hands, not subject to corporate greed.”
Update: Supreme Court lifts sanctions on FENAMAD
In July 2025, Peru’s Supreme Court lifted a gag order against local Indigenous organization FENAMAD, in place since 2021. The court ruled that the restrictions violated the organization’s rights to due process and freedom of expression.
In 2021, logging company MCT had sued FENAMAD and its then-president Julio Cusurichi Palacios after they publicly denounced logging on uncontacted Mashco Piro territory. A regional court imposed a gag order to silence FENAMAD and prevent the organization from defending the Mashco Piro people’s right to live on their land.
FENAMAD welcomed the ruling, stating that “The protection and lives of our uncontacted brothers and sisters are important and part of our own struggle.”
Notes:
1- The Yine people who live alongside Mashco Piro territory in Peru, are distantly related to the Mashco Piro.
2- An external evaluation commissioned by the FSC and conducted by Assurance Services International concluded that if the FSC considers lifting the current suspension of MCT, “MCT shall establish ‘conservation areas’ or ‘forest reserves’ or other designations over the entire area of its concession that is within the expansion of the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve and shall make a commitment to not carry out any forest management activities (i.e., no timber harvest or extraction of non-timber forest products, or construction of roads, bridges and other infrastructure) within this area.”
