Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
On April 4, 2000, the Terra Indígena Guarani de Itaóca was officially delimited by the Minister
of Justice, Portaria 292 (ISA 2001:772). The area still needs to be physically and administratively
demarcated to meet the full requirements of the demarcation process.
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Although Indigenous Peoples in Brazil do not need documents to have their rights officially observed,
most of the Guarani Nhandeva population in São Paulo, including Nhandeva families in Itaóca, is not
identified by Funai as “Indian.” This is also true for the 150 Nhandeva in Aldeinha, Itanhaém, as it
is for the 1,000 Pankararu living in two shanty towns, Favela Real Parque and Favela Madalena, in
the city of São Paulo, who do not appear in official state or federal records. Moreover, 13 Nhandeva
families in Itaóca have chosen to file land claims as non-Indian
posseiros
, or settlers, rather than
demand their rights over the land as índios; in this way, they can eventually receive financial
compensation for inhabiting the reservation for ten or more years, when the area is finally officially
demarcated. Because of this, and because there is hardly any official monitoring of Indigenous birth
and death rates in São Paulo by the Fundação Nacional da Saúde (responsible for Indigenous Peoples'
health), the high rates of infant mortality among the Guarani are not accounted for in the country's
national statistics, used by the Brazilian government to show that extreme poverty is being eradicated
(UNICEF 1999).
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See Scheper-Hughes (1992) on northeastern Brazil, Harrison (1997) on the Caribbean, Farmer (1996)
on Haiti, and Ferreira and Lang (2006) on northwestern United States.
At the turn of the 21st century, UNICEF estimated there were 50,000 children in Brazil gathering
scraps of food and tin cans at large cities' dumpsites. As UNICEF's The State of the World's Children
2012 report shows with clarity and urgency, millions of children in cities and towns worldwide live on
top of, and survive off garbage dumpsites. See
http://www.unicef.org/sowc2012.
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On the day Adilson died, another two Guarani children, Graciano Silveira and Florentina Gabriel,
who were also malnourished and infested with parasites, waited quietly in the lounge of the Pronto
Socorro Agenor de Campos, in Mongaguá, for a vacancy in one of the coastal hospitals. One-year old
Graciano, who had pneumonia, lay prostrated in his mother´s arms, while four-year-old Florentina
was covered with scabies, a contagious skin disease caused by parasitic mites, and had three visible
tumors on her head. Starvation in early childhood can stop or slow down physical growth and the
development of brain cells.
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Benzetacil is produced by White House, a multinational pharmaceutical company. The active
ingredient in Benzetacil is ampicillin, a semisynthetic penicillin effective against certain bacteria. It
was originally used to combat widespread syphilis epidemics among socioeconomically disadvantaged
populations in the U.S. (African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos), and has, since the 1960s
and 70s, become the preferred medication used in Brazilian governmental and missionary health care
centers for treating most infectious diseases among the poor. It is widely used on Indigenous lands in
Brazil.
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Local hospitals the Guarani children are taken to include the following: Hospital Municipal de
Mongaguá, Santa Casa de Praia Grande, Santa Casa de Santos, and Hospital de Cubatão.
In 1998, a group of 48 Guarani Mbyá who had been camping near the Cananéia beach resort, in the
southernmost part of the state of São Paulo, were transferred by the National Indian Foundation to a
small reservation near the neighboring city of Pariquera-açu. The land was donated to the Guarani by
a German supporter of the Brazilian organized Indigenous movement. The mayor of Pariquera-açu,
however, only agreed to have the Guarani within his jurisdiction “if they stopped collecting leftover
vegetables at the city's streetmarket, and scraps of food at the local dumpsite.” The mayor never
explained, however, how he expected the Guarani to support themselves in the short run on a small
piece of land which consisted basically of a steep hillside slope near the seashore, with sandy and thus
infertile soil, and no game. The Guarani do not eat fish from the ocean.
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It should be noted, however, that the U. S., in the company of Somalia only, has signed, but not
ratified, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
