A Dangerous Encounter with an Isolated Amazon Tribe

The Mashco Piro tribe is one of the last remaining groups to survive only by hunting and gathering with tools that its members make themselves. Residing deep in the Amazon rain forest, they are extremely isolated and, for nearly a century, have rarely been seen by outsiders. Recently, however, there have been encounters with the outside world—and members of the Mashco Piro have killed two people. In this segment, the New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson journeys up the Madre de Dios River to a remote contact point where government anthropologists are trying to establish relations with the Mashco Piro. They are charged with protecting the tribe from potentially fatal contact with drug traffickers, loggers, and epidemic diseases, and with preventing further violence.

This segment originally aired on September 30, 2016