Situation of Indigenous Peoples in Mato Grosso do Sul slide image

Situation of Indigenous Peoples in Mato Grosso do Sul

+ INDIGENIST MISSIONARY COUNCIL - CIMI Kaiowá Guarani and Terena indigenous lands, until the end of the 1970s. Faced with the expulsion of the last indigenous groups from deep within the large scale land holdings of the fazendas, known as areas of refuge, and of the total omission by the government in demarcating and guaranteeing the traditional lands of this people, their tekoha, the only remaining option for the expulsed communities was the retaking of these lands by their own initiative. It was from then on that they initiated the process of retakings that persists even today. The consequences were dire in that the fazenda owners with their gunmen reacted immediately and often times by calling in the police force. Kaiowá anthropologist Antonio Benites, describes the reaction of the fazenda owners facing the struggle of the Kaiowá Guarani for their lands and territories: "The movement for retaking/reoccupation of traditional Guarani territory became the focus undertaken intensely at the end of the decade of 1970, during the period in which the fazenda owners organized and initiated two instances of oppositional forces to restrain and to extinguish the movement for retaking of Guarani Kaiowá land. The first sphere of action is the organization of an armed group, known as "gunmen of the fazendas." This feared organization found, for more than three decades, in the exclusive service of the fazenda owners of MS for the purpose of emptying the places reoccupied by the indigenous peoples, in addition to assassination, massacre, for the torture of children, women and indigenous elders. This armed group has acted and continues to act in an identical form in all the indigenous lands retaken in the last 30 years. The perpetrators of these homicides and the contractors of this group have yet to be brought to justice Matam nossas crianças e jovens as jamais matarão nossa ESPERANÇA EXIGIMOS JUSTIÇA DEMARCAÇÃO JÁ!!! and punished. The second sphere of action is the ordering of dispossession of the indigenous peoples by the police force, requested by fazenda owners through the Federal Court. This in fact also occurred in all lands claimed by the Guarani. In this context of retaking of part of the Guarani territory, when the gunmen did not succeed effecting dispossession and brutally murdered the indigenous peoples, the fazenda owners retained lawyers to obtain the eviction order from the Court. It is important to observe that the when an eviction order of the indigenous peoples is carried out in MS, police agents acted and act in a mode similar to that of the gunmen, in their use of heavy weapons; they burn the Ocas (traditional dwellings), they threaten and they terrify the children, women and elderly. For this reason, in the understanding 57
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