TEN YEAR OLD Fortunata Escobar stayed at home one Sunday last August while her older sister went down to the river to wash the family's clothes. Alone in the house, she took a leather cord, tied it to the roof, and hanged herself. She was found several hours later, her younger sister trying at her feet.
Fortunata's suicide is just one in a wave of suicides which has swept the Guarani people, Brazil's second largest indigenous tribe who live in the western state of Mato Grosso do Sol. Last year 54 people, almost all of them young people, committed suicide out of a population of 30,000 - the equivalent, in Ireland, of 9,000 deaths.
"It is as though people no longer die of natural causes," says Mr Rosalino Ortiz, a Guarani leader who arrives in Dublin today. "We are so few. If things, carry on this way, there will be none of us left," he adds.
Last year, 18 people committed suicide in his village of Jacarey, a tiny settlement of 2,000 people, including 8 year old Analise Duarte, who hanged herself.
"The families are completely in "despair", said Mr Maucir Pauletti, a lawyer with the Catholic Church's Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), who has worked with the Guarani for eight years and is travelling with Mr Ortiz. "And for every suicide there are at least three attempts - hangings or poisonings or slashed wrists. The family takes them to hospital, but then they try again and again until they succeed."
Mr Ortiz has been sent to Europe by the Guarani assembly to explain the tragedy of his people and ask for Irish support in enforcing their rights. The problem, he says, is the loss of ancestral lands.
Two hundred years ago, the Guarani lived on a territory twice the size of Ireland, hunting, fishing and farming. Over the past 50 years they have been forced by large landowners and cattle ranchers off their lands onto 22 small reserves - a mere one per cent of their original territory.
"If they could, they would kill us just to get our land," says Mr Ortiz of neighbouring landowners.
Today, the Guarani live in tiny wooden shacks in communities wracked by cholera, tuberculosis and malnutrition. They farm on, plots too small to sustain life. Husbands and young men go out to work, travelling up to 200 km to work on 45 day contracts on sugar cane plantations or cattle ranches for as little as £1.65 for a 12 hour day.
For the Guarani, who are deeply religious, land is a gift from God. "We're part of the land and the land is a part of us", a Guarani woman told CIMI. "That's the reason we cannot live without our land."
Pentecostal sects, predicting the end of the world by the year 2000, have also deepened the sense of despair.
"Young people they have no future," explains Mr Oritz. "All they see ahead is hard labour. They feel our culture is being lost." That is why, he says, his own son committed suicide last year at the age of 17.
Working with Mr Pauletti and other lawyers from CIMI, which is supported by the overseas agencies, Christian Aid and Trocaire, the Guarani are using the courts win back their land. A third has been legally recognised as, theirs.
But even this is under threat. One community of 50 families - which has already lost its lands' three times in the past decade - has been ordered off their land again by a Sao Paulo tribunal under a new amendment giving landowners the right to challenge tribal land titles. They say, in a community letter signed by 14 indigenous leaders, that they will commit collective suicide if they are forced to leave.
"The only way to stop the suicides is to reclaim their traditional land," says Mr Pauletti. "That is the only hope. Otherwise we may be seeing, in a few years' time, collective suicides of up to 100 Guarani Indians.