A woman takes leadership of Paraguay’s Maka people

MARIANO ROQUE ALONSO, Paraguay — For the tiny Maka culture of Paraguay, political authority has passed from father to son for generations even as the band has struggled for survival, its way of life uprooted by war and migration from a vast, isolated countryside to an urban neighbourhood near the capital.

So the death in February of Andrés Chemei, a widely respected figure who led the group for 40 years, posed a problem. He had no son.

The solution has been at least a small advance for women in Paraguay: Maka leaders chose his widow, Tsiweyenki to be one of the first female chiefs of an indigenous people in the South American country.

Pedro Servin, The Associated Press