Aché Indians
From Freepedia
The Aché Indians (also known by the hostile names Guayakí, Guaiaqui, Guoyagui, Guayaki, which literally mean rabid or ferocious rats; and the alternate spellings Ache or Axe meaning in their language human or person) are an indigenous people in Paraguay. The Aché suffered genocidal massacres on the part of the government of then-dictator Alfredo Stroessner from 1968 to 1972. Earlier, they had been the subject of anthropological research by Pierre Clastres. By 2002, despite continued deforestation and displacement, their population had recovered to nearly 1,500.
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Genocide and Confinement
In 1968, the Aché’s forested home was made accessible by a new road, sending its value on the market skyrocketing as forest product and ranching interests bid for new territory. The Aché, a hunting and gathering people formally referred to by the government as Guayakí (literally, “rabid rats”), became the subject of a genocidal campaign. A pre-existing colonial legacy of hunting Indians was intensified into a practice with “the strange air of a folk festival combined with a military operation,” wherein manhunters and soldiers attack with bullets, machetes, poison meals, traps and dogs.[1] Survivors of the hunts were concentrated at the Guayakí National Colony, a reservation at Cecilio Baez. There they were denied the right to continue their culture: their own rituals, songs, customs, group activities, language, and original names were forbidden. Adequate food and health care were denied while abuse, including humiliation, rape, and torture were meted out in abundance. The administration of the reservation by the fundamentalist New Tribes Mission, beginning in September 1972, reduced overt brutality, but not deculturation. The government’s desire for assimilation and the missionaries’ regard for the Aché “as degenerate and given to dealings with the devil” meshed into cooperation. The head missionary participated in the hunt, while the official he replaced used the reservation to acquire Aché slaves. Both the hunts and the reservation served as sources for slaves of all ages for fieldwork, domestic service, and sexual slavery. By 1978, Professor Robert C. Smith of the University of Kansas reports, “the manhunt against the Achés appeared to have stopped because they have killed almost all the Achés in that area and there is no one left to hunt.”[2] However, sporadic killings and kidnappings of Achés continued through the 1980s.
Recent History
The rapid deforestation of eastern Paraguay which undermined Aché life prior to the manhunts have continued. So too have Christian evangelization attempts by the New Tribes Mission. In 1991, the US-based Nature Conservancy and the Paraguay-based Fundación Moisés Bertoni founded the Mbaracayú Forest Nature Reserve. The transaction was a classic debt-for-nature swap arranged with the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank. The reserve has acted as a bulwark against deforestation within its boundaries and a surrounding buffer zone, but has not stopped it elsewhere. Some 160,000 acres have been preserved from cutting. However, the Global Forest Coalition alleges that investment in Ache living standards have been meager, that the Aché are employed identifying forest resources for outside use with no benefit to them--a form of biopiracy, and that Aché themselves have limited rights to the Reserve, forcing them into settlements (an abandonment of their nomadic lifestyle) which are open to missionaries.
References
- Richard Arens (ed.), Genocide in Paraguay.
- Pierre Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians.
- Kim Hill, A. Magdalena Hurtado, Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People.
- Miguel Lovera, paraguay: life as commerce?
- ^ Mark Münzel, “Manhunt” in Arens (ed.), Genocide in Paraguay, 38.
- ^ Quoted in Rex Wyler, Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War Against the American Indian Movement, 226.
