Ava Guaraní people
The Guarani people are believed by archaeologists to have originated in the central part of the Amazon rainforest and migrated southward at an uncertain date.
The region is characterized by steep ridges and deep river valleys making access and communication difficult.
[13] The Spanish described them in the most unfavorable terms possible: without religion and government, dedicated to war and cannibalism, naked and sexually promiscuous.
[17] Despite epidemics of European diseases, the Chiriguano population, probably due in part to the incorporation of the Chané, rose to a high of more than 100,000 in the late 18th century.
[19] The Spanish became concerned with the raids of the Chiriguanos in the 1540s because they threatened the indigenous (Indian) workers of the rich silver mines at Potosí and surrounding areas.
In 1564, under a leader named Vitapue, the Chriguanos destroyed two Spanish settlements in eastern Bolivia and a generalized war between the Spaniards and the Chiriguanos began.
[22] The Spanish in the early 17th century followed a policy of attempting to populate the Andean foothills where the Chiriguanos lived and established three main centers as frontier defense: Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Tomina, 80 kilometres (50 mi) east of Sucre), and Tarija.
Records are lacking for the next 100 years, but it appears it was a period of relative peace in which Spaniard and indigenous allies enjoyed an uneasy co-existence with the Chiriguanos, although punctuated by mutual raids on each other.
The spark that ignited the war was the punishment by the missionaries of Chiriguano neophytes at Jesuit and Dominican missions, especially that of Juan Bautista Aruma, who became one of the three principal leaders of the uprising.
[25] In October 1727, with cooperation from the Toba and Mocoví peoples, the Chiriguanos attacked with an army of 7,000 men, destroying Christian missions and Spanish ranches east of Tarija, killing more than 200 Spaniards and taking many women and children prisoner.
The Spanish counterattacked from Santa Cruz in July 1728 with an army of 1200 Spaniards and 200 Chiquitano archers recruited from the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos in eastern Bolivia.
Violating a truce to negotiate an exchange of prisoners, the Spanish captured 62 Chiriguano leaders, including Aruma, and enslaved them in the silver mines.
Spanish-speaking communities, called Creole or "karai" as most of the people were of mixed Spanish/Indian heritage, survived by paying tribute to local Chiriguano groups.
The reasons for this success seemed to be that many Chiriguanos turned to the missions for protection from internal disputes and conflict with the Creole ranchers and settlers, the Bolivian government, and other Indian peoples.
The numbers and the independence of the Chiriguano also declined beginning in the 1850s when many of them began migrating to Argentina to work on sugar plantations.
By the 1860s, the Bolivian government was taking a more aggressive stand against the Chiriguanos, awarding large grants of land to ranchers in their territory.
It was led by a 28 year old man named Chapiaguasu, who styled himself Apiaguaiki Tumpa (Eunuch of God) and said that he had been sent to earth to save the Chiriguanos from Christianity and the Franciscan missionaries.
[34] Communist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara was attempting to foment revolution among the Chiriguanos when he was captured and executed by Bolivian soldiers on October 9, 1967.
[35] Guevara and his Cuban followers had studied Quechua to communicate with Bolivian peasants, but the Chiriguanos spoke Guarani.
[38] A 2009 investigation by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found that 600 Guaraní families in Bolivia continue to live in conditions of "debt bondage and forced labor, which are practices that comprise contemporary forms of slavery.
