BOOK REVIEW : Travels in Land Cursed by Bloody History : LAND WITHOUT EVIL; Utopian Journeys Across the South American Watershed by Richard Gott Verso; $34.95, 299 pages

“Land Without Evil” was the name given by the Guarani tribe of South America to an imagined paradise on Earth, “a place to which everyone yearns to go.” Now it is the darkly ironic title of a book by Richard Gott, an English newspaper correspondent who went in search of a lost utopia and instead discovered a land cursed by its own bloody history.

“Europe picked up South America in the 15th Century like a child’s ball,” Gott sums up in “Land Without Evil,” “played around with it for 300 years, experimented with its peoples, destroyed its individual nations, pillaged its forests and mines, and then tossed it away as though it were a useless discarded toy.”

Gott’s book is an account of his trek across the remote expanse of mountain and marsh and desert that lies between the Amazon and the River Plate, where the modern states of Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil bang up against each other. As he discovered--and as he recounts in his book--the terrain is soaked with the blood of native peoples who fell victim to conquest and exploitation on a nearly genocidal scale.

Gott has chosen to tell his tale in the form of a travelogue, but the narrative of his travels in contemporary South America is only an armature on which he has built an elaborate work of history, politics and anthropology. “It is, inevitably, a switchback journey,” writes Gott, who wanders back and forth across the centuries as he gives us random glimpses of battle, exploration, conversion and enslavement in harrowing (and sometimes taxing) detail.

Spanish conquistadors fought in these lands, as Gott points out, and so did Che Guevara. The Jesuits established a missionary empire, and they were succeeded by the Mennonites, Scottish missionaries and various born-again evangelists. Portuguese slavers were followed by Swedish ethnographers; French explorers were followed by German engineers and Norwegian farmers. Today, as Gott points out, remnants of the original peoples exist only in desperate cultural and material poverty, if they exist at all.

“The Terenos, the great nation that came from the Amazon side of the Chaco,” he writes, “now survives as the name of a railway station.”

“Land Without Evil” is thick with historical detail, and sometimes the sorry parade of conquerors and exploiters is a bit too fast and furious. Still, Gott manages to achieve a lilting quality to his prose, if only because of the exotic world into which we are plunged--a world where arquebusiers make war on bandeirantes, and caciques make peace with conquistadors. Even the place names amount to a kind of poetry: “Nauru, Campo Grande, Aquidauan and Miranda.”

No matter how remote or forbidding, the landscape where Gott traveled and studied is littered with the leavings of outsiders who came as explorers or exploiters, rescuers or refugees. For example, Gott comes across a backwater town on the Paraguay River that is populated by Syrians, and he encounters a T-shirt vendor who turns out to be “a man from Palestine who had once been in the British police.”

Gott, now the London-based literary editor of the Guardian, belongs very much in the rather eccentric tradition of English travel literature, and he is given to whimsy and sly humor that liven up the proceedings.

At one point, for example, he refers to Jesus Christ, simply but obliquely, as “the pale Galilean.” Later, he reflects on the fact that the Spanish, despite their zealotry and brutality, were sometimes unable to keep native laborers at work on their vast colonial enterprises.

“It is symbolic that one of the great inventions that the South American Indians have given the world is the hammock,” he observes. “Lying in a hammock was an infinitely more pleasurable experience than working for some European slob who wanted food and sex all the time.”

Gott went “in search of God and Indians,” as he puts it, but he collided with a tragic history and politics. For that reason, “Land Without Evil” is never merely quaint or picturesque--Gott insists on reminding us of the terrible price that was paid by the original inhabitants of the Americas. Perhaps one-quarter of the world’s population, he suggests, was exterminated as a result of the European conquest of Southern America in the 16th Century.

“God knows,” wrote one early conquistador of an incident of massacre and mass enslavement that symbolizes several centuries of outrage, “we did them wrong.”