The lost Amazon tribe photographed on the Brazil-Peru border is not a newly discovered tribe. The hoax perpetrated by environmentalists prompted this observation:
Even in an age when cynical sleuths can hyper-analyze stories for truth and accuracy, the occasional hoax still slips through the cracks. Such was the case with a so-called “lost Amazon tribe.”
Astonishing. Those who seek the truth are cynical. They hyper-analyze. And only an “occasional” hoax still slips through. It didn’t take long to expose this hoax, unless you compare it to the forged documents used by Dan Rather to tar President Bush on 60 Minutes. That hoax was exposed within the hour, although Rather still stands by it as “fake but accurate.” And “occasional”? Doctored photographs are driving the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The much-hyped Haditha story has recently fallen apart.
The cynics in these instances are not the ones who expose the hoax, but the journalists who find fault with the public for not swallowing their narrative hook, line and sinker.
The Guardian has the full story of the lost tribe hoax. Carlos Meirelles, who took the photo, works the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai. Funai has known about this tribe for decades. But it teamed up with Survival International, an environmental group, to publish the photos in order to influence logging policy. According to Mereilles, “Alan García [the President of Peru] declared recently that the isolated Indians were a creation in the imagination of environmentalists and anthropologists – now we have the pictures.”
[Survival International] defended the disturbance of the tribe saying that, since the images had been released, it had forced neighbouring
Now that Meirelles has harassed the tribe (they reportedly flee their homes when buzzed by aircraft) and made it famous (probably prompting others to seek it out), he takes a high moral tone on the need to leave the tribe undisturbed.
[H]e is determined to keep the tribe’s location secret – even under torture, he says. “They can decide when they want contact, not me or anyone else.”
After using the tribe to serve his own narrow agenda, he is determined that nobody else do the same. How laudable.
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