Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and save them. And there was only one place this reverse pursuit could
begin.
Bobby
On a white-hot day in late 2007, I made my way to the New Tribes Mis-
sion of Campo Loro, hoping to interview the missionary named Bobby.
At the time it was the largest Ayoreo settlement on either side of the
Bolivia-Paraguay border. With nearly a thousand inhabitants, this square
mile scar of grit and dust contained approximately one-sixth of all
Ayoreo-speaking people.
Experiencing the sheer scale of misery in Campo Loro was like a physi-
cal assault until you began to get used to it and I was never sure which
was worse. It was a searing scene. No trees broke the sun's relentless heat
on patchwork roofs of tin and tarp. Clutches of anonymous figures and
skeletal dogs sat in the scant shade of mud huts and plastic-walled shacks.
An incongruous brick church loomed in the center.
It was an unruly place where hunger lurked. Where the hollow trunk
of the death tree yawned. Where crops did not grow well in the hot sandy
soil. Where there was no game left in the shred of forest nearby, few jobs
in the mission brick factory and fewer still in the Mennonite colonies
forty miles to the south. In the Totobiegosode villages far to the north,
we heard of elders starving to death on the mission. A cruel irony had
led these people, descendants of the great Guidaigosode confederation,
from their ancestral territories south to this place in 1979—nearer, they
believed, to jobs, prosperity, and inclusion into moral modernity. And it
was to this place that the Totobiegosode bands had been brought in 1979
and 1986, clutching bows, covering eyes.
In the early 2000s, an enterprising young teacher converted his ram-
shackle hut into a combination bar, pool hall, and movie theater at night.
Crowds of teenagers paid the entrance fee to drink cheap soda or beer
and watch looping videos. Among the most popular were martial arts
films by Jean-Claude Van Damme. Campo Loro was divided into two
unequal parts. The Indian section of the mission was bordered on the
west by a neat airstrip, the small missionary neighborhood a safe quarter
mile beyond. It was a short distance from the devastation of the Ayoreo
encampment, but it seemed like a different world.
There a pale teenage girl with braces and American clothes walked
alone down the planed gravel, playing with her fat black bottle calf. I
