To Run Across the Sea

by Norman Lewis

  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.

  Further and more significant news was that missionary visas would not be renewed. As a 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 tribes in Paraguay was coming to an end. 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 a missionary spotter plane, that their tribal homeland should have been regarded as 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. 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 at 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 them mistrustfully from the other 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. Some reference to a missionary shotgun was allowed to slip out at this point; the Macu fled and stayed away for three months. In 1978 another evangelist was slightly wounded. Significantly, Brown Gold records that this ‘was the first time we had known the Macus to attack with no obvious provocation’.

  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, machetes were left along the trails. This seems to have done the trick. The Macu invited them to their village, providing an opportunity to conceal a microphone in 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; 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 bull-ring when the torero stands before the weakened but still belligerent bull and slowly draws the sword from the muleta in which it has been concealed. The Indians should have thrown their spears 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 become almost certainly the first to accept conversion, and next they are skilfully detached from their backward and conservative friends wishing to continue in their old ways. It is the eventual fate of these to suffer isolation, then expulsion from the community, then extinction. This tactic has not changed since the London Missionary Society used it to conquer the Pacific in a single decade.

  In 1986 the guerrillas withdrew and the missionaries were at last able to use their airstrip and bring in reinforcements. ‘Two previous flights had found the airstrip covered with 55-gallon barrels…. With a Vietnam-style landing the helicopter arrives.’ The Macu gardens are located nine hour’s walk away, and here the Macu are 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. Their friends are back … ’

  A year later, the NTM is 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 an 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 World War II, 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, whistled 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 farmers of the poorest and most degenerate type, whose habit it was to shoot Yuquis on sight and carry off their children to be sold as slaves, scratched a living in the vicinity. These 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 to be done here except cower behind armour-plated walls and wait. In between evangelising bursts it was normal for missionaries elsewhere to augment mission funds by engaging in the trade of 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 stands of timber were discovered in Yuqui territory and the logging companies moved in. Most of these were there illegally. They employed clandestine espontáneos 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 twenty-eight 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 twenty-two Indians at the NTM camp at Chimoré. ‘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 who engaged them can only be guessed.

  Nevertheless, the number of free Yuquis dwindled constantly, and by the summer of 1988, the end was very close. Now only one major group, the Arroyote Yuqui, remained at liberty. In response to an appeal by a logging company, ‘Larry got his team together and headed for the woods.’ Once again the outcome was unsatisfactory. The Yuquis’ ‘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 treacherous 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-General of the State of Santa Cruz to cease the transfer of Yuquis to its camp at Chamoré.’

  This it might well have done. The most recent estimate put the number of those remaining at large as 75, divided into three small bands, about half of them being women and children. Presencia informed that Yuqui bows and arrows, from which the owners traditionally refuse to be parted in their lifetime, were on sale in the market of Santa Cruz, being, on account of their rarity and the beauty of the feathering, in great demand by connoisseurs of such things.