‘Lost’ Amazon Tribe Story Not a Hoax, Just Misreported

An Al Jazeera interview with photographer Jose Carlos Meirelles has led to charges from several media outlets that the he and the indigenous rights group Survival International made false claims that they had discovered and photographed a previously unknown indigenous tribe in the rainforest.

The Guardian set off a chain of accusatory articles with a June 22 report in which it said that Meirelles had acknowledged that he did not come across the tribe unexpectedly, as widely reported at first, and that the tribe had been known about for almost a century.

The original stories about the tribe simply got out of hand, says Survival International expert Fiona Watson. “Some of the media got very carried away and started talking about undiscovered tribes,” she said to LiveScience.

The group, which helped to publicize the photos, denied Tuesday that it had described the tribe as "lost" and said that its objective at the time had been to show that they existed.

“These Indians are in a reserve expressly set aside for the protection of uncontacted tribes: they were hardly ‘unknown,’” said Survival International Director Stephen Corry in a statement.

Writer Warner Todd Huston of NewsBusters comments that, although the media ran away with the original story without investigating all of its facts, now, "the newest news of the incident is going to the other extreme and calling the whole incident a 'hoax.' But the revelations made by the photographer do not really reveal an outright hoax as much as evidence that the original story was only a little misleading."