Challenges and contribution of indigenous geography: Learning with and for the Kaiowa-Guarani of South America

The agribusiness sector in Brazil includes a broad coalition between landowners, conservative politicians, banks, industries and transnational corporations and represents one of the most perverse political forces in the country. Because of the erosion of the industrial sector and the accumulation of policy mistakes, agribusiness has become a key macroeconomic player and increasingly responsible for commodity exports. In areas of agricultural frontier, as in the case of Southern Mato Grosso, it gives rise to even higher levels of speculation, dispossession of common land and wide-ranging brutality. Frontier-making creates favourable conditions for the arrival of unscrupulous individuals in search of rapid enrichment and prepared to accept spurious economic and political practices. One of the main indigenous groups in the region, the Kaiowa-Guarani, have a profoundly qualitative involvement with land, nature and life, beyond the reductionist treatment of land as commodity and agriculture as business. Their identity and social experience is directly influenced by the place where the family lived and where relatives were laid to rest. Their culture is marked by the utopic search for the imperishable and virtuous land, although their daily experience is now shaped by fear, aggression, racism and violation of the most basic human rights.