BRAZIL: More than 30,000 Guarani Indians are struggling to reclaim their land from hite settlers, writes Tom Hennigan in Mangatu, Mato Grosso do Sul.
They live surrounded by some of Brazil's richest farmland, land that used to be theirs and that the federal government has ordered to be returned to them. And yet the Guarani Indians of Marangatu live by the side of the road, where their children suffer from malnutrition despite living in one of the world's biggest agricultural exporters.
But even with these grim conditions, the Guarani refuse to move from land they say was theirs until white ranchers arrived in the 1940s and 1950s and pushed them off it.
"White families just showed up saying they had bought the land and demanded the Indians either work for them or leave 'their' land," remembers Adão Ferreira Benites, one of the Marangatu community's leaders.
Many fled deeper into the forest. Those who stayed lived on a small patch one rancher gave them. Then in 1999, emboldened by a new militant spirit among Brazil's Guarani, some of them occupied rancher land and the community, invoking Brazil's constitution, demanded that the government return to them the 9,000 hectares they say make up their territory.
After years of delays they finally seemed to have won back their home last year when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, ratified the return of Marangatu to the Guarani. But ranchers immediately blocked the move in the supreme court. The Guarani, who had begun moving into the areas returned to them by Lula, were swiftly evicted.
Now they sit in huts on the side of the road wondering just what sort of power the president actually has.
The struggles of the community in Marangatu illustrates the plight of the Guarani Indians in Mato Grosso do Sul, the Brazilian farming state which borders Paraguay and Bolivia. Here more than 30,000 Guarani are desperately trying to reoccupy their lands in order to escape the poverty of the overcrowded reservations where they were corralled during the last century by governments trying to entice settlers from Brazil's coastal states.
The result is bitter conflict between the Guarani and white ranchers. Though mainly fought in the courts, it has also involved dozens of killings, almost all of them of Indians.
Under threat from ranchers, the Guarani have little faith in the police's commitment to protect them. "The police hate us. They attack us, shoot at us, kill our dogs and steal our sacred objects. The government does not pay them enough so they are susceptible to taking cash from ranchers," says Valdelise Véron, another of the Guarani's leaders.
"Here history is very recent," says Nereu Schneider, a lawyer with Mato Grosso do Sul-based Indians rights group, ITJE.
"At the bottom of this problem is fear, because the ranchers know their grandfathers took the land from Indians. They thought the Indians were dead but now they are coming back."
Much of the problem stems from the contradictory role of the federal government over the decades. Indians have enjoyed constitutional protection of their lands since the 1934 constitution, which predates much of the settlement of Mato Grosso do Sul. But it was the government that sold land titles in the state to white settlers. Now hundreds of these competing claims to land are before Brazil's notoriously slow courts.
The head of the main rancher organisation in Mato Grosso do Sul says his members are ready to reach an accommodation with Indians but are suspicious of the motives of the rights groups supporting the Guarani.
"Many of these non-governmental organisations are backed by governments from Europe and the United States, countries which compete with Brazil," says Leôncio de Souza Brito Filho, president of the state's agricultural federation.
"When you see that the biggest mineral reserves in the country coincide with the Indian reservations which are now being created, and when you see the amount of foreign money coming in to help set up these reservations, you realise these people are not concerned with the Indians but rather with what is under the ground."
But local campaigners dismiss such views as diversionary. One of the main Indian rights groups is the Indigenous Missionary Council, set up by Brazil's Catholic bishops.
International rights groups argue that as Brazil seeks a greater role on the world stage, so it must be ready for greater international scrutiny. "Brazil has signed up to international conventions on indigenous people's rights and as it seeks to become a big international player, so it must be open to and respond to international pressure," says Fiona Watson of Survival International, which campaigns for indigenous rights around the world.
But Brazil's powerful agricultural lobby has been able to exert far greater pressure on the government than Indians and their supporters. "The laws to solve the Guarani problem exist. What is lacking is the political will because the political interests of Mato Grosso do Sul are dominated by the agricultural industry and they frame the discussion as an economic one, saying how productive they are compared to the unproductive Indians," says Schneider.
Confined on reservations and small pockets of land while they wait on rulings about their land claims, many Guarani are left dependent on the federal government's Indian affairs agency, Funai, which they claim fails to meet even its most basic commitments.
"Funai is merely the government's way of saying it is doing something about the Indian question without doing anything," says Micheál Feeney, a Donegal missionary who has campaigned for indigenous rights in Brazil since 1983 and is now president of ITJE.
"Funai says it is there to defend Indian rights but the government does not give it the funds to do so." (Funai failed to respond to several requests for an interview for this article.)
Many Guarani need food assistance from the state to survive. Even then, children suffer from malnutrition, and alcoholism and suicide are rampant. "All our problems are the consequence of not having land," says Benites in Marangatu.
"I cry every day at our situation. It is a shock to our soul. The Guarani believe greatly in the spirit and we feel like we are imprisoned, not physically but spiritually. The only solution to all of this is for us to occupy our own lands."