A worsening convergence of drought driven by climate change, epidemic disease, and state neglect is creating a severe health emergency for the Indigenous Matsés people in the Peruvian Amazon.
Mongabay staff writer Aimee Gabay traveled to Matsés territory to investigate the environmental threats to the region. Instead, she found Matsés communities suffering from severe outbreaks of malaria and hepatitis B, she tells host Mike DiGirolamo in a recent episode of the Mongabay Newscast.
“When I arrived, interview after interview, I was asking questions about environmental threats, and people were like, ‘Well, people are dying on the streets’,” Gabay says. “And it got to the point where I was like I’m asking the wrong questions here.”
According to Gabay, the Matsés officially initiated contact with evangelical missionaries in 1969 to escape escalating violence from rubber tappers, loggers and military bombardments. However, the contact exposed them to infectious diseases. Roberto Necca Tumio Unan, a Matsés elder born before contact was initiated, told Gabay that entire families began dying shortly after contact from diseases previously unknown to them.
“They don’t have the immunological defenses to be able to fight these diseases that maybe, for us, we are constantly exposed to,” Gabay says.
Now, the health crisis is compounded by droughts in the Amazon. Low river levels restrict boat navigation, the primary transit route in the roadless region, preventing healthcare workers from entering remote villages and blocking sick villagers from reaching medical care.
Matsés chief Leo Chuma Teca Beso told Gabay that he traveled to Iquitos in northeastern Peru and capital Lima to plead for state intervention, reporting that sick community members are dying on streets due to advanced hepatitis B complications such as cirrhosis. While Peru’s Ministry of Health (MINSA) previously reported zero hepatitis B deaths among the Matsés, chief Leo said this figure reflects a lack of testing. Civil society health brigades have only screened around 20% of the population so far, identifying 17 hepatitis B cases, according to the health ministry.
Gabay says that MINSA officials cited budget constraints and geographic remoteness as reasons for the delays in healthcare aid and support.
The Matsés territory lies within the 16-million-hectare (40-million-acre) Yavari-Tapiche territorial corridor, where several other Indigenous groups live in isolation. Gabay says if the Indigenous people are forced to move owing to disease or drought, it increases the risk of them encountering illegal oil, logging and mining operations that could expose them to diseases.
“The moment there is an unhealthy environment, that automatically leads to more disease,” Gabay says.
Listen to the full conversation with Aimee Gabay here.
Banner image: The Matsés depend on rivers for transport. The closest village, Colonia Angamos, can take up to two days to reach from some of the furthest communities and receives flights only twice a week. Image by Aimee Gabay/Mongabay.
