ONE of the last tribes of Amazonian Indians who have avoided all contact with the outside world faces being wiped out by loggers and land grabbers, authorities and campaigners in Brazil have said.

Agents from the National Indian Foundation in Brazil say that they have photographed from the air isolated villages deep in the forest, which the tribe had recently deserted. These contained food, arrows and baskets — an indication that the inhabitants fled in a hurry to avoid loggers and others encroaching on their lands.

Indian tribes have been frequent victims of massacres as land grabbers seek to clear areas before tribes can register a claim to ancestral territory with the federal Government.

The tribe that the authorities are concerned about does not even have a name and its existence was only confirmed in 1987 by officials from the foundation.

They live in the Rio Pardo area of Matto Grosso state, in the southern region of the Amazon Basin. Matto Grosso means “thick forest” in Portuguese but has since been largely cleared by loggers and ranchers.

There are an estimated 50 tribes in the Amazon who have until now avoided contact with the outside world.

The foundation says a recent local court ruling lifting a protection order on the tribe’s traditional lands leaves the group with no defence against loggers and land grabbers. A local logging firm brought the case against the protection order.

“If something is not done quickly in this case it will be genocide,” said Fiona Watson, of Survival International, an organisation that works to protect the rights of indigenous groups.

“It is known that the Indians are there and now all protection has been knowingly removed from their land. Creating the conditions which could lead to genocide is characterised by the Geneva Convention, which Brazil has signed, as genocide. So by removing the protection both the local authorities and the loggers could be guilty of genocide.”

In 1996 five goldminers were convicted in a Brazilian federal court of genocide for their part in a massacre of 16 members of the Yanomami tribe along the Venezuelan border in 1993.

In March indigenous groups in the country issued a manifesto that denounced the left-wing Government of President da Silva as the worst at returning ancestral lands since the military dictatorship of 1964-85. Amnesty International says violence against Indians has increased as a result of the Government’s failure to protect them. The Government contests the Indians’ claims and says that since 2003 it has recognised 43 reservations. The Catholic Church’s Indigenous Missionary Council puts the figure at 13.

Brazil had an estimated six million indigenous people when the Portuguese arrived in 1500. Today there are 700,000 in a population of 183 million. More than half live in reservations that make up around 10 per cent of the country.

A boom in prices for South American beef, soy and timber has sparked a surge in land grabs directed against indigenous groups by ranchers and loggers in other parts of the continent as well.

Campaigners say the last South American tribe beyond the Amazon Basin to have avoided contact with the outside world is also facing destruction after the Paraguayan congress refused to create a reservation for the Ayoreo people whose land is being encroached on by ranchers and loggers.

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