Shock troops attack Guarani and Kaiowá community in Mato Grosso do Sul, say indigenous people

Bruno Pacheco and Ívina Garcia – From Cenarium Magazine

MANAUS – Indigenous Kaiowá and Guarani people reported, on Friday, 24, that shock troops of the Military Police of Mato Grosso do Sul (PM-MS) attacked, without a court order, the Guarani and Kaiowa community in the municipality of Amambai (351 kilometers from Campo Grande). Videos and photos of injured people from the confrontation were shared on social networks by leaders of the region, who are asking for medical assistance, ambulance, and justice. At least five people were injured and three are missing.

“Urgent and emergency! Medical assistance help and ambulance! Riot troops of the Military Police of MS, without a court order, attack, slaughter and injure. Genocidal action at this moment against Guarani and Kaiowa community in the municipality of Amambai, Guapo’y Mirim. Dozens of indigenous people wounded and missing, and dead. We need medical assistance and ambulances. We ask for justice”, reported the Aty Guasu page of the General Assembly of the Kaiowá and Guarani People, in a post on Instagram.

According to lawyer Eloy Terena, of the National Articulation of Indigenous Peoples (Apib), at least five people were injured and another three, two women and a seven year old girl, disappeared. The episode comes after a group of 30 indigenous people from the region retook part of their ancestral territory Kurupi/São Lucas, in Dourados-Amambai Pegua II and Naviraí.

“After the retaking, a heavy armed attack began, which started in the early hours of Thursday morning and extended until early this morning, Friday, 24th”, he reported. Eloy also said that the attacks are part of a reprisal of the ruralists to the struggles for the vote against the Temporal Landmark, suspended again by the Supreme Court (STF).

“The more the STF delays the decision on the original indigenous right to these lands, the greater the brutality of the colonizing elites on our lives, equipping the State, hiring gunmen to ensure their invasions and promote violence”, Eloy states in a publication.

Anthropological studies have already confirmed the area as traditionally held by the Guarani and Kaiowá who had a declaratory decree published by the Ministry of Justice in 2009 but are awaiting definitive demarcation by the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and the Presidency of the Republic.

The community, which lives on the side of a highway, claims the Guyraroká Indigenous Land (TI Guyraroká), of approximately 12 thousand hectares, in the municipality of Caarapó. According to leaders, around 24 families live there, totaling approximately 120 people. On Thursday night, 23rd, they had preliminarily advanced only as far as a pasture area, neighboring the strip of forest that they already occupied, and decided to occupy the headquarters of a farm that is inside their territory.

The houseman who was on the farm was released peacefully, as was the occupation by the indigenous people without violence, but according to the leaders, the response from the ranchers, private security guards and public agents was the opposite.

Conflicts

According to the report of the Documentation Center of the Pastoral Land Commission (Cedoc-CPT), by May 2022, 19 people were killed in conflicts in the countryside in Brazil. The number has already reached half (54%) of that recorded in the whole year 2021, when 35 homicides were registered.

Among these murders is listed the death of Alex Recarte Vasques Lopes, 18, of the Guarani Kaiowá people. He was killed when he was leaving the Taquaperi reservation in Coronel Sapucaia (MS) to look for firewood in an area around the Indigenous Land (TI). On the spot he was assassinated and his body was abandoned in Paraguay – in an area less than ten kilometers from the limits of the indigenous reserve.