Francisco Lima sits in the wooden watchtower, flicking a searchlight on and off as he surveys the dark river for the commercial fishermen who pillage the rivers of the Javari Valley, a remote indigenous reserve on Brazil’s Peruvian border.

His watchtower guards rivers leading into this reserve, home to 6,000 people from eight tribes, each with its own languages and customs, and the world’s highest concentration of “non-contacted” indigenous groups. Only authorised visitors and indigenous locals are allowed to enter. But the 12-volt light that Lima, 55, is operating is unlikely to stop intruders.



“There’s a shortcut,” he says, pointing into the gloom to show how a waterway bypasses the base, which belongs to the Brazilian government’s indigenous agency, Funai. He explains how fishermen flood their canoes, immerse themselves in water, and float silently under the searchlight’s beam.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Funai base at the entrance to the Javari Valley. Access to the reserve is restricted to indigenous people

This gaggle of wooden huts perched on stilts above the river is one of four Funai bases in the Javari Valley, a wilderness of thick forest, steep ravines and corkscrewing rivers with no roads or cellphone networks – or police. Anacondas and alligators lurk in Javari’s rivers; snakes, jaguars and scorpions roam its forests; monkeys screech in its trees; and it has a lush, tangled beauty mankind has yet to spoil.

For more than a decade after the reserve was set up in 1998, its 16 uncontacted indigenous tribes were among the best protected in Brazil. Yet today it is invaded on multiple fronts, leaving its isolated groups – who hunt with bows and arrows or blow-pipes, and avoid contact with modern society – at risk. Contact with outsiders can be deadly for these groups, who lack immunity to diseases like flu.

“The vulnerability of these peoples is growing,” Beto Marubo, a Javari indigenous leader, told the United Nations permanent forum on indigenous issues in New York in April. “There is no effective protection.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the Korubo tribe

Indigenous leaders and Funai staff say the conservative government of President Michel Temer is deliberately starving the agency of resources to appease a powerful agribusiness lobby. “Michel Temer wants to end indigenous lands,” says João Gomes Kanamari, 49, a member of the reserve’s Kanamari tribe. “We have a lot of wood. We have a lot of gold and mining resources.”

At the Funai base in Atalaia do Norte, the town nearest the reserve, telephones are cut off and the internet has stopped working. Contracts for fuel and other supplies are being wound up amid rumours it will close. “When you weaken the apparatus, it does not work,” says Bruno Pereira, a Funai official who works with isolated and recently contacted indigenous people here.

Deep inside Javari Valley, fishing teams haul away up to half a tonne of pirarucu fish and 700 turtles – both protected species – in one trip and hunt prey on land, depriving isolated groups of valuable food sources.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Uncontacted tribespeople in the Javari Valley. Campaigners worry that they now have little protection against the hunters and miners who encroach on their land. Photograph: Gleison Miranda/Funai/AFP/Getty Images

Illegal gold mining dredgers pollute rivers with mercury in its eastern regions. Cattle farmers are encroaching from the south. Narcotics flow down the Solimões River near its northern borders – 776kg of cocaine were seized last October after a gunfight.

The Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley has asked the Norwegian government for funding. “These invasions are going to regions where the isolated live,” says Paulo da Silva, its coordinator. “We are there with folded arms, and we can’t do anything.”

Following an invitation from his organisation, Guardian reporters travelled by open-top boat to villages deep inside Javari with a Funai team and indigenous locals, before trekking into the forest to track the movements of an isolated group – a journey of some 1,020km. The team would investigate reported sightings by Marubo villagers of the non-contacted tribe near a tiny, remote hamlet called São Joaquim.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Expedition leader Bruno Pereira talks to his team about the route, and security measures during the trek

Just outside the reserve, Pereira, leading the expedition, points out a team of commercial fishermen. Three wooden boats and a group of canoes lie moored in the water beside a circular green net for newborn Aruanã fish, trafficked as ornamental pets.

Fishermen have been threatening the Korubo tribe, who live hours into the reserve, in the riverside village of Vuku Maë. Naked, smeared in the red juice of urucum seeds or wearing scraps of clothing, they sit on logs under a thatched roof as children and tiny pet monkeys scamper around. They say incursions are increasing.

Just that morning, four fishermen had fired over the heads of three Korubo children to warn them away.

“We worry a lot about how we can fish,” says Txitxopi, a village chief. “We are scared.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Xuxu Korubo, of the Korubo tribe

Xuxu Korubo knows how vulnerable isolated indigenous people are – he himself lived wild in the forest until 2015, when his group was contacted.

“There were lots of fights with fishermen,” Xuxu says, concerned for his three brothers who still live in the forest with another non-contacted group. “They do not know that Funai and fishermen are different – for them it’s all the same,” he says.

Javari’s forests swarmed with loggers and settlers but outsiders were expelled when it became an indigenous reserve in 1998. International money helped Funai maintain regular patrols that have largely petered out.

A Funai team seized 700 turtles and half a tonne of pirarucu fish from a fishing team last December. But they were working with local police – a rare event – and even as they conducted the seizure, other fishing canoes sailed by, says Gustavo de Souza, Funai’s local coordinator. He lacks staff and resources to police the area, he says. Months earlier, a Funai team were shot at by another group of fishermen. Agency staff are not normally armed, nor do they have clear rules on arrests.

“It is dangerous to go after fishermen or hunters who are armed and in teams of six people,” de Souza says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marubo children at Rio Novo: (from left) Kai, Metsis and Vena

Funai’s budgets were falling even before President Temer took office in 2016. He decimated what was left and froze demarcations of new reserves. Funai’s budget to protect indigenous lands – which represents 13% of Brazilian territory – and demarcate new ones last year was just £3.8m, less than a third of its 2013 value, and it spent just £380,000 on protecting the Javari Valley. In contrast, Brazil spent £60m on housing allowances for well-paid judges in 2017, even those with their own homes.

“There is a political group in Brazil that want to weaken Funai,” de Souza says. “[Then] they can more easily exploit these territories.”

Such concerns meet little sympathy in Atalaia do Norte, where the president of the local fishermen’s association, Roberto da Costa, 47, says the reserve is too big. “It is a lot of land for few indigenous,” he says, adding that fishing is one of the few incomes in this impoverished region.

“At times [fishermen] might enter the indigenous land because they need to, their family needs it,” he says. “There are a lot of fish there.”

At the fish market in Leticia, just across the Colombian border, stallholders openly sell pirarucu they say is from Brazil – where it can only legally be caught from nurseries – and hand over the cellphone number of a man who offers to sell live baby Aruanã fish for 50p each. A male fish can keep up to 200 in its mouth.

At a meeting in the Rio Novo village’s wooden schoolhouse, far inside the reserve, Marubo villagers express anger and frustration over the agency’s failure to prevent fishermen entering their area, and talk about their fears for isolated “relatives” – as they call them.

“Many fishermen enter and take our riches,” says Alderney Marubo, 45, the village teacher. “We want to supervise our own rivers.” His brother Daniel, 50, who works at the health post, asks for a boat and outboard motor to do so. “It’s our land,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the Funai expedition team head down the Rio Ituí, inside the Javari Valley reserve

Given GPS and land management training, Bruno Pereira argues, indigenous people could do much more – as they are in other Amazon states like Pará, where the Munduruku tribe mapped their own land to pressurise a stalled demarcation process. “We have to empower them,” Pereira says. He supports more coordination between Funai, police and Brazil’s environment agency, tougher penalties for those invading the reserve and more money to protect it.

The indigenous association’s Paulo da Silva says that the people of the Javari Valley should develop a more active role in the management of their own territories. He says 36 tribespeople recently attended a 10-day workshop held by a non-profit organisation where they learned to use GPS and other mapping tools, and heard how indigenous people from other areas monitored their land. This was, da Silva says, a beginning.