Mashco Piro Tribe:
The Mashco Piro tribe, an uncontacted group in the Peruvian Amazon, has been sighted near a village, raising concerns about logging activities encroaching on their territory.
- The Mashco-Piro, or Mascho Piro, also known as the Cujareño people and Nomole, are an indigenous tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers who inhabit the remote regions of the Amazon rainforest.
- They live deep in the rainforests of southeast Peru close to the border with Brazil and Bolivia.
- They are believed to have fled into the recesses of the jungle during the Amazon Rubber Boom in the late 1800s, a time of enslavement and death for many tribes.
- They live on the banks of the Las Piedras River in the Alto Purús National Park in huts constructed of palm leaf. In the rainy season, they retreat to huts in the rain forest.
- Their movements across their territory are highly dynamic, dictated by dry and rainy seasons.
- They speak a dialect of the Piro language.
- Members of the tribe wear very little clothing.
- Men, women, and children alike wear only a yellowish-brown cloth above the waist and perhaps arm and leg bands of the same color.
- They have medium stature and an athletic build.
- All have straight black hair worn shoulder length or longer.
- Men probably hunt with the weapons they have been seen carrying, such as bows and arrows, as well as spears.
- Peru’s government has forbidden all contact with the Mashco Piro, fearing the spread of a disease among the population to which it has no immunity.
