Brazil's Guarani Indians killing themselves over loss of ancestral land
Brazil's Guarani Indians killing themselves over loss of ancestral land
Arson attacks and eviction at gunpoint for plantations driving many to despair and take their own lives
John Vidal
Wednesday 18 May 2016 12.18 EDT
The small Apy Ka’y community of around 150 Guarani Indians has lived in squalor by the side of Highway BR 463 in southern Brazil since 2009. Since then, they have been forced out three times by unknown gunmen, had their makeshift camp burned down twice by arsonists and three young people from the group have killed themselves.
Each time they were intimidated they returned and reoccupied their last patch of land but last month a Brazilian judge ordered the Apy Ka’y community to permanently move off the land that was theirs for hundreds of years but was seized without compensation by wealthy plantation owners in the 1970s.
“It will be a death sentence,” says anthropologist and community leader Tonico Benites Guarani who estimates that 1,000, mostly young, Guarani, have killed themselves in the last 10 years throughout Brazil – hundreds of times more than the average Brazilian suicide rate, and unequalled among all other indigenous peoples in Latin America.
But such is depth of despair and hopelessness in the tribe which has lost nearly 95% of its ancestral land to industrial scale biofuels, sugar cane and soya plantations that the true number of suicides could be many more, says Tonico .
“So many young Guarani people commit suicide. It’s around one a week. The time comes when you have had enough of waiting (for change). You work yourself up with hope, then the courts dash your hopes. Your family suffers with hunger and malnutrition, the despair increases, there is no security, no hope, you are not sure of life improving. It is very sad,” he says.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/18/brazils-guarani-indians-killing-themselves-over-loss-of-ancestral-land
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