Assuntos inacabados: relações internacionais e a colonização dos povos Guarani e Kaiowá no Brasil contemporâneo

Abstract

Recent research has indicated the need to approach indigenous peoples as subjects of International Relations. The study of the relations of these groups with the international system would contribute not only to decolonize the area, but also to improve the understanding of contemporary global politics, particularly because the western model of sovereignty was constituted by exclusion of indigenous political models. This dissertation aims at comprehending how the expansion of the European system of states is related to the reduction of the scope of validity of indigenous sovereignties. Such is a type of relation between political units of different natures. The European system of states is based in an institutional model of an exclusivist territorial sovereignty, created inside the Christian cosmology, dominant in Western Europe. Indigenous sovereignties, on the other hand, are political-institutional models of peoples who live according to many other cosmologies, and that, at a given moment in their histories, have been identified as indigenous peoples. More specifically, this work approaches the occlusion of the sovereignties of the Guarani and the Kaiowá peoples, in Brazil, and the socioeconomic consequences of this process, which translated into successive waves of impoverishment, leading to a contemporary situation of grave social exclusion. The method employed is the case study, with an undisciplined, compared and long term perspective. The contemporary situation of the Guarani and the Kaiowá peoples is investigated in search of causalities in three levels: the global, the national and the local. With an interdisciplinary bibliographical research, this dissertation proposes an analysis of five centuries of colonization in each of the levels; with a compared perspective, the Brazilian case is confronted to colonial history and contemporary situation of indigenous peoples in six countries: Australia, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Indonesia and Russia. It also designs theoretically the sociological mechanism that connects the expansion of the European system of states, the advent and the consolidation of the Brazilian state, the occlusion of Guarani and Kaiowá sovereignties, and the contemporary social exclusion of these peoples. It indicates that Guarani and Kaiowá have their own forms of political sovereignty since the time of conquest, and that the territorial and social scopes of validity of their sovereignties have been reduced due to the advancement of Brazilian colonization. It demonstrates that social exclusion faced by Guarani and Kaiowá communities - manifested in extreme poverty, violence and discrimination - is a direct consequence of the occlusion of their sovereignties and their submission to the colonial situation under the power of Brazilian state and society. It concludes that only the recognition of Guarani and Kaiowá sovereignties, with the production of a model of shared sovereignties among State and indigenous peoples, and the restoration of pillaged lands, has some chance of producing societies of material and psychological well-being, thus overcoming the colonial genocidal State that currently exists in Brazil.