A new report published on Monday by the NGO Survival International reveals 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups across 10 countries in South America, Asia, and the Pacific, according to a five-year study titled Uncontacted peoples: At the edge of survival. Half of these groups – tens of thousands of people – face extinction within a decade due to industrial activity, criminal gangs and missionary incursions, with logging, mining and agribusiness cited as the primary threats.
The report also warns that even indirect contact, such as disease spread by outsiders, could devastate populations, while the climate crisis and illegal activities further endanger their survival.
There are more than 60 confirmed and dozens more reported isolated Indigenous peoples living in the Amazon basin, according to a draft report by the International Working Group of Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact, and 90% of the confirmed groups live in our two countries, Brazil and Peru.
On the eve of Cop30, hosted by Brazil, they are increasingly threatened by attacks on the policies and agencies created to protect them. The forests give them life and, as the most intact, extensive, and biodiverse tropical forests on Earth, provide the rest of us with a defence against the climate crisis.
In 1987, Brazil adopted a policy to protect isolated peoples, requiring their territories to be demarcated and all contact avoided, except when the people themselves seek it. This policy has led to an increase in the number of different peoples reported and confirmed, and has allowed many populations to grow.
However, in recent decades, the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai), the agency that protects these populations, has been deliberately weakened. Its patrolling authority has never been formalised. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, issued a decree to remedy the situation last year but there have been attempts in congress to challenge it, which have partially succeeded.
Chronically underfunded and understaffed, the agency’s field infrastructure is in tatters, and its ranks have not been resupplied with qualified personnel to fulfil its delicate mission.
Congress also passed the “marco temporal” – or “time limit” – law in 2023, which recognises only Indigenous territories occupied by aboriginal peoples on 5 October 1988, the day Brazil’s constitution was promulgated.
In theory, this would rule out territories such as the Pardo River Kawahiva, where the Brazilian government has officially recognised the existence of an isolated community.
The first expeditions to confirm the presence of the isolated Indigenous peoples in this area, however, were in 1999, after the marco temporal cutoff. Nevertheless, this does not change the fact that these isolated peoples have lived in this territory long before their existence was “officially” confirmed by the Brazilian government.
Still, congress ignored the ruling and passed the law, which has served as a political weapon to block the demarcation of Indigenous lands, including the Rio Pardo Kawahiva, which is still in limbo and vulnerable to invasion, illegal exploitation and violence against its inhabitants.
Of Brazil’s 114 reported isolated groups, only 28 have been officially confirmed. Many peoples, confirmed and under investigation, are in undemarcated areas, while others are in areas that could be vulnerable to elimination if the marco temporal idea prevails.
The current push to weaken environmental laws and open protected areas and Indigenous lands to loggers, gold miners and agribusiness also presents a clear threat to isolated peoples. Incursions by resource extractors represent a death sentence for many forest cultures.
In Peru, disinformation denying the existence of isolated peoples has been spread by groups with economic interests in the rainforests. These human beings do, in fact, exist. The government has officially recognised 25 separate groups.
Indigenous organisations have gathered information suggesting there may be 10 additional groups. Denial of their presence amounts to a campaign of extermination, which members of congress are trying to execute through new laws that would cancel and shrink Indigenous territorial reserves.
The bill, known as 12215/2025-CR, would give congress and a “special review committee” oversight of reserves, allowing them to eliminate existing lands for isolated peoples and make new ones virtually impossible to create.
Bill 11822/2024-CR, meanwhile, would allow oil and gas extraction in all of Peru’s natural protected areas, including national parks. The government recognises the presence of isolated peoples in 13 protected areas, but our information suggests they inhabit 18 in total. Oil drilling in this land puts them at extreme risk of extinction.
Isolated peoples are threatened even without these proposed legal changes. On 4 September, the “multisectoral committee” responsible for creating reserves for uncontacted communities arbitrarily rejected the proposal for the 1.2m-hectare (2.9m-acre) Yavari Mirim Indigenous reserve, even though the Peruvian government has already officially recognised the existence of the isolated Indigenous peoples of Yavari Mirim via supreme decree in 2018. The rejection came despite overwhelming evidence for the demarcation of their traditional territories, which has been collected over the 22 years during which this reserve has been inching its way toward establishment.
Commission members from the ministry of agriculture, the forest service, and the regional government of Loreto voted as a bloc against the reserve, despite receiving millions in climate funding from the German KfW development bank under the “sustainable productive forests programme”. Funding also came from Germany, Norway and the UK under the Joint Declaration of Intent, an agreement to protect tropical forests such as those within the proposed Yavari Mirim reserve.
Even the ministry of environment, which has also received millions in overseas funding to protect forests, opted at the last minute to skip the commission’s meeting, passing up its chance to support the reserve.
The commission has also failed to finalise the expansion of the Madre de Dios territorial reserve, allowing loggers, some certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as “sustainable”, to operate in an area where the Peruvian government has confirmed the presence of the Mashco Piro peoples, leading to deadly conflicts.
In its role as host of Cop30, Brazil is urging countries worldwide to take ambitious climate action. And both of our countries gladly accept hundreds of millions of dollars to fight the climate crisis and deforestation, including through Brazil’s Amazon Fund. At the same time, these governments, sometimes the same agencies, permit the destruction of forests that hold significant volumes of carbon, rich biodiversity, and are home to the world’s most vulnerable human populations.
Indigenous peoples have resisted this hypocrisy because, for us, these forests are life itself. Many of our people have died in this struggle but we’ll keep fighting. We call on the Brazilian and Peruvian governments to stop playing both sides, to finally fulfil their constitutional, legal and moral obligations, and to join us in defending Indigenous territories and the isolated people whose simple request is to let them keep living free.
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Julio Cusurichi Palacios directs the programme for the defence of isolated Indigenous peoples for the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest – AIDESEP
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Beto Marubo is the Brasília representative for the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley
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