Background briefings

Making Contact

Although most invasions of uncontacted tribes’ lands are prompted by the desire of loggers, oil companies, cattle ranchers and so forth to take the tribes’ lands and resources, governments sometimes try to make contact for their own reasons.

Swine flu

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are known to have contracted swine flu; more than a thousand have died from the virus. The WHO has declared a global flu pandemic. Tribal peoples are particularly vulnerable to swine flu. Those th...

Barefoot India, Andaman Islands

Barefoot is a travel company with resorts in the Andaman Islands. Its guests have apparently included Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet. Barefoot opened a new resort close to the islands' Jarawa reserve, set up to protect the recently contacted ...

Petrobras - Brazilian national oil firm

Brazilian state oil company Petrobras has a contract to explore for oil in the south-east of Peru in an area inhabited by the uncontacted Murunahua (or Chitonahua) tribe. This is despite the fact that Brazilian government policy is not to make c...

CO3

CO3 is a London-based ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) consultancy which represents multinational corporations including mining company Vedanta Resources. Survival has called on CO3 to resign its account with Vedanta over the mining company...

Anil Agarwal - Chairman of Vedanta Resources

Anil Agarwal, Chairman and founder of Vedanta Resources, has worked his way up from scrap-metal dealer to billionaire with a home in London’s Mayfair and another in Mumbai. The tricks to his trade have been to buy cheap second-hand industrial pl...

Perupetro - Peruvian national oil firm

Perupetro contracts oil and gas companies to work in Peru. To date, 72% of the Peruvian Amazon has been opened up to companies. Some of these regions are home to vulnerable uncontacted tribes. A loophole in Peruvian law explicitly allows compani...

Dams

Dam construction is a menace to tribal peoples across the world. Once-stable river basins become flooded and river beds diverted as governments look for ways to increase electricity output. Local people usually suffer most, being forced off thei...

Perenco - Oil company

Perenco is a Anglo-French company which has a huge oil project in Peru’s northern Amazon. This is an area inhabited by at least two vulnerable uncontacted tribes who may well be destroyed by Perenco’s work there. One of the groups is believed to...

Vedanta Resources

Vedanta Resources, a British company, lost a battle to dig an open-pit bauxite mine on Niyamgiri mountain in India. The mine would have destroyed the forests on which the tribal Dongria Kondh people depend and wreck the lives of thousands of othe...

Belo Monte dam

A series of mega dams is being built as a central part of Brazil’s Accelerated Growth Programme, which aims to stimulate the country’s economic growth by building a huge infrastructure of roads and dams, mainly in the Amazon region. The size of t...