To Run Across the Sea (29 page)

He had seen them at work in a previous clash—the first in which the NTM had been involved—in the Bolivian half of the Gran Chaco. Jean Dye Johnson, a New Tribes missionary who was there, gives an unforgettable account of the scene in a book describing her experiences. The Ayoreos, she tells us, were under attack from the air. At the sound of a plane they would all throw themselves to the ground. Mothers prostrated themselves over their children, keeping perfectly still, the brown of their bodies perfectly camouflaged with the browns and greens of the jungle. Witnessing the terror to which they were subjected, her determination, she assures us, was even stronger to win these souls for Christ.

And here is the account given to me personally by an Ayoreo of a similar encounter with Bolivian troops some twenty 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 missionary 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 Ayoreos had come to the end of their history. Father Zanardini, head of the Salesian Mission at Maria Auxliadora 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 of seven, 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 anything for certain. The NT 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. They surrounded their actions with secrecy, accountable to no one. 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? and when? The little men had put an end to a remarkable race. The Ayoreos esteemed not only valour and intelligence, but—perhaps above all—a sense of responsibility. Von Bremen says that when a member of a band was bitten by a snake, the chief had to allow himself to be bitten. If a man was burned, or otherwise injured, the chief submitted to the infliction of similar injuries on his own body.

When an investigating commission was sent to Campo Loro, its members were debarred by mission Indians—now guards—from any access to their captives. Only surreptitious visits were possible. The few accounts published in the Paraguayan press were sometimes harrowing, always sad. The Indians, they said, were housed in subhuman conditions, sleeping in the mud in the rainy season. 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 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 its usual zealous collaboration in the elimination of the Aché Indians of Eastern Paraguay was exposed. 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 Aché slaves from the mission camp. The US Ambassador was recalled from Asunción to admonish him, thus setting a precedent for the State Department’s protection of the sect, and confirming the view generally held 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 1975 due to the evidence of casual passers-by in its vicinity who had seen 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 an idea of what this forest Belsen could have been like at its worst. Whether arising from injuries received in the manhunts, from 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 one young woman, determined not to be separated from her dead grandmother, jumping 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 added, ‘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 could be having second thoughts about what had become a damaging association, and be getting ready to call it a day. General Marciál Samaniego, Minister of Defence, defending the action taken against the Achés, had adopted an uncustomarily apologetic tone, admitting that crimes against the Indians had taken place, but arguing that ‘as there had been no “intent” to destroy the Achés one cannot speak of genocide’.

The NTM were becoming a little over-confident 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 Keege, at that time head of the mission at Campo Loro, whether the authorities had sanctioned the 1979 hunt, he received the astonishing reply: ‘We refrained from informing the authorities to avoid outside interference with our plans.’

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 worthwhile launching expeditions against Father Sanardini’s two families and three single men.

It was still said in Paraguay that, with the exception of the NTM’s unannounced manhunts, nothing was ever done without the President’s knowledge and sanction, and that nothing escaped his eye. The publication of
Mision: Etnocidio
, the most powerful and documented attack ever made on the sect, was a sign of the times, and a sign that the General’s patience was wearing thin.

In Venezuela in the same year, the NTM suffered the worst setbacks in its history. The missionaries had been expelled from several countries, but until then had encountered no great difficulty in mustering support back home to arrange for a return. There had been no question of the sect being permitted to conduct manhunts, Paraguay-style, or to set up camps to which Indians could be taken and held against their will prior to conversion to ‘non-salaried labour’. Here, the Indians of the area in which they chose to settle were attracted by gifts; in the first instance, these were often iron tools of a useful kind, but later they gave objects of 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. The Indian has been enticed away astutely from the self-sufficiency that is his racial custom, 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 NT missionaries dropped from the sky into the Panare Indians’ settlement at Colorado in Venezuela, 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), by a kitchen full of purring and blinking gadgetry, and by 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 they 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. He says we should stop living together in
malocas
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 faithfulness 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. 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 went on for nearly two years, during which time 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. The captain had found missionary baggage, labelled ‘combustible materials’, to contain military uniforms and ‘other articles’—this being taken by the press to mean geiger counters. At this point it became clear that, as in the case of Senator Abouresk in Washington, powerful influences were at work for the NTM behind the scenes. The captain claimed that the US Embassy had intervened in their support. ‘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 New Tribes Mission 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 called to describe the experience of compulsory conversion, involving such alarming devices as microphones 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 to break with their wicked past, on pain of a fiery extinction. To be effective, reform required the abandonment of such sinful pleasures as imbibing juices in which any trace of fermentation can be detected, skin painting, using feather ornaments, singing, dancing, smoking or playing musical instruments, doctoring with herbal remedies, attending funeral ceremonies, and 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 airforce 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 one 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 to the cross and his death, the passage ends with the promise of God’s 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—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 their operations, tightened their grip on Indian groups under their control and moved into new tribes. Venezuelans noted that 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 1987 a coalition of leading churchmen, anthropologists, newspaper editors and the heads of several government departments was formed to carry on the resistance.

This 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. These included accusations of 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.