One small way BBC’s ‘Simon Reeve’s South America’ could have been even better
British presenter visited remote Paraguay where he heard about 'people still living in the forest'
For a TV series on South America it was particularly apt that Simon Reeve, in his latest for the BBC, was able to squeeze in a brief mention of some of the indigenous people who live in such remote parts of the world that they have no regular contact with anyone else - not even, in some cases, their own relatives. No other continent comes close to rivalling it for the numbers of indigenous people in “isolation”, as the United Nations calls them, in the depths of its spectacular Amazonian and Gran Chaco forests. Beyond South America, the only other people living similarly appear to be on one island in the Bay of Bengal and in West Papua, the western half of New Guinea that since the 1960s has been occupied and colonised by Indonesia.
It was right at the end of Episode 4 of Simon Reeve’s South America, which concluded earlier this month on BBC2, that the British presenter visited an indigenous Ayoreo community, Chaidi, in the Chaco in north-central Paraguay. “Our purpose as a community organisation is to protect and preserve this territory for our communities and future generations, and also for the people still living in the forest,” one Ayoreo man, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, tells Reeve.
“What do you mean - the people who are still in the forest?” asks Reeve, looking quizzical in the back-seat.
“They’re our relatives who don’t have contact with non-indigenous people,” the Ayoreo man says. “They want to live in the forest in a traditional way. They live in isolation. They live like we used to live - no clothes, mobiles, electricity, Coca-Cola. . . none of that.”
Their car pulls up at a settlement, and Reeve and his host walk out into the forest to inspect some physical evidence of the “isolated” Ayoreo: the remains of a hut.
“I find it astonishing, beautiful and moving that in the 21st century there are still people living an isolated, hunter-gatherer existence out there in the endless Chaco,” Reeve says, bringing the episode to a close.
Credit to the BBC and Reeve for not sensationalising or exoticising the “isolated” Ayoreo, as so often happens in the mainstream media, as well as for pointing out that they’re not really “uncontacted”, as most people probably understand that term. But how might this seven minute segment have been even better? Most obvious would have been to make it clear that Paraguay isn’t the only country where indigenous people live in “isolation”, as viewers could be forgiven for thinking, and that actually the vast majority are in the Amazon basin in other countries: Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia etc. In fact, Paraguay is something of an anomaly because the Ayoreo are the only “isolated” people in South America not in the Amazon.
At the same time, it would have been worth emphasising that their territories, all across the continent, are under permanent threat and that they are highly vulnerable to contact because of a lack of immunological defences, meaning that germs and diseases can be easily transmitted and lead to fatal epidemics. This was what some decades ago decimated the Waiapi in north-eastern Brazil, which Reeve hears about when he visits them in Episode 3.
It would also have been worth emphasising that, mainly because of these risks, no one should ever go searching for any of these people in “isolation.” That might sound unnecessary or even absurd, but some people do get such ideas into their heads. That’s to say nothing of the evangelical Christians who make whole careers out of trying to contact and convert the “unreached”, and the fact that it remains in the interests of certain industries eyeing up their territories - oil, gas, logging and cattle-ranching in particular - for all such “isolated” people to be contacted and “brought out of the forest”, so to speak, or to be killed.