Situation of Indigenous Peoples in Mato Grosso do Sul
INDIGENIST MISSIONARY COUNCIL - CIMI
tume
"The land we're stepping on is a
living person, is our brother. It has a
body, has veins, blood. That's why the
Guarani respect the Earth, which is
also a Guarani. The Guarani does not
pollute the water, because the river
is the blood of a Karai. This land has
a life, just that a lot of people don't
understand this. It is a person's soul.
When a Guarani enters the Woods
and needs to chop down a tree, he
talks to it, excuses himself, because he
knows that it is a living thing, a person,
which is our relative and is above
us" Alexander Acosta, the village of
Cantagalo, Rio Grande do Sul.
In recent decades, the extermination of indigenous peoples
is being implemented, with mechanisms increasingly subtle
and effective, imbued with a different content-the premise of
indigenous integration in favor of a unified national identity
gives way to another, a single path to development. If, on the one
hand, there is a certain consensus about the importance of ethnic
and cultural plurality in the country, which generates sympathy
for diversity and its potential in a market avid for variations in
products and in consumer niches, on the other this sympathy does
not revert in concrete political actions of defense and protection of
different cultures and ethnicities by guaranteeing the conditions
of existence and, more importantly, demarcating the traditional
lands of these different peoples, primordial condition of their Right
to live.
The invasion of indigenous lands promoted by various groups and
sectors, is now approved as a model of development understood
as the only one capable of promoting growth and the projection of
the great nation of Brazil. Everything becomes a feature in the new
order development-environmental resources, cultural resources,
human resources - and these are incorporated into a commercial
and competitive logic, from which things are only worth the return
that it can generate and the potential for exploitation. In this sense,
the demarcation of indigenous lands and the guarantee of various
forms of thinking have no place since indigenous spaces are
intended for other purposes, seen as far more profitable. There is,
thus, the massacre, aggression, discrimination and racism against
indigenous peoples living in areas targeted for the expansion of
a rural model based on agribusiness, and also of an urban model
whose main brand is property speculation. In the country or in the
communities indigenous families are disrespected, are confined,
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