Land dispossession drove Guarani-Kaiowá suicide rates to sixty times the national average

Evidence

In disputed territories, indigenous people sometimes fight with bows and arrows, or clubs. The cowboys always use bullets. They may not have the federal government on their side, but they have enough to get the job done. In the Guarani-Kaiowá community, this dynamic had led indigenous people to slowly kill themselves. Over the previous three decades, members of this tribe had committed suicide at sixty times the national average. As June 2013 began, I was sitting in a hut with Alda Silva Kunha Tupa Rendyi, listening to her explain why they no longer wanted to live. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 330

Categorization

• QUESTION: This statistic begs deeper investigation into the specific mechanisms connecting land theft to the suicide epidemic among this community.