Introduction

News of suicide among the Guaraní_Kaiowá broke in the Brazilian press at the beginning of the 1990s, revealing numbers and indexes that, as well as being contradictory, left no doubts regarding that culture’s dramatic situation.

Detected initially in 1976, the wave of suicides intensified in the following years, from January 1987 to October 1991. FUNAI ( the National Foundation for the Indian) officially registered 69 suicides among the 24.000 Kaiowá that live in Mato Grosso do Sul, a Brazilian state that borders Paraguay. Other sources inform that 1983 to 1996, 258 suicides occurred, in addition to a high number of frustrated attemps.

The Kaiowá are one of the three groups that comprise the Guaraní ( the others are the Ñandeva and Mbüa); in additiobn to Brazil, the Guaraní are present in Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia. The Kaiowá, in particular, originally accupied na area shared by Brazil and Paraguay and were forced into contact with whites mostly in the last century, when many battles were waged in their territories.

The demarcation of national borders at the end of the wardivided the kaiowá into three groups that from then on came to have different indigenous histories and policies

On the Brazilian side, the Kaiowá were subjected, from the middle of the last century, the settlement that aimed to concentrate a greater number of Indians in a constantly shrinking space. This policy had - it continues to have- two clear goals: to acquire areas for colonization and economic production and, at the same time, drive the Indians toward the regional population so as to accelerate the process of contact and "integration". Since the demarcation of these settlements did not follow the criteria of traditional land occupation, many indigenous groups were forced to abandon their original lands and ended up being transferred to reservations set up by federal government organs.

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