Early on November 16th, gunmen shot and killed Vicente Kaiowá e Guarani, a father and spokesman for the Kaiowá, a people who have spent decades trying to return to the places they call tekoha. His community says the men who pulled the trigger arrived in the dark, well armed and organized. Police later suggested the crime stemmed from an internal dispute. The Kaiowá insist otherwise.
Vicente’s name now joins a list that has grown long. Attacks against the Kaiowá of Pyelito Kue and Mbarakay have become a grim fixture of life in Mato Grosso do Sul’s southern cone. The communities have endured raids, fires, beatings, and expulsions for years at the hands of militias linked to ranchers, with the state’s own forces often appearing more eager to protect private property than to enforce constitutional rights.
“We lost a warrior,” said a relative after the assault. It was not the first such loss, and no one pretends it will be the last.
The tekoha of Pyelito Kue and Mbarakay were officially recognized as part of the Iguatemipeguá I Indigenous Territory in 2013. Yet a decade on, the land remains undemarcated. The people remain hemmed in, squeezed onto a 97-hectare parcel carved out by a court order. They describe hunger and illness. A place meant to support hundreds of families has been reduced to a fraction of its former extent, surrounded by eucalyptus blocks, cattle pasture, soy fields, and the drifting haze of pesticides.
Their attempts to return home have met the same pattern: first, a precarious reoccupation; then the gunmen. Days before Vicente’s killing, Pyelito Kue endured two attacks in less than 72 hours as families sheltered in makeshift tents. Women ran with children in their arms. Rubber bullets and gas canisters were gathered afterward in piles. A fortnight earlier, the Guyraroka community, also awaiting demarcation, clashed with farmers after pesticide drift sickened families. Such episodes bleed into one another. The details change; the structure stays the same.
Vicente’s death is part of this continuum. In 2012 the country briefly rallied behind the campaign “We are all Kaiowá” after a court ordered Pyelito’s eviction and the community wrote, “Decree our collective death.” The outcry was loud enough to force a reconsideration. But the attention faded. The bureaucracy did not. And the violence resumed its slow, grinding course.
The dead are laid to rest. The living keep watch at night. Federal investigations are promised. Reports are drafted. Yet the tekoha remain unreturned, and the killings continue on land that, on paper, belongs to the people now burying their own.
Vicente leaves behind a family and a community that had asked only to go back to where their ancestors lived. His killers may never be named. But the circumstances of his death — guns in the dark, a stalled demarcation, a state that arrives late or not at all — are already well known in Pyelito Kue. Too well.
