Trails from a World Beyond E-Book

Benno Glauser

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 291

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The Ayoreo indigenous peoples have inhabited the Gran Chaco forests since time immemorial, until the forces of modernity, led by settlers, farmers and missionaries began to tear open their world and to pull them from it, like trees severed from their roots. Today, several small groups remain hidden, invisible to our eyes and avoiding any contact. TRAILS FROM A WORLD BEYOND tells the story of how author and activist Benno Glauser in the early 90's became aware of the presence of these groups and began to look for ways to support their resistance. TRAILS FROM A WORLD BEYOND is the story of a people's right not to be found, of their quest to recover what was lost in their forced finding, of their longing to return to themselves. It is the story of author, Benno's Glauser's, explorations and discoveries as he sets a path in defence of a people who know neither him nor the world he inhabits. It is the story of the meaning that their quest echoes in his own, and that of all of us. It is also the story of colonisation: of the compulsion to uphold one world that subsumes and destroys all others - and of the urgent need to restore a diversity of worlds, our own among them. TRAILS FROM A WORLD BEYOND invites you to let yourself be led along the tracks of the invisibles, into their world, where they, hunt, gather, and survive; to be, as they are, watchful and alert. Perhaps you will hunt and gather something you need for yourself, in your own life, in your world. You may recognize as your own a piece of soil, or a tree; glimpse in the shimmer of a memory a lost food, an abandoned place, your own forgotten community, or a way of being– and in their trails find hints of a future that may become possible again.

Leseprobe

BENNO GLAUSER

Trails from a World Beyond

The Ayoreo and their quest to return

Imprint

Copyright © 2023 by Benno Glauser. All rights reserved

Content, text and language editing by Seth Reynolds

Curatorship and editorial design by Adriana Almada

Cover design by Leo Klemm, 2007

Published with the support of IWGIA

(International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs)

I — Approach

Aliens attack

It was Saturday close to noon. A tractor with a farm wagon loaded with workers was returning to the centre of a huge area that had been cleared of virgin forest. They were slowly approaching their base, where the farm buildings were being erected. The sun was not visible but its heat was beating down as always through the grey-white layers of clouds overhead. The workers had been out since dawn, far off on the periphery of the new farm site and close to the edges of the forest, beyond which the endless wilderness of the Chaco continued in its untouched abundance.

The workers were tired yet content. They had the weekend ahead of them and most of them would return home, 100 miles south. They had only half a mile to go along the freshly-carved farm tracks until they reached the truck that would take them home. Suddenly, the silence of the forest was punctured by high-pitched screams. Four warriors, their bodies painted black, burst like lightning from out of the bushes on one side of the track. Arrows flew, two hit the tractor, another hit the trailer with the workers. One of the workers was struck in the head, the arrow didn’t penetrate his skull, but remained lodged under the scalp. The driver and one of the workers had rifles, and fired them several times. They later stated to the police that they had shot into the air, and that the shots had not been aimed at the warriors. The four Ayoreo vanished as quickly as they had appeared. One of them was said to have tumbled and collapsed but no traces of this would later be found.

The attack occurred in 1998. By then, for several years, I had grown to be increasingly fascinated with the clear and undeniable fact that there were, in my local vicinity, humans who continued to live outside and beyond what was thought to be the frontiers of mankind: indigenous groups living in the forests without ever having established contact with our western civilization.

A few years before, in 1992, the beginning of the conquest of Latin America some 500 years earlier was commemorated. An event which for Europe, marked the discovery of another world, the so-called New World. But to its old and original inhabitants, those we call indigenous peoples, it marks the breaking of a devastating wave of genocidal colonization. They had no choice. The forced contact upon the continent’s indigenous peoples meant that they were either eliminated, and disappeared, or subdued, and compelled to abandon their ways of life: to enter the life called civilized.

In that year, I travelled far away from the country’s capital, Asunción, to the Central and Northern Paraguayan Chaco, where some of those original inhabitants –known to belong to the ethnic group of the Ayoreo– were somehow continuing to live as they always had, as a human presence invisible to us, belonging to another time, living in pre-colonial conditions we could hardly imagine: humans “without contact”. In their own world, still, a world as complete as our own, yet ever more influenced by its conflicting proximity to ours.

Our worlds were radically separated. Yet once I knew they were there in close vicinity, my curiosity to understand their world began to grow into attraction, then fascination, then compulsion. I wondered, as many have done when confronted with such alien proximity, how might they live and how might they see the world? What would it be like to be in their place and not mine? To know nothing of my world of cars and cities, supermarkets and electric lights, multi-storey buildings and books. Two or three times a week a commercial flight of ours would cross the sky, which was also of course their sky, on its way to the Bolivian town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, further to the north. They surely noticed that plane. How would they perceive it? How would they explain to themselves its repeated appearance? What indeed would they be seeing when they saw what we call a plane?

For a few years I would insistently follow this fascination, seeking answers to these questions and others. The result was always more questions, although perhaps better and clearer questions. All of them in some way circled around the unsettling fact that there existed another world outside ours. I felt an irresistible and irrepressible urge to understand what relationship existed between these two separate worlds: ours and theirs.

Then, in 1998, those four forest Ayoreo made their sudden appearance at the verges of our world.

It was the beginning of July: the dry winter season in the Northern Chaco. A time when, for the Ayoreo, nature sleeps, and the small groups living in the forests must keep close to the scarce, shrinking streams and waterholes in order to survive.

In the very same area, but in our world, an ever-growing number of landowners –estancieros– would be taking advantage of the dry season to fell large areas of forest within their properties, and to establish farms with modern houses, fences, roads, artificial ponds and all that is needed for extensive livestock farming. The attack by the four Ayoreo occurred some 100 miles north of the densely inhabited Central Chaco, in a hitherto untouched region of continuous forest.

It took place precisely because such a new estancia was being built at that moment. In the few weeks preceding the attack, some 12,000 acres of forest had been wiped out by the bulldozers. In the Ayoreo world, the region where this estancia was being built is called Amotocodie, “where there are fertile soils”. The area contains rivers and waterholes and a rich and varied wildlife, as well as numerous camps used by the nomadic forest Ayoreo groups, with small paths uniting them, all of which had been –in a short time leading up to July 1998 – simply erased by deforestation.

It was in this context that the ambush took place. It was the first violent, armed action in four decades. The last such attacks had occurred during the 1940s and until the mid-50s, with Mennonite settlers in the Central Chaco pushing north into Ayoreo territory. The attacks always came out of the blue- surprise used as a deliberate strategy- and there were often fatalities. Since then, no armed action had been registered at this frontier of civilization, conveying the impression of a quietness, where in fact there was a gathering violence from the unrestrained expansion of our modern world. Now, in 1998, the silence from within the forest had been broken. When Ayoreo warriors paint their bodies black they are in a state of rage which can only be overcome by actions of war. So then why had they not killed the farm workers? And why had they also fired arrows against the tractor’s metallic body? Bows and arrows were arms habitually used for hunting, not for killing enemies, so why had they not used their deadly lancets and clubs instead?

We can surmise that, at the very least, the attack was a warning, and its target left little doubt as to the message conveyed. The Ayoreo group’s territory was not to be penetrated any further.

Back in our world, the event caused consternation and concern. Concern not for the wellbeing and needs of the forest people on whose behalf those warriors had spoken, but concern to quickly define what must be done. Peace and order and the normality of our expanding modern life had been disrupted. Something needed to be brought back under control.

The Chaco, a hazy horizon

The first time I consciously perceived the Chaco it was not more than a name put to a landscape across a river. It was April 1975, and Paraguay had been subject to a relentless and bloody repression led by military dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, since 1954. Based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I had been sent to Paraguay by an international human rights organization, the ICRC1, with the task of visiting the dictator’s political prisoners, and of interceding with the government on their behalf, and on behalf of its many victims of repression: the tortured, the disappeared, the disrupted families, the dead. At that time, the political prisoners of Paraguay were the longest held in Latin America. A good many of the men and women I visited and spoke to had been locked up for 16 years already, confined in narrow basement rooms and cells at several local police stations scattered around the capital, Asunción, without ever seeing the sun. The disappeared numbered over 500. However, when I was received by the government ministers and by the dictator himself, my enquiries about them were met with cynical remarks, silences or implausible promises.

It was on this my first visit that I saw the Chaco for the first time. It was explained to me that it began just across the Paraguay River, on the other side of the bay of Asunción. It could be seen from many parts of the capital. I could see it from my hotel room. It looked quite mysterious, a perfectly flat and dark green plain, stretching into a faint and distant horizon towards the north. There was no bridge. Travellers to the Chaco were taken with their vehicles across the river on shaky wooden rafts, after which they continued on a precarious dirt road pointing north-west. Talking to locals, it was clear that most Paraguayans had never even crossed the Paraguay river. The image that most of them had of the Chaco was about as hazy as the line of the horizon they could see from their houses.

This enormous region had been the scene of a war with Bolivia forty years previously. Because of that war it had become known as infierno verde (the green hell). It was Paraguay’s enormous back garden. But even though it occupied well over half of the country’s surface, most Paraguayans had little or no awareness of it.

1International Committee of the Red Cross.

Some facts from the Chaco’s life story

As I gradually grew more familiar with the Chaco in the 1970s, I learned that this vast but largely ignored backyard of Paraguay was in fact very much alive and busy unfolding its own life processes. It is a huge ecosystem whose full name is El Gran Chaco. Situated in the geographical heart of South America, it is smaller than the more widely known ecosystem of the Amazon Basin, but still extends across an area about four times the size of Italy. One part of it covers the North of Argentina, another the eastern lowlands of Bolivia, while a third portion constitutes the entire western part of Paraguay.

As my perception of it started to increase, I began to think of the Gran Chaco ecosystem as a living being lying beneath the Chaco that we usually see. This living being had existed for millions of years: a long, long time before modern humans came along to mark the borders of our modern-time countries, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.

It was during the gradual, centuries-long process of these modern borders being overlaid onto this living being –marking out nations in the manner of properties– that the Chaco took up its part in modern history.

Before the Chaco War (1932-1935), Paraguay had been involved in another war, The Great War (1864-1870). Neighbouring Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, rallied by England, which was the predominant colonial power in the region at that time, joined together to defeat landlocked Paraguay and put an end to decades of the country’s rebellion against colonial rule, and its rules. This costly war left Paraguay not only defeated, but also deeply impoverished. It was then that the Chaco suddenly acquired a certain value, much to its future misfortune. The urgent need for public funds could be met by selling off huge, remote parts of the Chaco to foreign, private companies and individuals. The sale took place on paper, drawing lines on maps, the sold-off extensions being physically inaccessible at the time. Nobody had seen them, nobody really cared for them; they were abstractions to the Paraguayan government that sold them. The fact that some fifteen different indigenous peoples belonging to five linguistic families were living there, as they had done for centuries –their territories covering the entire Paraguayan Chaco– would not have likely crossed anyone’s mind at the time. They were literally sold along with their land and, from that moment on, lived within private properties. Of course, not only were they unaware of their new condition, they were not even aware that such a condition could exist. Only with the gradual expansion of the borders of our civilization into the Chaco, would they learn, in the hardest way imaginable, that, according to the invaders’ rules, land could be owned as property.

Thus, unlike the huge Amazon Basin, which still largely remains the property of the modern nation states imposed upon it, those Paraguayan real estate sales converted the Chaco into a huge area of land under private ownership. Its new owners had plans for it: at the threshold of the 20th century they started turning the acquired parts of the Chaco’s living ecosystem into a productive resource of wealth, converting this immense vital ecosystem into commodities such as tinned meat extract and tannic acid used for industrial tanning of leather. In the latter case, for example, until synthetic tannin was later developed, thousands and thousands of slow growing, hard-wooded Red Quebracho trees were felled for extracting tannin by the Argentinian Carlos Casado Company, which had acquired 16 million acres in the Northern Chaco. The felling of the trees was largely done by indigenous people, who were forced to leave their land and become workers cutting down the very trees of their own territories –their homes–.

In the southern third of the Paraguayan Chaco, the so-called Bajo Chaco, the land sell-off in the 19th century meant that many of the privatized areas had become huge livestock farms. Quite a few of them continued, and still continue, to belong to families of the ruling oligarchy who have always had a large share of economic and political power in Paraguay.

Meanwhile the Central Chaco was undergoing similar processes. From 1927 onwards, the Paraguayan Government had granted permission for the settlement of Mennonite refugees arriving from several parts of the globe. Here again, modern civilization was superimposing itself on indigenous territories. After the foreign companies and the Paraguayan farmers from the capital, it was now the turn of white colonists from a religious sect driven out of distant places. In a matter of only a few years, the Mennonites succeeded in taking over the Central Chaco. On the surface they appeared as a peaceful –even peace-preaching– presence, but in reality they continued and extended the occupation, claiming land and nature for themselves, transforming both to match the northern European life model of their origins.

In spite of the extent of the violent destruction inflicted upon it, because of its size the vast North of the Paraguayan Chaco still remained largely untouched, mostly virgin. It was only on maps that the geometrical pattern of modern real estate boundaries had been drawn, and those lines had not yet transformed the outer reality. A satellite picture –if available then– would still have shown an almost limitless expanse of continuous green.

As I deepened my understanding of those forces acting upon the Chaco’s unfolding 20th century story, two began to take centre stage: the military and the missionaries. Each of them had been successfully executing their role as facilitators of the territorial conquest of the Gran Chaco. Throughout the world and throughout history, both have been formidable pillars of colonization. The Paraguayan military, under the conveniently opaque banner of national interest, maintained a close watch and control over the immense Chaco through a network of forts and outposts. Meanwhile, the missionaries –both catholic and protestant, and later also mennonite– fulfilled the complementary task of pacifying the indigenous peoples, making contact with them one by one and thus severing their relationship with their worlds of origin. As a result, by 1980, almost the entirety of the fifteen indigenous peoples of the Paraguayan Chaco had lost control over their home territories. They now lived –or rather, survived somehow– in marginal spaces on the furthest fringes of white civilization.

It had become clear to me that the territorial spaces where those indigenous peoples had lived for centuries had been conquered and appropriated by national and international colonizing forces. But I seemed to be largely alone with this awareness: it was almost never a subject of discussion with the people I met during those first years of initial incursions into the Chaco. Everybody behaved as if the process of gradually covering the Chaco with a new map was a God-given, natural process, following a law of life: there was no need to talk about it much.

Unseen people, white spots on a map

I had my first chance to go into the Chaco in 1975, during a second work period in Paraguay with the ICRC. In addition to my usual tasks, this time I was to provide a summary report on the health situation of the indigenous peoples in the country. It was an unexpected opportunity to get to know parts of the interior of Paraguay, and was my first ever direct contact with indigenous people.

As one does when setting off for an unknown region, I first acquired a map. It was the only map available at the time, edited by the Paraguayan Instituto Geográfico Militar2. It was given to me in a military establishment in Asunción, by officers of the armed forces: the same armed forces whose fierce repression had created a climate of silence, fear and pervasive mistrust throughout the country. It felt like a strange paradox to receive the instrument that would orient me in the Chaco from those same people who kept a tight control over that part of the country and its peoples, and who provided the necessary backing for its ongoing violent transformation.

The map showed what one might expect of a map: roads, of course; crossing points; some small towns and villages, with their names; some blue lines showing rivers meandering their way towards other, bigger rivers. There were in fact few roads, and none of them were shown as paved. A few dotted lines indicated smaller tracks cutting into the forest. I soon discovered that many of the named places were not in fact villages, just military garrisons and outposts. I realized that there was hardly any civilian population, but in doing so almost fell prey to that same general blindness towards the native population inhabiting the Chaco. The dense invisible network of indigenous dwellings, places and territories of course did not appear on our modern map.

In the Bajo Chaco, a dotting pattern appeared in several places which marked swampy areas. Then I saw that in the northern half, towards the Bolivian border –in the so-called Dry Chaco– the map showed a number of blank areas.

Those blank areas captured my attention: large white spaces about which our modern map had nothing to say. Of course, they were not in reality white or empty, only that the modern Paraguayan eye drawing the map had not yet reached them and had no knowledge of what they contained. Or else they had not found anything that white people might deem sufficiently noteworthy for their maps. What in fact did exist in those blank spaces, if noticed at all, was discarded as not relevant. But it needed to be seen. I had no doubt myself that these areas were full of significant places and phenomena, with names only in other languages and other worlds, unknown and inaccessible to me and to us.

As part of my assignment on that first trip, I would fly over the North of the Chaco on the way to a remote landing site. Sitting in our tiny plane, during the long hours of that flight, I felt like I was suspended in mid-air. We were over a flat extension of green that was so uniform that even the perception of our considerable speed would cease, and the plane seemed to just hang in the sky, moving nowhere at all. Later, on the distant horizon, the Paraguay River began to show itself against the morning sun, like a fine silver ribbon dropped casually into the landscape. Close to the ribbon, there were two solitary hills, the only elevations protruding from the flatness all around. We were flying over one of the map’s large blank spots. It seemed to communicate mystery, but also promise –of what, I did not know and had to find out–. For now, I could not spot any landing strips, it was not possible to touch down.

2Military Geographic Institute.

Touched by another world

There are experiences in one’s life that change everything that follows, moments that determine the path that our life will take. One cannot see them coming, nor does one go into them consciously. It was in the course of that same survey work that such an event found its way into my life. Not in the Chaco in fact, but in the eastern part of Paraguay.

A Paraguayan friend who worked with indigenous peoples had suggested I go and see a particular project dedicated to a Guaraní indigenous people, the Paï-Tavyterä, in a north-eastern region of Paraguay bordering Brazil. A venerable military DC 3 aircraft took me to a border town, from where a young Swiss anthropologist named Juan Wicker picked me up and took me to one of the nearby Paï villages. Juan was in charge of the project. It was about an hour’s journey into the rainforest. Today, 40 years after that drive, the tall forest that then shaded our journey has disappeared: felled and sold. There are but a few isolated small patches left here and there, most being small plots of land saved and secured on behalf of the Paï. But at that time, the rainforest still covered most of Eastern Paraguay and provided life resources and protection to the many indigenous communities inhabiting it.

While driving there, Juan Wicker told me about the leader of the village: he was a very strong personality, widely recognized as a political leader far beyond his own community, an authority for the entire region. His name was Leandro Morilla.

We arrived there and went to Leandro’s house, but he was not around. His wife told us that he was working in the fields, and somebody was sent to call him. When I finally saw him, I felt utterly perplexed: the person walking up to the house to welcome us was a diminutive man dressed in rugged and torn clothes, covered in dust, his hair sticking out in all directions. Nothing in his appearance spoke of authority. Had I crossed him in the streets of Asunción, I would not have noticed him at all. Yet there he was, a person of recognized rank, with a leadership extending far beyond his own community. He would be the one to take decisions in neighbouring villages, to intervene in issues that exceeded the authority of a local leader. A regional judge for cases of even serious offences like murder.

The contrast between this indigenous bearer of power, and the power holders of modern civilization back in my own type of society shocked me violently. Here was a man who sustained an authentic leadership, firmly planted in his community. In my current job I was shaking hands with state ministers and generals, sometimes presidents even –who were at that time military dictators without exception–. They were individuals who had made power theirs by force and by this force obliged everyone to consider them authorities. Facing Leandro brought a stark realisation of the emptiness of their power. In spite of their flashy uniforms or elegant suits, of their limousines, their pomp and protocol, their power seemed inauthentic, superficial. Looking further afield, it cast some doubt on the origin of the authority held up by leaders of my own European society. Whether taken by bullet or ballot, it all felt invented, ephemeral, illusory. Only later was I able to name more precisely the source of the authenticity in leadership that I perceived in Leandro on meeting him: there was an acute awareness at all times among the inhabitants of the settlement that this leadership was not a quality of Leandro as a person; it was just a role bestowed on him. The authority was theirs, not his. If they had lent it to him it was because he would use it to serve the community. And he could not claim any right to it, and they could take it back anytime at the shortest notice, and bestow it on somebody else.

As the day went on and I observed the daily organisation of the group, further insights into the culture of the Paï made a deep, lasting impression on me. For instance, how they took their political decisions. Formal meetings served only as a ritual to ratify a consensus, once all members of the community felt it had been reached. This consensus would result from an extensive, spontaneous process of conversations involving all dimensions of community life: women bathing or washing clothes together in the river; wives and husbands and extended family groups discussing in their homes; men hunting together in the forest, or working together in the communal plantation or as day-labourers on the neighbouring farms. To reach such a consensual decision could take a long time, but I realized that once established it guaranteed that the position finally adopted would be steadfast, forceful and cohesive. In contrast, decisions taken in many modern democracies are on a winner takes all basis: minorities are overruled by formal vote, with their views not taken on board by the victorious majority and integrated into the policy-making process, but instead dismissed. A procedure which weakens rather than consolidates the coherence of the whole, and deprives it of alternative viewpoints.

They told me that all plants had a healing force, even though, as they added, they did not as yet know their use in all cases. Material phenomena like forests, animals, humans, man made objects, the village with its daily life, were not complete, nor even thinkable, if not as integrated parts of a world which was essentially spiritual. I also learned more details about how leadership worked: I was taken to shake hands with Evangeli Morilla, Leandro’s father. Leandro was the political leader, but his father was the religious leader. Leandro could speak up with a firm voice, even loud if necessary; the religious leader hardly ever spoke, and if he did, he did so quietly, never raising his voice. He would only speak up in very special circumstances, for instance when a political leader was questioned by his people. The community would then look to the religious leader for guidance so long as this hiatus in worldly authority lasted.

What I saw and heard that day not only amazed and fascinated me, but made me feel in a strange way inferior. I had gone there with the self- assurance of the person who goes with an offer to help another. I had planned to register their likely needs, but now I returned home with the certainty that it was I that was in need –of things they had that I didn’t– of an as yet undefined sense of what my culture, and by extension myself, profoundly lacked. A wish took shape: to learn from them, for myself as well as for my people, my own society of origin. That is, if people like Leandro and others would be willing to teach me.

I shared this feeling of inferiority with anthropologist friends and was criticized for it. They felt my subordination expressed the germ of idealization or romanticism. Cultures were of course equal, on the same level, they argued, although it was evident to me that their belief was an idealization too: modern humanity is far from giving all cultures equal status. Even so, I was happy to wear the badge of romanticiser: I have found that idealization and even romantic awe can help generate the curiosity needed to open oneself to others, to enter a state that enables one to receive humbly, to learn deeply. The Paï were, visibly to me, of a political and spiritual rank I could learn from. I had been touched. Beyond theoretical considerations, comparisons or even competition, feeling inferior lead me towards an attitude of listening, of wanting to learn. It enabled me to explore my emerging relationship with indigenous peoples with freedom, curiosity and a fully open heart.

My wish to learn became a determination. Following this one encounter with Leandro Morilla I decided to redirect my life, to be closer to, observe, learn from, the indigenous peoples on the invisible edges of our world. This decision meant leaving a well-paid and promising professional position. Two years later, I had moved to Paraguay and begun this new chapter, a chapter that was to come to define my life’s work.

II — Exploring

Paraguay and beyond

1992. Seventeen years had passed since the encounter with the Paï leader, Leandro. Paraguay, where I lived now, was no longer ruled by a dictator, and a new era, declared as a “transition to democracy”, had given the population hopes of greater social justice and self-determination. Yet their country had not freed itself from the rapacious neoliberal market forces eager to continue exploiting its resources.

The “hazy horizon of the Chaco” had perhaps become a little less hazy, and had moved a little closer. Travellers could now cross the Paraguay river into the Chaco by a bridge, and a recently paved route would take them in a matter of only hours some 500 kilometers north, right into the centre of the Mennonite colonies. The Mennonites had begun to arrive in the late 1920s and had recently become a major economic force in the region. But beyond their settlements, the Chaco’s huge North still remained as remote as ever, accessible only by a few dirt roads which in the rainy season sometimes became impassable for days or even weeks. Observed from the satellites, it would still have appeared as a vast extension of uninterrupted green, Paraguayan maps continued to portray many areas as blank.

I continued to be intrigued by those blank spots, and by the groups without contact, and felt a growing need to unveil what they held. At a time when many Paraguayans, even many of my personal friends, were focused on rebuilding their country after years of dictatorship, my gaze instead was drawn elsewhere, to a yet unseen and unfelt land beyond the borders of modern society. Intermittent consulting work sustained the practical needs of myself and my family and left me with the freedom to follow my fascination.

Cleansing the North of Ayoreo

In my explorations of the northern forests appeared many fragments of the Chaco’s past, and gradually those fragments started to form coherent stories. The North of the Chaco has its own historic process as a huge ecosystem, as have its inhabitants, the indigenous, as well as the others who arrived more recently. Its history consists of their many respective and contrasting stories. I came upon such stories in anthropological writings, and in chronicles while exploring the Mennonite’s archives, but also around the night-time fires in the settlements of the contacted Ayoreo.

By the time of my exploration during the 1990s, most Ayoreo had already been contacted, their forced removal from the forests completed.

On the Bolivian side of the modern border, in the early 1940s the fundamentalist protestant New Tribes Mission, founded in the U.S., had begun to contact the Ayoreo and force them into taking on a sedentary life in mission stations. A number of the affected local groups1 were already in a destabilised state because of the Chaco War, as well as by twenty years of construction, from 1938 onwards, of the Santa Cruz to Corumbá Railway, which dissected the Bolivian Chaco, and with it the Ayoreo territory, from west to east. In 1943, the Ayoreo killed five members of the missionary team, a response to the violence brought by the missionaries, a structural violence wrapped in a web of god-willed legitimation and self-justifying discourse. Later, the mission published a book entitled God Planted Five Seeds2, suggesting that, through the missionaries acts, the Lord himself was happily cultivating in the forest.

On the Paraguayan side, during the 1940s the Mennonites’ gradually expanded their network of settlements towards the northern edges of the Central Chaco, prompting violent reactions from the Ayoreo on several occasions between 1947 and 1955, and leaving a number of fatalities on the non-Ayoreo side. In 1958, Mennonite missionary, Kornelius Isaak, travelled far north into the Ayoreo territory with the intention to establish peaceful relations with those savages there. His approach was not an aggressive one, but nonetheless received a belligerent defence in response. An Ayoreo warrior wounded him with his spear, and the missionary died. It was following this failed attempt that the leaders of the Mennonite colonies resolved to call in the New Tribes Missionaries, having heard of their successful operations in Bolivia.

The catholic Salesian order had established the Maria Auxiliadora mission station on the shores of the Paraguay River, on the eastern edge of the Paraguayan Chaco, outside Ayoreo territory yet within the territory of neighbouring indigenous peoples. The Salesians too intended to contact and convert the Ayoreo. Outposts of the mission were established inland within Ayoreo territory, even to the immediate north of the Mennonite colonies from where the protestant New Tribes mission was operating. The missionary zeal on all sides was always an expression of holy competition between the respective churches. Contacts by the Salesians began in 1958 with the capture of an Ayoreo boy who was subsequently trained as human bait for contacting his kin, which he successfully did throughout the 60s and 70s, collaborating with both missionaries, catholic and protestant.