Brazilian Official Lies About Lost Tribe – Media Soaks Up Story

A Brazilian official – working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency – has been caught creating a news story to promote an environmental cause. There is nothing new here, the drive-by-media loves a story that fits the liberal agenda.

In this case, a government official took photographs during an expedition flight over the Amazon, documenting Indians from one of the “world’s last uncontacted tribes”. The problem is that the tribe had been monitored for decades and the environmentalist lied to promote his “don’t cut down the trees” agenda.

News organizations fell for the story, with out any fact checking at all. Gee, that never happens.

Here is the original story, and here is The Buzz Log from Yahoo where they admit they got burned.

Perth Now has the “it’s a hoax” rundown.

The man behind photos of warriors from an “undiscovered” Amazon tribe that were beamed around the world has admitted it was a hoax.

Indigenous tribes expert, José Carlos Meirelles, said the tribe’s existence had been noted since 1910, and they had been photographed to prove that “uncontacted” tribes still existed in an area endangered by logging, The Guardian reported.

Mr Meirelles, who was working for Funai, the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency dedicated to finding remote tribes and protecting them, said he found the group, recorded they lived, and planned the publicity to protect them from losing their habitat.

Mr Meirelles, 61, said the “chance encounter” that produced the famous photographs was no accident.

The article goes on.

Survival International, the organisation that released the pictures along with Funai, conceded yesterday that Funai had known about this nomadic tribe for around two decades.

It defended the disturbance of the tribe saying that, since the images had been released, it had forced neighbouring Peru to re-examine its logging policy in the border area where the tribe lives, as a result of the international media attention.

I’d like to point out that on May 31, the day after the story broke, I wrote the following on SIGforum.com.

Am I alone thinking that a week or so from now, it may be proven that this was a set up? Or maybe these people have had direct contact with people from the modern world and choose to continue their life as before?

There does seem to be an environmental spin to this story too. …

I’m just seeing red flags all over the place in this story.

I guess the goofy thing is that if it does turn out to be BS, I would not be at all surprised.

Will anyone from Reuters – who pushed the original story – be held accountable?

Posted in

Steve McGough

Steve's a part-time conservative blogger. Steve grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Washington, D.C. and the Bahamas. He resides in Connecticut, where he’s comfortable six months of the year.

The website's content and articles were migrated to a new framework in October 2023. You may see [shortcodes in brackets] that do not make any sense. Please ignore that stuff. We may fix it at some point, but we do not have the time now.

You'll also note comments migrated over may have misplaced question marks and missing spaces. All comments were migrated, but trackbacks may not show.

The site is not broken.