- Isolated peoples and forests in the Kakataibo Extremo Norte area of the Peruvian Amazon are under threat from illegal loggers, drug traffickers, the construction of illegal roads, and multiple forestry concessions.
- Indigenous leaders and organizations have sought formal recognition for the area as an Indigenous reserve since 2021, but the Ministry of Culture rejected the application in 2023 because it relates to isolated Kakataibo people who are already recognized by the Peruvian state and receive protections in a nearby reserve.
- Sources told Mongabay that threats to the area’s isolated groups are increasing, exposing them to significant risk due to their extreme vulnerability.
- To apply for a new reserve, the Ministry of Culture said organizations should carry out a new study on the presence of isolated peoples in the region, but sources say studies have already been done and that they lack the finance to do them again.
An unprotected area in Peru’s Amazon, where Indigenous people live in voluntary isolation, sits in a growing sea of forestry concessions, illegal roads, illegal loggers and drug traffickers, according to maps and confidential reports seen by Mongabay. Indigenous leaders and national organizations are calling the area Kakataibo Extremo Norte, or Kakataibo Extreme North.
Julio Cusurichi, a Shipibo-Conibo leader and political coordinator of the PIACI (Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact) program of AIDESEP, Peru’s national Indigenous rights organization, told Mongabay that the forests and isolated people in this area face serious threats. “There are loggers there, there are illicit activities,” he said in an interview. “It is a very worrying issue. The fact that these illegal activities are linked to roads is particularly concerning.”
Indigenous leaders and organizations have sought formal recognition of Kakataibo Extremo Norte from the Peruvian state since 2021.
In 2023, however, the Ministry of Culture rejected the application, according to a confidential technical report seen by Mongabay, because it relates to the isolated Kakataibo people. The report said the Kakataibo people are already recognized by the Peruvian state and therefore measures and mechanisms for the protection of their rights have already been established.
Kakataibo Extremo Norte sits above the Kakataibo North and South Indigenous Reserve (RIKNS), established in 2021 to protect groups of Kakataibo people who live in voluntary isolation. This latter reserve covers 148,997 hectares (368,180 acres) — an area roughly twice the size of New York City — straddling the departments of Loreto, Ucayali and Huánuco.
For the safety of the peoples living in voluntary isolation, the exact size and location of the proposed Kakataibo Extremo Norte reserve’s boundaries, as well as the concessions and illegal roads inside it, are not included in this article.
Pierre Antonio Castro Rosado, an anthropologist for ORAU, the Ucayali regional branch for AIDESEP, told Mongabay by video call that without formal recognition of Kakataibo Extremo Norte, loggers will continue to extract timber, destroying the habitats of wildlife and the plant diversity that isolated people depend on to survive. These peoples are also vulnerable to the spread of disease when exposed to outsiders.
“The other issue is all the external threats that arise from this lack of protection,” Castro said. “We know that all these areas are currently being impacted by [forest] concessions; there are roads, and illegal drug trafficking routes.”
The Ministry of Culture did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment by the time this story was published.
Sources told Mongabay that Kakataibo Extremo Norte has experienced an increase in deforestation in recent years, as well as the development of illegal roads. There are also at least 15 forestry concessions within the boundary of the proposed reserve.
“These communities are highly vulnerable and any contact could lead to the death of all these people,” Cusurichi said. “The government must take action, and it isn’t doing so. It hasn’t established a system of control and monitoring. The only checkpoint is in a community called Puerto Azul, but that community is very, very far from this territorial reserve.”
An omission with ripple effects?
Researchers have reported evidence of the presence of isolated Kakataibo people across what they consider to be their traditional territory: a large area that spans the RIKNS and areas outside the recognized reserve, such as Kakataibo Extremo Norte, forest concessions, and Cordillera Azul National Park and its buffer zone.
Efforts to protect this traditional territory began in 1999, after AIDESEP received reports of uncontacted peoples in these areas. At the time, in conjunction with the Native Federation of Kakataibo Communities (FENACOKA), the NGOs presented a technical study to the Regional Directorate of Agriculture of Ucayali (DRAU), requesting the creation of an Indigenous reserve.
Studies using georeferencing, a digital mapping technique, testimonies of sightings, material remains, footprints, and other information were carried out by the NGO Institute for the Common Good (IBC) in 2002. In 2001, Cordillera Azul National Park was established. It overlapped with approximately two-thirds of the area requested by AIDESEP and FENACOKA for the territorial reserve in 1999, which covered the entire ancestral land of the isolated Kakataibo. Because of this overlap, the NGOs updated the original application and proposed the creation of two neighboring, but not contiguous, territorial zones instead.
After submitting a formal request to the Peruvian government, the second step to establish an Indigenous reserve is what’s known as a preliminary reconnaissance study (PRS), which the IBC conducted in 2016 in close collaboration with the Peruvian government. In 2018, the same organization carried out fieldwork for the additional categorization study (EAC), which collects anthropological, social and ecological data to justify the area’s categorization as a reserve and to safeguard vulnerable populations. These were formally presented to the Ministry of Culture in mid-2020 and were approved in February 2021 and decreed in July 2021.
Castro told Mongabay that the IBC found significant evidence of isolated people in the Kakataibo Extremo Norte area, but the area was not included in the application to formalize a reserve to protect the isolated people. Only the RIKNS was included and established.
“I can’t tell you why the IBC didn’t include the northernmost part, where there was considerable evidence [of isolated peoples] and was left unresolved,” Castro said. This was possibly to avoid overlapping issues, which could delay the reserve; or perhaps they didn’t want any conflicts with third parties, he said.
“I imagine that the IBC, perhaps, to not have those overlapping problems, and because the reserve is — well, the studies are voted on in a multisectoral commission — to avoid negative votes, it tried to reduce the original polygon,” Castro said. “Because since the 1990s, there are [more] rights, there are concessions, there’s the Cordillera Azul National Park, there are native communities that have also overlapped because they’ve also obtained titles over the polygon.”
Mongabay reached out to the Institute for the Common Good and the Ministry of Culture for comment, but neither responded by the time this story was published.
In December 2021, ORAU, AIDESEP and FENACOKA made the formal request to the Ministry of Culture to recognize Kakataibo Extremo Norte.
In a confidential letter seen by Mongabay, the ministry wrote in response that this application was based on information and groups included in the studies for the RIKNS application. To apply for a new reserve, the organizations should carry out a new study, it said.
“The government sent a report stating that the submitted application was invalid; that is, it didn’t receive a favorable opinion because it used information from a study for a reserve that had already been established,” Castro said. He added the organizations’ decision to use information collected as part of the process to create RIKNS seemed valid to him, “since conducting a new study is very expensive.”
“It involves going to the area, gathering information, processing it, and then presenting it to the ministry as an application,” he said. The ministry’s decision was wrong, he added, “because to this day, ORAU still hasn’t been able to find someone to directly finance it, to be able to do that study again.”
Banner image: Patches of deforested land observed from the air within the Kakataibo Indigenous Reserve. Image courtesy of AIDESEP.
Cite this article
Aimee Gabay (2026). Roads, loggers close in on an unprotected refuge for isolated Kakataibo. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-322779
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