The lifeless body of an Ayoreo indigenous person was found at dusk on the last hot day of the year 2023 next to the dry trunk of a white quebracho on a dirt road in Paraguay. The corpse lying on thorny bushes had the skin on its legs and arms covered in black, as the men of the Ayoreo people who live in voluntary isolation, inside the forest, traditionally paint themselves. It was at the gates of the second largest continuous forest in South America, the Gran Chaco, shared with Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia.
The Ayoreo are the only indigenous people in America outside the Amazon Basin with members living without establishing relationships with the society that surrounds them, that is, the State, NGOs, evangelicals, poachers, anthropologists or youtubers. Something only possible in the Amazon and the Chaco, due to the enormous forest mass that both regions have been since before colonization.
On Sunday, December 31, someone notified the local police station by phone and a photo began to circulate in Chaco WhatsApp groups. This is how the image spread to the phones of the Ayoreo and other indigenous peoples in the area, also the Paraguayans and the Mennonites, whose livestock cooperatives control part of the security and infrastructure of the area, in the absence of the presence of the Paraguayan State. . A little later, the photo and the news reached the cities and the Prosecutor's Office.
The legs and arms covered in black, as the men of the Ayoreo people traditionally paint themselves to hunt in the Chaco forest full of thorns and caraguatás; of pumas and jaguars. And the upper half of the body, from the waist up, destroyed.
The chest opened and pierced by the beasts shows that it had been there for some time, 1,800 meters from Lageranza'i, a tiny Paraguayan town in one of the most virgin natural areas of the continent and furthest from the oceans: in the heart of the people's ancestral territory. Ayoreo, native to the forests and lagoons of the border between Bolivia and Paraguay.
“As soon as we saw the photo and the toes completely open, we knew it was an isolated Ayoreo. Because the isolated ones don't wear shoes and their fingers open. In addition to the traditional black paint and the bracelet on his arm,” Guei Basui Picanerai, one of the eight community leaders who traveled on January 6 to the place where the body appeared, about six hours by car from the Mennonite city of Philadelphia, the largest in the Paraguayan Chaco and 14 hours from the capital, Asunción.
The leaders of the four Ayoreo political organizations claim that someone shot him and fled, leaving the body without help. That is why they are asking for a “deep investigation” from the Prosecutor's Office, which barely has any agents due to these payments and who, when they came to remove the body on January 2, did not remove evidence such as a mop of hair that the Ayoreo leaders later found, according to the account. Basui and shows in videos on his social networks.
“We demand that our complaint be taken into account and we demand to participate in the entire investigation process. The entire Ayoreo people are very sad because it could be one of the relatives who were not contacted who still live in the mountains,” the Ayoreo leaders write in a statement sent to the press this week.
The body appeared near a tajamar, a well where ranchers accumulate rainwater, near one of the dusty roads in the lushest area of the Paraguayan Chaco. There, one million hectares of the Defensores del Chaco national park in Paraguay and another four million hectares of the Kaa Iya park in Bolivia provide shelter to Ayoreo groups who live as before colonization: nomads, hunting and gathering. Its borders are drawn by the forest.
“Looking at the body, we think that the person tried to cross the road and drink water, but he ran into someone there, we estimate that it was a rancher. Maybe she gets scared and shoots him. It was at the height of Trébol ranch,” says Basui by phone upon returning from his trip to Lagerenza'i.
“We ask that the territory and way of life of our isolated relatives who decided not to leave their forest, which is their world, be respected because they feel safer there. In Paraguay, several isolated Ayoreo groups still live in the forest but it is being destroyed more and more and their lives are not respected,” add the leaders of this town of about 5,000 members between Paraguay and Bolivia.
Prosecutors have said they will conduct a DNA test that could be ready within two weeks. The body is now in Asunción, according to Ayoreo leaders.
“Our Public Ministry does not have the sensitivity that it should to intervene in the same way in cases that have to do with indigenous peoples, here they are not given the same treatment and they are not given the same speed, there is no action decided by their part,” adds to EL PAÍS, Miguel Ángel Alarcón, coordinator of the NGO Amotocodie Initiative, dedicated to supporting the preservation of the Ayoreo people, territory and culture.
What does voluntary isolation mean?
The Ayoreo have always been in the heart of the Gran Chaco, living in groups of about fifty people, exercising their right to self-determination, recognized by the Inter-American Human Rights System and by the Paraguayan Constitution itself. There are 120 isolated indigenous peoples in America, the vast majority on Brazil's border with Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.
The Ayoreo, protected by their nomadic way of life, by the forest and the savanna and by luck, survived European expeditions and modern wars well into the 20th century. Only after 1960 did the obsession of the American evangelical organization New Tribes, now renamed Ethos 360, confront them with our reality. The evangelicals forced them out, sometimes peacefully, other times not.
Another of the leaders who came to investigate the appearance of the body is Porai Picanerai, from the Chaidí community, which means “refuge” in the Ayoreo language, because it is where many of those who were expelled from the community have stayed in the last 20 years. forest by missionaries and military. Like the same.
Porai Picanerai says that the missionaries forced him to leave his forest and his family in 1986. Porai told EL PAÍS how New Tribes forced them to live in a reduction, where many died due to the lack of antibodies to the diseases of the surrounding society and where they had to dedicate themselves to semi-forced work.
To this day, Porai and other Ayoreo fight to title their territory, they defend it and travel through it, full of hot air and dry land to document the invasions and expel the loggers and cattle ranchers who may, as has happened now, encounter some of his relatives in isolation and kill him.
The Chaco is so large, that it is also one of the places on the planet where deforestation is advancing the fastest. Paraguay was the most deforested country in South America from 1990 to 2015, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Now it remains in second position, according to the Global Forest Watch (GFW) satellite system.
About 250,000 hectares of forest are destroyed here every year. About 1,400 hectares per day, about
seven trees per second, according to the calculation of the NGO Guyra Paraguay. To produce meat and to produce leather for export. (There are two films from Paraguay that describe this phenomenon very well and how it affects the Ayoreo: Barely the Sun, by Aramí Ullón and Eami, by Paz Encina).
The Chaco is so large that a few hundred Ayoreo people manage to stay off the roads to this day. Of the trucks and the yellow bulldozers that uproot the trees. They know what's out there: armed cattle ranch guards, drug traffickers and timber smugglers, religious missionaries and corrupt prosecutors. And they don't like it. Environmental conservation specialists and anthropologists from the NGO Amotocodie Initiative agree with the Ayoreo: their survival depends on stopping deforestation in the area and guaranteeing that their ancestral territory remains a forest. And if possible, yours.
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