Had some great interviews with some of the Yura here today. First I got some good descriptions of the saudawa people, whose camps the Yura used to raid. I can only guess that these are descriptions of the uncontacted Mashco Piro Indians, one of the two as yet uncontacted Indian groups in Manu National Park. I say this because their detailed descriptions of the saudawa and the saudawa's possessions seem to match what little is known of these people, and do not seem to match accounts of other groups that I have heard about. According to the Yura, the saudawa have "nothing" -- no permanent villages, no permanent homes, no agriculture, and only the rudest of materials. They make "knives" out of ronsoco teeth, use stone "axes," and have only the rudest of shelters. Basically, the saudawa are still in the stone age. When I asked the Yura why they would raid these people, they say matter-of-factly, "To steal their tapir meat," or something like that. They never seemed too interested in stealing a ronsoco-tooth knife. (From the Machiguenga, by contrast, they stole all kinds of good things -- metal tools, pots, women, kids, spools of cotton, etc.)

The second thing that I found out was that a number of people from this village were involved in attacking Fernando Belaunde, the former President of Peru. Back in 1984, President Belaunde sent a couple of helicopters here, where they let workers down by rope ladders to cut a trail across the Fitzcarrald Pass and and clear helicopter landing pads. It seems that Belaunde was interested in surveying possible sites for a road across the pass, but was unaware that the uncontacted Yura were in the area. Two days later, the Yura attacked the workers at night in their camp, sending salvo after salvo of arrows at them (what one of the workers later described to me as sounding "like bats flying"). One of the workers was hit, but the group hid out until the next day. That morning, the President came in his helicopter, not knowing that his men were being attacked. As the helicopter came down, the President saw the landing area littered with long arrows, and the workers crouching behind some oil barrels in the middle of the field. Around the perimeter of the work site were naked Indians, their bodies painted red. Then the Indians began firing arrows at the helicopters!

The workers finally did escape (as did the President), and it was a group of Indians from this village who attacked them. When I asked them what the workers had been doing, the Indians said that they had obviously been making clearings to grow food for their "parents" (the helicopters). Needless to say, the road plans for the area were shelved soon after.