The Log | School News
Into the Heart of the Amazon A ParksWatch
Investigation of Illegal Logging in Peru's Alto Purús
National Park
by Chris Fagan
It has been raining for over an hour and
I sit hunched over with my head in my hands. Soaking wet and
shivering, I watch the rain run off my head into the bloody
water collecting in the bottom of our wooden dugout canoe.
The source of the blood is an enormous catfish, upwards of
60 pounds I estimate, lying lifeless in the bow. It was speared
this morning by Manúel, one of the Sharanahua indigenous men
from a nearby village that we’ve hired as our guides.
Despite my discomfort, the rain has made
me feel optimistic about the long journey that lies ahead.
It’s the first heavy rain we’ve had since leaving Puerto Esperanza
10 days ago, and hopefully it marks the start of the rainy
season and a rising river. With any luck, we’ll be able to
continue traveling upstream for two more days before low water
forces us to finish the journey on foot.
• • •
It was October 2004, and we were deep within
Peru’s Alto Purús Reserved Zone, a vast 2.7 million hectare
rainforest wilderness in one of the most remote and poorly
explored regions of southeastern Peru. Concerned with reports
of loggers illegally extracting bigleaf mahogany (Swietenia
macrophylla) from the reserve, the Ucayali state government
asked for ParksWatch’s help. Since 2000, ParksWatch, a program
of Duke’s Nicholas School’s Center
for Tropical Conservation, has conducted threat assessments
in more than 80 protected areas throughout Central and South
America, and is considered to have great expertise on Peru’s
protected areas. By documenting the illegal logging and disseminating
the information, we hoped to catalyze actions to mitigate
the threat and strengthen the protected area. Our intention
was to traverse the reserve by boat and on foot to visit the
supposed logging sites.
In addition, at the time of the investigation,
the Peruvian government was dukenvironment 16 considering
a new conservation category for the reserved zone, and we
also were hopeful that our findings would support a pending
proposal to elevate the Alto Purús to national park status,
giving it the strictest protection possible under Peruvian
law.
The Alto Purús Reserved Zone is one of the most
important and best-preserved refuges for endemic and globally
endangered species in all of Amazonia, and throughout our
journey we were constantly reminded of the remarkable biodiversity
that surrounds us.
One afternoon we watched a magnificent jaguar,
pregnant and lethargic, sunning herself on the riverbank.
Unaccustomed to humans, she sat unperturbed as our canoe,
its motor coughing and sputtering, approached to within 30
feet of her before she sauntered into the forest. Each morning
we were woken before dawn by bands of howler monkeys whose
guttural, dinosaurlike roars seemed to literally shake our
tents. At sunset, we watched the sky become as busy as a city
street during rush hour with pairs of blue and yellow and
scarlet macaws crisscrossing on their way to roost in the
receding sunlight. One evening we counted more than 40 macaws
fly over the beach where we were camped.
But perhaps even more remarkable than its biodiversity
is the reserve’s importance as the home for some of the last
indigenous people living in voluntary isolation on Earth.
The Mashco-Piro, locally referred to as simply the Mashco,
are the larger of at least two distinct tribes of these uncontacted
indigenous people that use the reserve on their seasonal migration.
These hunters and gatherers continue to resist modern society
despite ever-increasing encroachment into their territory
by missionaries, drug traffickers and, more recently, loggers.
As stands of commercially viable mahogany become
increasingly rare throughout the Amazon, the still-lawless
frontier that is the Alto Purús harbors one of the largest
remaining populations of mahogany in Peru, has become a hot-spot
for illicit logging. In addition to threatening the overall
viability of the reserve, the illegal loggers threaten the
survival of the Mashco, whose immune systems are susceptible
to the unfamiliar viruses brought by outsiders.
page 1 | 2
| 3 |
