No One Wakes Up Safe in Iguatemi

Before the sun rose over Iguatemi, the ground in Pyelito Kue was already wet with something darker than dew. Between 4 and 5 AM, around twenty pistoleros stormed the retomada camp and opened fire. When the gunshots stopped, Vicente Fernandes, 36, lay dead with a bullet in the forehead — executed on the access road to his own village. Four others were wounded. Two of them were children. In Mato Grosso do Sul, this no longer shocks anyone. That’s how deep the normalization of Indigenous death runs.

The Engine Room of the Country, the Graveyard of Its First Peoples

Brazil keeps pretending the Amazon is its main environmental battlefield, but the most brutal conflict zone is the soy-and-cattle corridor of Mato Grosso do Sul (MS). This is the glamorous agribusiness showcase sold at trade fairs — Iguatemipeguá I included — while simultaneously functioning as one of the most violent landscapes for Indigenous bodies. MS isn’t just producing commodities; it’s producing martyrs. And the Guarani Kaiowá keep being forced to die for a land that was theirs before Brazil had a map.

A Territory Under Siege for a Month Straight

According to residents, attacks have been happening since the beginning of the month — four armed confrontations in less than thirty days. Always the same script: men with rifles appear at night or before dawn, shoot to kill, and vanish into the plantation grid. Vicente is the first fatality this cycle, but the wounds run deeper than the bodies on the ground. A territory reopened on November 3 has been turned into an open-air warzone by ranchers who mistake Indigenous memory for a threat to their profit margins.

Life in the Ditches: A People Exiled on Their Own Land

Drive along the borders of MS and you’ll see them — entire Guarani Kaiowá communities pushed into roadside slivers of dust, forced to survive between asphalt and barbed wire. Brazil calls it bureaucracy; the Guarani call it slow extermination. When demarcation stalls and protection never arrives, families do the only radical, logical thing left: they walk back onto their land. That act alone is enough to trigger gunfire. In MS, stepping onto your birthplace is treated as an invasion.

Retomada as Revolt: Memory That Terrifies Ranchers

A retomada camp is fragile by design — a few sticks, plastic sheets, a fire stubbornly burning — but it carries a political weight no court ruling ever does. It’s a declaration: We are not disappearing. And ranchers panic at that idea. That’s why they hire gunmen instead of lawyers. No paperwork can erase what the Guarani Kaiowá remember. So pistoleros are sent to do what paperwork can’t. Twenty of them this time.

Pyelito Kue: The Territory Brazil Tried to Erase and Failed

This land isn’t random. This is Pyelito Kue — the same territory where, in 2012, the community released a letter saying they preferred collective death rather than another expulsion. Brazil gaslit them as melodramatic. But here we are again, twelve years later, with more gunfire, more funerals, more children bleeding in the dark. Pyelito Kue is a mirror forcing Brazil to confront its own colonial habits. The country keeps looking away.

A Killing Designed by Policy, Not Chaos

Vicente’s murder didn’t happen in a vacuum. It unfolded inside a system built to make these deaths seem inevitable. Local power in MS is welded to agribusiness; ranchers sit in political offices, politicians sit on ranches, and pistoleros fill the gap in between. When Célia Xakriabá says she’ll pressure the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Police, she’s speaking into a landscape that historically protects soy more fiercely than Indigenous life. When Sônia Guajajara says that these attacks show “there is no truce for environmental defenders,” she’s telling a truth Brazil has spent decades denying.

Two Mato Grosso do Suls: One for Investment, One for Burial

COP30 is happening as the Guarani Kaiowá bury another body. The world applauds Brazil’s climate diplomacy while ignoring that those most responsible for protecting ecosystems are being hunted before dawn. The Indigenous movement repeats what should be obvious: demarcation saves lives. But ranchers frame demarcation as theft. Meanwhile, the Guarani Kaiowá say what no minister dares: “Não aceitamos mais ser tratados como invasores em nossa própria terra.” Brazil still pretends not to hear them.

The Camp That Refuses to Be Erased

After the shooting, after the body was removed, after the children were taken for medical care, the Guarani Kaiowá didn’t leave. They’ve been attacked four times in a month, but they stay. Retomada is not symbolic; it’s survival. Staying is the rebellion. Staying is the last remaining form of justice in a place where the state arrives after the shooting, never before.

Brazil’s War Without a Name

Mato Grosso do Sul is a battlefield disguised as farmland. Call it what it is: a war for land dressed up as “development,” waged through militias, silence, and bureaucracy. Brazil refuses to name it because naming it would reveal the architecture of its own violence. But every dawn attack exposes the truth: agribusiness isn’t just feeding the world — it’s feeding off Indigenous death.

Vicente Fernandes will not appear in export forecasts, climate negotiations, or patriotic speeches. But in Pyelito Kue, his execution is another reminder that the Guarani Kaiowá are not dying passively — they are being killed systematically. And still, even under gunfire, they return to their land, forcing Brazil to confront the lie at the heart of its modernity: a nation built on stolen soil always fears the people who remember.