Delivery of two DJI Mini 2 drones

Illegal logging has threatened the Shawi of San Martin region for years. Logging activity has reduced the availability of game to hunt, and at times when loggers encounter hunting parties, sometimes they threaten the lives of Shawi men directly. People often ask "why doesn't the government do something?" Which is something like asking why the government doesn't fix the potholes in their own town- Enforcement costs money, and takes a lot of physical effort in the Amazon, a difficult and changing territory far from roads and infrastructure. Peru is a developing country with far fewer resources and far more wild and remote territory than we are used to in the US or Europe. The Shawi are also a relatively small number of people who pay no taxes and live, like most indigenous Amazonians, on a large plot of land they can hunt and gather from, not agricultural land that can support higher population density on a smaller plot. This is both for cultural reasons- the Shawi prefer to live in the forest and hunt rather than clear the forest and farm, but also for practical reasons. Former forests, especially in the Amazon, have little topsoil. What's cleared for agriculture quickly depletes, and can only support crops for a few years. Grasslands have rich fertile topsoil that make good farm land, but where farming has replaced hunting, typically whole ecosystems are destroyed when the trees are cut and burned, and after a few seasons of growing crops, the devastated land is left, useless for hundreds of years as it slowly regrows, it may take many hundreds of years before a healthy ecosystem can re-build as it once was. The Shawi asked for drones- both to surveil areas where they might be at risk while hunting, and also to document deforestation so they have evidence to bring to the government, without which there is no chance of enforcement. Immigrants to the region from the Andes are also taking over former Shawi territory to grow coca for cocaine production. Without proper documentation there's little to stop this from continuing. A Shawi Project donor provided two DJI Mini 2 drones with extra battery packs to two villages along with the cell phones needed to operate them and training from an engineering student in Spanish. We are looking forward to seeing how the drones are used and what impact they can have on preserving the integrity of Shawi borders and keeping hunters safe.