Our response

I

Iniciativa Amotocodie was brought to life due to the accelerated expansion of the borders of our Western civilization in the Northern Paraguayan Chaco and the concrete threat this implies, both for the Ayoreo living without contact and the extensive forests with which they coexist. The processes affecting these isolated groups that continue to avoid all contact with surrounding modern society are also part of the historical processes affecting the Ayoreo ethnic group as a whole, as well as all other ethnic groups in the Gran Chaco.

Forced contact has been established with almost all the Ayoreo natives in Paraguay who, over the last 45 years, were induced to abandon their extensive ancestral territories and were deported by missionaries to settlements outside the traditional territories. Meanwhile, today more than 2000 Ayoreo natives live sedentarily in 13 often overcrowded settlements, where the Ayoreo way of living and cultural choices are strongly influenced and hindered by the alien life model of surrounding society, which gives them only a marginal, insufficient space for reshaping their own future.

II

The work of Iniciativa Amotocodie consists of accompanying the isolated Ayoreo forest groups from the “outside” and from a distance, and protecting their rights to life and self-determination. It also includes the protection of the integrity of their environmental, cultural and spiritual habitat.

In the broader context, the accompaniment of Iniciativa Amotocodie encompasses the entire Ayoreo ethnic group of Paraguay and UNAP, their representative organization (Union of Ayoreo Natives of Paraguay). Based on a growing critical awareness of their history of injustice, manipulation and dispossession, and the negative impact of the development model of surrounding society, the Ayoreo are aiming at a future in which the retrieval of their lost territories, as well as of the paradigm of the ancestral life model, is gaining more and more sense.

III

Aware of the great relevance and topicality of the life model of the Ayoreo living in the forest without contact, Iniciativa Amotocodie also proposes a process of intercultural learning, including the need to redefine the relationship with the “different others” and to make true the potential of their contribution to future humanity, as contained in the Ayoreo way of living which is still lived to the fullest by the forest groups. The main objective is not the eventual integration of the forest groups into our modern world, but the mutual integration of both worlds: the world of the life in the forest and the modern world, so as to ensure the material survival of the groups without contact as well as the survival and vitality of the meaning and contribution their life model can make to modern and future humanity.

IV

The horizon of action of Iniciativa Amotocodie incorporates into our world and times the presence and precedent of indigenous groups which, for the time being, avoid the process of globalization, and maintain a virtually perfect degree of self-determination, self-sustainability, and self-managed food security and safety. The struggles of other indigenous ethnic groups also seeking to have their demands fulfilled might receive important incentives from the isolated groups in the forest.

Furthermore, for the rest of the Ayoreo in general and other ethnic groups, the forest natives bear witness to a paradigm of a rapport with nature that all the indigenous groups have known in the past yet were forced to abandon. This paradigm leads to a crucial reflection on the history of these ethnic groups and is a source of inspiration when seeking presently for alternatives for their survival and the future.