Suspicious Suicides Amid Jungle Tribe

When Lindomar Cavalheiro turned up dead on a muddy roadside, a sleeveless T-shirt tightened around his neck, police quickly ruled it just another Indian suicide.

After all, Lindomar was a Guarani-Kaiowa, and his tribesmen have been killing themselves at an alarming rate for years.

Anthropologists studied them, journalists sounded the alarm, but the suicides persisted--255 reported over a dozen years for the 20,000 Guarani-Kaiowas living on 22 reservations.

And it seems to be getting worse. After a decline from 56 suicides in 1995 to 17 last year, six Guarani-Kaiowa killed themselves in just six weeks over December and January.

Or so police say. Lindomar’s father doesn’t think so.

For one thing, his 17-year-old son didn’t own a sleeveless T-shirt, Cavalheiro says. And there was nothing near the body that he could have hanged himself from, he adds.

“For the police, everything is a suicide,” Cavalheiro says. “But Lindomar didn’t kill himself. He was murdered.”

Lindomar’s death wasn’t the only suspicious one at the reservation near Dourados city. A patch in the endless soybean fields of southwestern Brazil, 800 miles west of Rio de Janeiro, the Dourados reservation has been the scene of 121 of the Indian deaths classified as suicides over the last dozen years.

Police say Lindomar’s uncle hanged himself in December from the leaf of a banana tree, barely strong enough to support a cat. Other official suicides are said to have hanged themselves while kneeling or standing on tip-toe.

Tribal chiefs charge that the two “captains” of the Dourados reservation’s indigenous police force are behind some of the deaths. The chiefs complained to the attorney general’s office, and federal police have reopened nine cases.

The captains, who serve as liaisons between the Indians and the Federal Indian Bureau, deny the accusations. They paint the allegations as a power play by the chiefs, their political rivals.

Critics have offered no specific motive for any of the deaths they link to police. But Indians charge that officers of the indigenous police often treat people brutally and sometimes a death results.

An Associated Press reporter and photographer were allowed onto the Dourados reservation on condition they travel in the company of one of the captain’s brothers, so it was difficult to find people willing to talk freely about the deaths.

No matter whether a particular case is a suicide or homicide, the violent deaths reflect a clash of values and lifestyles, of tribal traditions and Western influence. The future of the Guarani-Kaiowa--and other Brazilian tribes--may ride on the outcome.

The conflict became apparent in the 1950s, when Brazilians began moving from the Atlantic coast into the nation’s lightly populated interior--and traditional Indian lands.

In Dourados, the now-defunct Indian Protection Service created the post of “captain” in what many feel was an attempt to undermine the authority of chiefs and weaken Indian communities.

Luciano Arevalo is a captain as well as a minister at the God Is Love evangelical church on the reservation. He considers the captains the community’s true leaders and the chiefs essentially spiritual guides.

“We are being called criminals by some guys who have appointed themselves chiefs, and the press is supporting them just to pit Indian against Indian,” Arevalo says.

Guarani-Kaiowa chiefs generally inherit the title from their fathers. But the Indians who originally were brought to Dourados came from many different villages, and it appears Arevalo is correct that at least some “chiefs” are self-anointed.

Many Guarani-Kaiowa, in turn, question whether Arevalo is even an Indian, pointing to his Western features.

The other captain, Ramao Machado da Silva, is a true Indian--but also an outsider. In cowboy shirt, jeans and boots, he looks every inch the prosperous rancher as he steps from his brand new pickup truck, cellular phone in hand.

Da Silva is a Terena Indian, whose tribe was put on the reservation in the 1950s to teach the Guarani-Kaiowa how to farm. Although the Terenas account for just 30% of the reservation’s 8,900 residents, their assimilation of Western culture has given them influence beyond their numbers.

“There are Indians who are Indians and there are Indians who aren’t Indians anymore,” says Anastacio Peralto, a Guarani-Kaiowa. “The ones who aren’t will take advantage of others whenever they can, and the people who pay most for this are the humble.”

For Maucir Pauletti, legal advisor to the Roman Catholic-linked Indigenous Missionary Council, the murder-or-suicide debate is beside the point.

“The internal violence has the same causes,” he says.

Among them are the loss of ancestral lands, the encroachment of Western society and the erosion of traditional beliefs.

Originally hunter-gatherers, the Guarani-Kaiowa once roamed over 35,000 square miles of thick forests in southern Mato Grosso do Sul state and western Paraguay.

Today, the forest has been cut down to plant soybeans, and the Guarani-Kaiowa are confined to 22 reservations that together comprise less than 1% of their ancestral lands.

Until about two decades ago, the Guarani-Kaiowa lived in enormous grass-roofed houses called Ogajekutu. Now the grass used for roofing is scarce, and shelter often is little more than a tarpaulin-covered lean-to.

Disease and malnutrition are widespread--7% of the Guarani-Kaiowa have tuberculosis.

The encroachment of Western society is most evident in the Dourados reservation, whose 8,719 acres are barely three miles from the center of Dourados city.

Indians slip into roadside bars and leave with bottles of the sugar-cane liquor cachaca wrapped in newspaper, despite a law that bans the sale of alcohol to Indians.

Evangelical churches dot the reservation, and many local farmers rent Indian land in exchange for part of the harvest.

For the Guarani-Kaiowa, about the only salaried work available is in the sugar-cane fields of distilleries 125 miles to the south.

The work keeps the Indians away from home during the six-month harvest. When it ends, they return to unplanted fields and often go hungry until something grows, although the government provides a limited food allowance.

“When there is no work at the sugar-cane fields, that’s when the suicides begin,” says da Silva, who arranges jobs at the distilleries, reportedly in return for 10% of wages. “People drink more and go hungry. Most of the suicides are linked to family problems and to drinking.”

The Guarani-Kaiowa says it is more than that.

“In our language there’s a word, nhebasu, that doesn’t translate into Portuguese. It’s a word that covers a lot of things that the white man’s language doesn’t,” says Salvador Sanchez, whose 20-year-old nephew killed himself a few years ago.

“The white man has sadness, despair, difficulty, but nhebasu is more than that. The Indian feels nhebasu, and then he kills himself.”