Survival International has today released two short films highlighting the plight of the Guarani Indians in Brazil, to mark UN Human Rights Day (December 10th).
The film ‘One must have courage’ reveals the Guarani’s determination that their lands, which have been stolen from them to make way for ranches, soya and sugarcane plantations, must be returned to them.
In the film ‘The Gunmen’, Guarani express their anger and apprehension as the ranchers who have taken over their lands employ gunmen to shoot at them.
One Guarani woman states, ‘Imagine the gunmen’s bullets flying around all the time… at night time they could hit a child, a woman, or anyone’.
Many Guarani, including internationally respected leader Marcos Veron, have been assassinated following their return to their ancestral land.
Scores of Guarani now live in appalling conditions in makeshift camps by the side of main roads, or in overcrowded reserves. Last month, Deborah Duprat, Deputy Attorney General of Brazil, described one of these, the Dourados reserve, as ‘possibly the biggest tragedy concerning indigenous peoples in the whole world’.
This week, Alternative Nobel Prize winner, Bishop Erwin Kräutler, described the Guarani situation as a ‘cruel genocide in progress’ which the government is ‘ignoring… before their eyes’.
Guarani spokesman Anastácio Peralta is currently in Europe, denouncing this critical situation. He said, ‘They have stolen our lands, they have destroyed nature, they have polluted our rivers, they stained our ground with the blood of my people. But they didn’t manage to destroy our language, our prayer, our culture, our history and our resistance’.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘On this Human Rights Day, there are Guarani living without access to clean water in tarpaulin huts on the sides of highways, and others trapped with little food, amidst miles and miles of sugarcane fields. The Brazilian authorities must secure the Guarani’s future by granting them the fundamental right to live on their ancestral land’.
Earlier this year, Survival International sent a report to the UN, emphasizing the violence, suicide, malnutrition and other threats the Guarani face.
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