RIO DE JANEIRO: The Brazilian government has said it will employ heat-seeking radar in a last-ditch attempt to save the country’s remaining groups of isolated Indians. The body-heat sensors will be mounted on a Brazilian air force jet normally used to monitor rainforest destruction and will be used to locate an estimated 39 groups of isolated indigenous people, hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest.

The authorities hope the system will help them to locate groups of isolated Indians to protect them from invaders such as loggers, gold-miners and ranchers.

Antenor Vaz, the coordinator for isolated tribes at Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, said the system would allow authorities to locate tribes without disturbing their way of life.

“We have been using planes more and more, not just to monitor [isolated tribes] but also to find new references,” he said. But even the use of small planes brought disruption to the tribes because they flew at low altitude, he said.

Brazil’s isolated Indians hit the headlines in May when aerial photographs of a remote tribe near the border with Peru were released. Several tribesmen could be seen firing arrows at the plane.

Vaz said the sensors mounted on planes flying at high altitude meant the tribes would not even know they were being monitored.

By locating Brazil’s last isolated tribes, campaigners hope the process of land demarcation can be speeded up, helping to guarantee the protection of their ancestral lands.

Campaigners say the Amazon may be home to the largest number of un-contacted tribes in the world, and the authorities have long grappled with the dilemma of how best to treat indigenous groups who have had little or no contact with outsiders.

For hundreds of years colonisers and explorers have trekked through the jungle, coming into contact with isolated tribes, often with catastrophic results. There are thought to have been around six million indigenous people when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in 1500. Today there are fewer than 300,000. Violence and western diseases such as flu have devastated many indigenous communities.

In the 1980s thousands of gold prospectors poured into areas inhabited by Yanomami Indians, in northern Brazil, triggering genocide, human rights groups claimed. Some sources say up to 20 per cent of the Yanomami people died in seven years.

Since the late 1980s government policy towards un-contacted tribes has shifted to a “stay away” approach. A handful of sertanistas, or explorers, work in the rainforest trying to locate tribes without coming into direct contact with them.

Fiona Watson, Brazil campaigner for Survival International, an indigenous rights group, said there could be as many as 20 tribes living in the Brazilian Amazon about which the outside world knew nothing. “The idea of the remote sensors means you are not going to put any lives in danger [by making contact],” she said.—Dawn/Guardian News & Media