SURVIVAL
Protestors demanded ‘Save the Ayoreo’ at the annual shareholder meeting of Spanish company Grupo San José PHOTO/© Victoria Herranz/Survival
Protestors demanded “Save the Ayoreo” at the annual shareholder meeting of Spanish construction giant Grupo San José in Madrid today. The company has been implicated in the destruction of the uncontacted tribe’s last forest refuge.
Grupo San José’s subsidiary Carlos Casado SA, a South American agricultural firm, was caught illegally bulldozing and constructing roads and reservoirs on the ancestral land of uncontacted Ayoreo Indians in the Chaco forest in Paraguay. The company has also allegedly attempted to forge Ayoreo signatures for the construction of an access road through the tribe’s territory.
Most Ayoreo have been forced out of the Chaco – which has the world’s highest deforestation rate – but some of their relatives remain hiding in an ever-shrinking island of forest. They are one of the most vulnerable societies on the planet, who could be wiped out by violence from outsiders and by diseases like flu and measles to which they have no resistance.
Ayoreo man Porai Picanerai said, “I ask Grupo San José to give us back our land, because if they chop down our forest, our brothers who remain there will be scared.”
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