Indigenous people and ranchers are dying in southwestern Brazil in a century-old land war sparked by bad political decisions and a failed legislation.
Ranchers have sworn to keep their land, even resorting to hiring private security, but native Indians want what they claim is their land, no matter how long it takes.
Story and photos Carla Ruas | Editor Fronteira
Design Marcelo Armesto
Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil — Dorvalino Rocha was walking on a dirt road inside a private ranch named Fronteira (or Frontier, in English), in Brazil’s Southwest, near the border with Paraguay. It was Christmas Eve, 2005, and he was looking to harvest cassava for his family’s lunch.
Rocha was wearing regular clothes — jeans and a t-shirt- but was still recognisable as a native Indian by his features. Suddenly, his path crossed with that of a car heading in the opposite direction. The driver was a member of the ranch’s private security force, hired by the landowner to keep indigenous people out of his private property.
The car stopped.
Rocha, one of 900,000 native Indians remaining in Brazil, wasn’t just trespassing. His tribe, Nhanderu Marangatu, had been occupying the 22-acre ranch for many years — building typical thatched huts, planting crops, and using the grounds for hunting and fishing. The natives’ believed that their ancestors had been forcefully removed from the spot in the past and hoped that, if they occupied the ranch now, the government would grant them land ownership rights.
Rocha stood still as he watched four security guards step out of the vehicle. The driver, 38-year-old João Carlos Gimenes Brites, reached for a gun on his waist and shot Rocha twice without saying a word. One bullet penetrated his right foot. The other bullet entered the right side of his chest and never left, precipitating internal bleeding.
As Rocha fell to the ground, others from the indigenous community gathered nervously around him. Someone was sent to get his wife and young daughter. When they arrived on the scene, he asked his wife to go and fetch his ID — because he, as a native Indian, had often felt the threat of discrimination and he wanted to make sure that he had the one document that also made him a Brazilian.
In the meantime, an ambulance was called. But by the time Rocha arrived at the hospital, he was dead.
“They killed him without mercy,” said Bernardino Sarate, 40 years old, a friend of the murdered man, as he reenacted the event for me on the exact spot where it happened.
The shooter, however, recounted a different story to the police. In Brites’ version, the car had been suddenly surrounded by several aggressive indigenous people, who were armed with arrows, knives and rocks. Brites claimed that he fired his gun towards the ground only to scare the mob away, accidentally striking Rocha. But in the end, the police indicted him for Rocha’s murder.
As my indigenous guide and translator drove towards the spot where Rocha was killed, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, our surroundings looked nothing like the buzzing Brazilian coastal states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Here, our car was one of very few in a never-ending single-lane expressway — only occasionally did we come across slow moving trucks carrying grains from local ranches.
Through the cars windows, all I could see was a green sea of soybean plants and occasional patches of an Atlantic Forest that had been cleared away long ago for farmland.In the spots without vegetation, there was a red, clay-like soil, that is typical of southwestern Brazil.
Far away from the popular beaches, near Paraguay, the country grows so much soy that it is now the world’s second-producer of the crop, behind only to the United States (although many reports indicate that Brazil is poised to surpass the U.S. in 2015). Big ranches in this area also cultivate other extremely lucrative crops, such as sugar cane, eucalyptus and corn. As I looked around, it started to make sense why the stakes of land ownership are so high.
Between 2003 and 2013, 616 native Indians were murdered in Brazil — an average of 56 victims per year. This means that, if Brazilian native Indians were a nation, they would have a homicide rate of six victims per year (per 100,000 thousand inhabitants). While this is only a small minority of Brazil’s rate of 25 murders per-year, it is still more than the statistics of entire countries such as the United States, Argentina, and Chile. The data was published in 2014 by the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), a Brazilian Catholic organization.
Most of the indigenous’ unnatural deaths occurred right here in Mato Grosso do Sul. This is no surprise. Mato Grosso do Sul has 77,000 Brazilian native Indians (mostly Guarani-Kaiowá), the second largest population in the country, behind the state Amazonas (where most of the Amazon rainforest remains). But in Mato Grosso do Sul, native Indians are legally allowed to live in only 1.6% of the state’s land. While in the Amazonas state, twice as many indigenous people have access to 21.7% of the land, according to the National Indian Foundation (Funai).
Violent deaths of native Indians in this area — which rarely make front-page news in Brazil — can be traced back to one common issue: the struggle for land. Just like Rocha, many indigenous people have died while clashing with ranchers (or their employees), after entire tribes had invaded private property belonging to those ranchers. In other cases, the constant pursuit of pieces of land and a general sense of displacement have resulted in an increase in the use of alcohol and drugs, which in turn has elevated violence within the tribes.
“The indigenous death toll today is a result of native Indians being stripped of their land for decades and decades,” said Flávio Vicente Machado, CIMI’s regional director in Mato Grosso do Sul. “Just look at the places where native Indians have plenty of land — where they have space to live, to grow crops and to undergo rituals. In these cases, there are no homicides or suicides.”
The number of land-related homicides would be even bigger if it included suspicious hit-and-runs, which regularly take place on highways near tribes. A single tribe in Mato Grosso do Sul, Apikay, has lost eight members in the last decade. These deaths are often dismissed as a consequence of traffic accidents, but Apikay’s 79-year-old leader Damiana Lopes, is not convinced that they are accidents at all.
The tribe is located on the BR-463 highway, between the border with Paraguay and the second-largest city in Mato Grosso do Sul, Dourados. Even though the traditional thatched huts cannot be seen from the road (only a wooden gate is visible), the community is close enough to the road that tribe members frequently walk to purchase food at a nearby market. It is on this path that many have died.
“We are targeted by fancy big cars as we walk down the highway,” said Lopes, as we stood in the middle of her tribe under a scorching sun. She looked surprisingly small, but quite fit for her age, wearing a black t-shirt, jeans and flip-flops. On her head was a red and pink cockade.
Lopes pointed to a thick scar on the back of her shirtless son, Nivaldo Lopes, as an example of the tragedy that the group has experienced. Nivaldo was struck by an SUV in 1994, but managed to survive. “But my grandson, Gabriel, was run over and killed last year. He was only four years old,” she said.
Mother and son took me to see Gabriel’s grave on the far back of the tribe. On the way they performed a ritual dance as a tribute to the dead, singing in their native language Guarani and making percussion sounds with handmade rattles.
As recently as 120 years ago, indigenous communities in this area lived very peacefully and in some degree of isolation. They were free to occupy what was then a still-intact Atlantic forest that ran down the border with Paraguay. And although the Portuguese had been in Brazil since 1500, “these indigenous people had chosen to remain away from the cities in order to preserve their way of life,” explained local anthropologist Levi Marques Pereira, professor at the Federal University of Grande Dourados (UFGD).
However, after the end of the Paraguayan War in 1870, the Brazilian government decided to reinforce its borders by granting businessman Thomaz Larangeira the right to extract Yerba Mate in the region, a plant used in a popular Latin American tea. Larangeira soon began employing indigenous workers, who knew the forest better than anyone else. This was the natives’ first contact with the white men’s economy, and it was not very rewarding. “They were employed to harvest the plant in a semi-slavery system, in which they had to work for weeks or months at a time, but were always in debt,” Pereira notes.
After the Yerba Mate plants had been completely extracted from the area, around 1930, hundreds of ranchers came from all over Brazil to take advantage of the very fertile clay-like land. They received incentives from the federal government, which was anxious to feed a growing Brazilian population. Subsequently, the forest was destroyed to make room for cattle and crops. And natives were forced — often by violence — to move onto eight indigenous reservations located.
"On the reservations, natives were treated as if they were being held in concentration camps," says Pereira. “They were not allowed to leave, except to work on nearby ranches. Their tribal political system was ignored and they had to answer to white military officials. And, in one of the worst displays of disregard for indigenous culture, they were forced to become more ‘civilized’ as they were taught the white-men culture.”
In the meantime, the state’s government made a decision that would haunt indigenous communities for decades to come. Local authorities gave the land that native Indians had once occupied, along with ownership documents to ranchers. The ranchmen were thrilled to work on some very fertile land.
It was only in the 1960’s that indigenous communities began to fight back for their original land — or tekohas in their native language Guarani. The first person to speak out publicly about this issue was a small, toothless indigenous man named Marçal de Souza. He was the right person for the job. His father had worked in Yerba Mate extraction for Larangeira until the economy changed and they were chased off the land and forced onto a government-created reservation.
When both of his parents died of illness — possibly exacerbated by precarious health care — De Souza was raised by a religious white family. But as an adult he returned to the reservation to work as a preacher and nursing assistant. In the next few years, at every opportunity, De Souza began to speak out publicly about the expropriation of indigenous lands, as well on illegal logging, enslavement of native Brazilians and trafficking of native girls.
By 1963, De Souza had become the native Indians’ international representative, making passionate speeches throughout Latin America. By 1980, he was speaking at United Nations’ conferences and he even addressed Pope John Paul II. “Our land was invaded, it was taken from us, our territory was much smaller, and now we have no chance of survival,” he stated to the pope, according to his biographer Benedito Prezia.
Soon after, the leader decided to take further action, moving out of a reservation and into a highly contested area in order to lead a resistance movement for a tekoha near the border. Their ancestral land, the indigenous people believed, was located inside the Fronteira ranch.
Long before Dorvalino Rocha had his fatal encounter with a security guard on the very same spot, De Souza had received death threats and stated: “I am a person marked to die, but people die for a cause that they believe in.”
On one warm November night in 1983, he heard a knock on the door of his thatched cottage. A familiar voice requested medicine for a sick father. But as De Souza opened the door, two armed men leapt out from the shadows and shot him five times. One of the shots entered de Souza’s mouth and killed him instantly.
The bullets in his body were found to have come from a revolver belonging to Romulus Gamarra, an employee of a neighbouring rancher, Libero Monteiro de Lima. But by the time the investigation results were determined, Gamarra had run away to Paraguay and was never tried. His boss was charged with murder for hire, but was later acquitted at two different trials.“We now know that De Souza was the first of many native Indians who were later killed due to land disputes,” says anthropologist Rubem Thomaz de Almeida, who knew the victim personally, having studied the area for forty years.
In 1988 there was hope of peace among veterans to the conflict. After a 20-year-long military dictatorship, new democratic leaders had come to power in Brazil and pledged to correct many long-term injustices. In the midst of this optimistic mood, for the very first time, there was legal acknowledgement that indigenous communities had been unjustly displaced from their tekohas, along with an official decision to return their ancestral lands to them and to not interfere with their way of life.
A land compensation policy was put into the new constitution, clearly based on De Souza’s arguments and owed to the indigenous political force that was born with his death. The idea was for the federal government to purchase tekohas from ranchers and return them to their rightful owners — inverting the decision made decades ago, which gave them land ownership rights.
But the tekohas would only be purchased if there was proof that the land had belonged to their ancestors in the first place. Anthropologists were put in charge of canvassing ranches for any clues of ancestral ownership, such as indigenous cemeteries and artefacts.
According to the national constitution, it should have been an easy process and taken only five years to demarcate all of the indigenous land in Brazil. But in reality, almost 30 years have passed, and the process has been very slow and had limited success.
The Brazilian government has demarcated as tekohas only 38% of the 1,047 areas requested by indigenous communities, according to CIMI, and most of the approved areas (98%) are located in the Amazon rainforest- a vast and mostly underpopulated area. As for the rest of Brazil, where there are more ranches and people — such as the state of Mato Grosso do Sul — requests have stalled for decades due to political pressure and the inability of the government to negotiate with local ranchers.
Lúcio Damalia, president of Dourados Ranchers Association, in Mato Grosso do Sul, does not believe that the legislation was a good idea. “Brazil’s territory is already 61% native forest and has many indigenous reservations. If native Indians get more land, what will be left for agriculture? In a country as big as Brazil, to reduce agricultural production is not a solution, it is another problem,” he argued, while sitting behind his desk at the Association’s headquarters, in Dourados.
Ranchers also oppose the federal government’s efforts to purchase their land for below market value, which Damalia says is “a violence into itself.” Moreover, they argue that they have emotional attachments to the land, having raised their children and planted crops there for decades. In Damalia’s view, monetary compensation for emotional damages should not be off the table.
Last, but not least, the group is not convinced that indigenous people should be rewarded, as they see it, for having a different heritage than everybody else in Brazil.
"At this point, indigenous are just regular people, wearing the same clothes and talking on cellphones," said Damalia.“Some natives are hard workers and make an honest living on the ranches. But many just want to take advantage of the legislation. They want free land and free food without breaking a sweat. And that is not fair.”
As a result the result of the controversy, the number of land demarcations has been declining steadily. From 1995 to 2002, former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso officially designated a total of 145 tekohas. In the same amount of time, from 2003 to 2010, the subsequent president, Lula, approved only 79 such demarcations. Since then, current president Dilma Rousseff has signed in only 11 pieces of land — although she still has a few years to catch up to the others. The numbers were published by CIMI last year.
While there appears to be no solution in sight, indigenous people have decided to make sure that their rights are recognised and have settled with increasing frequency on privately-owned ranches as a way to exert political pressure. Ranchers, on the other hand, have vowed to defend their territory, and safety, by hiring security personnel.
In the midst of this anxiety over land rights, Aurelino Arce, a 32-year-old police officer, saw a business opportunity. In 1997 he created a security company named Gaspem in the city of Dourados. It soon became known as the company that would “resolve” any native Indian issue on ranches located on the border with Paraguay.
The company would charge up to 5000 reais (1280 British pounds) per month for a group of armed men to patrol ranches 24/7, in order to prevent further invasions by native Indians. And, according to police reports, up to 30,000 reais (7680 British pounds) to have a tribe completely removed from a private property.
By the early 2000’s business was so good that Arce inaugurated Gaspem’s new headquarters in the city — a three-story building painted yellow and blue, the colours of the company’s symbol. By that point, he had 50 employees attending to several ranches, and the calls requiring his company’s services kept coming in.
Pio Silva and his sons, owners of the ranch Fronteira (now divided into smaller ranches among family members), made the call. Silva had been trying to get indigenous people out of his land for at least 50 years. He had had some success in the 1970’s, with the support of local authorities, but one indigenous family resisted the move, and slowly rebuilt the community with the support of indigenous leader Marçal de Souza, who was then killed on the grounds.
By 2005, Silva was tired of fighting this war. So Arce sent him a team of nine armed security guards in uniform. Their job was to patrol the grounds and make sure that the indigenous community, which had been recently kicked off the ranch, was not setting up camp again. A few weeks later, native Indian Dorvalino Rocha was shot and killed by the security force’s leader, Brites.
After the murder, public prosecutors began to look at the company more closely. They found that Gaspem was already answering three other criminal charges for terrorizing indigenous people. There were several reports from local police stations in which native Indians complained that the company had shot in the direction of tribe members, stolen farming tools and set fire to traditional huts.
It was barely dawn on November 18, 2011, when around 10 Gaspem men snuck into the indigenous makeshift camp of Guaiviry tribe, right on the border with Paraguay. They were dressed in black, wearing hoods over their heads and armed with 12 caliber shotguns. They had been hired to remove 68 native Indians who had, for the previous 17 days, occupying illegally a patch of forest inside the ranch Nova Aurora, which they believed was their tekoha.
The security men found 15 indigenous men were wide awaken, waiting for them, with painted faces and cockades, armed with knives and sticks. To Gaspem’s men surprise, the group had been tipped off about the attack and was ready to fight for what they claimed was their land.
The rivals clashed, and there were several shots fired and some close-range knife attacks. The battle ended only when one of the security guards shot yet another native Indian: 55-year-old tribe leader Nízio Gomes. Scared, the other members of the tribe fled into the woods. By the time they got back, Gomes’ body had disappeared from the scene. An indigenous witness told the police that he saw security guards place the body into a van and drive off.
To the police, Gaspem security men stated that they only had rubber bullets and that the indigenous people were the ones with real ammunition. They even claimed that the alleged victim, Gomes, was alive in Paraguay and that there was no murder to be investigated.
But after the Federal Police, in an international operation, sent a team to look for Gomes in Paraguay, they concluded that he was in fact, dead, even though a body was never recovered. The problem then became how to prove murder without a corpse, in a country in which 92% homicides remain unsolved, according to a 2011 report from the Brazilian Association of Criminology.
But the police investigators soon learned that Arce had bigger, more personal problems.
A few months after Gaspem’s attack on the Guaiviry tribe, Aurelino Arce was surprised at his house by two armed men, who announced a robbery. As they looked for money, the Gaspem´s owner tried to fight back and was shot three times, in his hand, leg and chest. He survived. It turns out that one of the men was his mistress’s lover, and the duo had plotted to rob Arce because she was pregnant and they needed the cash. Arce himself was a married man when all of this happened.
The mistress and the two robbers were arrested on charges of attempted murder. While she was in jail, the police decided to question the mistress regarding the murders by the men from Gaspem. She had no reluctance in telling the investigators everything that she knew. The mistress confirmed that the limp body of Gomes, the native Indian from the clash who had disappeared, had been taken by car to an unknown location. And helped to identify the ranchers who paid Gaspem to ambush the Guaiviry tribe on that day.
Since it is illegal to hire a service to remove indigenous tribes from land with violence, a total of 19 people were charged in the involvement of Gomes’ murder, including local ranchers, lawyers, politicians and rural associations (although they could never identify the shooter). “For the first time, the investigation was able to prove a connection between the landowners and Gaspem’s violent removal of native Indians from their property,” said a local prosecutor Ricardo Pael Ardenghi, who was involved in the case.
After being implicated in two murders, Gaspem Security was finally ordered to shut down last year. A federal court ruling found that the company had a pattern of violence against indigenous people, which is illegal. As punishment, Gaspem’s owner, Arce, was also ordered to pay a fine of 480,000 reais (or 122,887 British pounds). But he has yet to pay the full amount.
"There were several indications that Gaspem’s activity was not to provide security but to provide certain services — such as the hiring of men to provoke violence, to murder and to spread ethnic hatred,” says Mato Grosso do Sul public prosecutor Marco Antônio Delfino de Almeida, who worked on some of these cases. “In reality, it was a legal mask for illegal activities. It was the end of the scale of a systematic and widespread discrimination against native Indians."
The judicial proceedings for the murder cases, however, are still ongoing. And in Brazil, a country known for its extremely slow justice system, there is no telling when verdicts will be reached.
When I visited Nhanderu Marangatu, where Dorvalino Rocha was shot and killed, I was introduced to his daughter, Lisandra Rocha, a very young-looking 22 years old. She was playing with her barefooted children, ages one and four, in the family’s outdoor living room– an area with a thatched roof but no walls, as is common with all tribal dwellings. Her father has been dead for almost 10 years now, but she still lives in the exact same spot inside the private ranch Fronteira.
Rocha speaks only Guarani, the language of her tribe, although she understands some Portuguese. While struggling to communicate, she decided to show me how much her father’s killing is still relevant for the community by taking me (and her children) to the spot where he is buried — a location that is, ironically, right in the middle of the ranch’s profitable plantation, where the sugarcane measures up to 2 meters.
The tribe’s land demarcation process has still not been defined. The group has access to only 345 out of the 22,000 acres that they have requested as their tekoha. The petition for their land was actually approved and even officiated by former president Lula in the very same year that Dorvalino Rocha was killed (2005), but this land reward was later suspended. The decision was made after a judge vetoed a different tekoha, opening a window for appeals from ranchers. The case is now awaiting new judicial decisions.
According to CIMI’s regional director Flávio Vicente Machado, the land demarcation process is complicated because ranchers have a lot of political and economic influence. “They are very powerful,” he said. Indeed, they are now lobbying Congress to approve a new legislation, named PEC 215, which would give Congressmen the power to make decisions related to demarcations of indigenous land (instead of the federal government). “Ranchers also have influence over Congress, and therefore, if this legislation is approved, the demarcations would never move forward.”
In January of this year, the Brazilian judiciary came close to a solution when it ordered the federal government to pay ranchers a sort of rent for the land that is being occupied by native communities. The idea was to solve the money issue, one of the points of tension in the matter, while punishing the government for not doing its job. But the federal government quickly announced that it will appeal of the decision because it has absolutely no intention to pay.
In the meantime, Lisandra Rocha does not plan to leave the ranch, nor do her fellow tribe members, who number up to 1600 — after having doubled in almost ten years. The group has built dozens of traditional wooden huts with thatched roofs on the terrain, some of them with electricity. They have also built a few brick buildings, such as a children’s school and a health clinic. The water for the community is extracted from nearby wells.
“We feel a lot more comfortable since the Gaspem men have left,” said tribe member Bernardino Sarate. “There have been no more conflicts, even though there is some tension between us and the landowners when they come and go from the ranch, because their access road cuts right through the middle of the tribe. But we will not be intimidated to leave at this point.”
Anthropologist Rubem Thomaz de Almeida, who has studied the area, reinforced the resolve of the native Indians to not back down, in spite of what they have endured. "They have a different understanding about land. White people have a sense of property, that involves a business deal and ownership documents. But natives believe that they belong to that tekoha, and that they should live and die there. It is very hard to convince them otherwise."
About 200km away is the Guaiviry tribe, where Nízio Gomes was ambushed in 2011. For this group, Gaspem’s closure has not made life easier. Since then, the ranchers have hired other men to monitor the tribe, which has grown from 70 to 300 people.
The ranchers decision to keep security on their grounds came, partly, due to an episode in 2013, when a rancher named Arnaldo Alves Ferreira was tortured and killed by indigenous men on the tribe Panambi, Mato Grosso do Sul. The death became notorious due to a viral video of the 68-year-old man struggling to breathe after being punctured several times with knives and arrows.
According to police reports, Ferreira and the native Indians frequently fought over a fence that divided his property from their makeshift camp. One day, the rancher went into the tribe to argue and some members of the indigenous community jumped on him and killed him. Six native Indians were arrested for homicide.“We don’t want any more deaths, but we do have the right to protect our land and ourselves,” said Lúcio Damalia, president of the Dourados Ranchers Association.
But at the Guaiviry tribe, the security guards cause fear. The group is settled in a small space, measuring less than 300 acres, only a portion of the 100,000 acres that they are requesting as their tekoha. It includes a small patch of forest, which has a river, but that is no good to them because it is polluted by pesticides, they say. There is no electricity. There are no health centers either, so they depend on a government health team that visits the tribe weekly for medical assistance.
Givito Gomes, 33 years old, the son of victim Nízio Gomes, has taken over the tribe leadership since his dad died. He talked about their saga inside a large, dark thatched hut, located at the tribe’s entrance, which is used as both a children’s school and prayer house. The smaller houses, where families live, are located further inland.
“We still feel threatened by security men, since every now and then they shoot their guns in the air and make verbal threats,” said Gomes, in between sips of Tererê, their traditional tea. “And to make it even worse, they have put a fence around our tribe, so now we cannot go into other parts of the ranch to hunt small animals anymore, which is such an important part of our culture.”
The demarcation process of the Guaiviry tekoha is only in the beginning — and could take up to 20 years to be defined, if it follows the pattern. “But we will stay. We are not afraid to die,” said local teacher Daniel Lemes Vasquez, age 38. We stood up and walked around the community, in between clotheslines and some wandering chicken. Vasquez showed me where Nízio Gomes was ambushed, inside the woods. A group of children followed us.
“We know that another one of us can be killed at any moment now. They would hide the body and no one would see. They have done it before,” he said. Suddenly I couldn’t move. My feet were stuck. I looked down. They were sinking in the sticky, fertile, blood-colored mud.
