The heat is screaming down on us, and it’s not yet 10am. Our truck rumbles along a red dirt road with little to protect us from the caustic glare of the sun other than a blue tarpaulin tied loosely over our heads. But this is the only way to get to the indigenous Wichi village of HokTek T’oi in the far north of Argentina.

Buried deep in the Chaco, a vast stretch of semi-desert lowland that stretches across the north of the country and into Bolivia and Paraguay, the Wichi are a world away from the glamour of Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, and an hour long drive from the nearest major town, Tartagal. An estimated 50,000 Wichi live in the Gran Chaco, and these hunter-gatherers have subsisted on the region’s red earth and thorn brush forests since before records began.

After a left turn we arrive at HokTek T’oi, home to more than 80 Wichi men, women and children. With no electricity and only one tap for running water, stepping out of the truck feels like shooting back in time. Domestic goats, pigs and dogs wander freely among the six or seven basic, red mud houses constructed around a clearing. The Wichi men and women, dressed in jeans and trainers or shirts and skirts, sit quietly in small groups, chatting in their native tongue. Girls as young as twelve suckle their babies, eyeing us curiously, because nowadays any visit from the modern world usually means trouble.

Over the last 100 years the Wichi´s home has been systematically encroached upon by commercial agricultural companies and absentee landlords. Survival International, an NGO that represents the rights of indigenous people around the world and has campaigned on behalf of the Wichi people, says that huge swathes of the Chaco have been destroyed due to the introduction of cattle, deforestation and logging.

In the last decade the Wichi have literally stood in front of the bulldozers to protect their homes from destruction, according to the head of the village, Rocky Miranda. “We are fighting for our rights, for our land, for our forest, our jungle,” says Miranda, as he shows me a part of the forest where some Wichi men sprung on a group of illegal loggers taking trees from their land. There was a confrontation, says Miranda, batting off the ferocious mosquitoes that thrive in the hot forest environment. He slaps at his hand where one of them has landed, leaving a smudge of his own blood smeared across his skin. Threats were exchanged and the Wichi ended up seizing the truck and calling the police. The law arrived and the truck was impounded, because the Wichi´s rights to the land are recognised in local, national and international law.

In 2003, the Argentine Supreme Court ruled against the Provincial Government of Salta, where the Wichi live, for issuing deforestation permits to a private company illegally. The court has now ruled that such permits cannot be awarded without the cooperation of the tribal people who live on the land. Earlier than that, in 2001, the government passed an Expropriation Bill to regain the title for 3000 hectares of land, which was found to have been sold illegally to a Buenos Aires landowner. But the land is still in the hands of the companies, and will remain so until an agreed level of compensation is arrived at by the government and the companies involved.

Argentina also ratified the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) Convention on the Rights of Indigenous People in 2000, unlike, for example, the United Kingdom, which is designed to help indigenous people protect their culture, language and identity, and exercise control over their own lives. “Indigenous people’s rights are well established in law, international law, national law and to a lesser extent in the local provincial law, and the future depends on ensuring those laws are fulfilled and enacted, so it’s not just that they’re letter of the word but that they’re benefiting from them, that they’re actually put into practice,” says John Palmer, or Juan Palmer, as he is known around these parts. (is this right? -Nicola) An anthropologist educated at Oxford University, Palmer is the Wichi´s unexpected representative. He met the indigenous peoples while travelling in Argentina in the 1970s. Now he lives in nearby Tartagal with his Wichi wife Vasilia, from where he champions their rights and acts for them in legal matters.

“It’s a simple cultural incomprehension,” says Palmer of the Wichi’s predicament. “It’s a question of the dominant, non-indigenous culture being entirely intolerant and rejecting entirely the indigenous culture. It’s part of the colonist ethos to over run and to dominate, and to understand is the opposite and involves stopping for a minute and listening to what they have to say, and that’s entirely alien to a colonist programme, and here we’re in a colonist situation. Take away their world and you take away their cosmos,” says Palmer.

That may be, but the Chaco is an enormous natural resource spanning more than 640,000 square km that the Argentine Government is understandably keen to tap into. Still recovering from a crippling economic crash in 2001, 33 percent of the country’s population is still living below the poverty line – the government cannot afford to ignore many opportunities for growth and industry. The Chaco yields hard wood trees, such as quebracho, as well as maize, corn and soy. Argentina is the world’s third largest producer of soy, after Brazil and the United States, according to the US State Department of Agriculture. Both sides have a lot to fight for and much to lose, but although the agricultural industry and the Wichi are staking claims on the same land, there is little common ground between them.