Barbara Arisi

Europe, do not drink or eat products from the Guarani, Kaiowá and Ñandeva’s apartheid

Por Barbara Arisi Publicado em: 06/06/2017 às 15:46

On the picture, Tove (in a white shirt), Inayê and Ládio in the European Parliament wathc the trailer of the film Martirio (Photo: Barbara Arisi)

Brussels, June 2017

There are those who criticize the boycott as a weapon against apartheid and genocide. But, in various historical moments, the humanitarian barriers have demonstrated that they can make the difference in this world where we increasingly eat, drink and wear what is produced with the sweat and blood of workers enslaved or suffering from humiliating and degrading conditions, far from our metropolitan places. In Brussels, on June 1, a meeting took place in one of the halls of the immense steel, glass and cement building that houses the European Union Parliament to bring together two representatives of the Guarani and Kaiowá people with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and other people that express solidarity with the struggle for survival of indigenous peoples in Brazil. Organized by the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), the event dealt with the serious human rights violations faced by the Guarani people that live in the regions of Mato Grosso do Sul and western Paraná.

The need to create humanitarian barriers in the European Union for Mercosur products, such as soybeans, transgenic maize, sugar cane and its biofuel, as well as cattle meat, have been raised several times. They are products from the Brazilian Gaza Strip, to use the term proposed by the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro and as such are stained by human right’s violation.

I had signed up as a listener, but two days before the event, Natália Carrusca from UNPO invited me to present something at the meeting. I asked my some Guarani friends and colleagues that are specialists in the Guarani people, with whom I communicated virtually, to help me with relevant information. I asked Nhanderu to enlighten me to speak well and beautifully. I have prepared a presentation on Guarani cosmology and I have tried to show what Europeans can and should learn from the peoples living in the basin of the Paraná River, where today the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil are found, and in the several communities in the Brazilian coastline. There are only 136 Guarani Indigenous Territories demarcated and many of them are very small and insufficient for agricultural crops and for a decent living. Most of them are located in the middle of the monoculture desert and with its waters pulverized by pesticide poison. I tried to explain something about the Guarani respect for high forest (kaaguy poruey, in Guarani language) where only the shamans can dwell without risk of dying, as recorded by Aguirre Neira.

I have shown maps and data that prove how indigenous people are right when they say that if they are killed, we will all die. For example, Indigenous Territories have a lower rate of deforestation (1.11%) compared to the Federal Conservation Units (1.17% ) and the Provincial Units (7.01%), according to technical data from FUNAI (2015). Besides Indians being the best protectors of forests, they helped to cultivate and to proliferate ecological wealth and diversity, as I had learned from Ballée and from the Indians themselves. “We do not own the land, it is the Earth that belongs to us,” the Indians repeat and repeat it, but some pretend not to understand them.

The Guarani people have a long history of contact and exchanges with Europeans. Among them, they have adopted the Jesuit missionary violin that has turned into the rabeca, a musical instrument to play in the house of prayer, also used to communicate with the divine beings. Unfortunately, there was no period in the history of Brazil in which indigenous peoples have managed to live without suffering with murders in the struggle for their original land. Both Tove Soevndahl Gant (Human Rights Division of the European External Action Service) and Emma Achilli (Front Line Defenders) expressed concern for the lives of Ládio and Inayê because Brazil is one of the countries in the world where environmentalists and human rights defenders are murdered the most.

Achilli reported that 56 indigenous people were murdered in Brazil only during 2016 and the total amount reached 370 in the last 14 years. Gant charges the European Union to press Brazil because the Union is signatory to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The Brazilian government has the obligation to guarantee the protection of the lives of Ládio and Inayê.

Clodiodi Souza Guarani-Kaiowá’s grave, assassinated on 14th June 2016 (Photo: Ana Mendes/Amazônia Real)

UNPO activist Fernando Burgés dealt with the Brazilian institutional impunity that allowed the historical violence perpetrated against the Guarani, Kaiowá and Ñandeva. He stressed the importance of enabling them access to justice mechanisms, because at that moment they are kept apart event to the fundamental right to fight for their rights.

Twice, I had the feeling that we were repeting the time when dictatorships in Latin America forced leaders of left-wing social movements, artists and intellectuals to seek support abroad to denounce the deaths and prisons. The first was when I heard Ladino Veron saying: “They are killing us with bullet and pen, they are killing my people, with poison, with bullets,” said the Guarani-Kaiowá leader whose father was murdered by gunmen in 2003. The words of the teacher Ianyê Lopes came with tears, but she has also pointed out that many of them, like herself, had studied and circulate now in previously inaccessible academic and political spaces of power.

The second time was when the Brazilian artist Inez Oludê da Silva, exiled in Brussels for 15 years, opened her question by saying that she had survived the pain of torture and three dictatorships: Brazil, Argentina and Chile. She said that she was happy to be there with us. Her words touched me deeply, since I am also a family member of a political prisoner, my stepfather Guillermo Rallo survived 12 years imprisoned in the Penal Libertad, in Uruguay. That encounter linked our Latin American lives, those of Ladio, Inayê, Fernando, Inez, mine with those of our colleagues from the North, to the lives of Tove, Urmas, Marisa, Xabier, and Emma. Together, we were more.

The meeting gave me strength. I hope it gave also more strength to the Eurodeputies from the socialist, environmentalist and left groups that had been present there, Xabier Benito Ziluaga (vice-president of the Delegation for Relations with Mercosur), Urmas Paet, Francisco Assis, Marisa, Matias, Estefania Torres Martinez, Ignazio Corrao, Pier Antonio Panzeri, Ramon Tremosa-i-Balcells and Pascal Durand, among others.

As suggested in the document of the event organized on April 26 by the Commission of Human Rights of the EU, when other representatives of Brazilian social movements were in Brussels, we will present at the Delegation for Relations between Mercosur and the European Union and where ever else we find it necessary the proposal for a humanitarian boycott. Those who live in Europe need to know better the implications of the interests of corporations and companies that take advantage of the political chaos in which Brazil currently lives, with a government dominated by a cleptocracy and one which favors monoculture and the exploitation of natural wealth. In Europe and Brazil, we will keep on firmly rowing, in order to move forward the campaign of the boycott and humanitarian barrier to Mercosur products produced at the expense of Guarani rights. Aguyeveté!

Barbara Arisi is a journalist (BA in Social Communication, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) and an anthropologist (MSc and PhD, Federal University Santa Catarina, with an internship in the University of Oxford). As a reporter, she worked in Zero Hora newspaper. She was born in Porto Alegre (RS) and she lived in Foz do Iguaçu (PR), Florianópolis (SC), Sao Paulo (SP) and Manaus (AM), Amsterdam, Maastricht and Hoorn (The Netherlands) and in London (United Kingdom). She is associate professor in the Federal University for Latin American Integration, in Foz do Iguazu. Currently she is a visiting researcher in the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she studies solid residue management (plastics and organic). She lives with her daughter in Hoorn. In Brazil, she had worked for theGreenpeace campaign for the creation of Extractive Reserves Porto de Moz and Verde para Sempre, in Pará in 2003. For 14 years, she researches in the Indigenous Territory Vale do Javari, in Amazonas, in 2006 and 2009 she was financed by CAPES and CNPq. In 2011, she produced a health diagnosis for the Vale do Javari, for Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) and Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (CTI). With Céline Cousteau’s team, she works for the documentary Tribes on the Edge since 2012. The film should be due in 2017.

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Barbara Arisi

É jornalista formada em Comunicação Social pela Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRS) e antropóloga com mestrado e doutorado pela Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Como repórter trabalhou no jornal Zero Hora. Fez estágio doutoral como antropóloga pela Universidade de Oxford, no Reino Unido. Nasceu em Porto Alegre (RS) e morou em Foz do Iguaçu (PR), Florianópolis (SC), São Paulo (SP) e Manaus (AM), em Londres, Amsterdam, Maastricht, Hoorn e vive agora em Groningen (Holanda). Foi professora concursada pela Universidade Federal da Integração-Latino Americana, em Foz do Iguaçu (PR) e pesquisadora visitante na Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, onde estudou manejo de resíduos sólidos (plásticos e orgânicos). No Brasil, trabalhou na campanha do Greenpeace Amazônia pela criação da Reserva Extrativista de Porto de Moz e da Verde para Sempre, no Pará, em 2003. Há 21 anos faz pesquisas na Terra Indígena Vale do Javari, no Amazonas; em 2006 e 2009 com financiamento da Capes e do CNPq. Atualmente, escreve um livro sobre os povos Matis e Korubo e colabora para o site de jornalismo independente Amazônia Real.