Ayoreo

The Ayoreo, whose name means “true people” in their own Zamucoan tongue, are a Gran Chaco people spread across the country between the Paraguay, Pilcomayo, Parapetí and Grande rivers, spanning both Bolivia and Paraguay.

They were organized into more than fifty autonomous local groups, among them the Totobiegosode, each belonging to one of seven clans, and lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, moving through the dry forest after peccaries, tortoises and anteaters and gathering wild honey, while planting small stands of corn, beans and squash in the rainy season.

The first Europeans to reach them were the Jesuits, who founded the San Ignacio Zamuco mission in the 1720s. It was abandoned in the 1740s, after which the Ayoreo returned to their roaming life and remained almost entirely beyond colonial reach for the rest of the period.