The Aché ( ) are an Indigenous people of Paraguay. They are hunter-gatherers living in eastern Paraguay.
From the earliest Jesuit accounts of the Aché in the 17th century until their peaceful outside contacts in the 20th century, the Aché were described as nomadic hunter-gatherers living in small bands and depending entirely on wild forest resources for subsistence.Hill, Kim, A. Magdalena Hurtado, and Aldine de Gruyter. Aché Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People. New York: Aldine Translation, 1996. . In the 20th century, four different ethnolinguistic populations of Aché were contacted and pacified. They are the Northern Aché, the Yvytyruzu Aché, the Ypety Aché, and the Ñacunday Aché. Each of these populations was an endogamous dialectal group, consisting of multiple residential bands, with no peaceful interaction between the groups.
The Aché suffered repeated abuses by rural Paraguayan colonists, ranchers, and big landowners from the conquest period until the latter half of the 20th century. In the 20th century, largely under military dictator Alfredo Stroessner, the Northern Aché, who had been the only inhabitants of nearly 20,000 square kilometers of rural Paraguay, ended up confined on just two reservations totaling little more than 50 square kilometers of titled land. In the process, they were massacred, enslaved, and gathered onto reservations where no adequate medical treatment was provided. This process was specifically carried out to pacify them, and to remove them from their ancestral homeland, so that absentee investors (mainly Brazilian) could move in and develop the lands that once belonged only to the Aché. Large multinational business groups—e.g. La Industrial Paraguaya. S.A. (LIPSA)—obtained title rights to already occupied lands and then sold them sight unseen to investors, who purchased lands where Aché bands had roamed for thousands of years, and were still present. The fact that Aché inhabitants were present and living in the forests of Canindeyu and Alto Paraná on the very lands being titled in Hernandarias seems to have been dismissed by cities such as Coronel Oviedo.
The Kuetuvy Aché were forcibly removed from the Mbaracayu region in the 1970s, but managed to return to their ancestral homeland in 2000.
Name The Aché are also known as the Axe people. In the past they have been called the Guaiaqui, Guayakí, Guayaki-Ache, and Guoyagui by Guaraní-speaking neighbors and by early anthropologists, however, these terms are now considered derogatory.
The earliest published reports (Lozano 1873-74 summary of Jesuit accounts in the 17th century)Lozano, P. (1873–1874) Historia de la Conquista del Paraguay, Rio de La Plata, y Tucuman, Vol. 1. Buenos Aires. about the Aché refer to them as "Guajagui", a term based on the Guaraní root "Guaja" (= enemy tribe, or brother-in-law) and "gui" a common Aché suffix (meaning "essence of" or "having the property of").
Language and genetics The Aché language provides clues to their origin. Current analysis suggests that it has a Tupí-Guaraní lexicon, overlaid on a unique grammatical structure not found in sister Guaraní languages.
Genetic analyses suggest that the Aché are a group of mixed biological origin containing about 60 to 65% Tupí-Guaraní genes, and 35 to 40% of genes with affinities to the Macro-Ge (also known as Jé) language family.Callegari-Jacques, Sidia M., Shaiane G. Crossetti, Fabiana B. Kohlrausch,1 Francisco M. Salzano, Luiza T. Tsuneto, Maria Luiza Petzl-Erler, Kim Hill, A. Magdalena Hurtado, and Mara H. Hutz. The Beta-Globin Gene Cluster Distribution Revisited—Patterns in Native American Populations.
The Aché are also culturally and phenotypically distinct from the neighboring Guarani. Early descriptions of the Aché emphasized their white skin, light eye and hair color, beards, and Asiatic features as identifying characteristics. Their subsistence practices and technology were considered extremely simple, and nomadism made them secretive and evasive.
History The first archaeological evidence of native peoples in Paraguay is represented by the "Altoparanense industry" of stone flaked tools found along the Paraná River, and Celt-type stone axes similar to those still used by the Aché of the same region (and dated to about 9,000 Before Present). About 500 CE Guarani horticulturists migrated into the area and began to persecute the Aché hunting peoples, perhaps causing them to move into forested hills, away from open country and navigable rivers, and adopt a more nomadic lifestyle.
Written history relevant to the Aché begins with the founding of Asunción in 1524. A few years later, in 1554, a small village (Guaira) was founded by the Spanish on the Parana river near the site of modern-day Guaira, Brazil. Fr. Luis de Bolaños arrived in Paraguay 1575, mastered the Guarani language and founded 18 Guarani villages in the province of Guaira between 1580 and 1593. Evidence of groups in Eastern Paraguay that might have been Aché comes from the earliest Jesuit archives around 1620. Non-Guarani groups that lived from hunting and gathering were often referred to as Caaygua or Caigua (Kaingang groups from the Southern Je language family). Descriptions of some Caaigua match fairly well with 20th-century descriptions of the Aché. For example, Techo (1897)Techo, N. del. (1897). Historia del la Provincia del Paraguay de la Compania de Jesus. Madrid. describes them as hunter-gatherers who ate only palm pith and fruits, venison and roots, and fastened little stones to their lips, which made them look ferocious, and he states that they worshipped only thunder. This is congruous with the Aché, whose economy is indeed based on palm pith and meat, and whose spiritual beliefs place "Berendy" (associated with booming meteors) in a central position. Lozano (1873) provides a seven-page early description of the Aché (whom he called "Guayagui"), using a summary of Jesuit archives from the 17th century. This description includes accurate information about the Aché economy, social organization, culture and belief system. Lozano and Techo also described how some Aché bands were captured near the mouth of the Acaray river in the 1630s, and forcibly brought to a Guarani Mission. That group of Aché captives all perished from disease within a few months.
After the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768, there is no further information about the Aché until the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, when several writers related the knowledge of local Paraguayan populations concerning the Aché, but none observed them directly. These included reports by several foreign scientists as well as the renowned Paraguayan naturalist Moises BertoniBertoni, M. (1941) Los Guayakies. Asunción: Revista de la Sociedad Cientifica del Paraguay. (whose information about the Aché was published posthumously). Finally, a German immigrant, Federico Maynthusen contacted a group of Aché in 1908, in the modern department of Itapua, and published information on both their language and culture.Mayntzhusen, F. (1912). Mitteilungen aus dem Gebiete der Guayaki. Actas del XVII International Congress of Americanists, Buenos Aires 191 0, (1):470.Mayntzhusen, F. (1920). Die Sprache der Guayaki. Zeitschrift für Eingeborenensprachen X (1919–20): 2-22. Berlin: Hamburg.Mayntzhusen, F. (1928). Instrumentos paleoliticos del Paraguay. Annals, 20th International Congress of Americanists 2(II): 177- 180. Rio de Janeiro.Mayntzhusen, F. (1945). Los Guayaki y la "Civilizacion." Boletin de la Junta de Estudios Historicos de Misiones 5:8- 1 1. Posadas, Argentina.
Contact In 1959, after decades of persecution, the Ypety Aché were contacted in modern-day Caazapa and pacified by Manuel de Jesus Pereira. Pereira then used Ypety Aché guides to track down, contact and pacify the Yvytyruzu Aché in the Guairá Department in 1963. Both groups together numbered only about 100 individuals when contacted. Between 1963 and 1968 more than half of the Aché that had been recently pacified perished from disease while under Pereira's supervision. During this time, the Ypety and Yvytyruzu Aché were studied and described by anthropologists Branislava Sušnik, Leon Cadogan, and Pierre Clastres.Susnik, B. (1979–1980) Los Aborígenes del Paraguay II. Etnohistoria de los Guaraníes. Asunción: Museo Etnográfico Andrés Barbero.Clastres, P. (1972) Chronique des indiens Guayaki. Ce que savent les Aché, chasseurs nomades du Paraguay. Paris: Plon.Clastres, P. (1972) The Guayaki. In Hunters and Gatherers Today. M. Bicchieri, ed., pp. 138–174. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.Clastres, P. (1974) Guayaki cannibalism. In Native South Americans: Ethnology of the Least Known Continent, P. Lyon, ed., pp. 309–321. Boston: Little, Brown. Prior to the 1960s, most ethnographic studies of the Aché were based primarily on captured Aché children.
By the 1960s the Northern Aché were the last large uncontacted ethnic group in Paraguay, but they were constantly persecuted by colonists, loggers, and ranchers. Paraguay, like other Latin American countries, had a long colonial history of Indian enslavement that continued well after the official prohibition of slavery in 1869. Aché bands were systematically raided with the intention of killing the men, and capturing the women and children. A slave trade developed in Paraguay where Aché children were sold openly in the region as late as the 1970s.Personally Observed, Kim Hill Chilean entomologist, Luis Pena, reported in 1971 on the slave trade at San Juan Nepomuceno (near the Paraguayan capital), writing that a child could be bought for between $18-$72. The "pacification" of the Northern Aché has been labeled as genocide by some writers (e.g., Munzel 1973,Melia, B a, L. Miraglia, M. Munzel, and C. Munzel. (1973) La Agonía de los Aché Guayaki: Historia y Cantos. Centro de Estudios Antropológicos, Universidad Católica: Asunción. 1974, 1976). On 8 April 2014, the Aché presented a complaint of genocide against their people during the military government of Alfredo Stroessner in an Argentinian court.
Because of increasing hostile encounters with Northern Aché during the construction of the new Saltos de Guaira road in the mid-1960s, Manuel Pereira moved with the Ypety and Yvytyruzu Aché to a site called "Cerro Moroti", in modern Caaguazú District, in order to track down and pacify the Northern Aché. At that time the Northern Aché still ranged free over a huge region from San Joaquin mountains to the Paraná River, and from the Acaray River north to the Mbaracayu Mountains, and there were approximately 560 individuals in the population. Pereira was encouraged to pacify this group and remove them from the area.
In October 1970, several Aché from the Cerro Moroti reservation were attacked while hunting. They routed their attackers using newly acquired shotguns, and captured a Northern Aché woman who was taken back to Cerro Moroti. Within a month the captured Northern Aché woman led Pereira's reservation Aché to her forest band, and the group was persuaded to move to the Cerro Moroti reservation in order to receive protection from "Papa Pereira". This "surrender" was accomplished peacefully because many of the Yvytyruzu Aché living at Cerro Moroti had known and were related to members of this Northern Aché band (the two groups had only been separated in the late 1930s when the road to Ciudad del Este was constructed).