Background briefings
Making Contact
Although most invasions of uncontacted tribes’ lands are prompted by the desire of loggers, oil companies, cattle ranchers and so forth to take the tribes’ lands and resources, governments sometimes try to make contact for their own reasons.
Barefoot India, Andaman Islands
Barefoot is a travel company with resorts in the Andaman Islands. Its guests have apparently included Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet. Barefoot opened a new resort close to the islands' Jarawa reserve, set up to protect the recently contacted ...
CO3
CO3 is a London-based ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) consultancy which represents multinational corporations including mining company Vedanta Resources. Survival has called on CO3 to resign its account with Vedanta over the mining company...
Perupetro - Peruvian national oil firm
Perupetro contracts oil and gas companies to work in Peru. To date, 72% of the Peruvian Amazon has been opened up to companies. Some of these regions are home to vulnerable uncontacted tribes. A loophole in Peruvian law explicitly allows compani...
Anil Agarwal - Chairman of Vedanta Resources
Anil Agarwal, Chairman and founder of Vedanta Resources, has worked his way up from scrap-metal dealer to billionaire with a home in London’s Mayfair and another in Mumbai. The tricks to his trade have been to buy cheap second-hand industrial pl...
Vedanta Resources
Vedanta Resources, a British company, lost a battle to dig an open-pit bauxite mine on Niyamgiri mountain in India. The mine would have destroyed the forests on which the tribal Dongria Kondh people depend and wreck the lives of thousands of othe...
Perenco - Oil company
Perenco is a Anglo-French company which has a huge oil project in Peru’s northern Amazon. This is an area inhabited by at least two vulnerable uncontacted tribes who may well be destroyed by Perenco’s work there. One of the groups is believed to...
Belo Monte dam
A series of mega dams is being built as a central part of Brazil’s Accelerated Growth Programme, which aims to stimulate the country’s economic growth by building a huge infrastructure of roads and dams, mainly in the Amazon region. The size of t...
Madeira River dams
A series of mega dams is being built as a central part of Brazil’s Accelerated Growth Programme, which aims to stimulate the country’s economic growth by building a huge infrastructure of roads and dams, mainly in the Amazon region. The size of th...
Niyamgiri Hills, India
The Niyamgiri Hills form a mountain range in the Eastern Indian state of Orissa. They are home to more than 8,000 of the Dongria Kondh people, whose lifestyle and religion have helped nurture the area’s dense forests and unusually rich wildlife....
Shell - oil & gas company
Shell explored for oil in a remote part of the south-east Peruvian Amazon in the early 1980s. The centre of operations was along the River Urubamba, which runs past the famous Inca ruin of Machu Picchu and is a major tributary of the mighty River...
Wilderness Safaris
Wilderness Safaris is a tourism company with lodges scattered throughout southern Africa. After the Botswana government closed the Bushmen’s only water borehole and forced them from their land, Wilderness Safaris opened a tourist lodge on their ...