Short read: ‘Let Them Live In Peace’: The Fight for Uncontacted Amazon People

Those who have read Jared Diamond’s remarkable book “Guns, Germs & Steel” would know that the way the European colonialists wiped out the Native Indians in South America was more by exporting new diseases from Europe to the New World than through actual shooting. The Native Indians’ bodies could not cope with these new diseases from more densely populated countries and perished in large numbers. Remarkably however, in the remote Amazonian forests of Brazil, there are still some tribes with little or no contact with the modern world. This AFP article is about these ‘uncontacted Amazon people’.

“Atxu Marima….is only around 40 but has already had many lives. Born Atxu among the Hi-Merima people, a nomadic group in the south of Amazonas state, he became Romerito (Little Romero) as a child labourer after fleeing the forest. But now to his wife and three children, he is Artur.

Until about the age of seven or eight, he lived between the Purus and Jurua rivers with his father, mother, and siblings as part of one of Brazil’s officially recognized “uncontacted” Indigenous communities….

Marima’s childhood in the Amazon had been idyllic — singing to trees to encourage them to bear fruit, families gathering to dance and racing across the forest floor with his siblings.

Until one day a jaguar attacked his father. He survived the mauling but suffered a severe head wound and began hallucinating that his children were prey – tapirs and pigs to hunt with his arrows.

His mother fled with them, leaving his father dying in his hammock above a grave they had prepared for him.

Marima never saw him again.

“My family, especially my mother, then decided to make contact with the ‘civilised’ world,” he told AFP.

It soon exposed them to diseases for which they had no defences.

“Everyone got sick and died,” he said, recalling how his mother, aunt and several brothers succumbed to what he called the flu.

Marima and four siblings were the only survivors, scattered among local families.

Renamed Romerito, his adoptive family forced him to work in “slave-like conditions” until he left around the age of 15.

He believes he is the last of the siblings still alive….

Marima now works with Brazil’s National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai), monitoring the Hi-Merima territory, which the government legally recognised in 2005.

He spoke with pride about his work preventing illegal fishing, saying those responsible try to “invade” and show “no respect for the area”.

Forest fires and deforestation pose another risk to their survival, he warned, noting that last year’s intense heat and drought endangered their homes and hunting.

“People lack the common sense to protect the Amazon rainforest,” he said.

Despite those threats, the Hi-Merima appear to have grown over the last 20 years, since incursions into their territory became illegal.

“You can see that there are kids, there are babies… they are growing and they are healthy,”…

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