Ayoreo Territory
This hunter-gatherer people inhabited, until the mid-20th century, a vast territory of over 30 million hectares between what we now know as Paraguay and Bolivia. They occupied practically the entire Boreal Chaco, delimited by the Paraguay, Pilcomayo, Parapetí, and Río Grande rivers. In this way, from north to south, their territory extended from the highlands of Chiquitanía (Bolivia) to the area occupied today by the Mennonite colonies in the Central Paraguayan Chaco.
Eami
Eami is what they call their world: more than just a territory, it is a living being that sustains their worldview and provides them with everything they need to live. The flora, fauna, and everything that surrounds them form an indivisible unity of which this people is a part.
However, they have been forced to abandon their way of life, which today is completely different from their traditional customs. Most of the Ayoreo were violently removed from their territory in the mid-20th century and forced to settle in small settlements, where they now subsist in a situation of extreme vulnerability, unsanitary conditions, and without access to drinking water or food.
Those who still live in isolation continue to use the same migratory routes they have used for generations. However, these routes are increasingly disturbed and fragmented by the occupants of their territory, which restricts the nomadic movement of those in isolation.
The colonization of this vast territory since the mid-20th century has had serious social and environmental consequences. The Chaco environment has undergone significant transformations that have drastically deteriorated the quality of life of the Ayoreo people, both sedentary and those in isolation.
The institutions in charge of distributing and controlling the use of land and resources are failing in their responsibility: they sell land and approve projects to transform forests and grasslands as if these areas were uninhabited. Worse still, they behave as if the inhabitants of these areas were intruders or lacked legitimate rights, despite their historical presence and the recognition afforded by national and international regulations. This lack of protection and recognition puts indigenous communities at grave risk, as they face the danger of being expelled from their homes and deprived of their means of subsistence and life.
In recent years, the construction and paving of the bioceanic corridor through Ayoreo territory has had worrying consequences. The invasion of properties, the opening of roads, logging and clearing, and the extraction of stone materials have caused environmental destruction and the destruction of indigenous territory.
Ayoreo lands have become an object of greed for many who seek to usurp them, taking advantage of the lack of compliance with the law and the complicity of authorities who endorse these illegal and criminal actions. This greed has led to the destruction of forests, of Eami, and of the historical memory of the Ayoreo communities, now besieged and threatened in their survival.
Since the Ayoreo are the last indigenous people in Paraguayan history to suffer forced contact, elders still survive with memories of life in isolation. The reconstruction of memory and identity keeps alive the awareness of the traditional territory, the formation of local groups within that territory, as well as the recognition of places when visiting sites where they moved just a few decades ago, when they still lived in isolation.
According to available data, the Ayoreo have been stripped of their home, Eami, and forced to settle on reduced lands, thus usurping more than 98% of their original territory. While they once occupied more than 11,000,000 hectares, today their territory has been reduced to less than 190,000 hectares of titled lands or lands in the process of titling.
Traditional territory of the Ayoreo people since the pre-colonial period, still used by groups in isolation
Current lands of the sedentary Ayoreo people of the Paraguayan Chaco
Source: Maps produced based on the collective memory of the last three Ayoreo generations (1960 onward)
