For as long as they can remember, the Guarani have been searching - searching for a place revealed to them by their ancestors where people live free from pain and suffering.
They call it the ‘land without evil’, and they are still seeking it. The plight of their tribe today makes it more necessary than ever.
The Guarani have been in intense contact with outsiders for hundreds of years, but have retained their own very separate identity - and with it their, ‘Constant desire to seek new lands, in which they imagine they will find immortality and perpetual ease’ (Pero de Magalhães de Gandavo, 1576).
Over hundreds of years, the Guarani in Brazil have travelled vast distances in search of such lands, and Guarani communities can now be found scattered far from their homelands in the south, across five Brazilian states.
At the beginning of the 19th century, for instance, hundreds of Indians set off on a journey, inspired by Guarani seers foretelling the end of the world and prophesying that an escape from doom could be found in the land without evil.
They marched 500 miles from the south of Mato Grosso do Sul almost as far as São Paulo. Here they were met by a Brazilian army expedition, which suffered severe losses in the ensuing battle and was forced to allow them to settle.
This permanent quest is indicative of the unique character of the Guarani, a ‘difference’ about them which has often been noted by outsiders.
Today, this manifests itself in a more tragic way: profoundly affected by the loss of almost all their land in the last century, Brazil’s Guarani suffer a wave of suicide unequalled in South America.
‘I think of the conditions in which we live - abject poverty, those little houses. We have nothing to eat and yet our people still sing with such joy, with such hope, always in search of the land without evil… We Indians don’t want money or riches. Do you know what we want? We just want enough land to live on how we like.’ Marta Silva, Guarani woman.
[The Guarani’s story, along with those of many other tribes, is told in Survival’s book ‘Disinherited - Indians in Brazil’, available from our online bookshop.]
