Your stories

He may have had to sample the rare delicacy of raw wild pig stomach, to the amusement of everyone, but Toby Marsden from Reading has returned from a remote part of Paraguay with a serious message.

Toby Marsden

As part of Survival International, the Reading University graduate travelled to the northern part of Paraguay, in the desert-like area known as the Chaco, to investigate the plight of the uncontacted and endangered Ayoreo-Totobiegosode Indians.

They are the last Indian tribe outside the Amazon to have no contact with the outside world. But with millions of hectares of their ancestral land being bulldozed by large land-holding companies, the outside world is making unwelcome contact with them.

Toby said: "One of the guys told us this very evocative story by firelight in the evening. He was acting out this story of when four or five years ago a bulldozer came straight through his garden to make a road into the forest to extract the hardwood that's there.

"They didn't know what this huge 'creature' was so they threw a spear at it and it bounced off its skin - the aluminium covering being 'too thick'.

"The bulldozer driver stopped and of course was petrified and ran away and took the spear with him.

An Ayoreo-Totobiegosode woman (C) Jonathan Mazower

"We have this picture of the bulldozer driver standing there with the spear and only later could the two sides of the story be matched up."

Communicating through an interpreter and broken Spanish, Toby has learnt that the Ayoreo Indians who remain uncontacted are in continued extreme danger.

The whole area being claimed by the Totobiegosode is under severe pressure of deforestation.

Their last forest refuge is being bulldozed at breakneck speed, partly for the abundance of hardwood on Ayorean territory, but mostly for cattle ranching.

Toby says: "You can drive through the Paraguayan Chaku for hours and hours and not realise anything is wrong because they leave this little strip of forest next to the roads.

"But you have to walk for only five or ten yards through that until you come to these open plains where there are thousands of cattle and tens of thousands of acres of land - the destruction is just extraordinary."

He adds: "If you look at satellite pictures or if you take a flight over the forest, you can get a sense of the scale of it all - we're talking about millions of hectares of land and the deforestation is going right up to the edge of the Indian's territory and even within it."

Toby Marsden filming in Paraguay

Powerful landowning companies are trying to have injunctions protecting the Indians' territory lifted, and Survival International has highlighted that some landowners have already illegally bulldozed through Ayorean land.

According to Survival International, Paraguayan law dictates that the small remaining part of the Ayoreo's forest homeland should have been titled to the Indians years ago.

Toby says: "They (the Ayoreans) don't have title to all of their land although they've
been living there for thousands of years. The titles are owned by big Brazilian companies and Argentinian cattle ranching companies.

"There's a real fight on now and we're asking for everyone's support".

For details on how to lend your support, visit: