By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service

DOURADOS, Brazil -- Later, Jaqueline Arevalo's grandfather would remember how content she was. He said he had not seen her so demonstrably happy in months. She chased playfully after her baby brother, hummed while washing the dishes, chatted about having lunch with the family later that day.

And then shortly before noon one day last month, Jaqueline climbed onto her bed, tied one end of a red, nylon cord around a wooden ceiling beam and the other around her neck, and jumped.

She was 13, a quiet girl with waist-length hair and diamond-black eyes who gave up on her life before she had even shed her baby fat. Hers was the third suicide this year on this reservation of 4,500 Kaiowa Indians.

All of them were teenagers, and were guns and not garrotes the weapon of choice in these parts, almost everyone here says the number would be far higher. The day after Jaqueline's death, her 17-year-old boyfriend tried unsuccessfully to kill himself. Her 14-year-old sister had tried a week earlier.

"It is a curse to have to cut your children down," said Luciano Arevalo, Jaqueline's uncle and head of the Bororo reservation here. "We are living in a time of a great plague."

Here on the plains of central Brazil, suicide bewitches the young and the poor, who see in the lives that stretch ahead of them nothing but grief and unbearable pain. According to news reports, more than 300 of the 30,000 Kaiowa Indians who live here in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul have taken their own lives since 1995; 54 did so last year alone, corresponding to a rate of 180 per 100,000. Brazil's death rate is 6.5 per 100,000, according to the World Health Organization.

The Kaiowa often attribute the suicides to a dark magic, a spell that finds its voice in a rustling wind that counts off the days you have to live. But tribal leaders, anthropologists, police and a broad collection of experts say that this reservation and others owe their despair to the perfect noose formed by landlessness, displacement and unrelenting poverty.

With a population of 180 million people and an area larger than the contiguous United States, Brazil has in its postwar development efforts squeezed its 300,000 native people into smaller and smaller reserves. The 30,000 Kaiowa who live in Mato Grosso do Sul occupy slightly more than 100,000 acres of arable land -- far too little, on average, for even viable smallholder farms.

Unable to live off the soil, the traditionally agrarian Kaiowa work at the alcohol distilleries and sugar cane refineries that line the state's two-lane highways like grazing elephants.

It is backbreaking work that pays little and requires workers -- usually teenage boys and young men -- to leave the reservation for months at a time, living in hostels far from home and from everything they know.

For much of the year, women greatly outnumber men on the reservations, straining relationships, budgets and families that are historically close-knit, officials, journalists and residents said. Men find it hard to adjust, shuttling between two demanding, very different worlds.

The unemployment rate on the reservation is more than 60 percent, said Luciano Arevalo. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant and malnutrition common, said Andrea Depieri, a local police officer. Often left behind, adolescent girls and young women from the reservation have increasingly turned to prostitution to support themselves or their families, she said.

"The reservations are like a vacuum," she said, "and the only thing that fills it is deprivation. People are just lost."

Two years ago police discovered a suicide note written in the sand near the feet of a 15-year-old boy who worked in an alcohol distillery. It read simply: "There is no place for me."

Friends and families say that Jaqueline did not leave a suicide note. But they trace the disintegration of her young life back to the breakup with her boyfriend, Waldir Ferreira, three months ago.

With no one in her immediate family holding down a full-time job, she moved in with her boyfriend and his family in August of last year. They divided Ferreira's $65 monthly paycheck among the nine of them.

When he returned from a two-month stint working at a sugar cane refinery, he accused her of dating another youth while he was away. They argued over money. Jaqueline moved in with an aunt.

"I was far away," Ferreira said. "When I came home I heard things from a cousin and she got mad that I listened to him instead of her."

Her grandfather, Maximo Arevalo, said Jaqueline told relatives that Ferreira had kicked her out of his parents' home following a squabble over $60 he had given her for food and clothes.

"His family was complaining that he was giving too much money to her and not enough to them," Arevalo said. "Everyone could see she was unhappy. She had stopped going to school and she complained to her mother that she didn't have money, that she wanted money to help her family buy food and clothes for herself. It is very difficult here for young people."

Antonio Brand, a history professor at Dom Bosco Catholic University in nearby Campo Grande, said efforts to redistribute land to Brazil's indigenous people have proceeded slowly. Since 1988, Brand said, federal laws have allowed indigenous groups to reclaim land if they can prove that it was formerly occupied by native peoples. But wealthy landowners have challenged their claims in court. In 16 years, indigenous groups have won control of about 42,000 acres of territory across the nation, he said.

In December, hundreds of Guarani Indians seized portions of 15 farms in the southern portion of this state -- posting signs that read "Our Place" -- before government negotiators intervened and reached a compromise for the squatters to vacate 12 of the farms.

And last year, three Kaiowa Indians threatened suicide if the government did not accelerate the redistribution of land to families on their reservation. The men later hanged themselves simultaneously.

"There is this tragic trajectory that begins with the loss of land," Brand said. "And then the physical space and the metaphysical space become quite intertwined. Without their land, where can the indigenous people of Brazil find their space in the world? Certainly not as manual laborers working far from home for very little pay in a refinery. There's no future. People lose themselves in alcohol and in drugs.

"Then they go get a rope."

A recent memorial service for Jaqueline at a schoolhouse here quickly turned into a political rally, with angry Kaiowa speakers pleading with a contingent of police officers in attendance for social and economic reforms.

"We need jobs. We need wages," Maximo Arevalo told an audience of more than 200 people. "This is why our children are committing suicide."

For more than 50 years, the Argentine-owned Mate Laranjeiras company leased nearly 15 million acres of land in Mato Grosso do Sul to make the herbal tea that is popular in neighboring Argentina. When the company's lease expired in the 1940s, Brazil's president at the time, the nationalist Getulio Vargas, decided to redistribute the land to white settlers from the northeastern part of the country.

Settlers and wealthy landowners continued their encroachment onto Indian lands until the 1988 Brazilian constitution expanded land rights for the country's native people, who make up less than 1 percent of the country's population.

But Indian efforts to reclaim lost land have resulted in armed standoffs between militias hired by landowners and throngs of Indian protesters, particularly since December. The ebb and flow of suicides here in this state coincides with the frustration of the Kaiowa's efforts to reclaim land, said Josandro Depieri, a local journalist who estimates that he has covered at least 150 suicides in and around the Bororo reservation over the past 12 years.

"It's like watching a genocide," Depieri said. "And until there is some real land reform here, the Kaiowa will continue to cut their children down from trees. There are these storms raging inside the young people, and it only subsides in the hours before they decide to take their lives. Their families always say that there was this calm, this peacefulness in them just before they kill themselves."

Waldir Ferreira's father cut him down from a tree when he discovered the 17-year-old hanging the day after Jaqueline's death. The fall saved his life but broke his left leg.

"I don't remember it," Ferreira said as he sat with his leg in a cast in front of his family's home. "I just remember that I was upset after Jackie's wake and someone gave me something to drink to calm me down."

Jaqueline, he said, was a level-headed girl who rarely lost her temper and loved children. He was swimming in a pond when she caught his eye, and he caught hers. The two flirted. She moved in two months later, a common arrangement on the reservations, where teenagers are recognized as adults.

Jaqueline, Ferreira said, was driven to suicide by evil spells cast on her by women in the neighborhood who were envious of her. Similarly, he said, someone must have cast a spell on him, but he was fortunate enough to survive it.

"I am going to church tomorrow so that I can rid myself of this curse," he said.

He did all he could for Jaqueline, he said. But it was difficult trying to support her, his parents and six siblings on his meager salary. He had never been away from the reservation until he went to work cutting sugar cane at the refinery two years ago.

"It's just so far away," he said of his job at a mill nearly 90 miles away. The hard work broke his body. The separation from his family "broke my spirit," he said.

But once he cleanses himself of his curse, and his leg heals, he said, he plans to search for another job, this time closer to home.

"I'm not going to try to kill myself again," he said. "You'll see. I am just going to work hard, harder than I did before. I'm going to find a way for my family to get out of this situation.

"Anything to end this suffering."

© 2004