Voyage By Dhow (15 page)

I asked Mr Stolz how many Indians were on the reservation, and he said there were 300. Most of them were out working on the land, he said. When I asked if I could see them at work he said they were on their way back to the camp and would be coming in soon. This seemed reasonable enough. It was now nearly noon. In Paraguay the working day starts soon after dawn, and the whole country knocks off for a siesta at midday. Work then recommences at three and continues until sunset. I asked Mr Stolz what the Indians were paid, and after a little hesitation he said they received 100 guaranies (about 33p) a day. ‘They have no sense of trade or money,’ he said.

In view of the camp’s large increase in population since the visit of the
New York Times
correspondent in January, I thought it reasonable to enquire where the new arrivals had come from. Mr Stolz seemed evasive. They just came in from time to time, he said. ‘In the night.’ The last group had arrived some weeks previously. He agreed that no ‘wild’ Guayakis were to be found any longer in the vicinity, and that those recently arrived had come from a long way away. ‘What made them come?’ I asked, and Mr Stolz said: ‘Maybe they heard this was a good place to be in.’ He confirmed that there were many enslaved Indian children in the neighbourhood. He mentioned four that had been taken two years previously at Kuruzú some twenty kilometres away, but had not survived. One of these had died from a gun-butt blow received at the time of his capture, and the others shortly afterwards from measles, a disease against which forest Indians have built up no immunity.

‘It’s the smart thing to own a Guayaki round here,’ he said. ‘I guess it’s a kind of status symbol.’

Donald was anxious to photograph Guayakis playing their musical instruments; their flutes and above all a species of one-stringed fiddle with which a range of about three notes is obtained simply by bending the neck, and thus varying the tension of the string. Mr Stolz said flatly that there were no musical instruments of any kind on the reservation. Did the Indians perform any traditional ceremonies? I asked. No, he said, none. Were there any chiefs? No. Any medicine men? Absolutely not. The only thing the Guayakis ever seemed to do was to sing, he said. The words of their songs were ‘not too interesting’. The men were always trying to build themselves up as great hunters, and the women sang those terrible groaning, bellyaching songs. They blamed everything on their ancestors.

At this point I decided to ask Mr Stolz what was the function of the mission and he replied that it was to bring salvation to those who were in a state of sin. This was to be done, eventually, by baptism after the converts had accepted Christ in their hearts, and by ‘admission through the mouth’. He thought it was a good thing that I should write down his replies to these questions on topics of faith and conversion and this I carefully did.

How many Guayakis had he baptized? I asked, and Mr Stolz said none. ‘Before I can bring them to Christ I must first understand what they believe,’ he explained.

‘And do you?’ I asked him.

Mr Stolz said, ‘Vaguely.’ He had a problem with the language, he added, but at least he knew that they believed in three gods. The tiger (jaguar), the alligator, and the grandfather. ‘This makes things difficult. When we talk of God’s son they think of a tiger’s son. It’s hard to get across the idea they can be redeemed from sin by a tiger’s son nailed to a cross. None of these Indians can make the admission, because they do not know what to admit.’

I asked Mr Stolz what progress, if any, had been made towards conversion, and he replied that most of them at least realized that they were living in a state of sin, particularly in sexual matters.

As by Mr Stolz’s own estimate it would be many years before any of the Guayakis were brought by his efforts into the fold of Christianity, it was supposed that many in the meanwhile would die, while a few, at least, would probably remain beyond reach of the missionary effort. What in the view of the New Tribes Mission, I asked, would be their spiritual fate?

Mr Stolz was on firm ground now. ‘There is no salvation,’ he said, ‘for those who cannot be reached. The Book tells us that there are only two places in the hereafter: heaven and hell. Hell is where those who cannot be reached will spend eternity.’

It seemed to me unreasonable that divine retribution should be visited on the Guayakis because Mr Stolz had been unable to learn their language, but the missionary shrugged his shoulders. Such things were beyond his jurisdiction, he suggested. Soon after this he excused himself to return to stripping down an electrical generator, some part of which had to be got away to Asunción that day, and I only saw him briefly again before we left.

I now joined Donald at his photography, noticing by this time that several young missionaries, not in evidence before, had come on the scene. There were about twelve small huts in the immediate area of the mission house. These averaged some fifteen feet square and it was difficult to imagine how as many as 300 Indians could have been sheltered in them. We saw about thirty-five Guayakis in all, about half of them the possessors of skin of the extraordinary waxen whiteness for which anthropologists have been able to offer no explanation. All of them were extremely mongoloid in appearance, and many could have passed for Eskimos. At a rough estimate about fifteen of these were nubile young women, or mothers with babies. There were a half-dozen boys between eight and twelve years of age, and two young girls in this age-bracket, all with the distended stomachs and decayed teeth suggestive of malnutrition. The rest of the visible population was made up of adult males.

All the Guayakis, with the exception of two or three men wearing pseudo-military uniforms, were in dirty cast-offs. There appeared to be no sanitary arrangements in the camp area, which smelled of human excrement. We noted that the adult males had access to bows and arrows with which they showed off their skill to the missionaries. The fact that these men were not at work, and that the missionaries fraternized with them in an affectionate manner, suggested at least the possibility that they were privileged, possibly as camp ‘trusties’, or even
señuelos.
In common with all other visitors to the reservation we observed an extreme disproportion in the sexes of its population. If Mr Stolz had told us correctly, there were 300 Indians, but—presuming women were not compelled to work with their menfolk on the farms—men outnumbered women by about twenty to one. We found it strange that we should have seen no old men.

About half the Indian adults were lying on the ground in their huts in what seemed a condition of total apathy, giving no evidence of awareness of our presence as we came and went. We saw no signs of food anywhere in the huts—no scraps or left-overs.

Some of the Indians had managed to keep the pets from which they are never parted when at liberty. In one hut we found three tame coatis, in another a fox cub, in another a baby vulture. The little boys with distended stomachs under their filthy shirts who came running up to stroke our hands and caress our fingers (the Guayaki are the most affectionate and outgoing of the Indian races) showed us their tame lizards. One had a hen perched on his shoulder, and another a hawk.

Having finished his photography in the central area of the camp, Donald strolled off towards two huts on the outskirts, followed by Mr Stolz’s son, who by now was carrying his tripod, and a smiling young missionary who assured him that there was nothing more to be seen. In one hut he found two old Indian ladies, in the last stages of emaciation and clearly on the verge of death. They lay on the ground apparently having been abandoned to their fate. This was a scene of the kind one associates with the ultimate disasters of Ethiopia and Bangladesh. In the second hut lay a third woman, also in a desperate condition, and Mr Stolz’s son, who had come up with the tripod, explained that she had been shot in the side while being brought in.

It was clear that behind the evasions and the resentful silences of Cecilio Baez a great deal remained to be explained before the charges made by the International League for the Rights of Man could be brushed aside. But it was also clear that attempts to probe further, at this time, into what went on behind the scenes would have been futile. Paraguay, the firmest of the Latin American dictatorships, is not a country where it is recommended to put too many inconvenient questions to persons entrusted by the government with the implementation of official policy. We should have been very unhappy indeed, for example, to have been obliged to surrender Donald’s films when leaving the country.

But as it turned out, a few more of the facts were let slip by a visiting New Tribes missionary from the Chaco, who asked us when we left—after several hours’ fruitless waiting for the Guayakis to come in from the farms—to give him a lift back to Asunción. He had been stranded by the rains for four days at Cecilio Baez, and, convinced that God had sent us in answer to his prayers, in his euphoria and relief he threw caution to the winds.

Mr Stolz had told us that the Indians received 100 guaranies a day (spendable at the mission’s store), but the Chaco missionary dismissed this as absurd. The farmers they worked for
promised
them 200 guaranies (66p) a
week
, but more often than not fobbed them off in the end with an old shirt, or a worn-out pair of pants. The Chaco missionary also succeeded in letting the cat out of the bag in the matter of Mr Stolz’s activities as an Indian-catcher. He had been out several times recently ‘to make contact’ he said, and once, indeed, had been narrowly missed by a Guayaki arrow.

It would be impossible without an investigation to substantiate the allegations that have been made that Mr Stolz has engaged in traditional manhunts using
señuelos,
and no investigator is ever likely to be permitted at the camp. But it is clear that the Indian population of Cecilio Baez has much increased in the past few months, and it is hard to believe that free Indians would wish to make a journey of at least 100 miles from the remote forests where they still exist, in order to deliver themselves up to a condition hardly distinguishable from slavery. In fact their reluctance to be ‘attracted’ by Mr Stolz is very clear from his colleague’s account of the arrow that narrowly missed him.

By Mr Stolz’s own admission the New Tribes mission at Cecilio Baez performs no religious function. What then is its purpose? It is hard not to agree with the view of Dr Mark Münzel in IWGIA Document No. 17, published in Copenhagen in August 1974, that: ‘The reservation has the function of a transitional “taming” camp: the proud and “wild” Indians of the forest would not be immediately willing to work in the white man’s fields; but they are willing once they have passed through the reservation, because they see no other solution, or because they are so instructed by the missionaries.’ It has seemed strange to outside observers that the countries of Latin America should tolerate and even favour the presence of such North American Protestant missions dispensing—when religious instruction is given at all—a version of Christianity which must be repellent to their own Catholic beliefs. The reason can only be that they are regarded by governments, intent at all costs on the ‘development’ of natural resources, as efficient in the performance of work that no other organizations are qualified by philosophy, temperament and—above all—by tradition, to undertake.

I do not believe that Mr Stolz would be particularly concerned to defend himself from inclusion in the category of those missionaries who, by the verdict of Bishop Alejo Ovelar, ‘are implicated in the grave crime of ethnocide’, because he would see nothing wrong in the destruction of the racial identity of Indians for which he feels little but contempt.

‘We believe,’ says the printed doctrinal statement of the New Tribes Mission, in ‘the unending punishment of the unsaved.’ What is a few months or even years of misery at Cecilio Baez compared to that?

1975

O
UR FIRST VIEW OF
the Panare was at the village of Guanama, sweltering at the end of the track from an unfinished dirt road that faltered southwards through Venezuela in the general direction of the Amazon. A half-dozen Panare males came out of a communal round-house, moving springily like ballet dancers, with an offering of hot mango juice. They were good examples of a people described as incredibly impervious to Western influence, dressed therefore in no more than scrupulously woven loinclothes, and armlets of blue and white beads. A long ancestry of nomadism had shaped them, and by comparison their nearest white neighbours, who spent their lives on horseback or in cars, seemed awkwardly put together, a little misshapen even, and inclined to fat. The Panare, who could run and walk fifty miles a day across the savannah if put to it, were lean, lithe and supple, coming close in their bodily proportions to the classic ideal.

Guanama was spruce and trim, with everything in place, a little like an anthropological model. Its round-houses were masterpieces of Stone Age architecture, built for all weathers, and marvellously cool under their deep fringing of thatch. It was a quiet place, as Panare villages are wont to be. The dogs remained silent and respectful, children did not cry, and the adults, back from hunting or work in their gardens, slipped into their hammocks after greeting us, to resume soft-voiced discussions on the topic of the day. Only one thing seemed out of place in this calm and confiding atmosphere—the new barbed-wire fence, a symbolic intrusion of an alien point of view.

We had made a point of this visit to Guanama after a report of extraordinary happenings by Maria Eugenia Villalón, who had gone there while employed in a census of the Indian population. A year before she had been in Guanama to record Panare songs, and now, returning for the census, she proposed to entertain the villagers by playing these back to them. No sooner had the tape recorder been switched on than the Indians leapt to their feet in a state of panic, running in all directions, their hands clasped over their ears. The machine was switched off and the commotion subsided. The Panare explained that what they had been compelled to listen to was the voice of the Devil speaking through their mouths. Now they had found Jesus, and henceforward would sing nothing but hymns. They lined up to oblige with one of these, a Panare version of ‘Weary of earth and laden with my sin …’, the first line repeated ad infinitum to Mexican guitars and the rattle of maracas. It was clear to Señora Villalón that the New Tribes Mission had moved in. Members of this organization are the standard-bearers in Venezuela of the new computerized, airborne evangelism that insists not only on conversion, but on the demolition of all those ceremonies and beliefs by which an indigenous culture is defined.