Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
way to “guarantee [isolated peoples] their rights to life and health, while
safeguarding their existence and integrity.” Likewise, the concealed Ay-
oreo groups are described as “living according to their ancestral cultural
norms, in another world; their knowledge of the modern life culture of
encompassing society is reduced to isolated fragments, which they are
able to incorporate into their own worldview without altering its co-
herence.”
29
Such familiar colonial conceits not only resonate with older
representations of a racialized Ayoreo humanity as “an archaic culture,”
“mythical consciousness,” or “wild and savage horde,” but they also con-
tradict the fundamental aims of multiculturalism by reducing Indigenous
life to a static culture, and by denying Indigenous populations control
over their own being.
Isolation can be considered a state of Indigenous exception, complete
with its own norms and hierarchies.
30
Yet it always exceeds the state,
especially in the Chaco, where the enforcement of law is already precari-
ous and expeditionary. The question remains: How is this peculiar legal
category translated into everyday practices and politics that Ayoreo can-
not avoid?
Isolation and Humanitarianism
What is most important about the image of the isolated Ayoreo, of course,
is what can be done with it. One month after the successful NGO protest
against the planned Chaco expedition, the attorney general of ethnic
and gender rights ordered a raid on its offices by national police.
31
Based
on this raid, the director eventually faced criminal charges for allegedly
embezzling a large sum of money.
This action was widely denounced by other NGOs in Paraguay.
POJOAJU, an association of Paraguayan NGOs, promptly issued a state-
ment in which they “energetically repudiate this abuse of power,” and
described the raid as a “disastrous precedent of state action against the
organizations of civil society in the Chaco.”
32
International organiza-
tions quickly followed suit, with Amnesty International condemning the
state's actions against these “defenders of human rights” as a punitive
reprisal for their denouncements against the expedition and for their
advocacy against large landholders in the Chaco.
33
In each case, the state's regulatory actions were described as attacks
not against the NGO per se but as against the rights of the isolated
Ayoreo the NGO supposedly defended. As the Amnesty International
statement concluded, “this case demonstrates once again the void in
