Situation of Indigenous Peoples in Mato Grosso do Sul
INDIGENIST MISSIONARY COUNCIL - CIMI
managing internal conflicts between the extended families, who
went through a process of dividing of the reserve. It is necessary
to emphasize that some of these external agents were capable of
acting with a certain degree of impartiality, but in the majority of
cases were extremely authoritarian and prejudiced in relation to
the indigenous mode of organization.
In any case, they exercised major interventionary powers and
determination in the resolution of internal conflicts, support and
use of political force often times being arbitrary, which made
possible the silencing of conflicts or the imposition of arrangements
among the population that lived in the reserve.
This attitude entered into frontal confrontation with the
Kaiowa and Guarani social organization. In the political system of
these indigenous peoples most resolutions are restricted to the
scope of the kinship group, led by a married couple who are elders
- ñamõi and jary'i, who eschew any recourse to coercion to impose
a following of orders, because all decision making processes pass
through counseling, convincement and the building of consensus.
The compulsory imposition of coexistence in overpopulated
reserves generates numerous social problems, such as lack of land
for planting, lack of alternatives for income generation, forced
coexistence with extended families led by the politically disaffected,
an environment of life unfavorable to practice of rituals necessary
to promotion of living together in harmony, high rates of violence,
etc. Many indigenous peoples speak of social disorganization in the
reserve, recognizing that leaders are already unable to succeed
in maintaining unity and motivation among the people to seek
coexistence oriented by ethnic-religious values - teko porã.
At present the official indigenist agency Funai has absented
itself almost totally from the reserves and from the most direct
interference in the political organization of the reserves. This is
due to various reasons such as: a) changes in national indigenist
legislation; b) massive entry by other institutions (National Health
Foundation - FUNASA; Secretariats at the Prefecture and State
level of MS, NGOs, Universities, missions, Pentecostal churches
both indigenous and non-indigenous, etc.); c) the degree of
internal complexity being reached in the reserves, complicating
the coordination of political processes. The extended families that
live in the reserves are left to their own fates, their own internal
political organization entering into collapse and the problems
ballooning into levels never before imagined. The state is flagrantly
absent from its responsibilities for a resolution to the problems
created by it.
The actions for regularizing the land issues that would resolve
the problem of many communities gathered in the reserves
remains tied up in the state bureaucracy and the social safety of
the population gathered in the reserves is found compromised,
despite the voluminous investments in social programs that do not
result in the strengthening of the families and the promotion of
more harmonious coexistence.
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