The Gaza Strip of Brazil

"In Mato Grosso del Sul there is an ongoing ethnocide and genocide and the Brazilian State promotes a policy of" extinction of a culture and a people "expresses Bruno Martins, magister in anthropology from the University of São Paulo who spent three years studying the resistance of the Guaraní Kaiowá peoples in Mato Grosso do Sul.

The recurring episodes of violence made the site of Dourados known as the Brazilian Gaza Strip, in the definition of the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 
As in the Middle East, land is at the base of disputes.
The Mato Grosso del Sul has the highest proportion of private lands in the country: 92% of its territory - and indigenous lands correspond to 2.2% of the total area of ​​the State.

Only in the Indigenous Reserve of Dourados, there are 20 thousand indigenous people confined in about 35 square kilometers.

The census of the inhabitants was done by the local indigenous community itself, reported Jaqueline Gonçalves Porto, Guaraní Kaiowá and advisor to UN Women.

Exploited by latifundia and monoculture,  indigenous people mobilized to occupy land and accelerate demarcation processes. While the Guarani Kaiowá use the term retaken, the `owners who hire thugs to expel the natives call them the "episodes of invasion ".

The anthropologist Bruno Martins says that "the resumed are the option of a people who do not want to renounce their cultural identity."

After the creation of indigenous reserves by the SPI and the arrival of soy production, many of the areas taken from indigenous people were sold to rural producers, creating the germ of the territorial dispute under way until today.

The teacher for the USP Bruno Martins points out that the colonization of Mato Grosso do Sul occurred through the "liberation of lands" artificially. "To the extent that the agrarian structure of Mato Grosso do Sul is being created, large estates and indigenous people are being removed to the reserves, generating a growing and epidemic explosion of violence," says Martins.

The resumption and death

Nestled among wide fields of corn, the occupied village of Guaiviry is like an unwanted mole for the owners of the region.

The Indians took the place in November 2011. First, they received an attempt at bribery, money to leave the land.

The second visit was the visit of the vans of the private security company Gaspen. Armed with 12-gauge rifles, ten men killed the cacique Nízio Gomes, dragged his body to the vehicles and fled. The body of the Indian was never recovered again.

Indigenous people living in the area told Sputnik Brazil that the gunmen were leaving the place when one of the men in the group ordered the body of the cacique to be taken away. The gunmen, then, returned to the place of murder, picked up Nísio and used rubber bullets to disperse the Kaiowá Guaraní.

After the cacique's death, indigenous people in the region report that the expert work was done negligently and that police forces and local farmers tried to argue that Nízio had been killed by a relative of his.

The peasants also paid another Indian, known as Dilo, to lie to the authorities about Níz's whereabouts. He received R $ 2.3 thousand to tell the Federal Police that Nízio was hiding in a village in Paraguay - and he also heard the promise of receiving financial aid to elect a councilor. The success occurred in the Rural Union of Aral Moreira, as confessed Dilo himself later. The agreement resulted in the subsequent preventive detention of Osvin Mittanck.

"Because we are human, we do not have anywhere to go, we do not come from outside of Brazil, we are from here, only the indigenous people are not being respected, the Mato Grosso do Sul is the worst State, it massacres indigenous peoples", said the Guaraní Kaiowá Eliseu Lopes to Sputnik Brazil.

Who watches the watchers?

Created in 1997, Gaspen is a company of retired military police officer Aurelino Arce. Although the company was formally registered in the name of his wife and daughter, the ex-PM himself confirmed in testimony to the Federal Public Ministry that the company had 13 jobs and 31 hired security guards.

Even after the homicide of Dorvalino and other episodes of violence, Funai hired Gaspen to do security on indigenous lands. In 2008, R $ 13.9 thousand was paid for the company to do the "protection and promotion of indigenous peoples"

Sputnik Brazil sent a request for clarification on the hiring of Gaspen for press advice from the Ministry of Justice, a body linked to Funai, but so far has not received a response on the reasons and criteria for hiring the security company. Delfino says that the Mato Grosso do Sul shows that the supposed Brazilian racial "éden" does not exist and that the "right to property conceals the possibility that you killed someone". It also highlights that the indigenous people contributed the most to the development of all State activities.

"These people who would be more acclimatized to the sertao are that they were used as labor, human tractors, were used as slaves in the Matte Laranjeira, for the extraction of yerba mate, as slaves for the felling of forests.

In the decision that confirmed the closure of Gaspen, federal judge Moisés Anderson Costa Rodrigues da Silva affirms that the company "is contumacious in the practice of illicit practices against indigenous communities, which shows indications of use as a private militia."

The law professor and director of the UN working group on militias, Gabor Rona, believes that there is a strong relationship between economic conditions, inequality and the creation of militias. And he points out that the creation of these armed groups does not guarantee security. "It is the existence of inequality, of racism, of animosity between different ethnic groups that is the most fundamental source of insecurity."

"The idea that you can protect yourself within walls, in your cocoon of privilege, is a short-term vision." History has shown us several times that there is a point at which the privileged few created walls so high for themselves that all who are outside that wall have no option but to tear down that wall, and the revolutions happened repeatedly, the governments collapsed repeatedly, many times because a lot of people, and usually are the minorities in terms of wealth and privilege, they feel that pressure is being applied, and the more walls, fences and private militias, and tax cuts that the privileged create for themselves, the more they press everything else against the wall, and that wall will fall apart, "says Rona to Sputnik Brazil.

Translated and adapted from sputniknews

https://br.sputniknews.com/brasil/2018060611403683-mato-grosso-sul-faixa-de-gaza-brasil-genocidio-indigena-guarani-kaiowa/