He crossed the dusty plain of his reservation where a forest once stood and stopped at the foot of a lone guava tree. From a branch a girl in a sundress dangled by the neck, her body swinging in the moonlight.
They were going hungry, and she could not bear to watch this. It was killing her soul. To save her soul, she killed her body. That is nearly double the average of 23 suicides in each of the four preceding years. By contrast, the suicide rate for Brazil as a whole is less than one for every 25, people, the census agency says. Only about 2. Indian experts attribute the phenomenon to poverty, the disintegration of families and forced acculturation of the Guarani-Kaiowa in the face of a violent westward push by white settlers, an encroachment similar to that on North American tribes a century ago.
Fewer than , Brazilian Indians are left today, down from an estimated 5 million when Portuguese explorers arrived in The Guarani and Kaiowa then were separate, nomadic tribes, their villages stretching 1, miles from the Atlantic Ocean into what is now Paraguay. About 50 years ago, white settlers began moving west and expelling Indians by violence or by obtaining questionable land titles, often from corrupt territorial judges.
In , FUNAI secured bank loans on behalf of the tribe for mechanized farm equipment and offered as collateral hardwood trees on the reservations. With no farm training or understanding of planting for profit, the Indians went bankrupt in two years. FUNAI divided the reservations into lots and authorized the cutting and sale of hardwoods. Today, about 25, Guarani-Kaiowa survive in 22 villages scattered over 68, acres of largely deforested scrubland.
The fragmented reservations are so small they cannot support even subsistence farming. The problem is most severe near Dourados, a boomtown of 80, people that has grown rich on cattle ranching and soybeans.
