Plans for a transcontinental railway cutting across the Amazon rainforest from the Atlantic to the Pacific have provoked outrage among indigenous communities and Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights. The project, backed by the Chinese government, would pass through indigenous territories and areas of exceptional biodiversity across Peru and Brazil, opening vast tracts of the Amazon to industrial exploitation, illegal mining and logging, and large-scale colonisation.
For the communities living along the proposed route, the stakes could not be higher. Ninawá Kaxinawá, an indigenous leader whose community lives near the planned line, described the project as an evil that threatens his people — a deadly danger that would put an end to the forest and the lives of those who depend on it, including uncontacted relatives whose existence depends entirely on the integrity of their territory.
It is the situation of uncontacted tribes that draws the most urgent concern. The most vulnerable societies on earth, they face potential annihilation not only from direct violence but from exposure to diseases such as flu and measles to which they have no immunity. History offers a grim precedent. When the 900km Carajás railway was built through Brazil’s north-eastern Amazon in the 1980s, it opened the territory of many tribes — including the Awá, considered the world’s most threatened tribe — to illegal loggers, cattle ranchers and settlers. Families were massacred, others succumbed to outside diseases, and more than 30% of the Awá’s central territory was deforested. Decades later, illegal loggers continue to threaten what remains. In December 2014, a group of three Awá were forced from their forest home by loggers; two are now critically ill.
The trans-Amazon railway would run across thousands of kilometres and threatens to cause devastation on an even greater scale. Survival International is calling on the Brazilian and Peruvian governments to uphold national and international laws requiring that indigenous peoples be properly consulted and give their free, prior and informed consent before projects affecting their lands proceed. Where uncontacted tribes are concerned, consultation is impossible — meaning their territories must be fully protected, without exception.
Stephen Corry, Director of Survival, was unequivocal: projects like this amount to nothing more than the theft of tribal lands, carried out in the name of progress and development. For uncontacted tribes, he said, this railroad is genocidal.
