‘They knew that we were here’: following in the footsteps of the uncontacted Pardo River Kawahiva people

In 1999, when Jair Candor came across four huts, several hunting blinds and a fishing spot used by a previously unknown group of people, he immediately followed government policy and retreated.

Brazil’s 1988 constitution requires that such places – where uncontacted peoples or isolados are proven to be – be declared Indigenous territory and outsiders should avoid making unwanted contact with communities living there.

Twenty five years on, Candor is still fighting to have this part of the southern Amazon officially recognised on behalf of the isolated Kawahiva people, who live in the largest undemarcated Indigenous land in the Pardo River Kawahiva.

Still, amid the devastation of the rainforest, some isolados are not just resisting decline but flourishing . They have survived encroaching large-scale agriculture and logging, remaining hidden, and thriving in their ancestral forests, which are vital for global biodiversity and carbon storage.

A map showing Indigenous territories around Brazil and highlighting the Pardo River Kawahiva.

Candor, 64, is the longest-serving expert on protecting isolated peoples within Brazil’s National Indigenous Peoples Foundation (Funai), the agency in charge of their protection. He first came to the Amazon when he was six, at a time when Brazil’s military leaders encouraged migrants to settle and deforest the region. He left school young and has never been far from the forest since.

His first jobs were in environmentally destructive industries, including mining and rubber tapping. Then, he was asked to be a boat pilot for Funai. The white-haired, bearded veteran is now a man sure of his cause.

At the Funai outpost on the southern edge of the Pardo River Kawahiva territory in Mato Grosso state, Candor rallies everyone for a barefoot football match at sunset on the eve of one of his last expedition before he retires. His destination is the heart of the 411,000-hectare (1m acres) Pardo River Kawahiva forest, where his team will assess the uncontacted people’s wellbeing and security, a checkup that takes place every few years.

Anthropologists believe the community belongs to the Kawahiva linguistic group. Virtually all of the rest of whom are either settled in known villages or have died over the previous two centuries.

Manguita Amondawa, whose own people were drawn out from isolation when he was a child, has joined the expedition to interpret any evidence the group may find, and to translate in the event of accidental contact.

Two pickup trucks leave the compound before dawn, travelling on the roads that funnel logging trucks, fire, people and cows into the forest. Taking a route through pastures where African grasses and babassu palms are bunched, fringed by trees in spots too wet or too steep to cultivate. The road ends at a new fazenda (ranch). From there the group walks a dirt track for 15 minutes until reaching thick forest that team members take turns to slice into with machetes – just enough for the rest to weave through.

The last man in line is always an expedition veteran. Falling behind for as little as 30 seconds can mean becoming lost as the group disappears into a wall of green. By 6pm it is dark and camp is made, hammocks slung by a creek beach that shimmers with constellations of bioluminescent insects.

The following day is spent looking for signs of people in the vicinity. The group comes upon a recent camping spot, which Candor first attributes to miners, then reassigns to copaiba oil collectors because there isn’t much trash. It is a worrisome find, just a five-minute walk from a spot the uncontacted people occupied four years ago.

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The resurgence of the Amazon’s uncontacted populations is a promising sign. The forests where they live are the biggest ones, with fewer roads, mines and farms. Matt Hansen, a University of Maryland geographer, mapped the largest tropical forest remnants in 2021, and the biggest two – in the northern and western Amazon – are the places with vast concentrations of isolated peoples. These intact forests are also the most resilient stores of biodiversity and forest carbon globally.

According to a 2024 draft report by the International Working Group of Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact, the Pardo River Kawahiva are one of 61 groups confirmed by seven South American governments. An additional 128 groups have been reported but not yet verified by authorities. Brazil accounts for 28 of the confirmed and 86 of the unconfirmed groups.

Before European contact, the Amazon is estimated to have had millions of people with complex alliances, conflicts and social structures. Between 600 and 1,200 languages were spoken, compared with the 300 or so today, says linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald.

Francisco de Orellana, the first European to boat the length of the Amazon, reported miles of riverfront planted with the region’s staple crop, manioc. European explorers, missionaries, rubber tappers, and others brought diseases that claimed 75% of societies and 95% of individuals. According to the damning 1967 Figueiredo report, the newcomers dynamited Indigenous villages from planes, handed out sugar mixed with strychnine and massacred with machetes.

So, survivors hid. Some, like the Pardo River Kawahiva, have evaded destruction by abandoning agriculture. In 1938, Claude Lévi-Strauss described a Kawahiva group growing five varieties of corn, manioc, peanuts, hot peppers, bananas and several other foods.

Today, isolated people hunt, fish, collect honey, gather nuts, build quick houses and move around to let resources recover and stay safe. Without big cultivated plots or houses, the Kawahiva are invisible from above.

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On the third night the group camps close to where Candor’s team knows the Kawahiva were in 2022. Due to the elevated risk of contact, he, Amondawa and Rodrigo Ayres, a 37-year Funai agent , undertake a reconnaissance mission. After an hour they return. “The good news is we found them. The bad news is they are 700 metres from here,” says Candor. “It’s too late to move camp, so we’ll sit tight and hope they don’t notice us.”

They had heard three or four people chatting in relaxed tones, not attempting to be quiet. They were screened by the trees, less than 100 metres away. Amondawa had wanted to get closer, to ascertain whether he could understand the language, but his boss ordered a speedy withdrawal.

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“If they attack, it will be at dusk or 5am,” Candor says, adding that they probably wouldn’t and, even if they did, they wouldn’t shoot arrows.

Over the years, Candor has gathered dozens of photos of huts, tools, toys, baskets and campfires. He has heard talking, singing and crying.

In 2007, Funai judged that the pressure from loggers and ranchers would prove unstoppable, ordering Candor to make contact with the Kawahiva. He tried, only to be pelted with rocks and chased from the forest. His superior came from Brasília and tried, with the same result, so Funai abandoned the idea of contact. The land was protected, but under a series of temporary orders that left open the prospect that developers would one day be permitted to deforest the area.

In 2011, a desperate Candor got close enough to film a group of Kawahiva walking along a trail. A child on an adult’s back spied him and cried out, “Tapy’ÿja!” – the Kawahiva word for “enemy”. Even with that dramatic evidence, it took five more years for the justice ministry, which oversees Funai, to declare the area an Indigenous territory. To halt development there must be physical markers and signs, and demarcation officially approved by Brazil’s president. Former president Jair Bolsonaro promised not to demarcate any Indigenous lands. But President Lula is pro-Indigenous, which exasperates Candor. “Why don’t they just demarcate this damn place?” he asks.

Anthropologist Janete Carvalho, Funai’s director in charge of boundary, says the foundation is not bowing to pressure from the agricultural lobby. Rather, the agency needs time to secure cooperation from the attorney general’s office to fend off future legal challenges and clear the path of the Pardo River Kawahiva territory’s demarcation.

Complicating matters, she says, is the drop in staffing Funai has experienced in recent years. “We are doing everything in our power to make sure that Kawahiva is demarcated in 2025,” she insists.

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After the overheard Kawahiva conversation the expedition’s mood is both upbeat and tense. The Kawahiva people are uncomfortably close. Around 9pm, Amondawa gets out of his hammock, highly agitated, waking up the camp. He speaks to Candor and sits uneasily by the fire embers before turning away from the fire and speaking urgently in his native language into the darkness before returning to his hammock.

In the morning he explains:

“They knew that we were here. He came close to our camp once and then again. The owl came. Their shaman sent him to our camp. I spoke to him in our language. I showed him I’m an Indian, like them. I said these are good white people who didn’t come to attack. He understood and went away.”

The group documents signs of the isolados before retreating, including the ruin of a tapiri, a temporary house thatched with the green leaves of the babassu palm, and high enough to stand up in. This tapiri is a couple of years old, says Candor, as he peers under the collapsed roof and extracts a two-foot-long serrated arrow point designed for fishing.

At a small river, Candor stops to scrutinise a beach of about a metre wide. Then he sees what he hoped for: three hollows scalloped in the coarse sand – a child’s footprint. “That means they feel safe. They’re growing,” he says.

The team finds, too, a very large print of an adult man and a watertight basket, recently fabricated, judging by the freshness of its leaves and vines. Leaving the river to follow a faint trail, the team finds a tree with an opening newly hacked in its trunk to extract a beehive from the hollow bole.

Amondawa believes the people he, Candor and Ayres had heard the day before came here to harvest the honey, taking it to the water to make what he calls a forest juice, using the leaf basket. The world the Kawahiva know has forest on all sides, a webbing of creeks, and all the nuts, water, honey, meat, fish and fruit they need.

The team begins the return journey, satisfied for now that the Kawahiva are at ease, raising children and thriving thanks to being free from harmful intruders – despite the “arc of deforestation”, where the wider southern Amazon is losing trees fast. Candor estimates there are about 35-40 Kawahiva, up from approximately 20 in 1999.

His hopes for these isolados are for them “to grow and go back to what they were before, with enough peace to plant their crops, raise their kids, and put an end to this constant running, running like crazy to survive.”

Candor reckons their population could continue to grow in this territory, especially if they are secure enough to resume planting. That’s what he wants – not necessarily what he thinks will happen.

He says that if he had eternal life, he’d like to keep looking out for them. “But since we all have to die one day, all I can do is wish good things for them. How it turns out will really depend on who carries on the work here and who’s in command. It will depend on the next elections, who’s in, who’s out,” he says. “You have to take all that into account.”

This piece is published in conjunction with O Globo. John Reid is the co-author of Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet. Daniel Biasetto is the content editor at the Brazilian daily O Globo. They were supported on this series by a grant from the Ford Foundation.