From Erth

http://www.indianz.com

Young Brazilian Indians Find Suicide Only Way Out
By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A22 DOURADOS, Brazil -- Later, Jaqueline
Arevalo's grandfather would remember how content she was. He said he had not
seen
her so demonstrably happy in months. She chased playfully after her baby
brother, hummed while washing the dishes, chatted about having lunch with
the
family later that day.



And then shortly before noon one day last month, Jaqueline climbed onto her
bed, tied one end of a red, nylon cord around a wooden ceiling beam and the
other around her neck, and jumped.

She was 13, a quiet girl with waist-length hair and diamond-black eyes who
gave up on her life before she had even shed her baby fat. Hers was the
third
suicide this year on this reservation of 4,500 Kaiowa Indians.

All of them were teenagers, and were guns and not garrotes the weapon of
choice in these parts, almost everyone here says the number would be far
higher.
The day after Jaqueline's death, her 17-year-old boyfriend tried
unsuccessfully
to kill himself. Her 14-year-old sister had tried a week earlier.

"It is a curse to have to cut your children down," said Luciano Arevalo,
Jaqueline's uncle and head of the Bororo reservation here. "We are living in
a
time of a great plague."

Here on the plains of central Brazil, suicide bewitches the young and the
poor, who see in the lives that stretch ahead of them nothing but grief and
unbearable pain. According to news reports, more than 300 of the 30,000
Kaiowa
Indians who live here in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul have
taken
their own lives since 1995; 54 did so last year alone, corresponding to a
rate of
180 per 100,000. Brazil's death rate is 6.5 per 100,000, according to the
World Health Organization.

The Kaiowa often attribute the suicides to a dark magic, a spell that finds
its voice in a rustling wind that counts off the days you have to live. But
tribal leaders, anthropologists, police and a broad collection of experts
say
that this reservation and others owe their despair to the perfect noose
formed by
landlessness, displacement and unrelenting poverty.

With a population of 180 million people and an area larger than the
contiguous United States, Brazil has in its postwar development efforts
squeezed its
300,000 native people into smaller and smaller reserves. The 30,000 Kaiowa
who
live in Mato Grosso do Sul occupy slightly more than 100,000 acres of arable
land -- far too little, on average, for even viable smallholder farms.

Unable to live off the soil, the traditionally agrarian Kaiowa work at the
alcohol distilleries and sugar cane refineries that line the state's
two-lane
highways like grazing elephants.

It is backbreaking work that pays little and requires workers -- usually
teenage boys and young men -- to leave the reservation for months at a time,
living in hostels far from home and from everything they know.

For much of the year, women greatly outnumber men on the reservations,
straining relationships, budgets and families that are historically
close-knit,
officials, journalists and residents said. Men find it hard to adjust,
shuttling
between two demanding, very different worlds.

The unemployment rate on the reservation is more than 60 percent, said
Luciano Arevalo. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant and malnutrition common,
said
Andrea Depieri, a local police officer. Often left behind, adolescent girls
and
young women from the reservation have increasingly turned to prostitution to
support themselves or their families, she said.

"The reservations are like a vacuum," she said, "and the only thing that
fills it is deprivation. People are just lost."

Two years ago police discovered a suicide note written in the sand near the
feet of a 15-year-old boy who worked in an alcohol distillery. It read
simply:
"There is no place for me."