Indigenous peoples isolated in the Amazon

Uncontacted peoples, also called isolated peoples or lost tribes, are communities that, by choice or circumstance, lived in total isolation or without significant contact with the surrounding society. Few people have remained totally unaware of the dominant civilization. Indigenous rights activists demand that such groups be left isolated, respecting their right to self-determination.

  Most isolated peoples are located in dense forest areas in South America and New Guinea, with some groups still in the Andaman Islands, India. The discovery of the existence of these people usually happens after encounters, sometimes violent, with neighboring tribes or, incidentally, during aerial filming. As isolated tribes have low immunity to common diseases, 50% to 80% of their members may fall ill and die soon after first contact.


Indians seeing the "white man" begin to attack with flexes.

In recent years, adventure tourism operators have adopted the controversial practice of organizing tours that include finding isolated tribes] The first contact with the outside world is usually a harbinger of disaster for isolated tribes. In 2006, a BBC documentary presented a controversial tour operator specializing in escorted tours for the "discovery" of uncontacted peoples in West Papua.

The NGO Survival International estimates that there are 107 uncontacted tribes in the world.


Most are in West Papua (part of the island of New Guinea, belonging to Indonesia), and in the Amazon (including Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil). In Brazil, these groups live mainly along the Boia River, but they go to Maranhão, home to the Awá, one of the last nomadic tribes of the Americas. It is also estimated that there are still hundreds of Totobiegosode (a subgroup of Ayoreo) isolated, wandering in the Paraguayan Chaco, threatened by tractors of large agricultural enterprises, which reduce all vegetation to pasture. In one of the Andamão Islands, India, sentineleses are considered the most isolated people on the planet, living in conditions analogous to those of the Palaeolithic. There would be about 250 people.