Ecuador's Last Uncontacted Tribes Face the Familiar Promise of Jungle Oil

[Potoooooooo]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/ec...tribes-and-the-familiar-promise-of-jungle-oil
I’ve been floating on a canoe for an hour when Luis Ahua taps my shoulder and points to the bank of the Tiputini River, deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

“Footprints,” he says, pointing to a small break in the treeline. Days earlier, a guide in a scientific refuge in the same forest had shown me jaguar tracks. But these were human footprints.

“Are you scared of them?” I asked him.

“No,” he told me. “Our tribe knows about violence. I can tell you about violence.”

What happened to the Huaorani people living in Guiyero, the village I'm visiting, was so textbook-predictable that researchers have been able to write and publish papers on how similar it was to what happened to dozens of communities of indigenous people in dozens of countries.

 

[Derec]

I do not see why the "uncontacted" (really a misnomer as they do have some contact with outside world, usually at the point of a spear but still) tribes should have any special legal privilege. Especially not when they are quite violent like the Taromenane. The article recounts how they killed an elderly man and his wife for example because their tribe didn't prevent the oil drilling.
I did find this bit quite funny:

They told him that they were scared to cross the road near Guiyero, that they were afraid of cars. Rather than cross the 20-foot-wide gravel expanse, they told him that they walked five days around the edge of the road instead of crossing it.

But the other group, the contacted Huoarani are a bunch of isolationist ingrates and hardly better. They want to attack an oil rig and kill oil workers despite everything given them - electricity, engines, education, western clothing, etc. Reminds me of "what have the Romans ever done for us".