News outlets were duped when they reported on the sensationalist images of a “lost tribe” in Brazil. Actually, the photos were real, but the context was deliberately innacurate. A photographer has come clean, stating that he’d disclosed the photos of a tribe in Brazil with the allure that the tribe was a never-before-seen moment in history. Unfortunately, the photos depicted a tribe that has been in the government’s sites since 1910, which means they are all wearing New England Patriot 2008 championship t-shirts right about now.

The tribe’s existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that ‘uncontacted’ tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry. The disclosures have been made by the man behind the pictures, José Carlos Meirelles, 61, one of the handful of sertanistas – experts on indigenous tribes – working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, which is dedicated to searching out remote tribes and protecting them.

Meirelles admitted that the tribe was first known about almost a century ago and that the apparently chance encounter that produced the now famous images was no accident. ‘When we think we might have found an isolated tribe,’ he told al-Jazeera, ‘a sertanista like me walks in the forest for two or three years to gather evidence and we mark it in our [global positioning system]. We then map the territory the Indians occupy and we draw that protected territory without making contact with them. And finally we set up a small outpost where we can monitor their protection.’

So he tried to pull a fast one by implying this was an accidental occurrence in order to save some trees from being chopped down and to save centuries old tribes from being annihilated? You dirty, rotten scoundrel of an awesome man, you.

Earlier: Lost Tribe Found In Amazon, Paparazzi Immediately Dispatched

Secret of the “lost” tribe that wasn’t [Guardian]
Image [Guardian]