The authorities presume that the man spent twenty-six years alone to wander in the jungle after the slow disappearance of the members of his community, already very small, in the mid-1990s.
Le Monde with AFP
He was known as the last survivor of an indigenous people not contacted and nicknamed Indian Tanaru or Indio Do Buraco (“Indian hole”), because of his habit of digging deep holes in the huts where he lived.
This man who had lived in voluntary isolation for almost three decades in Aboriginal territory in Tanaru, an area of an area of 8,000 hectares in the state of Rondonia, in the Brazilian Amazon on the border with Bolivia, was Found dead on August 23, the Funai, the Brazilian government agency for native affairs, announced. In 2018, La Funai had published images of a
According to the NGO Survival , the Tanaru indigenous land is an island of jungle surrounded by large cattle farms, in one of the most dangerous regions of Brazil, mainly due to illegal mining and deforestation.
The authorities did not indicate the age of man or the cause of his death, but they said they had detected “no sign of violence or struggle”. “Everything indicates that the death is due to natural causes,” said the funai in a press release, adding that he had found no indication of other people on the scene.
The authorities presume that man spent twenty-six years alone to wander in the jungle after the slow disappearance of members of his community, already very small, in the mid-1990s, when loggers and breeders monopolized land surrounding.
800,000 natives in the face of the exploitation of resources
“With his death, this is the end of the genocide of this native people,” said Fiona Watson, research director in Survival, who had visited the Tanaru territory in 2004. “It was a real genocide, the ‘Deliberate elimination of an entire people by livestock breeders eager for land and wealth, “she said.
According to the Funai, the presence of isolated native groups in Brazil, without contact with the rest of the world, was detected in 114 places. An assessment which varies however according to the reports. According to the 2010 census, more than 800,000 people declare themselves natives in Brazil, a huge country of 212 million inhabitants.
More than half of these natives live in Amazon and many are threatened by illegal and large -scale exploitation of natural resources on which they depend for their survival.