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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
A Guarani-Kaiowá leader standing on occupied land that they are attempting to reclaim. The communities receive death threats and have experienced several violent attacks by hired gunmen in the past.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
A Guarani-Kaiowá leader standing on occupied land that they are attempting to reclaim. The communities receive death threats and have experienced several violent attacks by hired gunmen in the past.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
A Guarani-Kaiowá youth living on occupied land that they are attempting to reclaim. The communities receive death threats and have experienced several violent attacks by hired gunmen in the past.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
A Guarani-Kaiowá girl, blonde in her hair from malnutrition, is seen outside her ramshackle home in a roadside camp.
The Guarani-Kaiowá are refugees in their own country.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
Prayer Ceremony
Community leaders are seen performing a prayer ceremony where they chant and pray for evil spirits to leave their land.
For as long as they can remember, the Guarani have been searching for a place revealed to them by their ancestors where people live free from pain and suffering, which they call ‘the land without evil’.
Profoundly affected by the loss of almost all their land in the last century, the Guarani-Kaiowá suffer a wave of suicide unequalled in Latin-America.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
Roadside Camp.
The loss and destruction of their lands have been at the root of the Guarani’s suffering.
Many have succumbed to mental anguish. Figures reveal that, on average, at least one Guarani has committed suicide every week since the start of this century. According to Brazil’s Health Ministry, 56 Guarani Indians committed suicide in 2012 (the actual figures are likely to be higher due to under-reporting.)
The majority of the victims are between 15 and 29 years old, but the youngest recorded victim was just 9 years old.
The Guarani are committing suicide because we have no land, said a Guarani man. In the old days, we were free. Now we are no longer. So our young people think there is nothing left.
They sit down and think, they lose themselves and then they commit suicide.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
A thin fence separates the Guarani-Kaiowá indians from their ancestral land, which has been occupied by industrial agriculture-corporations who use it to grow sugarcane.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
A Guarani-Kaiowá mother is seen next to her ramshackle home by the roadside. The only option other than living on a reserve, is to live on small patches by the roadside. Many choose this in order to be close to their ancestral land which they have a spiritual connection to.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
Three Guarani-Kaiowá children are seen sitting in a sofa at the edge of their occupied land. They are watching as trucks drive past, to see whether the drivers throw empty bottles out of the window. Plastic bottle recycling is their family´s only source of income.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
Guarani Leader Murdered
Guarani leader Marinalva Manoel (left) was raped and stabbed to death after campaigning for her tribe's ancestral land.
Guarani leaders are frequently attacked and killed by gunmen employed by the ranchers who are occupying indigenous land and earning huge profits from sugarcane, soya and cattle whilst the Guarani are squeezed into reserves and roadside camps.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
The Apy Ka’y community’s only water source has been polluted by chemicals used to spray soya and sugarcane plantations.
When it rained, we drank dirty water like dogs, says Damiana Carvalho - a community leader.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
In the past few years, Damiana’s husband and three of her sons have been run over and killed on the highway.
They are buried on their ancestral land, which is now a fenced-off sugar cane plantation.
Damiana risks her life in breaching the area in order to pray at their gravesides.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
They were my three warriors, says Damiana, of her sons who were killed on the road.
The location of their graves was a factor in Damiana’s decision to carry out the retomada (land re-occupation) here.
We decided to return to the land where three of our children are buried, she said.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
Damiana trespasses into a sugarcane farm and explains how vast their forests used to be in this area, before it became sugarcane plantations.
Sugarcane is used for ethanol production which Brazil is the world´s second largest producer of. Petrobras (see back of shirt) is a major actor in this industry. Petrobras the most profitable company in the Brazilian economy and one of the largest multinational companies in Latin-America.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
A Guarani-Kaiowá man stand watching as a trucks filled with sugarcane grown on his ancestral land, leaves for export.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
A Guarani-Kaiowá boy living in an overcrowded reservation. In these "rural slums" alcoholism has become rampant, suicide rates are extremely high and internal violence is increasing.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
A boy with a toy bulldozer living on occupied land.
The bulldozer is more than just a toy in this context. It is used as an instrument for narrating to the young the time before and after bulldozers came and destroyed their forests.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
In an interview, a father points to his naked son and says: "look at the colour of our skin. Now look at the colour of the ground. Is it not obvious that we belong to this land?".
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
An elederly Guarani-Kaiowá woman standing on occupied land that they are attempting to reclaim. The communities receive death threats and have experienced several violent attacks by hired gunmen in the past.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
In November 2014 Guarani leader Marinalva Manoel was raped and stabbed to death after campaigning for her tribe's ancestral land. She was found in a roadside ditch.
Guarani leaders are frequently attacked and killed by gunmen employed by the ranchers who are occupying indigenous land and earning huge profits from sugarcane, soya and cattle whilst the Guarani are squeezed into reserves and roadside camps.
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© 2019 Paul Patrick Borhaug
Guarani-Kaiowá communities have had their camps set fire to several times. The last fire in Apy´kay camp was reported to have started on the São Fernando sugarcane plantation and mill that occupy their ancestral land.
It was not the first time the camp had been engulfed by flames; in September 2009, gunmen set the Apy Ka’y shelters alight and attacked members of Damiana’s community.
The Guarani now say that the characteristic reddish colour of the earth is tinted by the spilled blood of their people.
Public Story
Paradise Lost / The Guarani Kaiowà
Credits:
paul patrick borhaug
Date of Work: 03/14/17 - 07/11/17
Updated: 03/26/19
Paradise Lost
The name of the tribe Guarani-Kaiowá means ‘forest people’. The Brazilian state they live in, Mato Grosso do Sul, means ‘Thick Forest of the South’. Today, there are no forests left and the ‘forest people’ are without land or human rights.
Brazil is the second largest producer of soybeans in the world and has one of the largest biofuel industries, in which sugarcane plays an important part. Ranching, soybean-, and sugarcane industries have taken over virtually all of the Guarani-Kaiowá´s land. On its way to becoming the world´s sixth largest economy, Brazil has left its obligations to human rights behind.
The plight of the indigenous Guarani-Kaiowá tribe is largely unknown to the world outside the agricultural state of Mato Grosso do Sul. The bloody history of this tribe is one that continues today, 500 years after the first colonisation of their land. In Mato Grosso do Sul alone, the Guarani-Kaiowá people once occupied a homeland of 350,000 square kilometers worth of rainforests and plains. But their territories have been subject to government-promoted colonisation by farmers for over a century. Today, most Guarani-Kaiowá live in appaling conditions in small, overcrowded reserves, where alcoholsim has become rampant.
The tribe is deeply connected to their land on a spiritual level. Profoundly affected by the loss of their ancestral land, the tribe today has Latin-Americas highest suicide rates, suffers severely from hunger and malnutrition, in addtion to extremely high levels of infant mortality.
Countless Guarani-Kaiowá who have challenged the occupation of their land by large-scale industrial companies, ranchers of farmers, have been murdered as a result. In this Brazilian ‘wild west’ ruthless ‘land-owners’ often employ gunmen to defend ‘their’ properties – meaning murdering any indigenous people on it. Still, the Guarani-Kaiowá frequently do re-occupations of their land, although they know they are endangering their lives by doing so. Anthropologists refer to the systematic abuse towards the Guarani-Kaiowá as “genocide”.
The Guarani-Kaiowá say they will continue their struggle for their land “until the last indian falls”.
By Paul Patrick Borhaug —
