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Paraguay Indians
Sixteenth-century Iberian explorers in South America found the
Atlantic Coast of modern-day Brazil in the control of Guaraní
Indians; the groups on the southern Brazilian coast, known as the
Tupinambá, had extended their territory inland to the Río Paraguay,
Río Paraná, and Río Uruguay. Various migrations eventually brought
these and other closely related groups to the eastern flanks of the
Andes.
The Spanish rapidly subjugated and assimilated the Guaraní they
encountered in what later became Eastern Paraguay
(see The Young Colony
, ch. 1). High rates of intermarriage or concubinage between
Spanish settlers and Guaraní women created a society that was
overwhelmingly mestizo. In the resulting synthesis, the dominant
social institutions and culture were Hispanic; the commonly spoken
language, however, was Indian in origin.
As many as 100,000 Indians lived in Jesuit-run
reducciones during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
After the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay in 1767, the
reducciones were taken over by civil authorities; subsequent
mismanagement caused their population to decline. The survivors
either were assimilated into the rural mestizo population or fled
to the hinterland
(see Religion in Society
, this ch.).
Over the next two centuries, relations between vestigial groups
of Indians and the dominant rural Paraguayans were infrequent. When
interaction occurred at all, it was often violent. Nevertheless,
the War of the Triple Alliance reduced the Paraguayan population
sufficiently to reduce pressure on forest lands and thus buffered
the remaining tribes.
The Indians' situation remained relatively stable until the
mid-twentieth century. Although much land along the eastern border
was held by foreign investors, these vast estates were not worked
intensively. Hunters and gatherers therefore had sufficient
reserves of land, as did the more sedentary populations. Although
Indians might occasionally serve as laborers, they were not
pressured by other rural settlers or missionaries. In the Chaco
most tribes adopted sheep and goat herding; the inhospitable nature
of the region provided a natural barrier to mestizo settlement and
protected many groups from outside interference until the Chaco War
of 1932-35.
In the early 1980s, the Paraguayan Indian Institute (Instituto
Paraguayo del Indígena--Indi) estimated the country's Indian
population at nearly 40,000. Indi's efforts to count the Indians
met with significant resistance from some indigenous leaders.
Various anthropologists placed the count higher, at 50,000 to
100,000, or 1.5 to 3 percent of the total population. But all the
numbers represented only the roughest of approximations.
Paraguay's indigenous peoples were divided into seventeen tribal
groups representing six language families. Even in the ethnographic
literature, there was confusion about the precise distinctions
among tribes and the linguistic relationships involved.
In general, observers relied upon a person's self-identification
and that of those in contact with him or her in categorizing the
individual as an Indian. Those who viewed themselves as tribal
members--separate and distinct from the national culture--and who
were seen by others as indios or indígenas, were
classified as Indians. Language was a less certain cultural marker,
but in general Indians spoke as their primary language neither
Spanish nor the variety of Guaraní used by most Paraguayans.
Despite pride in their Guaraní heritage and language, many
Paraguayans had negative feelings toward the country's remaining
Indians and viewed nomadic tribes as subhuman. A survey of
attitudes toward Indians in the 1970s found that 77 percent of
respondents thought: "They are like animals because they are
unbaptized." Indianness was a stigma; even Indians who became
sedentary and Christian faced continued discrimination in
employment and wages. According to estimates in the 1980s, the 3
percent of the population considered Indians accounted for roughly
10 percent of the poorest segment of Paraguayan society.
The Río Paraguay split the country's Indians: the four groups in
Eastern Paraguay all spoke varieties of Guaraní, whereas the
approximately thirteen tribes of the Chaco represented five
language families. In the 1970s and 1980s, the situation of
specific tribes varied according to a number of circumstances. The
principal factor affecting a tribe's well-being was the extent and
kind of pressure brought to bear on Indians and their traditional
territories by outsiders.
The Guaraní speakers of Eastern Paraguay were scattered
throughout the (formerly) remote regions to the northeast, along
the country's border with Brazil. Although much land occupied by
Indians had been legally owned by large estates, the tribes
traditionally had been able to practice slash-and-burn agriculture
and hunting and gathering largely undisturbed. Members of some
tribes occasionally worked as wage laborers on the immense yerba
maté plantations, whereas others had no peaceful relations with the
larger society. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the tribes'
customary ways of life were eroded by the IBR-sponsored
settlements, the influx of Brazilian migrants, the purchase and
more efficient operation of many estates by multinational firms,
and the initiation of large-scale hydroelectric projects. As a
result of increasing intrusions into traditional Indian lands,
almost all Indians in Eastern Paraguay were involved in wage labor
to some degree by the late 1970s.
For the past century, the largest tribe in Eastern Paraguay, the
Paiú-Tavyteraú, subsisted through a combination of slash-and-burn
farming, fishing and hunting, and periodic wage labor. For them the
far-reaching changes of the 1960s and 1970s meant loss of land, the
depletion of hunting and fishing resources, and increased
dependence on wage labor. By the early 1970s, anthropologists found
malnutrition widespread and tuberculosis endemic among tribal
members. Estimates of mortality during the first two years of life
were as high as 50 percent. The Avá-Chiripá, to the south of the
Paiú territory, had been subject to even more outside pressure:
they were well on the way to being dispossessed of their
traditional lands and becoming dependent on wage labor.
Contact between the Aché tribe and the larger society had never
been peaceful. During the 1960s and 1970s, a variety of rural
Paraguayans raided and enslaved some of the Aché, who continued to
follow a seminomadic existence in Eastern Paraguay's forests. By
the late 1970s, the Aché survived only in a few communities run by
missionaries and on a few ranches in Eastern Paraguay. Because of
the Aché's more secure position on missions and ranches, organized
raiding was largely eliminated by the early 1980s. Nonetheless,
small groups of Aché on return trips to the forest to forage and
hunt were often the targets of rural Paraguayans, and reports
persisted in the mid-1980s of Indians being held involuntarily by
Paraguayan families.
The Chaco Indians had a more varied history of contact with
outsiders. They tenaciously resisted colonial efforts at
pacification and conversion. Indeed, the warlike Indians, in
combination with the inhospitable Chaco terrain and climate,
presented an effective barrier to Spanish expansion west of the Río
Paraguay. The Chaco Indians subsisted in a traditional manner by
hunting and gathering and raising livestock. The sale of animal
skins and periodic wage labor in tanning factories along the Río
Paraguay or on sugar plantations in Argentina provided a source of
cash income.
The tribes lived without undue interference until the Chaco War
(and the subsequent expansion of ranching in the region) and
Mennonite colonization in the central Chaco. Almost all Chaco
tribes became more sedentary after the war. The Mascoi-Toba
speakers of the central and southeastern Chaco were especially
affected, and by the 1980s many spoke only or primarily Guaraní.
Some tribes that provided scouts for the army during the war later
found occasional employment with military garrisons. The increase
in ranching meant less land and game available to hunters and
gatherers and a concomitant rise in the need for wage labor. After
the government banned the sale of skins in an effort to preserve
the declining animal population, the Indians became increasingly
dependent on the region's cattle ranches for wage labor. Dependence
also increased following the closing of most of the tanning
factories. Demand for labor in ranching, however, declined
precipitously as lands were cleared and fenced. In addition, the
opening of the Trans-Chaco Highway meant that Indians had to
compete with migrants, usually single males, from elsewhere in the
country. Ranchers often preferred employing these transients to
assuming responsibility for allowing Indians with families to
settle and work on their ranches.
Language use among the Chaco tribes reflected the various ways
that groups adapted to the presence of outsiders and the changing
economy. Migration and wage labor brought with them a significant
amount of intertribal marriage. Guaraní or (less frequently)
Spanish came to serve as a lingua franca. In groups that had a
history of several generations of labor in the tanning factories,
husbands and wives from different tribes often spoke Guaraní in
their home. Their children were monolingual in that tongue until
they learned Spanish at school. By the 1980s, it appeared that a
number of languages--Angaité, Guaná, and Mascoi-Toba among them--
might die out within the next generation. By contrast, a group of
Mac'á who settled on the west bank of the Río Paraguay under the
patronage of General Juan Belaieff, whom they had assisted in the
Chaco War, remained almost entirely monolingual in Mac'á except
when engaged in commerce.
In the late 1970s, researchers estimated that more than half of
all Indians lived on settlements under the auspices of various
missionary organizations. This was particularly true of those
groups whose first intensive contacts with Paraguayan society dated
from the 1960s and 1970s. In the Chaco almost all Indians who were
not scattered on individual ranches lived under the patronage of
the missions.
Historically, official government policy had often left Indians
to the care of religious groups. Until the 1960s, the government's
only defined Indian policy was in the form of a 1909 law that
enjoined Paraguay "to take measures leading to the conversion of
the Indians to Christianity and civilization . . . ." Because the
legislation permitted missionaries to acquire land for Indian
settlements, some tribes were able to obtain land. At the same
time, however, the law increased the tribes' dependence on
missionaries as advocates in dealing with the larger society.
The missionaries offered the Indians under their care a measure
of protection from the worst predations of rural Paraguayans. In
some cases, mission educational programs taught in Indian languages
offered the only hope that these tongues would be preserved at all.
The impact of Christian proselytizing on indigenous belief and
social institutions was less positive, however. Fundamentalist
groups were particularly unrelenting in their efforts to eliminate
indigenous beliefs. Anthropologists David Maybury-Lewis and James
Howe noted that efforts to "crush witch doctors" drove a wedge
between Christian and traditional believers within the same tribe.
Critics charged that fundamentalist groups' aggressive
proselytization destroyed Indian culture in the process of
conversion.
Roman Catholics had the longest history of missionary activity.
Their efforts were focused on protecting Indians from the worst
effects of outside incursions, in particular forced removals from
tribal lands. The philosophy of the Second Vatican Council (1962-
65) called for a process of gradual conversion that included
respect for indigenous beliefs.
Anglicans had been active in the southeast Chaco since the turn
of the century. By the late 1970s, the Lengua converts at the
Anglican mission were generally in charge of running the
settlement. The most serious problems came from overcrowding as
more and more Indians displaced from elsewhere in the Chaco sought
refuge at the mission.
Mennonites used Indians as a ready source of labor when they
first settled in the central Chaco. As Mennonite-Indian relations
became more complex, the Mennonites formed the Association of
Indian-Mennonite Cooperative Services (Asociación de los Servicios
de Cooperación Indígena-Mennonita--ASCIM) to proselytize and assist
the Indians. As was the case with other mission settlements, the
problems ASCIM faced grew as Indians forced off their lands
elsewhere in the Chaco flocked to the Mennonite settlements.
Although ASCIM had resettled about 5,000 Indians on their own land
by the late 1970s, large numbers of landless people remained around
Filadelfia, hoping for employment on Mennonite farms.
A number of secular and official organizations attempted to
assist Indians over the years. Inspired by the indigenist movement
that flourished in Latin America in the early twentieth century,
middle- and upper-class Paraguayans founded the Indigenist
Association of Paraguay (Asociación Indigenista del Paraguay --
AIP) in the early 1940s. Over the years AIP campaigned for Indian
rights and publicized the problems Indians faced. In the late 1970s
and early 1980s, the association was active in sponsoring legal
defense and regional development projects for the tribes of Eastern
Paraguay and in drafting legislation that established Indi. Indi's
mandate was to help Indians improve their legal status, especially
in matters pertaining to employment and landholding. The efforts of
Indi and other advocates for Indian rights resulted in enactment of
legislation in 1981 that formally recognized the Indians' right to
pursue their culture and way of life, stated that landholding was
integral to the continued survival of Paraguay's Indians, and
expanded the means through which communities could obtain formal
legal status and title to their lands.
Data as of December 1988
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