Voyage By Dhow (14 page)

On 8 March, Senator Abourezk, supported by forty-four other senators, took the U.S. Senate floor ‘to denounce genocidal activities still rampant in Paraguay’. Revealing that he had a copy of a receipt for work done by slaves from the Colonia Nacionál Guayaki, he went on: ‘While on the reservation the Indian slaves are discouraged from using their own language, and music is expressly forbidden. The death rate from diseases of malnutrition and sheer lack of will to survive is one of the highest in the world.’ The senator called for the cutting-off of aid to Paraguay. He concluded: ‘A government which is bent on the mass extermination of part of its people does not deserve our aid any more than a convicted and professed killer deserves a welfare check.’

Following Senator Abourezk’s speech, the U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay was recalled and the senator and his supporters were privately admonished by the ambassador, who reminded them that the abiding friendship of Paraguay was indispensable in the framework of American hemispheric defence. The U.S. press remained strangely unresponsive to the news from Paraguay. Professor Richard Arens, Counsel to the League for the Rights of Man, says of this episode: ‘A careful survey of the national media … left us solely with an impression of a consciously or unconsciously determined news blackout.’

Repercussions in Paraguay were rapid. On 28 April 1974, the Department of Missions of the Paraguayan Episcopal Conference sent a letter to the Asunción daily newspaper
La Tribuna
, containing the following passage: ‘Our secretariat has in its possession documentation of cases of massacre, cases which, moreover, have been partly published in your very paper.’ The letter was signed by the Bishop of the Chaco region, Mgr Alejo Ovelar, and by Father Bartolomé Meliá, respectively president and secretary of the organization.

A second letter to
La Tribuna,
on 8 May 1974, said:

The Department of Missions of the Paraguayan Episcopal Conference has denounced and denounces, basing its denunciations on concrete data which has been duly investigated, the existence of cases of genocide … [It] desires there be a sweeping investigation, especially into the situation of certain indigenous groups of Paraguay, who are especially threatened in their ethnic survival …

Next day the Paraguayan Minister of Defence, General Marcial Samaniego, called a conference to discuss these allegations. The minister did not attempt to deny that crimes against the Indians had taken place. He stressed however that there was no
intention
of destroying the Guayaki, and thus, by definition, genocide was excluded. ‘Although there are victims and victimizer, there is not the third element necessary to establish the crime of genocide—that is “intent”. Therefore, as there is no “intent”, one cannot speak of “genocide”.’ (Asunción,
ABC Color,
9 May 1974.)

Thereafter whatever news breached the silence had been discouraging. Latest reports from Paraguay suggested that the New Tribes missionaries pursued their aims with undiminished zeal, and Mr Jack Stolz continued to ‘attract’ Indians—as the euphemism puts it—with methods only too similar to those employed by his predecessor Mr Jesús Pereira. Pereira was still around, too, the master now of some fifty slaves, and engaged in continual incursions into the forest on his own account. A new Guayaki group had been located in Amambay, in the far north-east, and an expedition planned against it. Colonel Infanzón, Director of the Native Affairs Department, responsible in its time for the administrations both of Mr Pereira and Mr Stolz, had said: ‘In spite of all our critics, we shall go on fighting and working, because we do not wish to leave unfinished the work we have started.’

In October 1974, Donald McCullin and I went to Paraguay for the
Sunday Times
Magazine to try to find out what was happening.

The opinion of a contact in Asunción was that we should not make formal application to the Paraguayan Ministry of Defence to visit Cecilio Baez, because permission might well be denied, and even if granted, we should be sacrificing the element of surprise. Professor Chase Sardi, who had accompanied the correspondent of the
New York Times
in January, described their mission as a waste of time, because of advance notice given to the camp’s administration, who were suitably prepared. Donald and I discussed the advice but felt obliged to reject it, because there was no certainty that having mounted an expedition to reach Cecilio Baez—in a country in which we supposed that every move made by a foreigner is under observation—we should be admitted to the reservation. It was conceivable, moreover, that any such abortive effort might be followed by expulsion from the country.

We therefore made application for the visit, and were duly summoned into the presence of Colonel T. Infanzón. It was hard to believe that the colonel, a man of mild appearance and courteous manner, could have been the subject of serious allegations relating to the procuring of young Indian women. He seemed uneasy at our request to visit the reservation, explaining his reluctance by the circumstance that a French couple who had been there on what had been described to him as a scientific mission had filmed Guayakis engaged in sexual intercourse. Their film had been shown in Panama. We assured the Colonel that we had no film cameras with us, and he seemed relieved. A trip might be possible, he said, but we should have to be accompanied by an official from his department. He would also have to obtain the permission of his superior, the minister.

A wait of some days followed, which we filled in with visits to country towns in the neighbourhood of Asunción. Many of these—once early Jesuit settlements—were of great charm, and the grandiose churches of the seventeenth century remain—a superb example being that of Yaguarón, a building of such external severity as to be hardly recognizable as a church, yet which astonishes with the extravagant baroque of its interior, decorated by Indian artists.

The delay provided time for interesting interviews, notably one with the Bishop of the Chaco region, Mgr Alejo Ovelar. The bishop spoke of growing concern felt by churchmen and intellectuals throughout Latin America over the activities of certain missionary sects ‘who seem indifferent to the spiritual—let alone material—welfare of the primitive peoples among whom they work, but subject them instead to commercial exploitation’. As a specific example he said that North American missionaries had set themselves up as middlemen in the Chaco region compelling Indians such as the Moros, who lived by hunting and trapping, to sell their skins through the mission. Traders who attempted to deal direct with the Moros had actually been threatened with violence. ‘These missionaries,’ said the bishop, ‘are also implicated in the grave crime of ethnocide.’

In due course, Colonel Infanzón announced his decision. We could go to Cecilio Baez if we were prepared to give an undertaking that any article written about Paraguay would contain no evaluation of the situation of the Indians in that country. Since we proposed to avoid evaluations and deal in facts, not about ‘the Indians of Paraguay’ as a whole but about the Guayaki, it seemed possible to agree to this. The permit was then given, together with a letter of introduction to Mr Jack Stolz, ‘American Missionary in charge at the Colonia Nacionál Guayaki, Cecilio Baez’. The proviso that we should have to be accompanied by an official from the Ministry of Defence had evidently been forgotten. Next morning at six, we set off.

The weather in Paraguay at this season of the year is subject to dramatic variation. Rainfall is at its highest, a sweltering summer is only weeks away, and hurricanes occur. We were being driven by a Paraguayan friend in his Citroen ‘Deux Chevaux’, and he had warned us that we could reach the reservation only if the rain held off. There are only two paved highways in Paraguay: one from Asunción, to Foz do Iguaçu on the Brazilian frontier, and the other, only about thirty miles in length, to the town of Paraguari, south-east of the capital. All the others are dirt roads, which are closed to traffic by steel barriers as soon as it rains, when the surfaces are instantly transformed into slimy red mud, and makeshift bridges are sometimes carried away. To reach Cecilio Baez we had to cover about 120 miles of the paved highway to Caaguazú and there take a left turning along a dirt road, leading eventually through 50 miles of forest to the reservation. This road was reported to be in exceedingly bad condition.

At Coronel Oviedo, thirty miles short of Caaguazú, clouds were building up ahead, and road police told us that it was raining in eastern Paraguay, and that all the roads were closed. We therefore turned off southwards in the hope of reaching our friend’s house in Caazapá. At Villarrica the road was barred, but after delicate and protracted negotiations with the road police, the barrier was unlocked and we were waved on into a landscape veiled already in pearly rain.

In this area all the Arcadian charm, the style and the swagger of South America had survived in its purest form. The streets of small towns like Caacayí (named after the call of a bird) had turned to grassland cropped by cows, and diurnal bats fluttered from the windows of great sepulchral mansions emptied by so many wars and revolutions. Aloof horsemen went thudding past under their wide hats, a palm always upraised in greeting. Enormous blue butterflies floated by—never molested because the Guaranis believe them to be the ‘ears of God’. The distances dispensed frugal harp music, and the melodious hoot of the bell-bird. There were eagles in the flowering trees by the roadside, and once we spotted a Model T Ford that had brought a couple to market. Caazapá, reached at sundown—after pushing the Citroën through miles, it seemed to us, of slippery mud—was at the end of the road, and if there was any place in the world to get away from it all, this was it.

In living memory there had been Guayakis in the woods round Caazapá, but it is a quarter of a century since the last of them were cut up to bait jaguar traps, or otherwise killed or enslaved. At San Juan Nepomuceno, twenty miles away, an episode took place in 1949 which proved too much even for the stomachs of the local whites. An Indian hunter called Pichín Lopez managed to round up the last of the Guayakis in the area, and having hacked to death the aged and enfeebled, carried off the viable survivors to San Juan where, naked and in chains, they were exposed in the town square for public sale. Pichín, denounced by the local priest, had to leave the country. It was the first time that Indian-killing had provoked such disapproval. Pichín’s lieutenant at that epoch was none other than Jesús Pereira—twenty years later the government’s administrator of the Colonia Guayaki Nacionál at Cecilio Baez.

The present calm of towns such as San Juan and Caazapá conceals undercurrents of extraordinary violence. In 1947 the political boss of Caazapá, one Matilde Villalba—a notable Indian-killer himself in his time—was ambushed and shot down with six of his sixteen sons, and the cemetery at that time being full to overflowing with victims of the short but incredibly bloody civil war just concluded, a charitable neighbour had to lend space in his family vault to accommodate the bodies. Guerrilla fighters captured in the vicinity round about the time of the Che Guevara fiasco in Bolivia were taken straight up and pitched from planes. Remembering this sombre period our friend said, ‘Thank God we now have peace and tranquillity.’ No sooner had this utterance been made than we noticed several people running to get a better view of something that was happening in the next street. ‘It is nothing,’ we were assured. ‘Probably two men have challenged each other to a duel.’ As it happened the excitement was caused by an informally staged bullfight, but confrontations—
High Noon
style—are said to remain common.

Next morning we left Caazapá early and drove all day over officially closed roads and collapsing bridges to reach Caaguazú by evening. The town was under water, and having found beds in a lodging house we splashed through the floods to the nearest cantina for a meal. Here, by the purest chance, a boy of about eight fetching and carrying in the restaurant was pointed out as a slave. In such cases the child will be passed off as ‘adopted’, and given the family name, although he will remain in a subservient position in the family for the rest of his days. The boy admitted to me to being an Indian—the family had rather absurdly denied that he was one—and he was clearly delighted by the rare experience of being for once the object of attention.

Incessant rain compelled us next day to return to Asunción, and this, as it turned out later, may have been a good thing. Three days later, a young Englishman employed on a scientific project in Paraguay offered to take us in his Land Rover to Cecilio Baez, and once again we set out at dawn. The reservation, reached through narrow and constantly branching tracks through the partially cleared forest, was hard to find, but eventually we came into a large clearing at the end of which a number of huts clustered round a building which, from its size and style, was clearly the missionary’s house.

Several Indians in near rags were mooching about, and a white man in mechanic’s overalls tinkered with a piece of machinery. This proved to be Mr Jack Stolz, who received us with marked coolness. I presented Colonel Infanzón’s letter, and without lowering his guard, Mr Stolz said that he had expected us three days before. From this it was clear that Colonel Infanzón had been in touch with Cecilio Baez by radio. I explained that we had been held up by the weather, but it was clear that the missionary remained suspicious. He questioned us much in the way that Colonel Infanzón had done, and the occasion seemed a delicate one. I formed the opinion that Mr Stolz would have to be regarded to all intents and purposes as a functionary of the government, empowered to turn us away from the reservation if he thought fit. We gave non-committal replies, but a positive assurance that we had no intention of making indecent movies of the Indians. At this point it turned out that Mr Stolz had never heard of Colonel Infanzón’s French couple. Mrs Stolz now came out of the house. Although I would have taken her husband for a top sergeant in an American combat unit rather than a missionary, she was what one thought of as the typical missionary’s wife; resolutely smiling, and calm in what might have seemed to her a crisis. She invited us into the house, which was pleasantly furnished without being luxurious, and devoid of the labour-saving gadgetry commonly found in such missionary establishments. Donald McCullin then found an excuse to wander off and start photographing, while I began to attempt to prise the missionary out of a defensive silence that had set in.