Documentary: Retomadas, A loita Indíxena

Documentary: Retomadas, A loita Indíxena

Direction and script: Xosé Abad
Running time: 22′
A temporary reserve turned into eternal condemnation. Unfulfilled promises of land restitution, overcrowding, racism, and scarcity of means of survival in the heart of a devastated wasteland, transformed into a gigantic area of multi-intensive cultivation of sugar cane and transgenic soy for the production of biodiesel. This is the reality of the 17,000 indigenous people of the Guarani and Kaiowá ethnic groups who live confined to little more than the 3,400 hectares that make up the Dourados Reserve.

Retaking the land and freedom

While time goes by without anything happening, some indigenous people, those who can no longer bear the confinement in the nothingness, exercise again and again a strategy of struggle and resistance under the word Retomada (Retaken). Families who leave the Reserve and risk building their hut in a territory that has already been officially handed over to the landowners but is still unproductive. It is an unequal war, one that pits force against resilience. The night attacks follow one after the other. The landowners’ security forces set fire to and destroy their wooden huts and tarpaulins, rob them of their meager belongings and, even more seriously, snatch and destroy their documents to leave them, officially, without an identity. Nothing stops them. Neither the aggressors nor the Guaranis, who once and again rebuild their barracks, knowing that success doesn’t come by the time spent in freedom but by the philosophy that underlies and feeds this resistance. To take back what is theirs, peacefully.