The Ayoreo Need You

Bulldozers move in on isolated Indians' heartland

The Ayoreo-Totobiegosode Indians live in the Chaco, a vast expanse of dense, scrubby forest stretching from Paraguay to Bolivia and Argentina.

Their territory has been bought by land speculators and ranchers and is now being rapidly cleared.

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There are 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. An unknown number still live a nomadic life in the forest.