The Anthropology of Paraguay: Ayore and deforestation

Of the several different sub-groups of Ayoreo, the most isolated are the Totobiegosode (‘people from the place of the wild pigs’). Since 1969 many have been forced out of the forest, but some still avoid all contact with outsiders. Their first sustained contact with white people came in the 1940s and 1950s, when Mennonite farmers established colonies on their land. The Ayoreo resisted this invasion, and there were killings on both sides. In 1979 and 1986 the American fundamentalist New Tribes Mission helped organise ‘manhunts’ in which large groups of Totobiegosode were forcibly brought out of the forest.
Several Ayoreo died in these encounters, and others succumbed later to disease. Other Totobiegosode groups came out of the forest in 1998 and 2004 as continual invasions of their land meant they constantly had to abandon their homes, making life very hard.

Recently a man belonging to the only uncontacted tribe,still living a nomaci life in the forest, was spotted in South America outside the Amazon basin. He had been sighted near a region targeted for deforestation by Brazilian cattle-ranchers. The next day an abandoned camp, a clay dish, and game ready for cooking were found nearby. The man is one of an unknown number of uncontacted Ayoreo-Totobiegosode living in the dry forests of northern Paraguay. The Ayoreo tribe has lost a lot of land due to cattle-ranchers, such as the Brazilian firm Yaguarete Pora S.A. The man was seen in an area owned by Yaguarete. In a letter to the Paraguayan government about the sighting, already-contacted Totobiegosode leaders said, ‘We are very concerned about [our relatives still in the forest]. They’re threatened by the deforestation in that region.’Yaguarete was recently fined $16,000/£10,500 by the Paraguayan authorities for concealing the existence of the Totobiegosode in the area where it was given a licence to work.

A clay dish for toasting seeds was found where the isolated Indian was spotted.