View of the World (26 page)

‘When we learn of the presence of an uncontacted group,’ said the missionary, ‘we move into the area, build a strong shelter – say of logs –
and cut paths radiating from it into the forest. We leave gifts along these paths – knives, axes, mirrors, the kind of things that Indians can’t resist – and sometimes they leave gifts in exchange. After a while the relationship develops. Maybe they are mistrustful at first, but in the end they stop running away when we show, and we all get together and make friends.’

But the trail of gifts leads inevitably to the mission compound, and here, often at the end of a long journey, far from the Indian’s sources of food, his fish, his game, it comes abruptly to an end.

‘We have to break their dependency on us next,’ Mr Halterman said. ‘Naturally they want to go on receiving all those desirable things we’ve been giving them, and sometimes it comes as a surprise when we explain that from now on if they want to possess them they must work for money. We don’t employ them, but we can usually fix them up with something to do on the local farms. They settle down to it when they realise that there’s no going back.’

‘Something to do’ on a local farm is only too often indistinguishable from slavery. Mr Halterman, whether he knows it or not, is the first human link in the chain of a process that eventually reduces the Indians to the lamentable condition of all those we saw in Bolivia, and there are many hundreds of missionaries like Mr Halterman all over South America, striving with zeal and with devotion to save souls whose bodies are condemned to grinding labour in an alien culture.

While the North American missionaries have become – often officially – the servants of such right-wing military dictatorships as that of Bolivia, opposition in the name of Human Rights is frequently organised by Catholic priests and members of the religious orders. Their efforts, although at best hardly more than an attempt to alleviate harshness and cultivate compassion, involve them in some risk, and shortly before we arrived in La Paz gunmen murdered two assistants of a priest who had been troublesome. We were told that such gunmen could be hired to assassinate someone of small importance for as low a fee as one hundred pesos (rather less than £3).

A number of our informants were churchmen of a staunchly liberal
kind, but it is not possible to mention them by name, or even identify the organisations to which they belong. One of them described the current Banzer regime as a confident and therefore fairly mild form of Fascism. Unlike Chile, which had lost all self-respect, it valued its good name. When, in January 1974, the peasants in Cochabamba showed too spirited a resistance to its authority, it had not been above sending in planes and tanks and killing a hundred or so, but for the moment it had fallen like a digesting crocodile into a kind of watchful inactivity.

In the meanwhile, the Church had cautiously involved itself in the formation of peasant groups that could bypass the fraudulent government-rigged trades unions. He expected that eventually the crocodile would show that it was far from asleep. Future repression, he thought, was certain.

It was a priest who introduced us to some of the facts about the abundant labour promised by Dr Strauss to the new white immigrants, and he took us to see cane-cutters at work on an estate near Santa Cruz. Some 40-50,000 migrant workers are brought in to deal with the cotton harvesting and the cane-cutting. These are all Indians, the majority from the Altiplano. Of the two groups, the cotton pickers seem marginally the worse off, being housed in dreadful barracoons in which they sleep packed in rows, sexes mixed, thirty or forty to a hut.

The working day is from just before dawn until dark. Altiplano Indians, accustomed to the cold, clear air of the high plateau, suffered dreadfully, the priest said, in the heat of the tropics, and also from the incessant attacks of insects, unknown in the highlands, but which made life unbearable to them here. It was difficult to estimate how much a worker earned, but, allowing for loss of working time through bad weather, the priest estimated that this might average out at fifty pence a day. But this was far from being the take-home wage. Various deductions had to be made, including the contractor’s cut.

All the estates employed agents who scoured the country in their search for suitable labour. The plantation owners paid them fifty pence to two pounds fifty for every man, plus a percentage deducted from the worker’s pay.

There were other drawbacks. The migrant worker would be forced to buy his supplies from the estate’s stores, where prices could be three or four times those normally charged. Jürgen Riester noted in his work on the Indians of Eastern Bolivia that a kilo of salt might be charged up in this way at ten times its market price, and a bottle of rum at twenty times normal cost. Thus the average daily wage could be reduced from fifty pence to twenty pence, or less. Worst of all, said the priest, almost all migrant workers were debt-slaves, and the debts they had been induced to incur went on mounting up every year, so that they were bound for life to a particular employer; their children, who would inherit the debt, would be bound to him, too.

The cane-cutters we visited were on a sugar estate about twenty miles from the city. They were Chiriguano Indians, from Abapó Izozóg – one of the two principal areas designated for the new white settlements. These men worked a fifteen-hour day, starting at 3 a.m., by moonlight or the light of kerosene flares, except on Sunday, when thirteen hours were worked. The two free hours on Sunday were dedicated to a visit by lorry to buy supplies at the estate owner’s shop in Montero, the nearest village. They were paid about fifty pence a day. Although their contracts stipulated that water, firewood and medicines would be provided free, there was no wood, two inches of a muddy brown liquid in the bottom of one only of the two wells, and the only medicine given was aspirin, used impartially in the treatment of enteritis, tuberculosis (from which many of them suffer), and snake-bite. Every woman over the age of eighteen had lost her front teeth as a result of poor nutrition, leaving the gums blue and hideously swollen.

A contractor hung about, keeping his eye on us; a sleek and smirking young man in a big sombrero, a digital watch strapped on his wrist and a transistor to his ear. Part of his duties would be to keep a look out for cane-cutters who were obviously not long for this world and ship them off back to their villages where they could die out of sight. All these
cane-cutters
were debt-slaves. It should be stressed that the estate was not specially singled out for this investigation, but was chosen at random, largely because it was easily reached from the main road. It was almost certainly no better nor any worse than the rest.

The current fight championed by the Church on such estates is for the elimination of the contractor and the abolition of a system by which twenty per cent of wages are withheld until the end of the harvest to prevent desertion. Even when, despite this precaution, workers do cut and run, they may be brought back by the police as absconding debtors. Little objection is seen from above to controlling labour by brute force: a mentality inherited from the days before 1962, when estates were bought and sold
with
their workers.

In 1972, at the time of the cotton boom and the trebling of cotton prices on the world market, workers were forcibly prevented from
leaving
the cotton fields, and troops sent to the Altiplano to recruit labour, while in Santa Cruz schools were closed so that the children might be free to help out.

The following news-clipping from
Excelsior
, dated 23rd June 1977, gives some idea of labour conditions that can still exist in odd corners.

The migrant workers I have described are classified as Indians integrated into the national society. They have, in some cases, been in painful contact with white people for several centuries. They dress as whites, are nominally Catholics, and often no longer speak an Indian language. The Chiriguano cane-cutters were descendants of those who survived the wholesale exterminations of the great rubber boom of the nineteenth century, when Indians who were dragged from their villages to become rubber tappers had no more than a two-year expectation of life, and could expect punishment, which might include the amputation
of a limb for failure to produce the expected quota of rubber. There exists a class of even cheaper and more defenceless labour. These are ‘
nonintegrated
’ Indians, who have only recently been driven or enticed from the jungle. They are at the bottom of the pyramid of enslavement.

On 16th October 1977, two days before our arrival in Santa Cruz,
Presencia
published an account of the kind of misadventure that can befall a forest Indian – in this case one of a band of refugees who escaped from a mission compound – who happens to follow a road and arrive at the end of it, dazzled, bewildered, and quite unable to make himself understood, in the streets of a boom city.

This Indian, an Ayoreo named Cañe, was washing his clothes in the River Piraí, a few yards from the Santa Cruz main railway station, when he heard screams coming from a parked car in which two men were attacking a girl. Cañe ran to the girl’s aid, and the two men drove off, but they soon returned with a police car. In this, after a thorough beating, Cañe was taken to the police station, where, being unable to give any account of himself in Spanish, and in the absence of an interpreter, one of the policemen simply drew his gun and shot him through the head. The bullet entered the right side of the head, low down, behind the ear, and exited, astonishingly, without damage to the brain.

What is unusual about this story, besides Cañe’s miraculous escape that got him into the newspapers, was that he was then taken to hospital. In Latin America it is unusual for an ambulance ever to be sent for an Indian.

This happened on 9th October, and on 20th October, learning that Cañe and the rest of his fugitive groups were still to be seen on a piece of waste-ground outside the Brazil Station, we found an interpreter and went in a taxi to talk to him. The taxi-driver had some reason to know just where the Ayoreos were to be found, because he mentioned that the Ayoreo women had been driven by starvation to prostitute themselves for five pesos (thirteen pence) per visit. He himself had had intercourse with one of them several days before, copulation having taken place at dusk, in the open, by the side of the well-illuminated and busy road. He now awaited with anxiety the possible appearance of dread symptoms.

We found approximately twenty Ayoreos on waste land by the side of the new dual carriageway. Cañe was among them, and we examined the still raw wound in the back of his head. He told us that a number of ribs had been broken in the beating he had been given, and that an attempt had been made to break both his wrists, using a device kept at the police station for that purpose.

Cañe, a magnificently strong young man, had put up such resistance to this that the policeman had had to give up his efforts, and then in frustration had drawn his gun and shot him instead.

The Ayoreos are the proudest of the tribes of Bolivia, making a fetish of manly strength and courage, particularly as demonstrated in their hunting of the jaguar. To acquire status in the tribe and marry well, an Ayoreo must be prepared to tackle a jaguar at close quarters, in such a way that the maximum amount of scarring is left by the encounter on his limbs and his torso.

For these Ayoreos the days of hunting the jaguar in the Gran Chaco were at an end. They had gone through the mission, been deprived of their skills and been taught the power of money. As a last resort, since food had to be bought, they sold their women. Cañe remembered being taken by a missionary as a boy from the Chaco. Since then he had slaved for farmers, being paid with an occasional cast-off garment or a little rice. In the end, he and his companions could stand the life no longer, and had just wandered away following the road through the jungle, and then a railway track until they reached Santa Cruz.

We learned that the mission from which the Ayoreos had decamped was a South American mission station in the jungle some twenty kilometres from the village of Pailón. Deciding to see for ourselves what were the conditions that could have caused this apparently hopeless headlong flight into nowhere, we visited the mission on 22nd October, in the company of three Germans, one of whom spoke Ayoreo.

The scene, when we arrived in the camp, was a depressingly familiar one: the swollen bellies, pulpy, inflated flesh, toothless gums and chronic sores of malnutrition, the slow, listless movements, the eyes emptied by apathy. Here, 275 Ayoreos, a substantial proportion of the survivors of
the tribe, had been rounded up with their jaguar-scarred chief, who presented himself, grotesque in his dignity, wearing a motorcycle
crash-helmet
. We inspected a deep cleft in his forehead where he had attempted to commit suicide, using an axe.

The only signs of food we saw was a bone completely covered by a black furry layer of putrefaction, being passed round to be gnawed, and a cooked tortoise being shared among a group. With our arrival a commotion began, led by some weeping women, and we soon learned the reason. Here in the tropics, at the height of the dry season, the water supply had been cut off by the missionary in punishment for some offence. The Indians, several of them ill, and with sick children in the camp, had been without water for two days.

We saw the missionary, Mr Depue, a lean shaven-headed North American of somewhat austere presence, who confirmed that he had ordered a collective punishment he believed most likely to be effective to deal with a case in which two or three children had broken into a store and stolen petrol. There was to be no more water until the culprits were found, and brought into his compound, there to be publicly thrashed.