Stealing Back Home
In Brazil, the battle for ancestral lands is fought one occupation at a time
Centuries after the first European explorers landed in South America, displaced indigenous peoples throughout the country continue to fight for reparations. In the rich agricultural belt of southern Brazil, Guaraní tribes have taken to seizing ranches, erecting ramshackle villages and appealing to the courts for rights to land which was historically theirs.
Brazilian-born Paulo Siqueira and his partner Nadia Shira Cohen came to the state of Mato Grasso do Sul to cover these retomadas, a local term meaning “take backs.” Amidst the soybean fields and cattle ranges hugging the border with Paraguay, Guaraní live without running water or electricity. Ranchers’ hired hands raid Guaraní encampments and burn them to the ground. Rival tribes drown their sorrows and lash out at one another in drunken spasms of violence. Ranchers bide their time wondering whether the government will buy them out while judges fail to enforce legislation that’s been on the books for more than twenty years.
“What most of the Guaraní told me is that they and their parents and grandparents have always been fighting to take back their land. In fact, the government only set up nine reservations in the ‘70s, but 23 more were created by Guaraní themselves out of resistance,” says Cohen. “Some of the retomadas are going on ten years now waiting on judicial proceedings. We did document one retomada that has actually partially legally been awarded land in which ranchers were ordered removed. They are still waiting on more land, however there was quite a different atmosphere in this place, less tension between them, a sense of building for the future. But as far as we know, in the retomadas we have focused on, there have been no legal victories so far.”
A missionary group working with indigenous tribes was the journalists’ point of contact until they could get settled and find a Guaraní guide. They visited several retomadas, sleeping where they could to maximize their time at each site. Taking up temporary residence also allowed villagers to grow comfortable and to stop throwing on traditional garb and breaking into prayer circles every time the cameras came out. Cohen and Siqueira had perfected their immersive reporting style over the years by crashing with Brazilian expats in Japan or struggling American families in motels.
Friends of the Siqueira family, which includes ranchers, introduced the pair to Dacio Queiroz Silva. The successful businessman lives at Fronteiras, some 11,000 acres of pastureland grazed by three thousand heads of cattle. There are also Guaraní, who moved onto the boundaries of several adjoining properties in the late ‘90s and initiated what has become a 15-year legal battle over who has the right to live there. Silva contends that if the courts award the land to the Guaraní he’ll leave, but he expects to be bought out by the government, a conversation that no one in any position of authority seems to be having.
Despite Silva’s apparent willingness to abide by any legal decision regarding land rights, signing over Fronteiras wouldn’t be like spinning off a corporate asset. The ranch was founded over half a century ago by his father. Silva was born and grew up on the land. It’s the only home he’s ever known.
“I think Dacio is emblematic of the ranchers side,” Siqueira says. “His father was a true pioneer of Mato Grosso do Sul, and a self-made man, so this land is also the sacred land of his origins.”
Land rights for indigenous people such as the Guaraní are a convoluted and evolving issue in Brazil. Historically they lived throughout the interior of South America, in parts of what would become Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia. As the forests gave way to agriculture their territory shrank, and the government began to force them onto reservations.
According to Cohen, attempts by missionaries to convert and westernize the indigenous people failed. Cramped within the confines of their new terrain, rival factions living side by side, people began to return to the disappearing woods which had been their home. As Mato Grosso do Sul developed ranchers began to close off their properties, chasing Guaraní off the land. They could return to the poverty and the culrual reprogramming of the reservations, or they could fight for the right to stay. In the ‘70s they began to carve out their own territories, being dispersed by military campaigns only to return.
In the late ‘80s the government finally began to cave. Legislation was drafted to delineate ancestral lands as defined by areas where indigenous people currently lived, allowing the various tribes to inhabit settlements and use whatever natural resources remained. The borders were never drawn. In 1993, in a case concerning tribes in the Amazon, the courts ruled that in addition to current populations, people removed from their lands could claim ancestral ownership rights. It would take more than ten years for the creation of Raposa Serra do Sol, the area given to tribes in the Amazon, to be fully recognized by the federal government.
Fronteiras was the only ranch Cohen and Siqueira visited. Many ranchers are reluctant to speak with the press, and time was short. In the end they chose to focus on Guaraní communities, whose situation is ultimately more precarious than land owners, regardless of how long their families have been there.
The fight for land rights has been violent, and it has been mismatched. Weeks before the journalists arrived, 15-year-old Delsio Barbosa was gunned down by a land owner for trespassing. In response, Guaraní from the neighboring reservation stormed the St. Elena Ranch, built simple shelters, sent men off to patrol the grounds with bows and arrows, and rechristened the land Tekoha Pindoroky. Barbosa is buried there.
When Cohen and Siqueira arrived there was a heavy federal police presence. They had been sent by the country’s Bureau of Indian Affairs at the behest of the occupiers. The rancher who killed Barbosa was never arrested or charged with any crime, an indication of the climate which allows armed mobs of hired hands to attack retomadas throughout the region. Mato Grosso do Sul is the Brazilian frontier with a porous border and little law and order. Once the police decide their own presence is no longer needed, the Guaraní who have seized Tekoha Pindoroky will be on their own.
Mercenary security forces aren’t the only hardships faced by the Guaraní. A retomada doesn’t have running water or electricity. Children can’t get to school easily and doctors can’t get to the sick quickly. Government shipments of bags of rice, beans, and a few other basics no longer show up like clockwork. Occupying a ranch is rough work, but the reservations that people are leaving have been decimated by alcoholism and crime. Off the record, people whispered of theft, rape and murder within the communities, violence more frequent than anything brought about by ranchers and those under their employ.
At a retomada along the Paraguay border, Cohen and Siqueira had split up to cover different parts of the encampment. Suddenly a shot rang out, and Cohen saw her partner running through the trees to take cover. When the immediate violence subsided they learned that a man who had been drinking got into an argument with a rival tribesman. His bullet missed, and he was then beaten and left with a cracked skull.
“We went to do a story and knew it would be difficult to experience first-hand the violence by the ranchers and their hired gunman,” Cohen says. “Instead Paulo was almost shot on an Guaraní occupation site because he happened to be caught up by accident in a family feud that was going on.”
Conditions on the reservations cannot be divorced from generations of subjugation, displacement and marginalization. The courts could decide to pay off every rancher in the state and give the land back to Guaraní tribes, but the legacy of colonization won’t disappear overnight. The journalists’ two week visit wasn’t enough to cover indigenous rights, centuries of history and Brazil’s sometimes unforgiving race towards becoming an economic powerhouse. Cohen and Siqueira will return in between editorial assignments and raising their two-year-old Rafael.
In the contested ranches and farms of Mato Grosso do Sul, settlers haven’t been offered any compensation for their properties and retomadas remain in legal limbo. Despite the decision in 1993 to recognize the impact of forced displacement, there is no set formula to decide what constitutes ancestral land. Dacio Queiroz Silva, the rancher whom Cohen and Siqueira stayed with, is attempting to combat claims on his property by arguing that the Guaraní were migrating from modern-day Paraguay to the Amazon and not actually indigenous. Silva, twice a former mayor and a successful businessman, has hired lawyers and anthropologists to make his case.
This may explain why residents of the retomadas are eager to be filmed in traditional attire, performing traditional rites. The forests are gone, the old ways of living are long dead. Today Guaraní live in houses, drive cars and use cell phones like anyone else. Any legal claims on property hinges on ancestral rights, so people play the part that is expected of them.
Cohen points out that ceding productive land to marginalized people isn’t profitable. Brazil is a growing world power, and much of its wealth has been generated through the cattle and soybeans which displaced the Guaraní. Huge swaths of the country could feasibly be contested by various tribes, including land with untapped reserves of mineral and metal deposits, not to mention potential energy exploitation. Whatever the reasons, the fact that some of the retomadas Cohen and Siqueira visited have been active for ten years suggest that no authority seems to be in any hurry to give them official status as returned land.
“Some Guaraní say they want to be the ranchers, and they feel the whites don’t have the confidence in them that they can,” says Cohen. “Ultimately I think they want more space and to fight for what was taken from their ancestors. There is a public debate that, because the Guaraní have evolved and now have cars and cell phones and no longer hunt monkeys in the wild, that they are not “Indians” anymore and that they should not be entitled to that land, or be so protected by the Federal Government. The point is there is no more forest (it was removed for grazing pasture), so going back to living in the wild is not so much of an option, nor do the majority of Guaraní really want that. However they do want something in between. What I saw in the retomada that has been legalized is that people live simply, off of the land, with more space.”
Since becoming parents the partners have collaborated frequently, bouncing from their home in Rome to all corners of the world. So far it’s been a family affair.
“Since he was three-months-old we have taken him to Japan, the States and Brazil where we worked on family projects,” Siqueira says. “Recently it’s become almost impossible to work with him because of his age and constant moving around. He is always in the frame!”
Changes in the media world have made making ends meet harder than ever, and personal projects have been neglected. This new reality is especially frustrating for two people who’ve worked their entire careers to free themselves from industry demands.
Boston-born Cohen, who first picked up a camera as a teen to occupy herself between chemo treatments, packed in eight years of agency work in New York to fulfill a dream of living in Italy. There she met Siqueira, who was working as a stringer for Reuters and feeling constricted by the grind of the news world.
He had already left Brazil by the time he was eighteen, discovering photography on the beaches of Australia in between surfing and partying. Although he sold his first image to a geology magazine down under, it took years assisting commercial photographers back home before feeling ready to hit Europe and become a news shooter.
Business is still taking precedence over personal work. Cohen recently traveled to Peru to cover the aftermath of that country’s guerrilla war during the 1980s, similar to past assignments with the Red Cross in Rwanda and Serbia. The couple has also just returned from a pair of stories in Brazil, one focused on the negative impact of economic change and the other on abandoned donkeys. But very soon their attention will be shifting much closer to home.
“Although we both have some individual projects in the works, the big new project will be the birth of our daughter in six weeks,” says Cohen.
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