Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to guide him to the miracle place. A week later, the couple returned to
the Chaco.
Like miracles, clear causes and clean ends were elusive for Ayoreo
people, many of whom were starving or chronically ill. In
Cojñone-Gari
,
Ayoreo were urged by the terms of lumpen capitalist exchange to embody
scenarios freighted with senses of an ending. They were often compelled
to be coparticipants in the destruction of the natural environment that
was previously the source of the hidden sacred.
The old people would run up to a recently arrived visitor in the New
Tribes Mission village of Campo Loro, ten or twenty pushing to the front
of a larger crowd, all soft eyes and ravaged gums and wild hair, pulling up
tattered rags and pressing the visitor's hands to their ribs so that he or she
would know that they were not lying when they said they were starving
and asked for food. When the price of Paraguayan beef and uncleared land
surged in the late 1990s, when the bulldozers worked twenty-four hours a
day, someone decided to donate food to “the poor starving Indians,” sub-
sidized in part by humanitarian aid from a European government. Once a
week for several years, a truck carrying unusable bovine entrails from the
Mennonite slaughterhouse would drive through the settlement, make a
slow U-turn, and dump the wet offal on the dusty ground. The news was
shouted among the households and the race was on. Old ladies and chil-
dren trampled and pushed down other old ladies and children, fighting
over the small shreds of foul viscera, covered in bloody mud.
These efforts were replaced by a scheme to have Ayoreo make charcoal,
also sponsored in part by international development aid. This scheme re-
quired the inhabitants of most Ayoreo communities—people who once
believed that every plant, insect, and animal in the universe had been
a member of their tribe—to clear-cut the trees and woody vegetation
remaining on the small plots of land they still control and burn them in
underground pit ovens. They were paid approximately six cents per kilo-
gram of charcoal produced. The grain and texture of the wood was visible
in the fossilized black lumps, which were sold to Mennonite middle-
men and eventually fueled backyard barbecues in Germany. One of the
highest-selling brands of this charcoal featured a half-naked cartoon In-
dian as its logo. The workers emerged like half-remembered dreams, pal-
lid skin visible in sweat lines through black soot. The fragile alkaline earth
was left bared to the sun.
Scenarios that may provoke frustration, confusion, and despair (not
to mention sympathy, nostalgia, or shame) made a sort of hopeful sense
in apocalypticism's inverted logics. The more intense the suffering, the
nearer the new beginning.
