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The death of Tanaru, the last member of an uncontacted group in the Amazon, raises questions about ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people, justice and the future of ancestral lands
For at least 26 years a man known as Tanaru lived alone in a small forest in the south-western Brazilian Amazon, moving around his territory, building several houses, planting crops and hunting. He also dug large, mysterious holes inside his homes.
When a team from the National Indigenous Peoples Foundation (Funai) came across him in 1996, he resisted contact, aiming an arrow at them through a gap in his palm shelter, a scene captured in the 2009 documentary Corumbiara. In 2007, Funai officials made another attempt at contact. Again Tanaru repelled it, leaving one man with a bad arrow wound.
He lived undisturbed for another 15 years as the environmental destruction continued around him in Rondônia, one of Brazil’s most deforested Amazonian states. Some called him the “man of the hole” without knowing why he dug the holes.
“I don’t doubt the holes were linked to his spiritual world,” says Altair Algayer, a Funai agent who spent decades protecting Tanaru and his forest territory.
In 2022, Tanaru lay down in his hammock and died; Algayer was the one who found him. His death, confirming the extinction of his people, made the future of his 8,000 hectares (19,800 acres) of rainforest contentious. Local lawyers argue against demarcating it as Indigenous land, citing a lack of native population. Government prosecutors insist the territory was historically occupied, so should be protected despite not having Indigenous people left in it. The dispute highlights the complexity surrounding the fight for Indigenous land rights, the impact of historical atrocities, and the ongoing risk to uncontacted people (isolados) in the Amazon.
While Tanaru was alive Brazilian justice enforced temporary-use restrictions to protect the land, typically precursors to a permanent demarcation of territory for isolados. However, further steps were never taken. The use restrictions became invalid with Tanaru’s death.
Sandro Salonski, a lawyer representing non-Indigenous individuals holding title to the area, says the protection was excessive and “became an instrument of governmental abuse”.
In response to a Guardian request for comment, he wrote: “Discussing the demarcation of an area devoid of Indigenous population is entirely unjustifiable and is not provided for in our federal constitution.”
Federal public prosecutor Daniel Luis Dalberto disagrees and is leading a court action to formalise the area as Indigenous land.
“This territory should have been demarcated a long time ago. Tanaru’s death doesn’t change the fact that Indigenous people occupied this land since time immemorial and it therefore belongs to the union,” he says in a public civil action.
Under Brazil’s constitution, Indigenous peoples have exclusive rights to their lands, formally owned by the federal government. Salonski refers to the dead man as “the only survivor of the Tanaru people,” implicitly acknowledging that the land was occupied by a people at the time those he represents were granted title. Indigenous rights advocates fear that leaving the area undemarcated equates to a decision to greenlight the area’s deforestation, which has profound implications, including putting Indigenous people’s lives at risk.
A century of massacres, slavery, forced relocation and introduced diseases eliminated many Amazonian peoples and winnowed the Tanaru to a single man. Atrocities of the rubber boom in the western Amazon were documented by Roger Casement, sent by the British government to investigate the Putumayo region in 1910-11. In 1919, a letter from an agent with the Indian Protection Service reported that men working for a rubber boss in Rondônia “slaughtered 72 men and many women and children and left in complete misery 63 women and children who fled to our post.” The invaders burned six malocas – a type of communal housing – and all the people’s crops.
New waves of white settlers and ranchers were encouraged to take the forest from its inhabitants during the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. People were poisoned, intentionally given smallpox, massacred in village raids, and sometimes pursued from helicopters, according to various accounts, including the bombshell 1967 Figueiredo report.
In the late 80s, Algayer located evidence of the people whose suspected massacre by an incoming rancher left Tanaru the sole survivor. Algayer discovered a large dwelling with an oversized hole, “as if they had taken several holes and lined them up so they made one big one”.
“There were also numerous holes in the vicinity – 14 of them – and more individuals on that farm,” Algayer says. “We found crops planted. So it was clear to me that there was a group, not just one person fleeing and hiding.”
Fábio Ribeiro, executive coordinator of the Observatory of the Human Rights of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples , says Funai failed to formalise the Tanaru’s land for 26 years. Now that it is depopulated, it has become a complicated, unprecedented case.
“Who will be ‘rewarded’ for the disappearance of those people?” asks Ribeiro. “It’s very clear the land was occupied. People lived there and suffered a massacre. There’s no doubt.”
Ribeiro is in charge of the technical report that would provide the basis for protecting the Tanaru’s forest. It would be the first time, he says, a territory is protected as a measure of reparation for the murderous destruction of an Indigenous population rather than to permit a living people to thrive.
A few hundred kilometres north, a similar situation has occured in the 243,000-hectare (600,000-acre) Piripkura territory. In 1984, João Lobato confirmed the presence of isolados. In 1989, Funai agent Jair Candor encountered the last two Piripkura living in the forest.
Lobato had gathered accounts indicating a dozen or so isolados were in the vicinity in previous years. Now, there were just two men.
Candor was told about one event, presumed to have taken place in the 1970s, that had pushed the Piripkura to the brink. They were crossing a river, using a canoe to ferry small groups at a time. Land grabbers intercepted the craft on its way back for more passengers. Although some of the waiting Piripkura managed to flee into the jungle, the intruders assembled the rest on the riverbank and cut their throats.
Such killings were routine during that period, says Candor. “The Indigenous [person] was seen as a beast in human form.”
As in the Tanaru case, the process of the Piripkura territory’s demarcation has been bogged down for years. Today, the older of the two Piripkura survivors lives in a hut at the edge of the forest. The younger roams the woods. Candor last found one of his huts about a year ago.
Recently, his team apprehended loggers inside the Piripkura territory. Body-cam video showed Funai agents in the forest ordering chainsaw operators to the ground. They confiscated equipment and expelled the invaders from the domain. The loggers were back 10 days later. The land was acquired by a process in which lots are fraudulently registered and then consolidated into holdings that extend for hundreds of thousands of hectares.
Piripkura lands are “owned” under this system by several wealthy families. A single family claims nearly half of it. Demarcation would extinguish those ownerships. On the other hand, the end of the Piripkura people could remove roadblocks to clearing the forest.
Candor says demarcating Indigenous territory with no Indigenous people left in it is a way to counter the idea that ethnic cleansing is still rewarded with land rights. “It has to be done to remember them,” he says.
Beyond Piripkura and Tanaru, there are other lands where the same drama could unfold, such as the Pardo River Kawahiva territory, where 35-40 people live in 411,000 hectares (1m acres) of undemarcated land.
So first, says Fabio Ribeiro, the isolados must be proven to exist. “There are 114 different isolated groups reported, 85 of which Funai has not managed to investigate systematically to confirm their existence. That is a lot. What’s happening in those areas? No one knows,” he says.
Brazil has a policy against establishing contact with isolados. Yet, to demonstrate that there is a people to avoid contact with, someone has to get close enough to photograph huts, artefacts or other signs proving their existence. Funai personnel and former agents emphasise the drastic lack of staffing, budget and training to perform this delicate work.
Responding to a petition by the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), in November 2023 Brazil’s supreme court ordered Funai to bolster its protection of isolated peoples and Indigenous territories. The court asked the agency to provide the rationales for the possible boundary of the Tanaru and Piripkura areas and a schedule for demarcation of the Pardo River Kawahiva’s forest, plus the development of budgets, staffing plans and a schedule for verifying unconfirmed peoples.
Progress has been slow. In May, Edson Fachin, the judge overseeing the action, issued a one-month deadline for a plan of action. It is still in progress. On 16 October, he acknowledged incremental advances in some areas. He published another timeline for the outstanding items, requiring completion of Funai’s plan for isolated peoples and milestones on specific territories within two more months.
This piece is published in conjunction with O Globo. John Reid is the co-author of Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet. Daniel Biasetto is the content editor at the Brazilian daily O Globo. They were supported on this series by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
Brazil’s mysterious ‘man of the hole’ is dead. Should his land remain protected?
