When the internet came to an isolated tribe, it brought them education, healthcare… and porn

Villagers in Peru’s Palotoa-Teparo enjoy better communication and learning opportunities but are also liable to corruption

Peering intently at their battered Chinese mobile phones, members of a tiny indigenous community deep in the Amazon slowly cluster in the overgrown grass near the Wi-Fi signal.
It’s 7am and the village internet, powered by solar panels, has just been switched on. It is time for the locals, most of whom still speak their ancestral Matsigenka language, to catch up on the news, greet relatives in other communities scattered across Peru’s endless jungles, and doom scroll.
The connection, provided via US satellite firm HughesNet, would be painfully slow, around one megabit per second even for a single user. But somehow, the dozen or so villagers make it work.
The chief, Virginia Silva, 33, is browsing through her video feed on Facebook, by far the dominant app here. Quickly, she flicks through Shrek, Angry Birds and Grinch memes and then lands on a clip of a blindfolded, overweight woman flailing off the roof of a pickup truck into a river.
Eventually, Ms Silva lands on some content that truly interests her, watching it over and over again – an advert for a chainsaw. “There’s a one-year guarantee,” the presenter says jauntily. “Remember, it’s Japanese technology!”
For residents in this isolated village, the internet has represented a seismic, irreversible change to an ancestral way of life deeply rooted in the surrounding tropical rainforest, which provides them with everything from food and medicine to their creation myths and way of understanding the world. Connectivity is now reshaping a culture that previously proved resistant even to attempts by missionaries and Peruvian functionaries to “civilise” them.
Nestled in the buffer zone of Peru’s vast Manu National Park, one of the most virgin stretches of rainforest in the entire Amazon, Palotoa-Teparo has no running water, sewerage, mains electricity, TV or mobile phone signal. The village radio, previously the only link with the outside world, broke down years ago.
Its 20 or so families live a near-subsistence lifestyle. They fish, hunt – everything from howler monkeys to tapirs and agoutis, a rodent resembling a large, tailless rat – and grow crops, above all cassava, which they use for food and masato, a traditional beer. Their meagre income comes almost exclusively from occasionally selling bananas in the nearest town.
But their process of adaptation to modern life has been turbocharged by a small charity that set up Palotoa-Teparo’s HughesNet connection just before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Creakingly slow by most standards, its benefits are nevertheless undeniable. They include allowing the community to streamline arduous jungle logistics, swiftly manage medical emergencies and the village’s primary school to access online learning tools.
One of the most obvious is in the village’s attempts to extend its 15,000 acres of officially-recognised tribal land by another 7,000 acres. The community is desperate to achieve this goal, in part to preempt outsiders, typically impoverished migrants from the Andes, occupying and logging their forests.
The highly bureaucratic titling process previously required multiple trips to the regional capital, Puerto Maldonado. The jungle town lies three days away by boat or two mainly by road through spectacular cloud forests, via Cusco, some 11,000ft up in the mountains.
Although the former capital of the Inca Empire now visited by millions of foreign tourists each year may not be much more than 100 miles away as the crow flies, it feels like lightyears.
Now, at least some of that extensive red tape can be handled online: “It makes a huge difference,” says Ms Silva. “Before, you had to keep going back and forth. It saves so much time, and fuel.”
David Rivera, a development worker with Cedia, a Peruvian non-profit organisation that works with the community, agrees, stressing how the village can now also immediately inform the authorities when intruders attempt to colonise or log on their land.
“The internet has allowed them to take charge. It has allowed them to become citizens,” he says.
Yet connectivity has proven a double-edged sword. Along with its unquestionable advantages, the villagers are also struggling with the same cyber-problems familiar to the rest of us, especially parents. “Porn!” exclaims village teacher Romualda Cahuari, when asked about the biggest downside to the internet.
During the pandemic, Peru’s education ministry put in a second satellite connection to the village, in the primary school, and gave it 12 tablets. But Ms Cahuari, who teaches in both the indigenous language and Spanish, no longer lets the children take the tablets home.
A couple got lost. Others came back malfunctioning. One tablet even turned up with a nail through the middle. But the biggest issue, Ms Cahuari insists, is the pupils – or possibly others in their families – accessing X-rated content.
“They just don’t use them for educational purposes,” she says. “They play games or spend the whole time glued to social media, and neglect their studies. They are spending less time playing football, climbing trees and in the river. It’s not healthy.”
Perhaps the only two internet evils the community has escaped, so far, are the fake news epidemic and cyberfraud.
Nevertheless, satellite internet, which is spreading like wildfire throughout the Amazon, may still represent the final straw for the basin’s myriad indigenous cultures, besieged since the rubber boom kicked off in the 19th Century.
That process of cultural loss has now been accelerated to warp speed by the internet, and the Hispanophone and Lusophone, hyperactive, distorted view of the world it gives youngsters in remote communities like Palotoa-Teparo.
That includes the two children of Pablo Chagueva. A living link to a bygone age before Europeans first arrived in the New World, he speaks only Matsigenka, has no idea of his age and has no national identity card, meaning his existence has yet to even be registered by the Peruvian state.
Without speaking Castilian, never mind reading and writing it, or any means to buy a mobile phone, the internet remains as mysterious and inaccessible to him as the Mariana Trench. But now his two children, aged eight and 14, are in the village school and starting to venture online for the first time.
The community now stands on the brink of a second information revolution, one which could see its connectivity ramp up, literally, by orders of magnitude.
On the opposite side of the village to Mr Chagueva lives Ruben Semperi, perhaps the community member most adapted to modern life thanks to a modest income he earns from ferrying development workers up and down the river in his boat.
Frustrated at the slowness of the communal internet, and the ban on downloading films and other heavy files, Mr Semperi, 50, has, after months of scrimping, bought a Starlink kit for 1,200 Sols (around £250).
For a monthly fee of 169 Sols (£35), Mr Semperi now has high-speed internet of 170 Mbps per second beaming into his dilapidated wooden hut a stone’s throw from the muddy river.
“I did it for work because I need to be able to coordinate with my clients, and for my kids,” says Mr Semperi, who has 10 children aged between three and 29, all but the youngest with their own mobile phones. “Of course, it worries me what they can get up to online. There’s all kinds of bad stuff out there. You have to be strict, and not allow them to be on it all the time.”
He can also now stay in touch almost continuously with his wife Sandy as she accompanies her 69-year-old mother Carlota to Cusco for medical treatment.
Previously, without the internet, villagers might not hear news of a loved one in a faraway hospital for months.
“It’s a huge relief,” says Mr Semperi. “It’s like they are being treated right here. It’s still hard to fathom.”
Only a few villagers have so far cottoned on to the vast difference in speed between the communal internet and Mr Semperi’s Starlink connection. But they are already talking about raising the cash to buy a kit for the entire community.
For one of Mr Semperi’s sons, Enrique, 17, who has just finished secondary school, Starlink means both unlimited access to clips about football and the opportunity to apply to the government’s Beca18 student grants programme.
“I would probably be helping my dad more, with the crops and other jobs, if it wasn’t for the Internet,” admits Enrique shyly after spending the afternoon catching small catfish by hand in the river, which his aunt then cooks wrapped in a large leaf over an open fire.
Today, Enrique, who understands Matsigenka but does not speak it, flicks compulsively through memes about Liverpool and Brazil goalkeeper Alisson Becker missing his country’s upcoming World Cup qualifier in Peru through injury.
Even when watching such relatively wholesome content, the sheer amount of time that the village’s youngest generations now spend online has the teacher Ms Cahuari deeply worried.
“It’s killing their chances of learning their native tongue,” she says. “The internet is an amazing tool. But we are losing touch with our identity, with who we are.”