With harrowing accounts of attacks from illegal logging operations and drug traffickers, members of a previously uncontacted Amazonian tribe fled their lands to modern towns. 

The sad event was dramatically recorded on video filmed along the Peru-Brazil border. The footage, released by Brazil's indigenous affairs department (FUNAI) first shows several young and seemingly healthy natives exchanging bananas with locals as a sign of goodwill. However, through interpreter Zé Correia, they told a grim story.

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"The majority of old people were massacred by non-Indians in Peru, who shot at them with firearms and set fire to the houses of the uncontacted," Correia said. "They say that many old people died and that they buried three people in one grave. They say that so many people died that they couldn't bury them all and their corpses were eaten by vultures."

Experts believe the massacre occured in late June somewhere in the densely forested Amazonia region of Peru, and the tribesmen fled across the border to the community of Ashaninka in the Brazilian state of Acre.

Local FUNAI treated the natives for an acute respiratory infection. Having never had contact with European populations, they have no immunity to a host of deadly diseases including plague and cholera. FUNAI kept them in quarantine from other villagers for several days to prevent further infection and to ensure they did not carry disease back to other uncontacted peoples. After their medical isolation, the natives returned to the forest.  

Peru, which has leased its Amazonian territory to several outside interests, has been condemned by the world community for failing safeguard native populations, but to little effect. 

"It's vital that Brazil and Peru immediately release funds for the full protection of uncontacted Indians' lives and lands," said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples' rights. "Their economic growth is coming at the price of the lives of their indigenous citizens. Now, their new-found wealth must be used to protect those few uncontacted tribes that have so far survived the ongoing genocide of America's first people."