Six children have starved to death this year on a poverty-stricken Indian reserve in central Brazil and officials warned more could die in a scandal that has shocked South Americas biggest country.
About 11.500 traditionally nomadic Indians are crammed onto a reservation in Mato Grosso do Sul state. Infant mortality and suicides rates are up to three times higher than national averages on the reservation, originally created to house 300 people.
– It has become a concentration camp, said Senator Delcidio Amaral of Mato Grosso do Sul, upper-house leader for the ruling Workers Party (PT), adding: – Our Indian policy has gone wrong. Something is going wrong if so many children are dying, and it could get worse.
Senators and local officials at a congressional hearing warned Indians could invade local farms if they did not get land and assistance to help end their “human confinement.”
Pictures of dead Indian children published over the last two weeks have shocked Brazilians after center left President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva promised to improve conditions for indigenous communities that have suffered centuries of abuse.
Brazils Congress promised a commission to investigate malnutrition and overcrowding on reservations. Federal officials said they would create a group to coordinate provision of health care, benefits and infrastructure.
Indian agency officials, and activists, said more aid and assistance would only dull the pain in Dourados.
– The structural problem is lack of land, they are completely surrounded by fields of soya,’ said Mercio Pereira Gomes, head of the governments Funai Indian agency which oversees Indian reserves.
Brazils Indian population has grown from 400.000 at the end of the 1980s to 734.000 in the latest census in 2000.
The growth has strained the reservation system and Indians want to move onto new ancestral lands – as is their right under Brazil’s constitution.
There were an estimated 6 million Indians in Brazil when the Portuguese arrived in 1500 and brought abuse and illnesses.
The 12-square-mile Dourados reservation was created 90 years ago in an area of savannah and forest now converted into one of the worlds largest grains growing areas.
The Kaiowa-Guarani Indians want more land to return to traditional hunting and gathering activities. That puts them at odds with landowners driving economic growth with soy exports.
Other reservations in Mato Grosso do Sul have occupied local farms and ranches at gunpoint to get land.
Kilde: The Push Journal
