Appeal: Roar of the bulldozer could sound the death knell for tribe of forest-dwellers

The burring noise came closer and closer, then a roaring, then the aching sound of falling trees. It was the dry season, and the forest garden was in full bloom: melon, beans, pumpkin and corn. Surely the big, yellow bulldozer had come to eat the fruit, and then eat the family who had planted it.

The burring noise came closer and closer, then a roaring, then the aching sound of falling trees. It was the dry season, and the forest garden was in full bloom: melon, beans, pumpkin and corn. Surely the big, yellow bulldozer had come to eat the fruit, and then eat the family who had planted it.

Ibore dropped the carob fruit she had just picked and ran. Her husband Parojnai, dropped his tools, bow and rope in the scramble. Seeking shelter in the dark foliage, the family were scattered. One relative was not seen again.

The bulldozer is a defining moment in Parojnai's fugitive, fragmented life. Although there are thought to be up to 5,000 members of his tribe, the Ayoreo, living in Paraguay and Bolivia, his family had been isolated from their people for years. Intensive missionary activity and the invasion of farmers on their traditional lands had forced hundreds of them to abandon their huts and live rough in the forest.

Eventually Parojnai and Ibore, who belong to one of the most isolated Ayoreo sub-groups, the Totobiegosode, became tired of their lonely existence and anxious to find partners for their children. But they knew little of the cojñone, or "weird people", the Ayoreo word for whites, who awaited them beyond the forest. The first contact was in 1998. As another bulldozer's jaws closed in on the family, Parojnai summoned his elder sons to decide who would accompany him on his mission.

On the edge of the forest they came across a white man. The forest-dwellers approached, gesturing with their hands, their strange sounds of reassurance lost on the frightened Spanish speaker. "I kept saying don't be scared, cojñoi, although he was scared of us," Parojnai says. "It was in his face, he was always moving his head looking around in fear."

But then began a ritual of trust: water was offered to the Indians, who offered their bees' honey. "He brought white, strange biscuits. And other things which we now know were empanadas (pastries)." As conversation between the two was fruitless, Parojnai offered a necklace made of purugode (black seeds). A red-striped football shirt was given which Ibore still wears.

After this first fearful, yet friendly contact, the family returned to the forest. Months later, they found themselves at the boundary of a cattle ranch, and decided to approach the whites again. This time their words were not incomprehensible. They had stumbled upon a fellow Ayoreon, who was working with the cojñoi as a farmhand.

Their new friend took the family to a tribe of several hundred Ayoreo in a camp run by the American fundamentalist group New Tribes Mission. But the family could not flourish away from the woods and their traditional sources of food, and, like many fellow tribespeople, became desperately ill. Survival International one of the three charities in this year's Independent Forgotten Peoples Appeal, likened conditions in the camp to "semi-slavery".

But due to the work of one of Survival's partners, a Paraguayan organisation called the Totobiegosode Support Group, Parojnai and Ibore are now living in a community of 12 Ayorean families in an area the Paraguayan government bought for them from landowners. "Life on the run from the bulldozers was very hard for me," Ibore says. "We moved with all our things from one place to another. Even though I am a woman I still had to hunt for anteaters. I got so tired. Now life is easier. We have our house; we have our things stored in our house."

The couple are desperately concerned for their relatives, living uncontacted in the forest. Footprints and deserted huts suggest there may be hundreds of Ayoreos living a precarious life. But there is cause for hope. Thanks to a 20-year campaign by Survival International, the New Tribes Mission has abandoned its practice of using contacted Ayoreans to hunt isolated relatives and bring them into camps.

The question of landownership for the Ayoreo people is more slippery. Although the government is required by international law, and its constitution, to buy and hand over traditional Ayoreon lands to the tribes, so far, only a quarter of the traditional territory is back in Ayoreon hands.

Injunctions against landowners that prevent them selling the land to developers have little effect. As recently as last September one firm sent bulldozers into the heart of Ayoreo land. The tracks of another company penetrate the core of the Totobiegosode-Ayoreo forest; only hundreds of letters sent by Survival supporters galvanised the attorney-general's office into halting 300 men about to start logging operations there.

Verena Regehr, a Swiss anthropologist who works for the Totobiegosode Support Group. fears the invasions could result in deaths by violent clashes or disease transmission. "These people are still hunter-gatherers who exist on the land. If these companies invade their gardens and woods, extinction is a real danger."

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