  We present low resolution (R = 500) near-infrared spectra of 46 candidate
young stellar objects in the Chamaeleon I star-forming region recently detected
in several deep photometric surveys of the cloud. Most of these stars have K <
12. In addition, we present spectra of 63 previously known southern hemisphere
young stars mainly belonging to the Chamaeleon I and Lupus dark clouds. We
describe near-infrared spectroscopic characteristics of these stars and use the
water vapor indexes to derive spectral types for the new objects. Photometric
data from the literature are used to estimate the bolometric luminosities of
all sources. We apply D'Antona & Mazzitelli (1998) pre-main sequence
evolutionary tracks and isocrones to derive masses and ages. We detect two
objects with mass below the H burning limit among the 46 new candidates. One of
this object (PMK99 IR Cha INa1) is the likely driving source of a bipolar
outflow in the northern region of the cloud.
