Twenty-one years ago, Norman Lewis was the first to draw attention to the genocide of
the South American Indians. Despite widespread protest, he reports, the
massacre continues.
On 27 December 1986 a party of 34 "tame" Indians armed by the New Tribes
Mission set out from the sect's headquarters at Campo Loro in the Gran
Chaco, Paraguay, to capture a small group of Ayoreo Indians spotted from the
mission's plane in the jungle. These survivors of a number of previous attacks,
had established themselves some 50 miles from Campo Loro. The attacking party,
too, were Ayoreos, although of a different clan, and traditionally the enemies
of their quarry - a fact of which the missionaries were well aware. The mission
Indians were carried in trucks as far as these could be driven into the jungle,
then left to continue on foot. It took them three days to hack their way
through dense undergrowth and reach the village of the "Pig People",
as they were called by the missionaries.
There have been varying accounts - all from missionary sources - of what happened
next. Early versions spoke of the tame Indians advancing to the assault with
New Testaments in their hands, and it was only in an issue of the missionary journal
Brown Gold that any mention of guns was made. "The village had been
prepared for war," reported the journal, "and was always kept that way because of
tremendous fear they [the forest Ayoreos] had of the leader of the mission Indians
and his group. A bush fence had been put up round the village and only a couple
of small paths led into it ...where the attackers would trip and fall in this
area it was easy to spear or club him [sic]... "
A verbal description was given of the mechanisms of such a jungle attack by a missionary
speaking to Luke Holland, a representative of Survival International, who told
him that when the mission Indians entered the village they "grabbed" members
of the other group and became their owners. "People who are grabbed are in
a way slaves of the ones who grabbed them," said the missionary. In
accordance with this system, "one of our men grabbed Porai [a 'Pig
Person'] and had him put his weapons down ...When he went to grab another man,
Porai picked up his spear and speared one of our men. `When this happened the
killing started." In the course of the battle that followed, five of the
mission Indians were killed and four wounded. After some hours the fighting
came to an end and the surviving mission Indians, with the 25 "Pig People"
they had been able to round up, returned to their base at Campo Loro.
There was nothing new about such expeditions. In 1988 a book entitled Mision
Etnocidio, published by a Paraguayan human rights group, investigated practices
of the fundamentalist New Tribes Mission sect which have long been obscure. One
of the book's contributors, Volker yon Bremen, an anthropologist who has carried
out field studies for the past 10 years among the few remaining Ayoreos, said
that the sect's man-hunts had been frequent and had caused great loss of life in
the 20 years preceding 1974, after which the attacks had died down as the
forest emptied of Indians. Such hunts were conducted in secret, and little or
no mention of them appeared in the muzzled Press. Astonishingly, the
information that has leaked out was usually to be found missionary
publications, which the missionaries may have assumed the public would never
bother themselves to read. These could be bewilderingly frank, sometimes hardly
bothering to conceal chilling facts behind the façade of biblical quotations
and conventional pieties.
During a man-hunt in 1979. Indian women had been chased round the forest three days,
and one was severely injured when she fell from a tree. (In an earlier
missionary expedition this same woman had a breast shot away.) Of the eight captured
women, four who were pregnant suffered miscarriages. Moreover, as a missionary
admitted to Luke Holland. "The Pig People who were brought in didn't keep
many children because it was hard to run away. They killed many children."
Another evangelist was more specific: "One woman killed four."
Mr Sammons, head of the New Tribes Mission at Campo Loro, told Luke Holland:
"Some of them [the captured indians] are looking pretty bad. They want
their jungle food, and haven't got used to eating hamburger-type food
yet." Pedersen, NTM field co-ordinator for Latin America, said he did not
know many Ayoreos brought in to the mission had survived. "We don't keep
that kind of detailed record." he said, adding. "they're all pretty
well mixed up with the others down there and those Indians all look pretty much
the same." But Volker yon Bremen was able to conduct a further
investigation from which sinister facts emerged. The Indians had told him that
the captured Ayoreo chief, his wife and daughter had been shut in a room and
given strong medicine (remedio fuerte) from which they all died.
Yet despite the many casualties of the operation, a few captives survived in a
somewhat miserable fashion. Sharon Burkhari, writing about the Ayoreos in Brown
Gold in March 1983, says: -"Life has not been especially full of blessing
for them since they left their wandering ways in the woods. They were contacted
in 1979. Within several months Orojot's father, mother and sister had all died
… The next year Ijerai's parents passed away. In 1981 Ijerai and Orojoi
contracted measles a killing disease among primitive people." Even on the evangelical front the campaign
had been a disaster, for these wretched people clung stubbornly to their old
beliefs.
It was estimated at the end of the Thirties that some 4,000 Ayoreos roamed that
vast amalgam of forest and swamp, divided between Bolivia and Paraguay, known
as the Gran Chaco. They were constantly at risk from the small-scales raids of
farmers, who carried off a few off as slaves, but held their own in the
labyrinth of the "Green Hell" in which only they could find the
way. Doomsday came with the ending of
the Second World War: the rush for gold, for strategic metals, for oil, for
gas, for valuable timber, all of which Latin America was found to possess in
abundance. With the advent of new road-building techniques, the bulldozer, and
planes that could put down and take off from a couple of hundred yards of airstrip,
the jungle ceased to offer refuge. To the loggers and the exploration teams,
the Indians were at best a nuisance. To the missionaries swarming overseas,
they were a rich harvest of souls waiting to be gathered in. Within ten years
of the return to peace 300 missionary sects, nearly all of them fundamentalist
Americans, were in action in South America, where the evangelist concentration
was by far the greatest in the world. By 1982 Time counted 9,250Protestant missionaries
in the subcontinent: in some small communities the missionaries outnumbered
those they had come to convert.
Competition for souls was intense and eventually many of the less successful contenders
went to the wall, leaving the two largest organisations - the Summer Institute
of Linguistics and the New Tribes Mission - virtually to divide up South America
between them. Of these, the SIL - which despite its name is in no sense a
scientific body - is the larger and the richer: the New Tribes Mission, if
possible more fundamental. The NTM rejects the use of Bible translations other than its own - thus
opening the way to considerable reinterpretations of the Holy Writ. It is
obsessed with its struggle with Satan, who is seen as eternally locked in
combat with God from which he sometimes emerges as at least a temporary winner.
Open letters to Christ appear in its publications. "Dear Jesus Christ, we acknowledge
receipt of your memo …We appreciate your offer to serve as our resource Person,
and should we care to undertake the project sometime later, we will be in contact.
Cordially, the Christians." In its recruitment of missionaries it
publicises its indifference to educational standards. The sect fields 2500 missionaries (about 1000
fewer than its rival) in 16 different countries, and it is supported by its own
air feet and the computerised panoply of any giant multlination corporation.
Its home base is in Sanford, Florida, and its European headquarters are at
Matlock Bath, Derbyshire. [http://uk.ntm.org/content/ntm-in-uk]
It seems natural that to 1956 General Stroessner, the seemingly permanent dictator
of Paraguay, should have chosen the NTM to receive the contract to "settle
and civilise" the Indians of his country, seen as standing in the way of
progress. He would no doubt have been impressed by the text from romans 3: 1,
"There is no government on earth God has not permitted to come to
power", which features so prominently in fundamentalist literature, and
which in the English Bible's version appears more simply as "The powers
that be are ordained God." At that time, of all the areas of Paraguay thrown open to
international development, the Gran Chaco was seen to offer the greatest prospects
of instant wealth, and it was to the Chaco that the general's fundamentalists were assigned.
They were to deal with the Ayoreos, and several thousand hectares of land were made over
to the mission to facilitate their task. When some years later I asked a
Paraguayan army officer why it had been decided that missionaries rather than
the army should have been chosen to get rid of the Indians, his reply was,
"They're better at it. When we go in we shoot some, and some get away.
They get the lot. The missionaries know how to talk to them. When the
missionaries clear an area they leave it clean."
He had seen there at work in a previous clash - the first in which the NTM had
been involved - in the Bolivian half of Gran Chaco in 1943. Jean Dye -Johnson,
a New Tribes missionary who was there at the time gives an unforgettable
account of the scene in a book describing her experiences. The Ayoreos, she
tells its, were under attack from the Bolivian Air Force, with the
collaboration of the missionaries. At the sound of a plane they would all throw
themselves to the ground. Mothers prostrated themselves over their children,
keeping completely still, the brown of their bodies perfectly camouflaged in
the browns and greens of the jungle. Witnessing the terror to which the tribes
people were subjected, the determination, she assures us, was even stronger to
win these souls for Christ.
And here is the account given to me personally by an Avoreo of a similar encounter
with Bolivian troops some 20 years later in the Chaco, to the south of Santa
Cruz. " I must have been about nine," he said. "The soldiers
came and killed my mother and sister. They bayoneted them in the throat to stop
them screaming. My brother and I ran away and hid in a swamp. There was a
missionarv with the soldiers. He found us and took us away."
By 1987, after a struggle carried out against terrific odds and lasting 40 years,
the Avoreos had come to the end of their history. Father Zanardini, head of the
Salesian Mission at Maria Auxiliadora, in the Chaco, which has consistently
opposed forcible conversion, collected what evidence he could find of the
continued existence of Indian groups in the jungle. He had heard of a group
made up of the members of two families, of three adult males in isolation and
of a man and his wife. There were reported to be about 800 Ayoreos confined in
NTM camps, but of them no one could say anvthing for certain. The NTM
missionaries, little people from little towns in their own country, but here
invested with the power of mad Roman emperors, were a law unto themselves,
accountable to no one. They `surrounded thernselves with secrecy. No records
would ever be produced of the flights of their spotter plane and the raids that
had followed. They had spoken in their publications of many deaths, but there
was no one to count the graves and ask how? arnd when? The little men had put
an end to a remarkable race.
When an investigating commission was sent to Campo Loro by a Paraguayan human rights
group, its members were debarred by mission Indians - now become guards -? from
any access to their captives. Only surreptitious visits were possible. The few
accounts published in the Parayuavan Press were sometimes harrowing, always
sad. The Indians, they said, were housed in subhuman conditions, sleeping in
the rainy season in the mud. Able-bodied males were transported for labour as
peons on farms of the Mennonite sect - being rewarded with vouchers
exchangeable only for clothing and food. Pabla Romero, a Chamacoco Indian, took
the considerable risk of speaking out at the camp at Puerto Esperanza. Desperate
to find a way of momentary escape from the dreariness, she and her friend had
wanted to dress up as payasos (clowns) The application was met with a stern
refusal. "Senorita Wanda Jones told us that when we have clowns it starts off
an epidemic in which our children suffer. If we don't have clowns she promised
to help us and see that we have enough to eat."
Nevertheless, the sect had been losing ground. It had aroused general disgust following the
scandal unleashed in the Seventies when it had collaborated with its usual zeal
in the elimination of the Ache Indians of Eastern Paraguay. A description
published in Europe by a German anthropologist who witnessed these events led
to Paraguay being charged with complicity in enslavement and genocide by the
League for the Rights of Man. Following this a US senator took to the Senate
floor to add to these charges denunciations of torture, massacre, the
withholding from the Indians of food and medicine, and the compulsory
prostitution of their women. He also produced the copy of a receipt given by a
missionary for money paid for work done by Ache slaves from the mission camp.
The US Ambassador was recalled from Asuncion to admonish him, thus setting a
precedent for the State Department's protection of the sect, and confirming the
generally held view throughout Latin America of the NTM as the religious arm of
the CIA.
The camp at Cerro Moroti had already had some publicity by the time of my visit in
1974. Casual passers-by had witnessed scenes of Indians, screaming, bleeding
and vomiting over each other as they were brought in from the jungle. It was a
sinister place in the extreme, but only a description, provided by a missionary
- in this case the head missionary's wife - can give all idea of what this
forest Belsen could have been like at worst. Whether arising from injuries
received in the man-hunts, sickness or the refusal to take food, there were
many bodies to be disposed of: these being commonly thrown into a hole in the
ground and cremated. Mrs Stolz, the missionary, describes an incident when one
young woman, determined not to be separated from her dead grandmother, jumped
into the hole after her, saying she would go to the sun, where her grandmother
was going. It took four men, Mrs Stolz said, to pull her out. She asked,
"Will they believe there is a fire hotter than anything they could make to
cremate a body waiting for anyone who dies without Christ?"
There were signs even at this stage that Paraguay's military leadership might be
having second thoughts about what had become a damaging association. and be
getting ready to call it a day. General Marcial Samaniego, Minister of Defence,
in defending the action taken against the Aches, had adopted an uncustomary
apologetic tone, admitting that crimes against the Indians had taken place but
arguing that "as there had been no 'intent' to destroy the Aches, one
cannot speak of genocide".
The NTM were becoming a little overconfident in their dealings with the government.
Latterly as it turned out, they had not even bothered to keep General
Stroessner informed of their intentions and actions. When Luke Holland of
Survival International asked Mr Keefe, head of the Chaco mission at the time,
whether the authorities had been informed of the 1979 hunt, he received the
astonishing reply: "No, we just keep quiet and carry on in our own way. If
we tell what is happening, it always creates problems with interference from
outside."
What, then, had the general and his followers to gain from the continuing presence of
the sect in Paraguay? The latest massacre had been no more than a drop in the
ocean of Indian misery, but it had given the country a bad name. The fundamentalists
had been criticised by the Pope on the occasion of his visit. and now faced the
united opposition of the Catholic Church. In terms of mere expediency, their
presence no longer served any purpose, for in fulfilment of their contract they
had "settled and civilised" the Indians. and although they promised
to continue to "press contacts", it was hardly worth while launching
expeditions against the few surviving Ayoreos.
It is true that General Stroessner, supposed to have been the friend and protector
of many war criminals, was also the friend of Les V Pedersen, an early leader
in the NTM operation in Latin America. As Pedersen tells us in his autobiography,
Poisoned Arrows, "The President assured me of his appreciation of what we
are doing" - as well the President might. The two men, says Pedersen, were
very close. Under Stroessner's protection, the sect felt itself immune from
attacks from any quarter. But after a military coup earlier this year. the man
who for so many years treated Paraguay as if it were his private farm, has been
removed from the scene. Even if his support had already seemed to falter, this sudden
turn in events must fill the NTM with gloom.
In Venezuela there had been no question of the sect being permitted to conduct man-hunts
Paraguay-style, or to set up camps to which Indians could be taken to be held
against their will prior to conversion into "non-salaried labour".
Here the Indians of the area in which the missionaries chose to settle were
attracted by gifts; in the first instance, often iron tools of a useful kind,
but later those having little real value such as electric torches and toys of
various kinds, operated by batteries which required renewing and could only be
obtained through the mission store.
With this cargo-cult which provides Indian children with T-shirts, and Indian
families with an assortment of dehydrated soups and canned foods, an iron dependency
is finally established. When this happens, the rule is cash on the nail. Astutely,
the Indian has been enticed away from the self-sufficiency of the culture of
his race, based upon hunting, collecting and the cultivation of his vegetable
garden, and must now be prepared to settle himself where he is readily available
as a wage-earning labourer. Within a few years 50 per cent of the active males
of a tribe broken up in this premeditated fashion become alcoholics, and the
provincial towns of Venezuela are full of them.
In 1972, when the first NTM missionaries dropped from the sky into the Panare
Indians' settlement at Colorado, they found them living on comfortable terms
with their white neighbours, with whom they exchanged vegetables grown in their
gardens, small game and fresh fish for things like axes and hoes. Impressed by
a plane, which they had never seen before, a kitchen full of purring and
blinking gadgetry, and the radio transmitter with which they believed the
evangelists were in direct and daily contact with God, the Indians were
inclined to listen to what the missionaries had to say.
The first missionary task was to explain to them the meaning of sin and guilt such
concepts being inexpressible in most Indian languages as well as absent from
tribal thought. It took years to do this. Practically every Panare activity
carried out before the landing of the first missionary plane turned out to meet
with God's disapproval, spoken through a missionary mouth. "God wants us
to wear pants and to use soap," said the Patiare Indian after instruction
from the missionaries. "He says we should stop living together in malucas
and move into one-family houses with proper locks on the doors. When we are
sick there is no need for us to go to a healer. The Lord in his faithfullness gives
us aspirins. It's OK to pay with money, but we have to quit giving things
away."
In Paraguay, opposition to the sect had been stifled until the last moment by
press censorship. But in Venezuela, a democracy, the clamour raised by the
NTM's virtual takeover of the lives of its Indian minorities was vociferous. A
congressional investigation of the sect, set up be the Venezuelan government in
1974, went on for nearly seven years, during which a whole catalogue of bizarre
facts came to light. A naval officer spoke of scientific espionage, noting that the
missionaries inevitably installed themselves in areas known to contain strategic
minerals. He had found missionary baggage labelled "combustible materials" to
contain military uniforms and "other articles" - this being taken by
the Venezuelan Press to mean Geiger counters. At this point it became clear
that powerful influences were at work for the NTM behind the scenes. The
officer claimed that the US Embassy had intervened in support of the sect.
"I ordered the arrest", he said. "of two American engineers who
were carrying out [illegal] scientific investigations. Later it was proved that
James Bou [head of the NTM in Venezuela] had organised their journey. Mr Bou
telephoned the US Embassy, and the Counsellor of the Embassy then called me,
asking me to release the two men." He hastily did so, but lost his job all
the same.
Indians were also called by the Venezuelan commission to describe the experience of
compulsory conversion, involving such alarming devices as loudspeakers hidden
in trees which shouted threatening messages at them in their own language. One
witness said his tribe had been told that the appearance of a comet heralded
the end of the world. The head missionary had rounded them up to give them
three days, on pain of a fiery extinction, to break with their wicked past. He required
the abandonment of such sinful pleasures as the imbibing of juices in which any
trace of fermentation could be detected, the painting of skin, using feather
ornaments, of singing, dancing, smoking or playing musical instruments, of doctoring
themselves with herbal remedies, of attending funeral ceremonies, and of
following the tribal custom of arranging marriages within the framework of
kinship groups. The weapon of Armageddon and the imminent fiery destruction of
the world, from which only the missionaries and their converts would be saved,
was constantly brandished. The Indians were warned of a communist plot to drive
the missionaries out of the country, and were told that if this were to happen
US Air Force planes would be sent to bomb their villages.
A Venezuelan anthropologist, scrutinising mission literature, noted that the
scriptures had been manipulated to such a degree that in a book entitled
Learning About God the Panare tribe had been accused of Christ's crucifixion.
"The Panare killed Jesus Christ," it began, "because they were
wicked." After a description of Christ's nailing on the cross. and his
death, the passage ends with the promise of Gods vengeance. "I'm going to
hurl the Panare into the fire." said God.
The Venezuelan congressional investigation into the activities of the NTM fizzled
out in 1951 ? as everyone knew it would leaving the Venezuelans with the
unpleasant sensation that the sect might have to be regarded as a state within
a state. The missionaries heralded a victory, over communism and, in the years
that followed, extended and intensified the operations, tightened their grip on
Indian groups under their control and moved into new tribes. Multinational companies,
particularly those involved in mining, were setting up in areas where the
missionaries had established themselves, sometimes referred to in company
prospectuses as "pacified zones". However, in 1957 a coalition
between leading churchmen, anthropologists, newspaper editors and the heads of
several government departments was formed to carry on the resistance.
It was based upon the familiar complaints of psychological terror, mental and
physical cruelty and the instigation of panic among Indian societies, and was
treated by the NTM as no more than another communist manoeuvre, and as such destined
to certain failure. At this point, to the consternation of the sect, the Army
moved in with charges of its own. They included damage to national sovereignty
by the establishment of colonial enclaves, the occupation of strategic territories,
unauthorised construction of numerous landing strips, the unconstitutional use
of short-wave radio to transmit messages in a foreign language, and the use of
military uniforms for the purpose of intimidation. It called for the closure of
the mission school at Tama Tama, and this was done last year.
Further and more significant news was that missionary visas would not be renewed. As
one newspaper put it, "The Army's action has accelerated the campaign
against the New Tribes Mission, and will serve in part to neutralise the
pressure of the powerful interests that have supported it."
Apart from the minor problems of organising a supply of missionised Ayoreos to
perform what elsewhere might be described as slave labour, the NTM's long and
arduous involvement with the tribe has been coming to an end in the last two
years. This was bound to leave "contact personnel" with time on their
hands, and the new generation of young evangelists, straight out of'
"MK"? (missionary kids) schools with diminished opportunities for the
expenditure of energy and zeal. Two prime targets for mass conversion had been
under sporadic assault for a number of years and now once again occupied a
prominent place in missionary reports. These were the Macu of Colombia and the
Yuqui of Bolivia.
It was to the Macu's advantage after their discovery deep in the jungles in 1971
by missionary spotter plane that their tribal homeland should have been
regarded as left?wing guerrilla territory. This deterred attempted contact for
a while, and when an advance party moved in and cut an airstrip, this was put
out of action by the guerrillas, who placed oil drums on it to prevent planes
from landing. But the Macu were handicapped in their encounters with persistent
evangelists by the fact that although this area abounded with rivers, they
could neither swim nor handle a boat. When, therefore the Macu made it clear
that the missionaries' presence was unwelcome by using their blowguns to shoot
darts an them, the newcomers took refuge on an island in a lake, and there
established their base.
Years passed. The missionaries sat on their island and the Macu watched then
mistrustfully from the further bank. Once when the missionaries crossed over in
their boat they came under attack and one of them was struck in the neck by
what was called a poisoned dart, although without ill effect. In 1978 another
evangelist was slightly wounded.
By 1981 some ground had been gained. Until this time the missionaries had been
unable to learn the language. "Months went by and we could hear the
Indians shouting, but never saw them." Now it was decided to shower them
with gifts and, paddling softly across the lake, the missionaries left machetes
along the trails. This seems to have done the trick. The Macu invited them to
their village, providing an opportunity to conceal a microphone ill the roof of
one of the huts by which the language was recorded. A return occasion was even
more successful. The evangelists cooked popcorn in a pan for their visitors,
and a drawing of this episode shows the Macu warriors encircling the pan,
spears raised to defend themselves, if necessary in the face of this new
evidence of the white man's magic powers.
This was the instant when their fate hung in the balance. It was the equivalent of
the moment in the bullring when the torero stands before the bull, weakened but
still ready to do battle, and slowly draws the sword front the muleta in which
it has been concealed. The Indians should have thrown their spears and turned
and run. Instead they stayed and they and the missionaries shared the popcorn,
and the bond of a disastrous friendship was thus sealed. Those who come first to
such meetings are almost certainly the first to accept conversion: next they
are skilfully detached from their backward and conservative friends who wish to
continue in their old ways. It is the eventual fate of these to suffer
isolation, then expulsion from the community, then extinction. The tactic is
one that has not changed since the London Missionary Society used it in the
nineteenth century to conquer the Pacific in a single decade.
In1986 the guerrillas withdrew and the missionaries were at last able to use
their airstrip and bring in reinforcements. They were aided by some of the Macu
who were the missionaries' old friends from the popcorn days, now become allies
in the fight against their unsaved fellow tribespeople. "The most savage,
naked people in the world are hugging, embracing and dancing for joy,"
reported Brown Gold. "Their friends are back."
A year later, the NTM was well dug in, with total victory in sight. "Forty
other [unconverted] Macu arrived who were from far away...This situation was
touchy for a while, and still is. The rest of our group is to arrive soon. and
there's going to be a big confrontation between the two groups, involving about
one hundred Macu." Remembering the Ayoreos, we should all know what comes
next.
The fate of the last of the Yuqui has been, if possible, more unkind. In 1964 art
NTM "contact team" took a party by surprise in the corner of a jungle
in Central Bolivia, carrying off 25 of them to their camp. Thereafter
"contact" work lapsed. Further advances into Yuqui territory met with
stiff resistance, as exemplified by the adventures of Bruce Porterfield, a
missionary with combat experience in the Second World War who wrote a
missionary classic. Commandos for Christ, saturated with the spirit of military
adventure. To prepare him for such jungle encounters, Porterfield was sent to a
mission "boot camp", where the training by army NCOs simulated as
closely as possible the stresses evangelists might encounter among hostile
Indians "and hence toughen them up as `commandos' for the Christian
battlefield". In the boot camp they taught him to make a strong house
"with two rows of flattened gasoline drums ...nailed against the outside, making
a crude wall of armour plate about seven feet high".
This is what Porterfield built in Yuqui country, and into it he and the other
members of the team withdrew with their Bibles, their shotgun and a .22 pistol
to withstand a long and unproductive siege.
The Indians, hidden in the jungle, whisded at them, and they whistled back, and
this was the only form of communication. In the short interludes of peace they
stole out to lay gifts, as instructed, along the Indian trails. The stratagem
in this environment was ill-advised. White farmer of the poorest and most
degenerate type scratched a living in the vicinity. Their habit was to shoot
Yuquis on sight and carry off their children to be sold as slaves. These
farmers added their own contributions of sugar mixed with arsenic to the
missionaries' gifts. One of the evangelists, straying too far from the strong house,
was shot to death with arrows.
There was nothing here to be done except cower behind armour-plated walls and wait.
In between evangelising it was normal for missionaries elsewhere to augment
mission funds by engaging in trade in such things as jaguar skins and Indian artefacts
but here inactivity was absolute. Quietly the curtain came down, and the
contact that never was came to an end.
Then in the early Eighties valuable timber was discovered in Yuqui territory, and
the logging companies moved in. Most of them were there illegally. They
employed clandestine espontaneos to fell the trees, providing the finances and
the equipment for their operations, and even building the roads. When ? as they
were bound to do the loggers ran into trouble with the Yuqui whose livelihood
they were destroying, they turned to the NTM for help. By 1984 the missionaries
were back in full force, cutting an airstrip in the heart of Indian country.
The new missionary team took with them several of the now tame Yuqui from the
original contact in 1964, from whom they had picked up a few words of the
language. Even so, the expedition was a failure. "We called out friendly
phrases and prayed as those we sought fled into the jungle." Although 28
Yuqui had been seen, it was not possible to "bring them in". A further
three years passed before partial success could be announced with the arrival
of 22 Indians at the NTM camp at Chimore. "In the quest to bring these
wild Yuqui under the sound of the Gospel, three missionaries and three of their
Indian helpers have been wounded, shot with eight?foot arrows by those they
thought to befriend," said Brown Gold. The fate of the Yuqui bowmen can
only be guessed.
Nevertheless, the numbers of the free Yuqui dwindled constantly, and by the summer of 1988,
the end was very close. Now only one major group, the Arroyote Yuquis remained
at liberty. In response to an appeal by a logging company, reported the
missionary journal. "Larry got his team together and headed for the
woods." Once again the outcome was unsatisfactory. The Yuqui's
"treacherous behaviour, was in full display", arrows flew in all
directions, two of the team were wounded and the retreat was sounded.
Twice again the loggers called in the missionaries, by which time it was clear that
the Yuquis were close to the end of their tether. However, the shadow of the
future falls across Larry Depue as he writes. "Since that time [the last
encounter] Satan has done all he can to see the New Tribes Mission expelled
from the country. Accusations were rampant and rumours spread like
wildfire."
In February 1988 the Bolivian newspaper Presencia reported that an "evangelical
sect" had used a clandestine plane to remove 200 Yuquis to its camp. Half
this group, it said, had disappeared. It published the statement of the
Pro-Vida Committee organised by the Bishop of Santa Cruz in which the bishop
expressed alarm at the operations of the North American organisation in the
zone. The statement deplored the unexplained deaths of nine Yuqui Indians and
continued: "The New Tribes Mission has given assurances to the Attorney
Genetitl of the State of Santa Cruz to cease the transfer of Yuquis to its camp
at Chimore."
Thus it might well have done. The most recent estimate put the number of those
Indians remaining at large at 75, divided into three small bands, about half of
them being women and children. Presencia reported that Yuqui bows and arrows,
from which their owners traditionally refused to be parted alive, were on sale
is the market of Santa Cruz, being, on account of the rarity and the beauty of
the feathering, in great demand by connoisseurs of such things.
On 8 December 1988, the Pope stressed in his message for the World Day of Peace
the right of all religious minorities to be able to worship according to their
own rites. This freedom has been violently opposed by the NTM, with
irreversible damage to the tribal peoples with which it has come into contact.
Now that the tide has turned against it in Latin America, with expulsions to be
expected, it is surely unacceptable that the sect's principal training ground
outside the US should continue to exist on British soil.
THE INDEPENDENT MAGAZINE 1 APRIL 1989 by Norman Lewis
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