Document(s) 6 of 23

Bruno Barras is a leader of the Yshiro–Ebitoso people of the Paraguayan Chaco. He has participated in numerous organizations searching to improve the living conditions and political situation of his people in particular, and of Paraguay’s Indigenous peoples in general.

I want to introduce you to our idea and vision of development, and to show why I propose a ‘life project’ instead of development projects to solve the problems of our people. I must begin, and I do not intend to offend anybody, with the arrival of the so-called ‘discoverers’ and what this event meant to us. Upon their arrival, they justified their deeds by saying that they came to civilize us. I wonder, what did they mean by ‘civilization’? In our understanding and experience, civilization means the dispossession of our lands, the demise of our culture and the attempt to make White people out of us. We had our stories, our knowledge, our ways of organizing, our ways of praying and our ways of mapping our territories. But none of that was of importance to the Whites. They made their written words and their maps the only valid ones. Thus we lost our territories, and the younger generations were turned away from the ways of our ancestors. The colonizers completely disregarded our realities and asserted their own views of us. For example, they believed that they had arrived in India and called us Indians, when actually they had arrived in what is today called Latin America. In Paraguay, to this day, when ordinary citizens speak of Indigenous peoples they refer only to the Guaranis. Yet there are sixteen different ethnic groups, with their own languages and cultures. What about them? As you can see, from the beginning our relations with the Whites have been based on mistaken ideas and lack of knowledge of Indigenous peoples’ realities.

Here our topic is ‘development’. I wonder, what does ‘development’ mean? For us, it is the same as what we have seen in the Americas for the last 511 years. We do not see any significant change in the forms in which the offspring of the colonizers relate to us. After 511 years of ‘civilization’, in Paraguay there is not one university-educated Indigenous individual. After 511 years of ‘civilization’, we are still not allowed to speak for ourselves. In the Paraguayan parliament there is a commission on human rights that speaks in our name. Here, as in most institutions that are supposed to be in charge of our affairs, we do not have a voice or a vote in the decisions that are taken. I wonder, is it that we are mute? Who better than Indigenous peoples to defend our rights? What would be properly respectful is that we, Indigenous peoples, become the protagonists of our own future instead of having someone else speak on our behalf. Any other way of doing things diminishes us.

In Paraguay there is the Instituto Nacional del Indígena (INDI), which is the governmental institution in charge of furthering the development of Indigenous communities. We believe that it is time for us to control this institution. It is necessary that institutions in charge of Indigenous affairs be managed by Indigenous peoples. Many non-Indigenous people are in agreement with this idea, and many others are in strong disagreement. We wonder, why are there some who refuse to grant us control of this governmental institution? The answer is that with Indigenous participation it would be harder for corrupt functionaries to do their business. For example, a few years ago the government appointed, as INDI’s head, a person about whose honesty Indigenous leaders had expressed serious concerns. We, Indigenous leaders, said that we did not want any more thieves in INDI. We took risks putting signs in front of INDI’s building. We said that we were mourning. We were not mistaken in our distrust. The head of INDI, who was given the position by the president of the Republic for past political favours and who had no knowledge whatsoever of our realities and cultures, filled his pockets and now is on the run from justice. This kind of corruption still intervenes every time that we want to design and advance our own agendas for the future of our peoples. This is not acceptable.

There are others–private businessmen–who come to our communities offering diverse ‘development projects’. It never fails that these projects will be based on the use of our natural resources. For example, a factory to process palm-sprouts was opened in the area where I come from. Nobody asked us anything, and that is how the destruction of the palm forest began. Palms are very important to us. We use them as food, as medicine for hepatitis and parasites, and as material for our houses. But here a businessman shows up wanting to cut down every single palm in our forest just for the palm hearts. We, the leaders, got together and calculated that the 600 guaranis (US$0.25) that would be paid for each sprout did not begin to cover the total value of the palm trees in terms of food, medicine, construction materials and handicrafts. Without palm trees we have no reserve of food, no medicine, no houses. We decided not to give away a single tree. This factory failed, thanks to the decision of the Indigenous leaders, who were able to foresee the consequences of the communities giving away their trees.

But it is not always like this. Unfortunately, there are situations in which community members do not want to listen to the advice of their leaders. Instead they listen to the NGOs. This situation leads many communities to commit enormous errors in following the advice of outsiders who do not understand our realities. The problem is that most NGOs treat us as if we are babies still drinking from feeding bottles. They speak for us and design projects for us. Most times they are the main beneficiaries of the projects ‘for the communities’. In Paraguay there are hundreds of NGOs who, by obtaining the compliance of some Indigenous individuals, believe that they possess the right to decide on behalf of entire Indigenous communities. In other cases, not even acceptance by a few is required for advancing what outsiders view as solutions to our problems.

I have seen this with my own eyes. Once, an NGO came to our community. The NGO had designed a project without ever asking us what we wanted. When funding for the project was granted by an international donor, the NGO sent a musicologist to oversee the project. What we needed badly at that time was an agronomist, for the Yshiro-Ebitoso had been hunters, gatherers and fishers. We do not know how to plant very well, what seasons correspond to each crop, and so forth. We asked that this NGO send us an agronomist, but there is always this attitude of not listening to our voice. They sent us a musicologist, as if in our poverty what we need is just to go on singing. ‘An agronomist, not a musicologist, is what we need’, we said to them. ‘Yes, yes. Sure, sure’, they said but later on sent us a veterinarian. He was probably a friend of the NGO’s director. We do not have animals! This is shameful. The projects never work out well because those who organize and direct them will not listen to us.

Something similar happens with the ecologists, which is very interesting, too. Nature is always being taken care of by Indigenous peoples. The environment is handled by our expert shamans. These are professionals, like astronomers, who observe the cosmos and its movements. They know what is going to happen in nature–the coming of the seasons, the behaviour of the rain, the coming and going of droughts, whether the animals will appear or whether they will hide. The shamans’ school is the forest. In the past, our children were taught in the forest. They were taught not to damage the trees or burn the forest. Our ancestors knew that otherwise nature would curse them. Nowadays, the ecologists show up with their new preoccupation for the environment and wanting to create national parks and biological reserves without allowing a place for Indigenous peoples to live. They want to prohibit us from using the forest as we have always done. Is not this also a dispossession of our lands? They change the name, but for us it is just another word for the attempt to use our lands. The best they offer us is to be guardians in their parks. What is this? It is shameful.

Governments make their agreements for financing projects to do this or that with our lands, and nobody asks us what we think. It has always been this way. When in the early 1980s, during Stroessner’s dictatorship, Indigenous peoples mobilized to create a national organization, we were deemed communists. We did not even know what a communist was. They just said that to silence our voice. They did not care what we had to say. But we fought until we obtained recognition of our existence and our rights to the land. I fought nine years to obtain property titles for my community. Bureaucrats and ranchers showed me papers and more papers to demonstrate that our lands were privately owned. I did not care because in that land our grandparents are buried. They showed me papers. I showed them bones. When I received the titles to our lands, the bureaucrats and ranchers who had laughed at me asked, ‘How did you obtain the land?’ ‘With the bones of my ancestors’, I replied.

The younger generations of our people are becoming more aware of our dispossession. When they want to move around our territory and cannot, they see that we must confront these problems. We are intent on recovering our ancestors’ values. But for this to work, we have to make the Whites understand our values. Without understanding there is no communication. Without communication there is no mutual respect. We are simply asking for this: let us respect each other. We are really tired of things being done to us without ever being asked our opinion. This is at the root of our problems. We do not want anybody to speak for us.

We ask international donors to find mechanisms for direct consultation. We ask them to create mechanisms for making sure that funding requested by an NGO, on behalf of Indigenous communities, really reaches those communities. Those mechanisms must include the participation of Indigenous peoples in the administration of the funding. We are not children who need tutors to perform their duties. There are many among us who are perfectly able to take positions of responsibility in the management of programmes to further our peoples’ quality of life.

I know that there are many potential donors who are sympathetic to our plight. We merely want them to avoid the perils and mistakes of funding projects that lead nowhere and only mean a waste of resources that never reach the communities. Be aware that in our country there are hundreds of projects that are made by someone sitting at a desk without having a hint of what is going on in the communities. Nevertheless, many of these projects obtain funding to pay big salaries to their personnel. The only thing these GOs do is pay a quick visit to the communities, distribute some food and medicine, and, as soon as they can, take their plane back to the city. Then they prepare a report for the donors saying that the project is working fine. But the project goes wrong, very wrong. And when the fact that it has gone wrong cannot be denied any longer, Indigenous peoples are blamed. ‘They do not want to work’, the ‘professionals’ say. The professionals have nothing to worry about. After all, they are left with the savings from their salaries and their four-wheel-drive vehicles while we are left as poor as ever and with our two legs.

For these reasons we are proposing what I call a life project. I call it that because our plans and projects are oriented to achieving autonomy in deciding our own future. We do not want somebody else taking us by the hand to lead us wherever they want to go. We want to advance our own projects so that what is done in the communities has continuity and so that the knowledge and skills brought by the technicians we hire will be transmitted to our youth. We are searching for ways to unite all our communities under one organization. We are trying to recover the way of our ancestors in organizing our communities. Who better than ourselves to do this and to fight for and defend our territories?

For us to carry on this life project we need the respectful support of donors and financing institutions from the North. We need them to consult Indigenous leaders and listen to them. The leaders know their peoples and, due to their participation in meetings and conferences, know what is going on at the national and international levels. I cannot find a stronger way of expressing the urgent need for direct contact between donors and Indigenous leaders to avoid the waste of resources and to remove the mistrust of Indigenous peoples’ capacity to manage their own lives. If you want to know what we need and what we want, if you have meetings to discuss our situation, please, I ask you to contact our communities. Invite us directly, not the NGOs who say they represent us. Otherwise you will be playing their game, you will be empowering them and silencing us. Then they will always believe that they are our parents. Please do not do this any longer.

Document(s) 6 of 23