Voyage By Dhow

by Norman Lewis

  Amatenango’s tragedy is also the vicinity of the Pan-American Highway, passing within half a mile of the low hill on which it is built. The life of this village as described by a traveller in the 1950s followed archaic ceremonial patterns, most of which have been brusquely swept away. It was the habit—still observed in other less accessible villages—for the male head of the household to rise in the small hours to perform the principal act of creation, that of lighting the fire, after which the family gathered for a three-hour exchange of ideas and discussion of moral problems before the day’s work began. Thereafter the men occupied themselves with such manual tasks as digging and preparing the clay, while creative activity passed into the hands of the women, who fashioned the pots, shaping them with their hands, smoothing surfaces with the instruments employed by their ancestors for at least 1,000 years, and painting them with traditional abstract designs. At this point the men would be called in to make fire again, and the pots would be baked—as now—in bonfires of brushwood lit in the village streets.

  Every stage in the pot’s preparation required its small ceremonial act, its mumbled invocation, or its libation, and when finished it was regarded with pride, and with respect for the impulse of creation translated to the clay. A potter would be happy, as she might in the case of the surplus puppy, to find it a good home. The medieval craftsman’s desire to impose his personality upon his production survived, as it still does in the remoter textile village of Bochil, where an order for a large number of the exquisite embroidered blouses which are its speciality was recently turned down because the buyer insisted on absolute uniformity, whereas by tradition no two garments could ever be exactly the same.

  Amatenango was the last of the villages we visited, and it was immediately clear that something was wrong. It is a picturesque place with well-made wooden huts screened by high cane fences. The women’s blouses, brilliantly embroidered in reds and yellows in imitation of tropical birds, remain as yet unchanged—although they are certain to go—and the spectacle of these magnificent creatures at work firing their pots in the street bonfires is irresistible to the camera of any tourist. The village has indeed been featured in the promotional literature of several tour operators, bringing in the main visitors from Japan and from France. At the moment of our arrival a Club Mediterranée group was just about to leave and was being besieged by a horde of the only ill-mannered Indian children I have ever encountered, selling ugly pottery toys, demanding to be photographed for payment, and when refused shouting insults in broken French.

  My Chamula friend led the way to the house of a potter he knew, where the feeling of disharmony became stronger. There were no words in the Tzotzil language spoken in the villages for the processes of trade, for stock, profits, discounts, competition, turnover, etc., so the villagers who find themselves drawn into commerce are obliged to turn to Spanish, and these people were speaking Spanish most of the time.

  The complex protocol of village life had been largely abolished. On the occasion of this visit we should have been courteously seated, but thereafter kept waiting in near silence outside the house while the Lares and the Penates of the home accustomed themselves to our presence before being invited to enter. But what was the point of such a procedure when almost daily groups of excited tourists would arrive to stand and stare, to point their cameras, and even to push their way into the houses without further ceremony?

  People had too much time on their hands, too, and almost certainly too much money. Men were mooching about the streets, hands in pockets, dazed with their indigestible leisure. There was a village shop with canned beer on sale, and where the rude little girls, whose mothers could now afford to dress them in drab factory-made dresses, bought ice-cream with the money extorted from tourists.

  The woman of the house explained that it used to take her family four days of common endeavour to make a pot of the largest size, for which she was paid about £3, but that by arrangement with the couriers who brought the parties of tourists she now charged the equivalent of £2 to allow herself to be photographed making a pot. The suspicion grew that the pots were no longer made for sale. It was a suspicion strengthened by the plastic buckets stocked by the village store and a depressing feature of local markets.

  What the village still makes and sells is pottery toys, although these are no longer of the artistic calibre of those once made here and offered in fairs all over South Mexico. In the old days they were models of jungle animals, of alligators, armadillos, anteaters and the great cats, and the Indians’ insight, their special comprehension of the animal world, had enabled them, sometimes in the very grotesqueness of these objects, to capture something of the quintessential quality of their living models.

  These works of art have now vanished, and are to be found only in collections or museums. The new kind of buyers brought here in the air-conditioned coaches remained unimpressed by Indian art, although they were on the lookout for colourful souvenirs of their travels. The weavers of Bochil refused to admit Donald Duck into their traditional designs, but the potters of Amatenango surrendered. One of the tourist couriers gave them a sample of the cuddlesome toy he believed no tourist could resist, and he was right—Amatenango now turns out large numbers of Disney-style pottery kangaroos, and, sad to say, so far has taste been corrupted that Indians even buy these for their own children.

  Now is the time to see South Mexico. Nothing can dim the glory of the great pre-Hispanic ruins and the great colonial towns, but outside that, in ten years it will be all Amatenango.

  1980

  MANHUNT

  IN 1972, DR MARK Münzel, an anthropologist working in Paraguay, reported wholesale enslavement, torture and massacre of the Guayaki Indians, among whom he was conducting his field studies. The Guayaki, who once occupied the whole of the forests of eastern Paraguay, have in recent years been reduced to a few bands roaming an area as large, perhaps, as Wales. They are of unique ethnic interest in that in a high proportion of cases they possess fair skin—for which reason they are sometimes known as ‘white Indians’. They live as hunters and gatherers, and are notable poets, composers of epics and laments of extraordinary beauty.

  Like all the forest Indians of South America the Guayaki have always suffered the persecution of settlers, ranchers and agriculturists, but until recent years they have been able to survive by withdrawing further and further into the depths of the forest. With the forest’s gradual destruction and its replacement by ranching and farmland, their position has become increasingly desperate, and their hunger greater. These lovers of nature in all its forms—who actually embrace and talk to trees—are non-aggressive, and there is no recorded instance of a Guayaki having drawn his bow against a settler without provocation, but here and there hunger, through the removal of game, has caused them to kill a cow, with instant and terrible reprisals. In 1972, then, it seemed that official policy called for their elimination, or ‘sedenterization’ by forcible removal from the forest into a small reserve; the Colonia Nacionál Guayaki.

  This operation was attended by atrocious circumstances. Professional Indian-killers were employed to carry out the raids into the forest. In many cases adult Indians were simply shot on sight, and the fate of their children was to be sold as slaves to farmers all over eastern Paraguay—a fact which has been confirmed by the accounts of numerous travellers in the area. Reports reached the international press, including that of this country, that so great was the glut of child slaves that their market price had fallen as low as five dollars. Later the figure fell to $1.50. At this time Dr Münzel and his wife happened to be working on the collection and translation of Guayaki poems in the neighbourhood of Cecilio Baez, where the reservation had been established, and he was already familiar with Jesús Pereira, the camp’s administrator, an ageing manhunter with a criminal record, now transformed into a government official. Pereira still drew his gun on slight provocation, and his method of disciplining recalcitrant Guayakis at the camp was to cram them into a wooden fram
e called the ‘tronco’, in which the victim, unable to sit down or stand up, was left as long as necessary in full sun. He was a notorious sexual pervert, attracted to very young girls. Münzel was at the camp on one occasion when a batch of captured Indians was brought in, and he says that Pereira offered him an immature girl of about eleven, presumably to keep him quiet.

  Thereafter, Dr Münzel visited the camp on several occasions. He noticed extraordinary variations in the number of its inhabitants. Although Indians were constantly being brought in, the number present on the reservation never exceeded 200. By the end of July 1972 there were sixty fresh graves to be counted, and Münzel calculated that seventy-five Guayakis had disappeared since March of that year. He also recorded a great disparity in the sexes of the captives. There were hardly any girls between the age of five and puberty. Female slaves in this age-group attracted the best prices on the market, and Münzel was forced to assume that a clandestine trade in slaves was being carried on. All the evidence—not only that of Münzel but of Paraguayan intellectuals and leaders of the Paraguayan Church who have publicized the facts of the Colonia Nacionál Guayaki—leads to the view that this was a camp through which the remaining Indian population of eastern Paraguay was doomed to pass into servitude or oblivion.

  For obvious reasons Münzel’s visits to the camp soon came to an end, after which a curtain of secrecy descended on its operations. For all this the manhunters seem to have felt no shame if by some accident the general public happened to witness them at their work—nor in fact did the general public evince any signs of the moral outrage one would have expected. ‘I was on the bus to Asunción, when it made the usual stop at Arroyo Guasú. We heard that señuelos had just brought in a large number of Guayakis, and all the passengers got down to see them.’ They found the Guayakis, guarded by the señuelos, bathing naked in the river. A passing car stopped. ‘A woman and her two daughters got down. One of them went down to the river’s bank and took a child feeding at the breast from its mother, and went with it back to the car. The woman made no attempt to stop her or even cry out. She seemed petrified.’ The writer of this account, a Paraguayan zoologist, Dr Luigi Miraglia, rushed after the abductress and took the child back. One wonders how many more such pathetic human souvenirs were taken when the hunters came in with their prey on that, and so many other days.

  The term señuelo calls for explanation. Señuelos are ‘tame’ Guayakis turned hunter. Wild Guayakis cannot be taken by a white man in what, to him, is an impenetrable forest, but they can easily be captured by their own kind, armed with the belief shared by Indians of both conditions that the whites are jaguars in human form, and that when a Guayaki is captured by a jaguar, he too becomes a jaguar and is compelled to capture more of his own people. When the free Guayakis find themselves face to face with the ‘jaguars’ they throw down their bows, offer no resistance, make no attempt to escape. With their capture, they lose their humanity. The magic power of their chiefs is lost; the ceremonies are forgotten, the musical instruments thrown aside. Their only purpose in life now is to hunt as jaguars themselves. The señuelo’s immediate reward is the wives of the free men he captures.

  In the summer of 1972 the Roman Catholic Church of Paraguay stated its grave concern over these events, and announced that it had informed the Holy See, while the Paraguayan anthropologists—Father Bartolomé Meliá, and Professor Chase Sardi—and the zoologist Dr Luigi Miraglia made a public declaration of genocide. In the resulting scandal Jesús Pereira was relieved of his functions and served a short term in prison. The administration of the sinister Colonia Nacionál Guayaki was then transferred to Mr Jack (Santiago) Stolz, of the New Tribes Mission—a North American Protestant missionary sect which combines a streamlined business approach with religious fundamentalism in dealing with problems of conversion. The mission has its own air service and radio transmitters, and three of its four centres in Paraguay are provided with airstrips.

  A few months after Mr Stolz’s takeover there were reported to be only twenty Indians left on the reservation. However in February 1973 a German army officer, who succeeded in visiting the camp in the guise of a tourist, found a group of fifteen or twenty ‘obviously just arrived, in a desperate state of mind, just sitting around passively and staring at the ground’. A North American working on the reservation told him that these had just been brought in by none other than the old convicted manhunter, Jesús Pereira, who had caught a whole band and afterwards divided up the captives, some for the reservation, some for sale, and some for a farm he was now running with slave labour. The Jesuit Father Meliá writing in June 1973 to the German firm Farbwerke Hoechst, one of the original sponsors of the reservation, said that in the first nine months of the Stolz incumbency some 120 Guayakis had disappeared. It had been established that on 2 April 1973 more Indians had been brought into the reservation from the Itakyry region, but at this time no visits were allowed and therefore no investigations possible. At this time, Mark Münzel says in a report published by the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (Denmark), ‘there [were] signs that hunger was a problem on the reservation after the “arrival” of new Indians’. A letter from a Paraguayan contact said, ‘There was a Guayaki who, in order to be able to buy something to eat, sold his son to some settlers for 80 guaranies [25p].’

  Hunger is also mentioned in a letter written on 1 May 1973 by the Paraguayan rancher Mr Arnaldo Kant to Mr Nelido Rios, at that time assistant to the administrator of the reservation.

  Yesterday Mr Jack (Santiago) Stolz, administrator of the Colonia Guayaki was here … He threatened to report me because I had that group of Guayakis you had gathered for me. I explained to him that I had them on your request, and only to prevent them from being used as slaves … I was struck by the fear that this man [ Jack Stolz] inspires in these Indians: when they noticed he was there [to return them to the reservation], they started to run away into the forest. The women wept, telling me they did not want to return to the camp because there they were given no food … The administrator claimed payment for the work the Guayakis had done cleaning up around their houses, and I gave him the sum of 2,500 Gs., as proved by the enclosed receipt …

  The receipt, given at Cecilio Baez on 30 April 1973, is ‘for labour performed by a group of Guayakis’. According to Mr Stolz, he wanted the money only in order to pay it to the Indians later on.

  It should be understood that by this time the forest sheltering the Guayaki had been cleared to leave the reservation surrounded to a great depth by ranches and farms, and that no Indians had been seen anywhere in the vicinity since the great manhunts of 1972. In the unlikely event of any Guayaki leaving the forest to enter the reservation of his own free will, he would have had to travel for many miles across these cleared areas, now the property of settlers said to be prepared to shoot Indians on sight. Despite this the population at Cecilio Baez showed a sudden increase, reaching 110 by June 1973. At this time, Mark Münzel, back in Frankfurt, received a letter from a local contact to say that: ‘The New Tribes missionaries are now hunting by motor vehicles for Guayakis in the region of Igatimi (100 miles from Cecilio Baez) in order to reintegrate them into the reservation.’ Nevertheless, a visitor to the reservation on 23 August 1973 counted only twenty-five Indians—who were considerably outnumbered by the missionaries and their families. There was an upswing in population again by 17 September when (by Münzel’s account), ‘according to the North American missionary … a band of forty-five Guayakis were brought to the reservation on a truck, “by the decision of God” and with the help of the Native Affairs Department of the Ministry of Defence, and of local police authorities from the region of Laurel, Department of Alto Paraná’. Thus, by the end of September, there should have been some seventy Indians on the reservation, but in January 1974, when it was visited by New York Times correspondent Jonathan Kandell, less than fifty were counted. The reservation continued to devour Indians.

  In March 1974 the International League for the Right
s of Man, joined by the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, charged the Government of Paraguay with complicity in the enslavement and genocide of the Guayaki Indians in violation of the United Nations’ Charter, the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

  In a protest to the United Nations’ Secretary-General, documented by four annexes, eye-witness accounts and photographs, the organizations stipulated the following violations leading to ‘the wholesale disappearance of a group of human beings’, the Guayaki ethnic group: (1) enslavement, torture and killing of the Guayaki Indians in reservations in eastern Paraguay; (2) withholding of food and medicine from them resulting in their deaths by starvation and disease; (3) massacre of their members outside the reservations by hunters and slave traders with the toleration and even encouragement of members of the government and with the aid of the armed forces; (4) splitting up of families and selling into slavery of children, in particular girls for prostitution; and (5) denial and destruction of Guayaki cultural traditions, including use of their language, traditional music and religious practices.

  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.’