Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
By Lunae Parracho
Three-year-old Sandriely has a look of suffering. She was
born in the roadside camp along the same highway where her brother was
run over by a truck. Her grandmother Damiana Cavanha, one of the few
women chiefs among the Guarani Indians, has lost, beside her grandson,
five other family members: one aunt died of poisoning from pesticides
used on the neighboring sugar cane plantation, and her husband and three
of their children were hit and killed by passing vehicles.
Damiana, Sandriely, and 23 other Guarani Kaiowa Indians are
living in a makeshift camp along the shoulder of highway BR-463 in Mato
Grosso do Sul since 2009. They settled here after their last failed
attempt to take back their ancestral land, called Tekohá Apika’y.
(Tekohá is loosely translated as ancestral land, and Apika’y, the name
of that specific plot, means “those who wait.”) That was four years ago
when they were expelled from their land by gunmen who shot one of them.
A federal prosecutor visited the camp back then, and wrote
in a report, “Children, youths, adults and the elderly are subjected to
degrading conditions against human dignity. The situation experienced by
them is analogous to a refugee camp. They are like foreigners in their
own country.”
Four years later, nothing has changed in Tekohá Apika’y.
The Indians continue living squeezed between the road and a sugar cane
field which is part of the land they claim. Divided into eight huts,
they do not have access to drinking water and depend on meager donations
of food.
Their children show obvious signs of malnutrition. They
live with the constant danger of trucks rumbling closely by them loaded
with Brazil’s rich agricultural commodities, some of which were
harvested from plantations on the very land they are claiming as
ancestral.
I made two trips here, one in early August when Amnesty
International’s Secretary General Salil Shetty visited. While I was
photographing I heard him say, “I feel like I’m in a place where human
rights don’t exist. This is really shameful for Brazil.”
Two weeks after that visit, a fire ravaged the camp, and I
quickly returned. Three of the eight shacks were destroyed, and the
Indians escaped just on time while their few belongings and food
reserves burned. When I arrived I found the community desolate.
“The fire came to kill us, but we survived. Gunmen want to
kill us, but we’re not leaving ,” sighed Chief Damiana as soon as she
recognized me. Her strength is amazing. Even after so many personal
losses, she remains decided.
“The seed of my ancestors is in this earth and I will not give it back,” she said.
The cause of the fire remains unknown but Damiana told me
how, the night after, gunmen invaded the shacks and threatened to kill
the Indians if they didn’t abandon the site. The federal prosecutor
opened an investigation into the threats and the possible connection
with a major security company already accused of working as a private
army for large landholders against other Indian communities.
I went in search of Sandriely, the girl born on the roadside, and
found her crying, still frightened, amid the ashes. Her eyes, glistening
with tears, contrasted with the gray destruction all around, and I
couldn’t avoid thinking of my own daughter Ana, about the same age.
Sandriely stuck two sooty fingers inside her mouth while crying. “She’s
hungry,” her grandmother said.
BLOOD FOR LAND
“We’re taking back our land with our own blood,” said
Getulio Potyvera, a Guarani Kaiowa chief who has received death threats.
I met Getulio in his home in the nearby city of Dourados at the
beginning of August, as part of my first trip. He invited me to into his
ogapeysu’y, a thatch roofed house of prayer. As he told it, there is a
price on his head. His relatives denounced to the public prosecutor’s
office that they were confronted several times by men who were looking
for Getulio, offering money for information on his whereabouts.
On the same trip I toured other Tekohás, including one near
Caarapo where Indians are fighting to regain Tekohá Pindo Roky. Native
women pay a daily tribute at the grave of Denilson Barbosa, shot dead at
the young age of 15 by rancher Orlandino Carneiro, last February.
Carneiro confessed to the shooting and was arrested, but is now free on a
plea of self-defense, while Barbosa’s family is being kept under a
government program to protect witnesses and victims of crimes.
The main victims in the land war are the Guarani, with a
population of more than 50,000 divided among the Kaiowa, Ñandeva, and
Ava sub-groups. Confined to small areas of land or camped on roadsides,
these Indians suffer a long, bitter struggle to return to their
traditional territories.
At another plot called Tekohá Ita’y I watched Guarani
Kaiowa children making and using a toy gun out of scrap metal. Last
April, farmer Arnaldo Alves Ferreira, who was a former policeman,
invaded the camp. Armed with a revolver and machete, Alves Ferreira shot
at a group of Indians, grazing one in the head. After running out of
ammunition, he started wrestling with them and died in the fight. Six
Indians were arrested for murder. Out on bail with a self-defense plea,
they report suffering other shooting attacks and threats from the
farmer’s family, which continues to live on the land legally designated
as Indian land.
“Most of the time we don’t have enough to eat, said
Amarilda Carvalinda, a Guarani woman who lives near where the attack
occurred. She lives in an improvised home with cloth walls, while
waiting for the day the land is returned to them. Her daughter, Marilei
Mboypotyrendyi, 9, had a sad face as she sat in an old armchair outside
the shack.
Everything in recent Guarani history seems to have
conspired to make them an extinct tribe in Brazil today, but they
persist. United around their struggle, they preserve their native
language and their religion, which they practice daily in rituals and
collective prayers.
One night I witnessed and became an unexpected participant
in a healing ritual called Jerokyete. A group of Ava Guarani Indians
tried to heal 30-year-old Rosalino Kunumi of her ills. Suddenly the
chanters had me sit in a chair next to chief Kunumi. One of them asked
me my name, put his hands over my eyes and blew smoke on my face while
muttering in Guarani. An elderly woman put her hand on my head and
chest, and blew smoke on me and my camera. It’s hard to explain the
feeling of being part of that moment with them.
I was also invited to attend an Aty Guasu, or Grand
Assembly of the Guarani people, on a night of baptism called Mita
Kara’í. Through prayers, children are protected from evil and disease.
Discussions unfold in the Guarani language, and visitors like myself
understand little of what is being said. But among what I did understand
were the repeated words, “nhande kuera, nhande luta”, or “our people,
our struggle.”
During these collective prayers, apart from asking for
protection for Ke’grusuguasu, their Great God, they also said that many
of their elders are aging and dying, and they want to return to their
land while still alive to take back their Tehohás occupied by farmers.
“We can no longer wait,” was the final word of the Aty Guasu assembly.
In the past year, Brazil has witnessed a more than twofold
increase in violence against native peoples, according to a report by
CIMI (Missionary Council for Indigenous Peoples), linked to the Catholic
Church. Just in Mato Grosso do Sul, 317 Indians were murdered in the
past 10 years. The report also reveals that there were more than 200
attempted murders against Indians in the state during the same period,
and, according to the Health Ministry, 470 Indians committed suicide.
Survival International calls the Guarani suicide rate
“epidemic”, quoting Guarani tribe members as blaming it on the loss of
land and freedom, and nostalgia for their lost way of life.
