Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
would tear them off. . . . When I saw her four months later she had gotten
over her leg wound but took malaria and died two days later”). But even
this record of a woman captured on a path to the salt lakes was no more
than a casual footnote.
The fragments that remain bespeak a saturating violence whose de-
gree has already escaped documentation. Killing an Ayoreo-speaking
person in the 1940s and 1950s wrote missionary Jean Dye Johnson, was
considered less morally compromising than killing a dog. At least two
soldiers in the Chaco War recalled killing entire groups of Ayoreo at the
Salt Lakes with machine guns and light artillery. The official policy of the
Paraguayan government well into the 1960s was a “state of war” against
Ayoreo-speaking people. Paraguayan military conscripts at some Chaco
forts could reportedly gain exemption from service if they presented the
severed head of an Ayoreo person to their commanders during this time.
After two cowboys roped a twelve-year-old Ayoreo boy in 1956, he was
put in a cage and exhibited in downtown Asunción as an “authentic sav-
age Moro Indian” before being sent to the zoo. How did the upper-class
Asunceños, who each paid a dollar to see him, perceive this slight figure
huddled behind bars?
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Perhaps the most vivid records of all were the tall tales and rumors still
told about Ayoreo-speaking people in small towns along the Chaco fron-
tier. “They used to take children and eat them,” an old man in northern
Paraguay once told me, “I can show you the place.” Some remembered
them as incestuous cannibals. During my fieldwork, they were sometimes
still called Moors (an odious name imported from the Iberian peninsula)
or simply barbarians. I was warned about traveling to their villages. About
being too near. “You must take a pistol.” One rancher told me not to go
out at night in the Chaco, that savage Ayoreo were still lurking nearby.
The violence against Ayoreo by outsiders was amplified in warfare
between various Ayoreo subgroups. Ayoreo elders agreed that sometime
in the 1930s, the peace established at Echoi was broken. While there
was no consensus on which group started the war, all concurred that
a man from one group speared another in the chest at Echoi in a dispute
over a woman. Ayoreo groups soon turned against one another. The
main aggressors were the newly allied Guidaigosode and Garaigosode,
who launched devastating raids against all other groups. Demoralized
and defeated, Direquednejnaigosode and Jnupedogosode bands initi-
ated contact with evangelical missionaries in 1947. From the mission-
aries, they obtained shotguns and machetes and launched their own
revenge attacks against their enemies. The result was that by 1977,
nearly all Ayoreo-speaking bands had made contact with missionar-
