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Genocide in Paraguay
Mark Munzel, a German anthropologist, was the first to call
attention to the massacre of the Paraguayan Indians, with whom he
lived for a year. He points out that "the Ache are inconvenient" -
particularly, for the few enterprises with a majority of foreign
(Brazilian, United States, and Western European) shares that
dominate the Paraguayan economy, and for the Stroessner
dictatorship that has imposed its terrorist rule with substantial
U.S. support, as did its murderous predecessors. As the forests are
cleared for foreign & domestic mining and cattle-raising interests,
Indian removal, using some combination of outright killing and
forcible resettlement , is a normal facet of "development" policy.
In the case of a "poor man's Nazi" regime such as Stroessner's
Paraguay, the nature of the resettlement (comparable to those in
Nazi concentration camps") is such as to make the charge of
genocide an appropriate one.
Munzel records the campaign against the Indians by manhunts,
slavery, and deculturation. In manhunts with the co-operation of
the military, the Indians are "pursued like animals," the parents
killed, and the children sold (citing professor Sardi). Machetes
are commonly used to murder Indians to save the expense of
bullets. Men not slaughtered are sold for field-workers, women as
prostitutes, children as domestic servants. According to Sardi,
"there is not one family in which a child has not been murdered."
The process of deculturation aims at the intentional destruction of
Indian culture among those herded into the reservation. Little
effort is made to maintain secrecy about any of this, except by
agencies of the U.S. government and by the U.S. media. For example,
Munzel was offered teenage Indian girls by the Director of Indian
Affairs of the Ministry of Defence, who "sought my goodwill," and
he comments that "slavery is widespread and officially tolerated." Slaves can be found in Asuncion, the capital city.
Indians who survive the manhunts are herded into reservations
where, according to Munzel, they are "subjected to stress and
physcological degradation calculated to break the body as well as
the spirit." Torture and humiliation of Indian Chiefs is a
"standard procedure designed to produce the disintegration of group
identity." Medication and nourishment are purposely withheld. When
spirits are broken, the reservation is used " as a manhunt centre
where tamed Indians are trained in fratricide." In a recent visit,
Arens was impressed with the "striking absence of young adult
males," the horrendous condition of the children, with festering
sores, distended abdomens and widespread symptoms of the protein-
deficiency disease Kwashiorkor, and the refusal of medication and
medical care as a general practice. Arens, even on a guided tour,
was aghast at the systematic maltreatment and felt himself
"engulfed by the collective gloom of a people who had given up on
life."
The systematic humiliation and ethnocide, Munzel writes, "produces
docile Indians who are sometimes taken to Asuncion and exhibited to
the public. Thus, the 'good image' of the reservation (as
illustrated by the well-fed and smiling Ache photographed by a NEW
YORK TIMES reporter) is preserved." Not all reporters are
so easily fooled, however. As Arens notes, contrasting the
contemptible behaviour of the U.S. media with the more serious
treatment abroad, "where a reporter for the NEW YORK TIMES had
discovered a clean reservation, peopled by smiling and happy
Indians, Norman Lewis [of the LONDON SUNDAY TIMES] had found a
death camp." This is also what Wolf reports in his survey and what
Arens found in his guided tour of the Paraguayan camps.
The reservation in question is RUN BY U.S. FUNDAMENTALIST
MISSIONARIES, one of whom, "has himself been observed participating
in Indian hunts within the forest areas and, beyond that, in the
lucrative sale of captives in his charge" (Munzel). The takeover of
the extermination camp by missionaries "has meant the end of overt
brutality" and the beginning of reforms which appear to be "window
dressing," Munzel reports. "Fundamentalist missionaries have
followed the official line of the Paraguayan Indian Affairs
Department with greater cruelty than their predecessors ; they have
attempted and continue to attempt to secure the rapid cultural
'integration' of the Ache at almost any cost." Their technique is
"civilizing with a sledgehammer," in the words of the Director of
the South American Section of the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum, who
discusses their "racist feeling of superiority" and suggests that
their disdain for Indian culture may be the reason why they were
selected by the government to run the reservation. Indians are
forced to give up their names, customs and traditions, and taught
to think "that anything connected with their own culture is
shameful." For example, when a child died OF HUNGER in a camp,
after capture, Munzel reports, his parents were forbidden to bury
him in the forest in the traditional manner but were required to
bury him close to the house in a Christian rite.
Christian values are taught in other ways as well. A Paraguayan
rancher writes that he "was struck by the fear that this man
inspires in these Indians," referring to Jack Stolz of the New
Tribes Mission ("The most influential of the North American
Protestant missions in Paraguay"), administrator of the "Guayiki
Colony" (Norman Lewis). When Stolz arrived to return a group of
Indians to the reservation, "they started to run away into the
forest"; women wept that they did not want to return to the camp
because "there they were given no food." Stolz proceeded to claim
payment from the rancher for work done by the Indians. Other
missionaries commented to Lewis that they are making good profits
by the sale of Indian handicrafts produced by "the tame Makas under
missionary control." Stolz, who seemed to be "virtually a
functionary of the Paraguayan government," and who had himself
participated in manhunts according to one of his colleagues,
"attempted to hide the fact that the Indians were still hunted and
their children enslaved," Lewis reports after an October 1979 trip.
Stolz reported that all evidence of Indian culture had been
suppressed and admitted that he had made no converts and had not
attempted to learn the language: "the missionary believed that all
these Indians who remained, without hope of conversion, were doomed
to spend eternity in Hell" - perhaps the reason why the
missionaries are preparing them with a hell on earth. With a
combination of racist missionaries, along with the complicity of
International Corporations, the U.S. government, and the press, the
future looks bleak for the Ache. Perhaps they are the lucky ones,
however. Paraguayan liberals, according to Lewis, fear that the
same, "or even more ruthless methods" are being extended to other
regions where corporations are exploiting natural resources and
"the role of North American fundamentalist missionaries in the
areas suggest a fate for these Indians comparable to that of the
Guayaki-Aches....."
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