One or two people have asked me, since the launch of Survival’s Stamp it Out campaign last year, how necessary it is.

‘Do some people still really think tribal peoples are primitive?’ I was asked. ‘Or stuck in the Stone Age?’

Tragically, the answers to both these questions are the same: one emphatic ‘Yes!’ followed by another.

If you don’t believe me, just look at the article on our Stamp it Out page published in La Nacion, a Paraguayan newspaper.

There a group of Paraguayan Indians are described as being ‘Neolithic’ (three times), possessing a ‘backward, withered culture’, maintaining an ‘out-of-date way of living’ and having ‘filthy habits’. Their humanity is questioned and their presence in Paraguay’s city, Asuncion, is compared to a ‘dangerous cancer.’

What does this tell us? That there are people, some of them in positions of authority and influence, who do still harbour racist opinions about tribal people. That these people think their way of living - in cities, paying taxes, for example - is somehow ’superior.’ That Stamp it Out is needed more than ever.

Please do join our campaign and send a postcard. Sending one can rarely have meant so much.