How Organized Crime Threatens the Amazon's Uncontacted Tribes
Organized crime has become an existential threat to the uncontacted Indigenous peoples of the Amazon as illegal gold miners, drug traffickers, loggers, and poachers advance ever deeper into the world’s largest rainforest.
The Amazon basin is home to around 95% of the Indigenous people living in isolation, with an estimated 124 groups living in Brazil alone, according to a recent report by Survival International, a non-governmental organization that works with Indigenous peoples around the world. Although commonly referred to as uncontacted, all are aware of the outside world, and most have had some kind of contact with it but choose to live in isolation.
The regions with the highest concentrations of these communities have become prized territories for criminal networks and armed groups, offering access to lucrative illicit resources and opportunities to conduct operations far from the reach of authorities.
Some of these criminal actors are sophisticated and powerful armed groups, like Brazil’s Red Command (Comando Vermelho – CV) and First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC), which operate across Brazil’s Amazonian border regions, or Colombian guerrilla groups such as the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN) and dissidents of the demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC), which occupy territory encroaching on Indigenous lands in both Colombia and Venezuela.
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