Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Upon entering the camp, one of the mission men grabbed a young
Dejai and claimed him as his captive. The others began to do the same
thing. But when the man let go of him to pick up his cassette recorder,
Dejai grabbed his spear and began to fight. Others soon joined him in
attacking their captors. In the ensuing battle, five men of the mission
group were killed, including another Totobiegosode captured in 1979,
and another four were badly wounded, including Jochade.
The mission group retreated and continued to shout to the others
that they came in peace and wanted to take them to the
Cojñone
. That
night, an uneasy truce had been brokered and the Guidaigosode raiders
slept in the camp. By the following afternoon, most of the Totobiegosode
agreed to go back with them to the mission. Some of the captors walked
to a nearby ranch and radioed the mission. The mission plane dropped
medical supplies and airlifted one of the wounded men out. The con-
tacted group of eighteen captives arrived at Campo Loro on the back of a
tractor-trailer. It was the evening of January 4, 1987.
What few could agree on—in 2007 or in 1987—was the ultimate signifi-
cance of these events.
Once news of the contact became public, a small group of Paraguayan
indigenistas
mounted a vigorous public critique that resonated across the
social divides of the military dictatorship and internationally. This cri-
tique built on several prior denunciations: international accusations of
state genocide against Aché groups, Luke Holland's exposé of the New
Tribes 1979 pursuit of Pejeide's band, and the fallout from human rights
scholar Richard Arens's 1977 visit to the New Tribes Mission (which he
likened to Nazi concentration camps, controlled by death-dealing mis-
sionaries and focused on routine patrols to hunt down the forest bands).
1
The 1987 critique, which called the work of the mission “offensive to our
nation,” was widely circulated in topics, articles, and newspaper stories.
It became an organizing point for the nascent Indigenous rights move-
ment in Paraguay.
2
The
indigenista
critics denounced the central institution of the New
Tribes Mission: actively pursuing and capturing so-called uncontacted
bands of Ayoreo. They argued that such Totobiegosode contact expedi-
tions were manhunts. Moreover, according to these critics, the Totobi-
egosode “human hunts” were best understood as a form of “ethnocide,”
or the active extermination of culture and a collective psyche:
This process is simply and straightforwardly called ethnocide; institutionalized eth-
nocide, systematic ethnocide. More than the declared redemptive objectives, the
