About
Community
Bad Ideas
Drugs
Ego
Erotica
Fringe
Society
Politics
Anarchism
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Corporatarchy - Rule by the Corporations
Economic Documents
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Foreign Military & Intelligence Agencies
Green Planet
International Banking / Money Laundering
Libertarianism
National Security Agency (NSA)
Police State
Political Documents
Political Spew
Right to Keep and Bear Arms
Terrorists and Freedom Fighters
The Nixon Project
The World Beyond the U.S.A.
U.S. Military
Technology
register | bbs | search | rss | faq | about
meet up | add to del.icio.us | digg it

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....."

 
To the best of our knowledge, the text on this page may be freely reproduced and distributed.
If you have any questions about this, please check out our Copyright Policy.

 

totse.com certificate signatures
 
 
About | Advertise | Bad Ideas | Community | Contact Us | Copyright Policy | Drugs | Ego | Erotica
FAQ | Fringe | Link to totse.com | Search | Society | Submissions | Technology
Hot Topics
Ed & Elaine Brown * Shots Fired *
Why are we stalling on Darfur?
george galloway what do you think of him?
Hinchey Amendment
why UK accepts US subjugation and infiltration?
George galloway suspended from HP
Why Marxism IS Economically Exploitive...
Situation in Turkey
 
Sponsored Links
 
Ads presented by the
AdBrite Ad Network

 
www.pigdog.org
 

TSHIRT HELL T-SHIRTS