To Run Across the Sea (28 page)

Last spring in Balouta was cold and wet. It had snowed in May, thereafter raining for 30 consecutive days before my arrival in June, and the children were going about like little Andean Indians in knitted caps with side flaps pulled down well over the ears. This was the time the maximum possible effort was required from the whole population to set the year on course, with every day filled with urgent tasks, in this instance to be carried out in the rain and mud. Despite this there were smiles everywhere. Balouta appeared a cheerful place.

Reference to the village was made a number of years ago in the journal of the
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
of Madrid. ‘Those of us who wish for a greater understanding of the lives of our Celto-Iberian ancestors,’ said the writer, ‘should spare no effort to visit Balouta. It may convince them that the gap that divides us is narrower than they suspected.’ Evidence gathered from burial sites, he said, showed that the villagers of old had possessed good physique and lived on the whole to ripe old age. The very isolation of such villages had spared them in a later epoch from the plagues of the Middle Ages. There had been nothing, either, said the expert, to deflect the course of natural selection; thus Balouta and the other villages of the area had developed their own well-adapted human strain.

Two thousand years had passed in which Balouta, roughly unchanged, had survived the oppressions of the Romans, the Visigoths and the Moors. The Inquisition had sent its agents into all these villages to stamp out local brands of faith, but little or nothing was remembered of them, and the repeated hurricanes of war had been forgotten, too.

I discussed the future with Rafael Campos in the San Pascúal family’s bar. Rafael, a bachelor of 40, is the owner of seven cows, making him by local standards a rich man. He admitted smilingly to his wealth, adding pleasantly: ‘Not that it matters much one way or another when there’s nothing to spend it on. We’re busy now, and again in the autumn, but in summer I spend most of the time hunting or fishing. I can count on getting hare every time I go out. We all get together to round up the wild boars. These streams are full of trout. City people pay thousands for what we have for nothing.’

The bar was a table in the low-ceilinged, smoke-cured living room in which the San Pascúal family and friends fiddled with the knobs of Balouta’s only television set to produce a variety of flickering ghost images with which they seemed well content. We sipped
aguardiente
in which cherries had been steeped, with which came hazelnuts to be broken up with a hammer.

An overladen oxcart passed the door, interrupting us with a tremendous squealing. Balouta carts resolutely follow Bronze Age models, their wheels solid with the axles which turn in unlubricated bushes. ‘I love the sound,’ Rafael said. ‘So do we all. A friend of mine was offered a share of a farm in another village but he only agreed to the deal if he was allowed to take his “screamer”—as we call them—with him. His new neighbour complained of the noise, so he came back.’

‘But people are leaving?’ I said.

‘Yes. There are fewer of us with every year. By the time you’re 40, you’re a fixture of the place. But the young are on their way out. What can you expect?’

Our world has pushed forward its frontier here to La Vega de Espinareda, 30 kilometres across the mountains from Balouta. This once almost equally isolated village was reached by a hard-surfaced road back in the fifties, being by this unrecognisably changed almost overnight. Before that it had been distinguished by its gracious wooden houses, with their enormous Alpine-style balconies, but now the angular breeze-block constructions have taken over. La Vega of our days is part of the new Spain, a country with a crime-rate slightly lower than ours, but unemployment much higher, and the incidence of AIDS in heterosexuals higher still. La Vega has a supermarket with Bulgarian tinned stew currently on offer in this land overflowing with milk and honey, three
discotecas
and two English-style ‘pubs’. The first graffiti have appeared on the walls, the first degutted car lies abandoned in the street and the first mugging has been reported in the press. This is the Mecca to which local youth flocks.

‘What is to happen to Balouta?’ I asked.

It would disappear, Rafael thought. The government had done something for Pioredo, the other
palloza
village just over the pass, by designating it an historical and artistic complex. Their idea was to attract tourists, and there had been a handout of money to tidy the place up, but for all that the population was down once again to 67, and falling as fast as ever.

The Balouta smile, almost invulnerable to adversity in its many guises, had faded. Rafael seemed to be listening. Rain struck like a fistful of tiny pebbles at the window, and a second oxcart turning into the street began its comforting screech. He appeared encouraged, and the smile fought its way back.

‘The only hope would be to open a
discoteca
here,’ he said. ‘Then everybody would be happy.’

O
N 27 DECEMBER 1986
a party of thirty-four ‘tame’ Indians, armed by the New Tribes Missionaries, set out from the sect’s headquarters at Campo Loro in the Gran Chaco, Paraguay, to capture a small group of Ayoreo Indians spotted in the jungle from the mission’s plane. These, the survivors of a number of previous attacks, had established themselves in a village some 50 miles from Campo Loro. The attacking party, too, were Ayoreos, although of a different clan, and traditionally the enemies of their quarry—a fact of which the missionaries were well aware. The mission Indians were carried in trucks as far as these could be driven into the jungle and, after that, left to continue on foot. It took them three days to hack their way through dense undergrowth and reach the village of the Pig People, as they were called by the missionaries.

There have been many and varying accounts—all from missionary sources—of what happened next. Early versions spoke of the tame Indians advancing to the assault with New Testaments in their hands, and it was only in an issue of the missionary journal,
Brown Gold
, that any mention of guns was made. ‘The village had been prepared for war,’ said the journal, ‘and was always kept that way because of the tremendous fear they [the forest Ayoreos] had of the leader of the mission Indians and his group. A bush fence had been put up round the village and only a couple of small paths led into it … where the attacker would trip and fall in this area it was easy to spear or club him … ’

A verbal description was given of the mechanisms of such a jungle attack by a missionary speaking to a representative of Survival International. He said that ‘when the mission Indians entered the village they “grabbed” members of the other group and became their owners…. People who are grabbed are in a way slaves of the ones who grabbed them.’ In accordance with this system, ‘One of our men grabbed Porai [a Pig Person] and had him put his weapons down … when he went to grab another man, Porai picked up his spear and speared one of our men. When this happened the killing started.’ In the course of the battle that followed, five of the mission Indians were killed and four wounded. After some hours the fighting came to an end and the surviving mission Indians with the twenty-five Pig People they had been able to round up returned to their base at Campo Loro.

There was nothing new about such expeditions. A book entitled
Mision: Etnocidio
has been published investigating practices of the fundamentalist New Tribes Mission sect which have long been obscure. In it a contributor, Volker Von Bremen, an anthropologist who has carried out field studies for the past ten years among the few remaining Ayoreos, said that manhunts had been frequent and had caused great loss of life in the 20 years preceding 1974, after which the attacks had died down as the forest emptied of Indians. Such hunts were conducted in secret, and little or no mention of them appeared in the muzzled press. Astonishingly, the information that had leaked out was usually to be found in missionary publications, which the missionaries might have assumed the public would never bother to read. These could be bewilderingly frank, sometimes hardly bothering to conceal chilling facts behind the façade of biblical quotations and conventional pieties.

Indian women had been chased round the forest for three days, and one was severely injured (a breast had been shot away on a previous hunt). However, ‘It was a joyous occasion when we arrived at the mission. There was a lot of hugging and hand-shaking going on, even though the Pig People weren’t familiar with these customs.’ Missionary reports in further issues of the journal paint a gloomier picture of the scene. Of the eight women captured, four who were pregnant aborted there and then. As a missionary admitted to Survival International: ‘The Pig People who were brought in didn’t keep many children because it was hard to run away. They killed many children.’ Another evangelist was more specific: ‘one woman killed four.’ Mr Sammons, head of the New Tribes Mission at Campo Loro, told Survival International: ‘some of them are looking pretty bad. They want their jungle food, and haven’t got used to eating hamburger-type food yet.’ Les Pedersen, the NTM Field Co-ordinator for Latin America, said he did not know how many Ayoreos brought in to the mission had survived. ‘We don’t keep that kind of detailed record,’ he said, adding, ‘they’re all pretty well mixed up with the others down there, and those Indians all look pretty much the same.’ Von Bremen was able to conduct a further investigation from which potentially sinister facts emerged. The Indians had told him that the captured chief, with his wife and daughter, had been shut in a room and given strong medicine (remedio fuerte) from which they all died.

Yet, despite the many casualties of the operation, a few captives survived in a somewhat miserable fashion. Sharon Burkhart writing in
Brown Gold
in March 1983 says, ‘Life has not been especially full of blessing for them since they left their wandering ways in the woods. They were contacted in 1979. Within several months Orojoi’s father, mother and sister had all died. The next year Ijerai’s parents passed away. In 1981 Ijerai and Orojoi contracted measles, a killing disease among primitive people.’ Even on the evangelical front the thing had been a disaster, for these wretched people clung stubbornly to their old beliefs. ‘The greatest prayer request for them,’ Sharon asks, ‘would be that they would see the need of accepting Christ as their personal saviour.’

It was estimated at the end of the thirties that some 4,000 Ayoreos roamed that vast amalgam of forest and swamp, divided between Bolivia and Paraguay, known as the Gran Chaco. They were constantly at risk from the small-scale raids of farmers, who carried a few off as slaves, but they held their own in the labyrinth of the ‘Green Hell’ in which only they could find the way. Doomsday came with the ending of World War II, in the rush for gold, for ‘strategic metals’, for oil, for gas, for valuable timber. Latin America was found to possess all of these in abundance. With the advent of new road-building techniques, the bulldozer, and planes that could put down and take off from a couple of hundred yards of airstrip, the jungle ceased to offer refuge. To the loggers and the exploration teams, the Indians were at best a nuisance. To the missionaries, swarming overseas again, they were a rich harvest of souls waiting to be gathered in. Within ten years of the return of peace, 300 missionary sects, nearly all of them American fundamentalist, were in action in South America where the evangelist concentration was by far the greatest in the world. By 1982
Time
counted 9,250 Protestant missionaries in the sub-continent, noting that in some small communities the missionaries outnumbered those they had come to convert.

Competition for souls was intense and eventually many of the less successful contenders went to the wall leaving the two largest organisations, the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the New Tribes Mission, virtually to divide up South America between them. Of these, the SIL—which despite its name is in no sense a scientific body—is the larger and richer; the New Tribes Mission is, if possible, more fundamental. The NTM rejects the use of Bible translations other than its own—thus opening the way to considerable re-interpretations of the Holy Writ. It is obsessed with its struggle with Satan, seen as eternally locked in a combat with God from which he sometimes emerges as at least a temporary winner. Open letters to Christ sometimes appear in its publications. ‘Dear Jesus Christ, we acknowledge receipt of your memo…. We appreciate your offer to serve as our resource Person, and should we care to undertake the project sometime later, we will be in contact. Cordially, the Christians.’ In its recruitment of missionaries it advertises its indifference to educational standards. The sect fields 2,500 missionaries (about 1,000 less than its rival) in sixty different countries, and it is supported by its own airfleet and by all the computerised panoply of a giant multinational corporation. Its home base is in Sanford, Florida, and its European headquarters are in England, at Matlock, Derbyshire.

It seems natural that in 1956 General Stroessner, the seemingly permanent dictator of Paraguay should have chosen the NTM to receive the contract to ‘settle and civilise’ the Indians of his country, seen as standing in the way of progress. He would no doubt have been impressed by the text from Romans 3:1, ‘There is no government on earth God has not permitted to come to power,’ which features so prominently in fundamentalist literature, and which in the English Bible’s version appears more simply as: ‘The powers that be are ordained by God.’ At that time, of all the areas of Paraguay thrown open to international development, the Gran Chaco was seen to offer the greatest prospects of instant wealth, and it was to the Chaco that the General’s fundamentalists were assigned. They were to deal with the Ayoreos, and several thousand hectares of land were made over to the mission to facilitate their task. When, some years later, I asked a Paraguayan army officer why it had been decided that missionaries rather than the army should get rid of the Indians, his reply was, ‘They’re better at it. When we go in we shoot some, and some get away. They get the lot. The missionaries know how to talk to them. When the missionaries clear an area they leave it clean.’