Rare footage shows ‘uncontacted’ Amazon tribe whose lives are threatened by loggers

  • Spear-wielding tribesmen run from nearby tribe who are filming with a camera
  • An indigenous tribesman is seen ‘sniffing’ machete in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest 
  • Campaigners have warned that these tribes could soon be wiped out by logging

A young man is pictured holding and then sniffing his machete in the Amazon rainforest, Brazil

Rare footage of an ‘uncontacted’ tribe members hunting in the Amazon rainforest has been released. 

Environmental campaigners and NGOs have warned that the Awa tribe in Maranhao, Brazil, could be wiped out by logging.

An almost a minute-long clip shows a young man holding a machete in the rainforest.

He appears to sniff the machete blade before he looks towards the person filming him. 

Seconds later he and other members of the spear-wielding tribe run away.

Organisation Survival International claim that the tribe has been frequently attacked by loggers. 

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The man and other members of the tribe carrying spears run away, above. They can be seen with their backs turned running away through the trees, centre

Director of Survival International Stephen Corry claims that ‘only a global outcry stands between them and genocide’.

He said: ‘Loggers have already killed many of their relatives and forced others out of the forest.

‘President Bolsonaro (of Brazil) and his friends in the logging industry would like nothing more than for those who still survive to be eliminated.’

The footage was shot by a member of neighbouring indigenous tribe Guajajara in August last year, according to NGO Survival International. 

Erisvan Guajajara of Midia India, an indigenous film-making association, said: ‘We didn’t have the Awa’s permission to film, but we know that it’s important to use these images because if we don’t show them around the world, the Awa will be killed by loggers’.

Members of the Guajajara tribe belong to the Guardians of the Amazon group, which aims to protect isolated indigenous people.

While most Awa have been contacted, some are known to still live uncontacted in an area of rainforest that is being ‘rapidly destroyed’, Survival International said. 

The almost a minute-long clip shows the young man appearing to sniff the machete blade before he looks towards the person filming him

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