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José Iquebi was hunting wild pigs in the forest when he was kidnapped at gunpoint by men on horseback. They lassoed him, locked him in a cage, and transported him hundreds of miles downriver to Paraguay’s capital, Asunción. His captors charged people money to stare and take photographs. He was about 12 years old.
“They treated us like animals,” recalls Iquebi, now 84. It would be decades before he saw his nomadic Ayoreo community again.
The colonisation of Paraguay’s portion of the Chaco – a sprawling South American outback of gnarled hardwoods, arid grasslands and brackish swamps – had just begun in earnest.
In 1926, the first Mennonites arrived: a group of ultra-traditional Protestants from the Soviet Union and Canada. Paraguay promised them virgin territory and freedom from persecution.
The German-speaking settlers sent missionaries to catch and convert hunter-gatherers like the Ayoreo who already called the Chaco home. Untold numbers of Indigenous people died from disease. The survivors were given jobs clearing the undergrowth and herding cattle, while the Mennonites razed a country-sized swathe of forest and became wealthy from ranching.
Today, a few small bands of uncontacted Ayoreo – estimated to number roughly 150 people – still hold out in the remaining patchwork of green. They are one of the world’s last cultures living in voluntary isolation outside the Amazon. But representatives from a dozen Indigenous communities and organisations say a fresh wave of deforestation poses an “imminent risk” to their forest-dwelling relatives.
An “extraordinary” – and fiercely disputed – flurry of traces of uncontacted Ayoreo were reported throughout 2023 and 2024 around a vast cattle ranch called Faro Moro. Until recently, the property encompassed 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) of intact forest. The ranch served as a sanctuary for endangered jaguars.
Some Ayoreo recall stories of family members returning to the forest at Faro Moro after the trauma of contact. Iquebi remembers it as Tamucode, a place with plentiful game and abundant streams. “There’s water there, even during drought,” says Guei Basui Picanerai, 43, the leader of Ebetogue village. “That’s why we think our isolated brothers still live there.”
But since early 2023, satellite imagery indicates at least 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres) of vegetation at Faro Moro have been bulldozed and replaced with pasture for cattle.
Community leaders say the accelerating destruction is piling pressure on their isolated relatives, forcing them out of their territory. Nowadays, they fear, white people will treat any uncontacted Ayoreo not as a curiosity, but an inconvenience to be quietly disposed of.
“The cattle ranchers only think about money. When they see an isolated Indigenous person, they know their business will be put at risk,” says Iquebi.
Carlos Diri Etacore, 56, props a corroded shotgun over one shoulder and follows a trail along the perimeter of Faro Moro, slipping between towering cacti, thorn bushes and a wire fence. The leader of Ijnapui – an Ayoreo village of dust-blown wooden shacks – was also born in the forest, and can read it like a book.
As a neighbour widens the path with a machete, Etacore studies a shredded branch. “We’re looking for some kind of sign,” Etacore says. “Because many people deny the information we put out, and the sightings.” Community patrols like this have helped Iniciativa Amotocodie, a Paraguayan nonprofit, register dozens of clues to the existence of uncontacted Ayoreo at Faro Moro.
Experienced Ayoreo trackers say they have seen and heard clearcut evidence: an axehole in a tree for extracting honey; tribal marks cut into bark; a discarded wasps’ nest, whose larvae settled Ayoreo no longer eat; whistles and singing issuing from the trees; salt taken from a village, where a stone tool and harvested plants were left behind.
Some report finding prints beside their vegetable plots: whether those made by the tell-tale splayed toes of the forest Ayoreo, or their sandals made of rectangular strips of wood, tapir hide, or salvaged vehicle tires.
Mirian Posoroja, 30, the primary school teacher in the Dos de Enero community, says she glimpsed a half-naked figure with a child on the edge of the dirt road that runs past the ranch. “Suddenly, they disappeared,” recalled Posoroja. “I think they saw me and returned to the forest.”
Iniciativa Amotocodie has also logged a handful of reported sightings. In testimony shared by the NGO, two Ayoreo villagers say the son of a Faro Moro foreman approached them in a store and told them that workers on the ranch had seen two uncontacted people running away while they were felling a section of forest. He also reportedly told them workers had discovered – and destroyed – what seemed to be an Ayoreo shelter made of branches. An Ayoreo student subsequently claimed to have seen a photograph of the shelter on the mobile phone of his classmate, the son of another Faro Moro employee. However, the Guardian was unable to verify this account.
Others say that intruders – possibly isolated Ayoreo searching for food and metal tools – have crept into their villages at dawn, causing their dogs to bark incessantly. But they know contact could be lethal for both groups.
Though highly vulnerable to outsiders’ illnesses, the forest-dwellers are fierce warriors. “Because we wear clothes, they consider us white people,” Picanerai says. “They won’t recognise that we are the same blood, and could do us harm.”
A contract from December 2022, seen by the Guardian, indicated the ranch was then owned by Faro Moro Limited, a company registered in the Isle of Man, a British Crown Dependency. Its directors are Peter Kaindl, an Austrian lumber baron, and Danish citizen Henrik Buchleitner.
A request for comment was made via another company owned by Kaindl. Buchleitner could not be reached for comment.
The contract and the environmental impact assessment indicated that a Paraguayan company, Hekopora SA, has rented the ranch from Faro Moro Limited and received environmental permits to raze more than half the property’s forested area for ranching.
Andrés Cramer, Hekopora’s vice-president, denies any evidence of uncontacted Ayoreo living at Faro Moro, and defends the deforestation as fully compliant with Paraguayan law. The ranch “has been constantly monitored for the last 35 years,” he says. “At no moment have people, footprints, remains of campfires, [or] signs of human occupation been identified.”
He said any sighting of uncontacted people within Faro Moro “would be considered extraordinary and exceptional, and without doubt would have been reported to management and spread throughout the whole region”.
Citing client confidentiality, Cramer declined to confirm who owns Faro Moro. But he revealed that leadership positions within Hekopora are occupied by AgrInvest, an agricultural investment and management firm with offices in Hamburg, Germany and a portfolio of 13 ranches across Paraguay, adding to growing concerns over rich nations exporting biodiversity loss.
Dr Jeffrey Thompson, who studies jaguars and their prey with Conacyt, Paraguay’s national scientific council, says he conducted research at Faro Moro for several years starting in 2017, including operating more than 200 camera traps for four months. He lamented the large-scale licensed deforestation “from the perspective of habitat loss”.
But Thompson says he had seen no evidence of isolated groups, and that neither the ranch’s then-owner, employees, nor neighbouring communities had mentioned them. “I don’t think there are uncontacted Indigenous people there,” he says.
Yet according to Iniciativa Amotocodie, Faro Moro is the central link in a migration corridor between the PNCAT, an Ayoreo reserve, and the dense forest along the border with Bolivia. If this fragile chain of tree cover is broken, Ayoreo groups that range widely in search of sustenance could perish, or be forced to leave the forest, says the NGO.
Those that survive this process – the most recent contact was in 2004 – are “always kept on the margins” of modern society, left dependent on Mennonite, Paraguayan and Brazilian landlords for work, says Miguel Alarcón, the NGO’s coordinator. “So much is lost,” he adds. “It’s the annihilation of a culture and a way of life.”
In February, the International Working Group on Indigenous Peoples Living in Voluntary Isolation (GTI-PIACI), a coalition of native organisations from across South America, warned that uncontacted Ayoreo at Faro Moro face an “alarming risk of contact and genocide”.
Last May, Ayoreo communities went before a judge in the Mennonite colony of Filadelfia, about 80km (50 miles) south, in search of an urgent court order to halt the deforestation. The court ruled against them. Appeals have since been rejected. They are now preparing to take the case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, says Marilina Marichal, a lawyer representing the Ayoreo.
International treaties legally bind Paraguay – and its own constitution – to protect Indigenous peoples, she argues. But in practice, “we’re still in the era of feudalism, where the lord does what he wants with his property and whatever’s in it”.
The threats to the Ayoreo and their forest home are mounting. The Bioceanic Corridor, a new highway for agribusiness bisecting the Chaco, due to be completed in 2026, will ramp up road traffic and ranching activity – and deepen penetration by drug cartels.
Mining firms are searching for lithium, the mineral crucial for smartphones, datacentres and electric vehicles, also linked to depletion of ecosystems in neighbouring Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.
Years of drought – worsened by the climate crisis – have left the Chaco’s vegetation prone to raging wildfires. One such blaze, started on deforested ranch land in September, scorched 200,000 hectares (495,000 acres) of Ayoreo territory.
Yet Paraguay’s farming groups and many Mennonites dispute the scientific consensus on human-made global heating. They also defend the cattle industry as bringing growth to an isolated region of one of South America’s poorest countries. Top destinations for Paraguayan beef – with a record 22 million cattle slaughtered in 2024 – include Chile, Taiwan, Brazil, Israel, the US and Russia.
The Paraguayan Rural Association claims that reports of uncontacted people at Faro Moro are part of a plot. Werner Schroeder, 57, a Mennonite lawyer and the ranching lobby group’s regional president, assisted Faro Moro’s defence in the lawsuit. He has never visited the property, but he thinks it is “99.9% impossible” that uncontacted Ayoreo live there.
“There should exist some trace,” says Schroeder. “They haven’t even shown us a photo.” He claims that witnesses who testified before the court that they had seen “wild people” had imagined it, or been coached.
“Who is behind this?” he asks. “Why do they want to put a brake on development?”
He complains that ranchers’ margins are being squeezed by Europe’s “extremist” environmental standards and punishing drought, although he maintains that humans contribute “little or nothing” to global heating.
Two-thirds of Paraguay’s native population lives in poverty, three times the national average. Schroeder argues that they enjoy “excessive” privileges, suggesting they should have to choose between Indigenous status and the right to vote. “The Indigenous are our neighbours, and we’ll have to live with them,” he concedes. “They need us.”
But if the gulf between the native majority and the Mennonites widens further, he predicts, “tomorrow they will kidnap us, or do us harm,” adding “we’re going to have to build prisons if we can’t create jobs.”
Other Mennonites agree that the Chaco is at a crisis point but differ profoundly on the way forward. Riky Unger, 53, is the high school principal in the colony of Neuland.
The tall biologist and theologian in a tweed jacket and jeans is unpopular with his peers for several reasons: he’s divorced, believes in human-made climate change, encourages his students to question their elders and recently awarded a scholarship to an Indigenous Nivaclé girl.
Unger is also scathing about Mennonite claims to have brought Christian values such as humility and respect for God’s creation to the Chaco. His people, he argues, “are extremely hard working, they’re well-organised, but they’re also hypocrites”.
Hunting down and forcibly evangelising the Chaco’s pre-existing cultures “was the greatest error we ever made,” he continues. “We complain that the natives don’t want to work and can’t support themselves. But what did we do? We took their identity away.”
He warns that the amassing of wealth and power by a few families risks triggering internal splits and draws the hatred of other Paraguayans, factors that forced the Mennonites to flee multiple historical homelands. “We always make the same mistake,” he says.
Unger says a century after the Mennonites arrived, they urgently needed to preserve what was left of the Chaco and reach a new understanding with those who were there first. “The first step,” he says, “is to ask for their forgiveness and admit that we’ve done wrong.”
Iquebi, the formerly enslaved Ayoreo elder, thinks the reckoning should extend more widely. “The Paraguayan government doesn’t protect the lives of Indigenous people in general, much less the Ayoreo,” he argues. “They should send an official, an authority, to see our needs and concerns.”
The government’s Indigenous institute and the environment ministry were contacted for comment.
If deforestation continues, and the forced contacts that marked his childhood are repeated, Iquebi warns: “that will be the end of the Ayoreo.”
