Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
where Guidaigosode Ayoreo speared the Mennonite missionary Isaak
Cornelius. Like the concealed Ayoreo bands, the low forest along the
road was a palpable presence with its smell of sun-baked spice and hid-
den sounds.
The northern Chaco was a place of extremes where the margins be-
tween reality and fantasy were stretched thin. Official maps of the area
showed settlements and roads where none exist. At a military outpost, a
handful of adolescent soldiers harassed travelers and told stories of sav-
ages. White-lipped peccaries rooted in the road's puddles and its bends
glinted with shell casings from archaic machine guns. More than seventy
years since the end of the Chaco War, the entire northern Chaco re-
mained a militarized zone requiring special permissions and inspections
to traverse. Despite the bombast and a giant concrete cavalryman outside
Fort La Gerenza, the frontier itself was a vague no man's land where na-
tional borders were only formally fixed in 2009. It was a place where local
strongmen were the rulers and the whims of their hired hands became
the rules.
We followed the road through the twenty-five-thousand-acre ranch
of a retired army colonel, who met us in his yard in a threadbare under-
shirt. He was clipping his nails and he did not look up. “I know where
the savage Ayoreo are, I know where they live and I know many things
that you would like to hear,” he said unprompted. “But I cannot tell
you anything.” As he walked back inside, we continued down tunnels
in parched brush.
After hundreds of monochrome miles, the road curled around a bend
of white sand, and I knew we had arrived somewhere that should be
named, if it is possible to fix names on a place and a time at all. An im-
mense blue lake lay in front of us, encircled by green grass and swaying
palms, dotted with flocks of white and gray water birds. Behind it a flat-
topped mountain loomed blue in the distance. The road ended at its base
in Fortin Ravelo, where two dozen teenage Bolivian soldiers ringed us
with machine guns, then invited us to join a soccer game played behind
a single mud wall with flag-mounted battlements breached by a hole they
made to facilitate the retrieval of stray balls.
Near the mountain the forest changed. The breeze was cool. Hard-
wood trees towered to twenty or thirty meters, twice the size of any trees
to the south. Many of their trunks were marked with ancient rectangles:
the precise cuts of Ayoreo honey hunters and their two-handled tension
axes. The ground beneath them was fragrant with fallen leaves. Bees and
tapir and jaguar drank from springs that trickled down gashes in sheer
basalt.
