I visited and photographed the Ayoreo indigenous community of Campo Lorro (Parrot Field) in the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay. The photos in this essay were taken in early 2009 of a community and people struggling for survival. I traveled with Dr. Miguel Lovera, part of the Ayoreo support group Iniciativa Amotocodie. The Chaco forest is one of the fastest disappearing forests on the planet.

I was invited by the Ayoreo people who live in Campo Lorro to take photographs in a project called “Sharing the Eye.” An elder leader of the community walked with me through their lands, village, houses and workplaces–sharing his vision with me, which I recorded with my camera.

Campo Lorro is a 10,000-hectare field that was given to the community in exchange for their nomadic realm of more than 10 million hectares. The Ayoreo were the masters of the harsh northern Gran Chaco territory. They lived by hunting and gathering. Because they posed a “threat” to the expansion of white “civilization,” they were forced into settlements. The subhuman confinement conditions, which subdued these people, depleted their self-esteem – that they are now trying to reclaim.

There are still uncontacted Ayoreo living in the Gran Chaco. They do not want contact with “civilization” and wish to remain in their forest home. Today, however, unsustainable livestock farming, along with the expansion of genetically modified soybean plantations for biofuels, hydroelectric dams and mineral exploitation threaten the forests of the Chaco.

A March 2012 New York Times article pointed out, “At least 1.2 million acres of the Chaco have been deforested in the last two years, according to satellite analyses by Guyra, an environmental group in Asunción, the capital. Ranchers making way for their vast herds of cattle have cleared roughly 10 percent of the Chaco forest in the last five years, Guyra said. That is reflected in surging beef exports.

“Paraguay already has the sad distinction of being a deforestation champion,” said José Luis Casaccia, a prosecutor and former environment minister, referring to the large clearing in recent decades of Atlantic forests in eastern Paraguay for soybean farms; little more than 10 percent of the original forests remain. “If we continue with this insanity,” Mr. Casaccia said, “nearly all of the Chaco’s forests could be destroyed within 30 years.”

Campo Lorro is the largest displacement camp of Ayoreo in captivity. When I visited Paraguay again, in the latter part of 2014, these compounds were now called concentration camps as the situation in the Chaco is rapidly disintegrating.

The photos in this essay were displayed in an exhibit in Campo Lorro in the summer of 2009.

Dr. Miguel Lovera: “All signs show that Paraguay, both its territory and its population, are under attack by conquerors, but conquerors of a new sort. These new ‘conquistadors’ are racing to seize all available arable land and, in the process, are destroying peoples’ cultures and the country’s biodiversity — just as they are in many other parts of the planet, even in those areas that fall within the jurisdiction of ‘democratic’ and ‘developed’ countries. Every single foot of land is in their crosshairs. Powerful elites do not recognize rural populations as having any right to land at all.”