Time for a quick roundup of responses to Survival’s ‘Most Racist Article of the Year’ award. This year’s worthy recipient was Paraguay’s newspaper La Nacion for an editorial which compared Paraguayan Indians to a ‘dangerous cancer’ and described them as ‘filthy’.

The award triggered a firestorm of commentary at Ultima Hora, Paraguay’s largest daily newspaper website, currently running to six pages of heated discussion (in Spanish, of course).

The Independent’s Pandora noted the occasion…

Champagne flows and the awards season continues apace. Yesterday brought the Most Racist Article of the Year presentation. … Step forward (drum roll)… the Paraguayan paper La Nacion! I’d like to thank my parents, my editor…

… the award got an honourable mention at Racism Review, while over at IndyBlogs Jerome Bell cried foul:

Clearly the awards is a bit of a cheeky PR stunt by Survival but what the heck.

Cheeky PR stunts? Us?

Jerome wondered how the arrival of the award certificate would be received at La Nacion:

For their journalistic excellence the editors of La Nacion will be sent a certificate inscribed with a quotation from a Native American author who died in 1939. The inscription reads: “All the years of calling the Indian a savage has never made him one.”

I wish I could be a fly on the wall when the editor of La Nacion opens up that parcel.

Indeed.

And for your viewing pleasure, here’s the certificate that La Nacion will shortly be receiving:

Our news item is up on Digg and needs a bit of help, so please vote away.

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Indians are described as being ‘Neolithic’ (three times), possessing a ‘backward, withered culture’, maintaining an ‘out-of-date way of living’ and having ‘filthy habits’.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.