A FEW DAYS LATER I linked up with Jürgen Riester who had arrived in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, capital of the eastern lowlands of Bolivia. What distinguished Riester from perhaps the majority of anthropologists, preferring to conduct their studies in an atmosphere of scientific detachment, was a habit that compelled him not merely to gather and evaluate data but immerse himself in causes. Among other scientific works he was the author of Indians of Eastern Bolivia (IWGIA, Copenhagen) and, with an all too close experience of what happens to those Indians, was prepared to take time from his academic work, to do what he could about it.
Riester’s account had been largely devoted to the migrant Indian cane-cutters and cotton pickers, some 40-50,000 of whom are imported into the lowlands for a season of up to three months each year. The men worked a 15-hour day, starting at 3 am by moonlight or the light of kerosene flares, except on Sunday when 13 hours were worked. Pay was the equivalent of 50p per day, although this was subject to various rake-offs and deductions. Those we saw were housed in dreadful conditions in airless barracoons, where they slept, sexes mixed, and tightly packed in rows. Where there were children these were just piled on the adults. Being accustomed to the cold, clear air of the high plateaux of the Andes, where they are recruited, these Indians suffered from the tropical heat and the incessant attacks of insects that made life unbearable to them. Many became sick, and watch was kept to see that those likely to die could be shipped out back to the highlands. The only medicine, supplied impartially to those suffering from tuberculosis, enteritis or snakebite, was aspirin. Indians were obliged to buy supplies from company stores where up to ten times normal prices were charged.
Worst of all, these tens of thousands of Indians were locked into a system of debt slavery, from which there was no escape. Any attempting to default would be hunted down and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. In all these backward, under-developed, missionized, dictator-ridden countries, there was slavery under one guise or another whichever way you looked.
Riester’s arrival from Germany with three female coworkers had been strategically timed so that they could be on the scene for the end of the season, within days of the arrival of the ramshackle buses in which the migrants would be transported back to the Andes. This had been arranged so as to defeat the annual practice by which those Indians, who—despite all forms of plunder and extortion—had managed to put aside a few pesos, could be relieved of them.
The only object—the single article of luxury every migrant family wanted to possess—was a chair. This after the long summer of labour was the symbol of survival and reward. To be able to take a chair back to their furniture-less Andean shack and display it proudly to admiring neighbours was the height of Indian ambition. The company store carried a stock of chairs but few families had scraped together the money to pay the company’s price for one, and a surrender to the temptation to take one on credit only dragged a family deeper into debt.
At this point Riester and his team of ladies went to work. Riester found a loophole in the company’s contract by which he contended they were only compelled to buy provisions from the store. He then went to a furniture manufacturer in Santa Cruz de la Sierra and bought all the chairs required at factory prices. I helped them load up a hired truck with chairs, and they took them back to the estate and handed them over to the Indians. I was dazed with admiration not only by Riester’s resourcefulness, but his courage. By this action he made enemies of ruthless men and placed himself in danger. In Santa Cruz hired gunmen worked to a tariff: they would kill someone of slight importance for 100 pesos (£3). An average citizen could be removed from the scene for about ten times that amount, and a foreigner’s elimination might cost as much as 3,000 pesos. It was still less than £100. This in Bolivia was the way accounts were settled.
Glancing through the local newspaper, Presencia, soon after my arrival, I was struck by an item that read almost as an ugly fairy story in the calm and security of the Santa Cruz Holiday Inn. The story described the kind of misadventure that could befall a group of forest Indians—in this case Ayoreo refugees from a missionary camp—who had wandered away down a long traffic-choked road, finding themselves in the end, bewildered and dazzled and deafened by the clamour, and unable to make themselves understood, in the streets of a boom city. They camped out on a strip of urban garden at the side of one of the busiest roads where the women prostituted themselves, to get food, behind the shelter of low flowering shrubs. It was probable that few citizens of Santa Cruz would have noticed they were there.
One of the male Ayoreos, a young man called Cañe, was washing his clothes one evening when he heard screams coming from a car parked nearby in which two men were attacking a girl. He ran to the girl’s aid and the two men drove off but soon returned with a police car. In this, after a thorough beating, Cañe was driven to the police station where, as he was unable to give any account of himself, a specialized piece of machinery was used in an attempt to break his wrists and, when that failed, a policeman simply drew his gun and shot him through the head. The bullet entered the right side of the head, low down, behind the ear, and exited some inches further away, astonishingly without damage to the brain.
What is unusual about this story, presented by the Presencia writer with no more passion than if he had been reporting an accident to a bus, was that not only had Cañe survived a bullet through his head, but that he had then been sent to hospital. In Latin America it is almost unthinkable that an ambulance should be sent for an Indian.
I mentioned this case some days later to Jürgen Riester and it was decided that we should go and see if the Ayoreos were still there. Learning that Cañe—now released from hospital—and the rest of the fugitive group were still to be seen on a piece of waste ground outside the Brazil station we took an interpreter and went in a taxi to talk to him. The taxi driver had some reason to know where the Ayoreos were to be found, because he mentioned that he had had intercourse with one of the women only a few days before. As sexual partners he found the Ayoreos very satisfactory, he said. They were cheap, the price being 5 pesos (13p) a visit, and much more gracious and natural in their manner than the ordinary hardbitten prostitutes of the city with whom he was normally obliged to consort. On the other hand, whereas girls in the brothels underwent regular medical inspection the Ayoreos did not, with inevitable results. He now awaited with anxiety the possible appearance of dread symptoms.
It was early evening, and to me there was something faintly satanic about the scene outside the Brazil station. A new dual carriageway had been cut through here, and there had been some attempt to dispel the rawness of the environment by plantings of palms and hibiscus, and by decorative street lighting. In between the swish of traffic and the brazen uproar of car-horns the sob and wail of cassette-music came from the double-parked cars. An amphitheatre of electric signs enclosed the lower part of the sky.
We found the Ayoreos as promised, and at the moment of our arrival some half dozen middle-aged women were at work to prepare as many nubile girls, whose bodies would provide survival for them all, for the night’s work. The older women and the men were still in the dismal regalia and the sad sacks of the mission camp, but mini-skirts and T-shirts had been bought for the girls—each of them nursing her baby—and one or two of them sported new shoes with bright buckles. Make-up was being applied using tiny jungle tools with breathless concentration and considerable skill, although the attempt to lighten a normal Ayoreo swarthiness by the application of white powder produced a slightly ghastly effect. In the end the girls were ready, kneeling, eyes downcast, the great clamour of the city about them, bright reflections of headlights and advertising signs crawling over their cheeks, babies cradled in their arms at the pavement’s edge. There was something profoundly formal about the sight, oriental rather than Indian, an act of submission to destiny. Not one of them had so much as glanced in our direction.
The men busied themselves in small ways among the background shadows of the trees. The younger ones looked extremely strong. Through selective breeding necessary to survive in the daunting environment of the ‘Green Hell’ of the Chaco, the Ayoreos have developed perhaps the most imposing physique of the Indian races, making a fetish of manly strength. To acquire status and marry well a man had to be prepared to tackle a jaguar at close quarters in such a way that the maximum amount of scarring was left by the encounter on his limbs and torso. Physically the brawny Ayoreos were the antithesis of the nimble, mountaineering Huichols. When Cañe was found we were confronted with a young Samson, and although he spoke nothing but Ayoreo it was clear that he was amused that even with their wrist-breaking machine the police had been unable to break his wrists. They had thrown him into the street at the back of the police station at a time when by the greatest good fortune he had attracted the attention and curiosity of a passing doctor, surprised that a man with such a wound should be not only alive but conscious.
The wound in the back of his head was still raw and suppurating with no dressing on it, and before displaying it he cleaned it as best he could with a wad of cotton waste. A number of ribs had been broken by the beating he had received, but these caused him no trouble. He had been taken by a missionary as a boy from the Chaco during an army attack on the tribe and had seen his father and mother killed by the soldiers. Since then he had slaved for farmers, being rewarded with an occasional cast-off garment and enough rice to keep alive. And then he and his companions could stand no more of the life in the mission camp and wandered away, following first a jungle track, then the railway line, then another road that brought them to Santa Cruz.
Strangely he seemed in no way embittered by this unprovoked attack that had nearly cost him his life but was, rather, smiling and jubilant at his escape—and this was characteristic of the way the Indians saw life.
Now the first customer had driven up, parked and locked his car and was strolling in our direction. The girls knelt as if carved in stone. Cañe wiped a small smear of blood from his head and we turned to go, promising to return with some rubber sheeting of which Riester kept a stock, for the rains were due to start.
The Indians had decamped from a South American Mission station in the jungle near the village of Pailón, some twenty kilometres away. Riester suggested that we should go down there next day and see what was happening, and this we did.
We left before dawn next day in Riester’s Land Rover, and found the missionary camp at the end of a jungle track, along which threatening notices had been posted in the hope of keeping visitors away. Nearer the centre of the camp grimed and dishevelled women and children squatted round a fire on which a tortoise was being cooked. Riester, offered a blackened claw, took this and chewed it with every appearance of satisfaction, and later tried a bone covered with a furry layer of putrefaction, that was being passed round to be gnawed. In the centre of the camp we found a large wooden hut with several male Ayoreos propped against its walls and keeping themselves upright by holding onto the overhanging rafters with their hands. These men were dazed with apathy and unable or unwilling to speak. When some hours later we left the camp their position had not changed, and one of the German girls suggested that they might be willing themselves to die.
While the New Tribes Mission had been allotted the Ayoreos removed from the jungle in the Paraguayan sector of the Gran Chaco, those in Bolivia had become the charge of the South American Mission Society. Of these, 275—a substantial proportion of the survivors—had been rounded up with their jaguar-scarred chief. He presented himself to us in all his dignity, wearing a motorcycle crash-helmet. This was removed for us to inspect a deep cleft in his forehead where he had attempted to commit suicide, using an axe.
A commotion began, led by some weeping women, who had broken through to tell us that the camp’s water-supply had been cut off as a punishment for some offence, and that many sick children in the camp had been without water for some days. It seemed a matter of urgency to do something to rectify this situation so we went to see the missionary, Mr Depue, whose trim compound was adjacent to the bedraggled camp area. The missionaries occupied a substantial but unpretentious house and one was immediately aware of crated machinery that had arrived or was waiting to be taken away; the radio mast, the generator’s throb, the cases of Dr Pepper’s empties, and the line-up by the door of sturdy imported toys. Mr Depue and his family were at lunch when we arrived and we were shown into an anteroom within sight of the Depues at their meal, which they consumed slowly and in absolute silence. After Mr Depue had said grace the family rose from the table and marched wordlessly away, and Mr Depue joined us, a lean, shaven-headed man reminiscent rather of the male figure in Grant Wood’s well known picture, American Gothic.
He unhesitatingly confirmed that he had ordered a collective punishment he believed most likely to be effective to deal with a case in which two or three children had broken into a store and stolen petrol. There was to be no more water until the culprits were found, and brought into his compound there to be publicly thrashed.
‘Would you be administering the thrashing, Mr Depue?’ I asked.
‘That is my intention,’ he said, ‘although I should not be averse to supervising the necessary chastisement undertaken by another person. But I’m afraid that’s unlikely.’
He went on to explain that the situation was a difficult one because in all the many years he had spent as a missionary he had never heard of a single instance of an Indian punishing a child, which was to say that the conception of corrective chastisement seemed to be beyond their grasp. Mr Depue spoke of this aversion to punishment as of some genetic defect inherited and shared by the whole race. It had now come to a trial of strength, a test-case. He hoped as much for his own sake as for the Ayoreos’ that it would soon be resolved.’
‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.
‘Because we are in the same boat with them. Whatever discomfort they may be experiencing is being shared by us. I have ordered the water to be cut off to the mission house, too.’
It occurred to me that before taking this step Mr Depue might have prudently arranged for a reserve supply, because both water and soft drinks had been in evidence at their midday meal.
Mr Depue happened to have read the newspaper account of Cañe’s misfortune, and remembered that he himself had ‘brought him in’ during a pacification drive in the Chaco. ‘Three or four youngsters including this fellow became separated in the panic from the rest of the tribe. I kept out of sight and sent Ayoreo-speaking Indians to offer them a better life, and to persuade them to come in, and they did.’
We stood at the door of the mission house looking down over the scene of Mr Depue’s endeavours, over the planning and order of the mission compound, the chapel where frequent prayer-meetings were conducted and a low dais for speech-making, where it was to be supposed the public thrashing would take place. Beyond that the cleared area was strewn with pitiful litter, and the shed was still in sight with Ayoreos clinging by their arms to the roof-rafters. One hundred and fifty yards away the dry secondary scrub forest began. The Indians told our Ayoreo-speaker that nothing lived in it: it had been cleaned out by the dispossessed Indians and not a bird, not a snake, not an edible grub remained. The tortoise eaten that day had been thrown to them by a local farmer who had visited the camp to discuss some business with the missionary.
‘And do you still believe that this is a better life?’ I asked Mr Depue.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I cannot describe to you in words how much better it is.’
‘The Ayoreos who left the camp and went to Santa Cruz,’ I told him, ‘are living on the women’s earnings from prostitution.’
‘There would be little alternative,’ he said.
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘I leave it to you to imagine my feelings,’ Mr Depue said, ‘and I am only comforted by the knowledge that a soul once truly saved can never be lost.’
The first great intervention by the missionaries in the Bolivian Chaco had been led by William Pencille, of the South American Missionary Society, called in when white cattlemen moving into the tribal area ran up against the Ayoreos. Pencille established a friendly contact, persuaded the Ayoreos to give up their resistance, and settled them on a barren patch of land by the side of the railway line, where within a matter of a few weeks 300 Indians died of influenza.
There can be no doubt that it would have been possible for the missionary, who had a jeep, an aeroplane and funds at his disposal, to save the lives of these people. But Pencille was convinced that ‘It’s better they should die. Then I baptize them (on the point of death) and they go straight to heaven’. (Extract from a conversation between William Pencille and Father Elmar Klinger, OFM, quoted by Luis A. Pereira in The Bolivian Instance.)
Mr Depue’s successful collaboration with the Bolivian Army, as described to me, was probably the last operation of its kind, after which it is believed that no Ayoreos were left at large in Bolivia.
The once virtually impenetrable jungle of thorn-scrub and swamps, known as the Gran Chaco, sometimes referred to as the ‘Green Hell’, covers an area of roughly 1,600 square miles and is divided by Bolivia and Paraguay. As far as is known, the last of the Bolivian Ayoreos had been cleared out of the Bolivian sector to the north of the operation in which Mr Depue was engaged, although possibly 1,500 remained in Paraguay. Ranchers and oil prospectors began to move into the area. In 1942 General Alfredo Stroessner, dictator of Paraguay, gave a contract to the New Tribes Mission of Florida ‘to settle and civilize’ the Indians of the Chaco, later presenting them with 2,500 hectares of land.
It was a task which the missionaries set out to accomplish with considerable vigour and, as one can gather from the accounts of the day, with the assistance of the Paraguayan airforce. In 1943 the first of many Indian hunts by the missionaries took place, in the course of which five missionaries were killed.
Missionary descriptions of such operations are often disarmingly simple and direct—all the more so because it has always been NTM policy to recruit young evangelists of limited education, who are not always discreet. God Planted Five Seeds, by Jean Dye Johnson, a classic of its kind, is the account of a young missionary wife, soon to become a widow.
When the Johnsons arrived in Paraguay it is not at all certain from the wife’s account that they realized that they were in the same continent as the United States. Only once in 213 pages does she refer to Indians, and then in quotes, as if real Indians were to be found only in North America. Otherwise the mission is out to capture ‘naked savages’, or bárbaros.
Mrs Johnson refers in terms of rather dreamlike detachment to the killing of naked savages and a single quotation is enough to convey some idea of what the process of capture and conversion must have been like for those subjected to it.
We did not know then how clever the Ayoreo were at hiding from the very sight of a plane. A captive bárbaro later explained how everyone threw himself on the ground at the first sound in the air. A mother would prostrate herself over her child to keep him from moving, her brown body blending into perfect camouflage with the jungle browns and greens.
There is no criticism of these happenings. No sympathy for the Indian mother’s heart-rending predicament.
We were more than ever determined to win these souls to Christ when the Ayoreos, driven in their extremity out of the jungle, came in.
Mrs Johnson noted that the householders, ‘most of whom owned ranches or farms just out of town were shameless in their desire to get their hands on some Ayoreo who would become a labourer without pay’.
Many neighbouring ranches already were using Ayoreos as workers, most of whom had been captured as children. Now the townspeople looked them over calculatingly, picking out likely prospects.
The use in this passage of the adjective ‘shameless’ is the single example of implied criticism in this book of the servitude imposed on the Indians. For years Mrs Johnson lived among ‘captives’ and ‘labourers without pay’, but the word ‘slave’ is never used. On a single occasion she expressed regret for the murder of an Indian.
He (Paul Fleming, founder and head of the NTM) was troubled by the fact that the second search party had killed a savage.
With this in mind also, Dorothy (one of the missionary wives) answered Paul’s letter.
It might only mean that more savages would be killed, and sent into Christless graves. We came down here to reach them not to kill them.
Mrs Johnson’s concern here is likely to have been less with the death of a savage, which was a matter of frequent occurrence, than with the mission’s responsibility for a soul’s condemnation to everlasting hell.