Geography Reference
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[which] is bringing the cause of the modern Ayoreo (out of the forest)
ever closer to that of the isolated groups, and the protection of them
[is] becoming their own cause.” 39 In such descriptions, the figure of the
culturally pure isolated Ayoreo became a metaphor for the value of all
contemporary Ayoreo people, even as the NGO's objective was glossed
as the agenda of all Ayoreo-speaking people.
Despite their bitter and public disagreements, both NGOs produced
strikingly similar imagery about isolated groups as a form of life that
had “not yet had any contact whatsoever with modern civilization,” and
was in danger of imminent extinction. 40 They both invoked the sanctity
of this imperiled life as justification for their intervention, and used it
to connect to wider humanitarian narratives and global NGO networks.
Survival International was particularly effective in raising international
awareness around the plight of the concealed Ayoreo groups, begin-
ning with its exposé of New Tribes Mission manhunts. 41 In recent years
Survival has focused on the unchecked deforestation of Totobiegosode
lands, and organized several direct actions around the issue, including
popular demonstrations in 2010 at Paraguayan embassies across Europe
by thousands of protestors waving signs that read “Save the Ayoreo.”
The narrative of saving this “Tribe that Hides from Man” from extinction
was a predominant one; website visitors were urged to donate or support
Survival's work by statements such as “The Ayoreo Need You,” or “Their
Future is in Your Hands.”
Such imagery reinforced the notion that isolated life exists only as a
state of emergency: the sovereignty of this life is contingent on the moral
actions and financial charity of those in the Global North. This common-
sense moralism prefigures NGOs as lifesaving institutions that “do good”
by “giving voice to the voiceless” or taking anti-hegemonic positions
against states and markets and empowering grassroots aims. 42 Thus, com-
mentators have noted that “in Paraguay, civil society organized through
NGOs plays a crucial role in promoting the protection of the territories
and rights of the Ayoreo Indigenous families in the Gran Chaco. In this
process, Iniciativa Amotocodie is distinguished as an NGO at the forefront
of this protection, promoting as it does a unique participative model.” 43
Such impressions are also necessary to insure the continued funding of
these NGOs, mainly via charity groups and foreign aid offices of Norway,
Holland, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the European Union.
These NGO actions were instrumental in raising awareness around
the plight of the concealed Ayoreo, including the rampant destruction
of their ancestral forest homelands. In practice, however, the imagined
constituencies of such NGO politics also required erasing the unsettling
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