In Peru, approximately 7,500 people have chosen not to have contact with the outside world, or have only just begun to establish a relationship with the rest of society. The Ministry of Culture formally recognizes them as PIACI (Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact). Their territories are concentrated in regions where illegal mining, logging, and drug trafficking have advanced without pause.

Isolated from What?

More than a hundred years ago, the brutality of the rubber boom pushed thousands of Amazonian indigenous people to flee the slavery imposed by companies like the Peruvian Amazon Company. It was the early twentieth century, and the invention of the pneumatic tire and the mass adoption of the automobile in the cities of the Global North had triggered an unprecedented demand for natural latex, turning the Amazon rainforest into the epicenter of an enormously lucrative business. What followed was one of the darkest chapters in the history of the continent.

Between 1900 and 1930, the Bora, Muinane, Ocaina, Andoque and other peoples of the Putumayo, who knew that forest in its immensity, could read it and move nimbly through it, were subjected to slave labor, torture, massacres and mutilation. All of these atrocities were documented by British consul Roger Casement in 1910, in what is known as the British Blue Book. By the time they were reported, three quarters of the native population of the Putumayo had already disappeared.

Many of today’s PIACI are descendants of peoples who survived that violence and chose to reject any contact with the outside world as a survival strategy.

The New Kings of Extractivism

The extractivist logic has not changed since its origins. The actors and products shift, and where the Peruvian Amazon Company once operated in search of latex, today oil companies, logging operations, and mining interests advance over those same Amazonian territories.

To protect the PIACI from that pressure, indigenous organizations and their allies fought a long bureaucratic battle that culminated in 2006 with the passage of Law No. 28736, known as the PIACI Law. The regulation establishes indigenous reserves as delimited and intangible territories where no extractive activity may operate, with the sole purpose of ensuring that these peoples can continue living autonomously. In practice, however, that intangibility has proven porous.

An analysis by Earth Insight reveals that active and proposed oil and gas blocks overlap with 20% of PIACI reserves, equivalent to 1.6 million hectares. In the Yavarí-Tapiche corridor, a 16-million-hectare stretch that serves as refuge for isolated peoples, oil, gas, mining, logging, and road projects are steadily penetrating the forest. Meanwhile, in Loreto the Regional Government has granted at least 47 forestry concessions that encroach on territories of intangible status.

While political debate over what should be done with these spaces tends to frame the question in terms of “productive use,” the Amazon operates at an immeasurable level of productivity. It regulates the region’s climate, sustains the continent’s freshwater reserves, and is home to one tenth of the planet’s known biodiversity. The value of these forests lies in the living systems they keep functioning, and in the peoples who have managed them for centuries and continue to protect them. Yet a paper published in Science Advances warns that we are approaching a point of no return: the combined deforestation and degradation of the Amazon already exceeds 20% of its total surface area, dangerously close to the threshold beyond which the ecosystem could irreversibly transform.

A Calculated Ignorance

None of this is a surprise. Anthropologist Beatriz Huertas Castillo has devoted her career to documenting what happens when economic interests encounter these peoples. As she explains, the PIACI have not developed immunological defenses against diseases common to the rest of the population, which makes any forced contact a death sentence. In her book she documents several such episodes. In 1984, 50% of the Kugapakori-Nahua people died from diseases introduced by loggers and operators of Royal Dutch Shell during explorations in the Urubamba and Manu regions. In 1995, another group of loggers forced contact with the Chitonahua; the attack resulted in five indigenous deaths.

The anthropologist Stefano Varese also publicly denounced the government of President Belaúnde Terry in 1967 for having ordered the Peruvian Air Force to bomb the Matsés villages of the Yaquerana River with napalm, with logistical support from the International Petroleum Company. The press at the time presented it as a heroic act against “barbarism.”

Those who most actively deny the existence of the PIACI are, almost always, the same business leaders and politicians with economic interests in their territories. Congressman Jorge Morante, of Fuerza Popular, who has on more than one occasion denied the existence of isolated peoples, introduced in 2022 a bill that would allow a special congressional commission to nullify or extinguish existing indigenous reserves, block the creation of new ones, and revoke the official recognition of the PIACI. In 2025, congressman Juan Carlos Celis Mori, of Acción Popular, also a PIACI denialist, pushed a bill with the same objective. Both had the backing of the Coordinadora por el Desarrollo Sostenible de Loreto, an association linked to oil, logging, and construction companies.

Twenty Years of Waiting for Yavarí Mirim

On September 5, 2025, the PIACI Multisectoral Commission voted eight to five against the creation of the Yavarí Mirim Indigenous Reserve, ignoring more than 20 years of struggle and 113 new pieces of anthropological evidence, including 25 settlements, malocas, and purmas (abandoned agricultural plots) confirmed by satellite imagery, all demonstrating the presence of Matsés, Matis, Korubo, Kulina-Pano, and Flecheiro peoples in the area.

The Ministries of Energy and Mines and of Agriculture were the first to oppose it, along with the Regional Government of Loreto. “The day before, the Multisectoral Commission had the legal and moral obligation to approve the additional categorization studies to establish the Yavarí Mirim indigenous reserve, yet economic interests prevailed,” said Maritza Quispe, attorney at the Instituto de Defensa Legal. Behind this decision lies a judicial violation as well. In 2023, a ruling by the Fourth Constitutional Court of Lima ordered the creation of five indigenous reserves to protect the PIACI, but only three have been established.

The PIACI Law has not been enough to bring Yavarí Mirim into existence. Its creation is vital because it would allow the PIACI to continue living autonomously, sustaining a way of life that draws on the forest’s resources without disrupting the natural cycles of the ecosystem around them. At Sapiens, we believe it is not possible to speak of sustainability while the peoples who sustain this ecosystem are still waiting for the State to comply with its own law. The Amazon does not distinguish between those who protect it and those who ignore it. The megafires, droughts, and floods growing more frequent each year ask no one their title or ministry. The Yavarí Mirim Reserve is not a concession. It is an outstanding debt.