Karla Mendes -
Three years after he was shot, indigenous chief Elpidio Pires cannot shake the smell of gunpowder.
“They came to kill me,” the 50-year-old Guarani-Nandeva Indian said, as he pointed out a scar on his back.
The shooting, which took place near Brazil’s border with Paraguay, was carried out by a gunman on behalf of a local landowner, Pires said. The dispute was over land in the town of Paranhos, about 1,180 km southwest of the capital Brasilia.
“My brother-in-law was shot in the arm, and a woman was raped and had all her hair cut off,” he said of the attack.
“We suffer (attacks) like this every day,” he said on the sidelines of a meeting of indigenous leaders in August in the town of Caarapo in Mato Grosso do Sul state. The area where the meeting was held is called Guyraroka indigenous land, which is also in the middle of a dispute between Kaiowa Indians and farmers.
In 2000, the land that Pires’s Guarani-Nandeva people sought, known as the Potrero Guacu indigenous land, was recognised by the Ministry of Justice as belonging to them after anthropological reports proved the tribe’s ancestral ties.
But the demarcation process was halted after farmers filed lawsuits refusing to leave the area without compensation.
The attack three years ago was one in a long line of violence linked to land disputes between indigenous people and farmers in the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
Seventeen indigenous people were murdered in the state last year, making it Brazil’s third-deadliest, according to a September report by the Conselho Indigenista Missionario (Cimi), a church-linked monitoring group.
Cimi said many murders were connected to land conflicts — because a lack of land rights lies behind many of the problems that afflict Brazil’s indigenous population. The authorities said the true figure was likely higher. “Undoubtedly violence has increased,” said federal prosecutor Marco Antonio Delfino de Almeida as his vehicle passed land planted with soybeans and sugar cane on his way to observe the leaders’ meeting.
De Almeida said a lack of land rights was a key issue: the 2010 census showed Mato Grosso do Sul had about 73,000 self-declared indigenous inhabitants, the country’s second-highest behind the northern state of Amazonas’s 169,000.
Yet they enjoy ownership rights over less than 1 per cent of the state’s territory, said de Almeida. That compares against nearly 30 per cent in Amazonas state, according to Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), a Brazilian advocacy group. “It’s a disproportionate number,” he said.
De Almeida said the decades-long legal battle with farmers over ancestral land had forced indigenous people to occupy other areas to make a living.
Their loss of land has largely been driven by cattle, he said: about 2.7 million people live in Mato Grosso do Sul, the government estimated this year, as do 22 million cattle, according to FAMASUL, a farmers’ association in the state.
And while many indigenous people in other parts of Brazil have sought title over public and unspoiled land, De Almeida said, that is not the case in Mato Grasso do Sul: there they are contesting ownership of ancestral land that was sold — and then officially transferred — to farmers over the past century.
The result, he said, was deadlock between indigenous people and farmers, with the latter refusing to give up ownership without compensation.
FAMASUL said that although its members had legally acquired their land more than 50 years ago, “a significant number” of farmers had had their titles questioned, and 143 properties had been invaded. “These occurrences are an evidence of the legal insecurity experienced in our state for decades, resulting from the lack of a definitive response from the government to
ensure peace in the countryside,” FAMASUL said. — Reuters
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