On March 5, the Guarani-Kaiowá of the Indigenous Land (TI) Sasoró, from the city of Tacuru, Mato Grosso do Sul, locked the MS-295 highway in protest for the lack of water that had reached the site 16 consecutive days. The community, with more than 2,200 inhabitants, blocked the road that gives access to Iguatemi and is one of the main ways to southern Brazil and an important latifundal grain flow route. With the combative lock, a technician from the MS Special Sanitary Sanitary District (DSEI) went to the scene stating that a survey will be conducted to investigate the issue. Protesters gave a period of 15 days for the problem to be resolved. Otherwise, they are willing to perform new protest actions.
While water is lacking for the Guarani-Kaiowá, there are promises of pro-latifundium governor Eduardo Riedel (PSDB), who was in the city of Tacuru on 03/04. The announcement of R $ 17.9 million in infrastructure and education for the municipality did not even contemplate a real for indigenous peoples from there. Backly, Riedel sat next to Mayor Rogério Torquetti (Patriota) and Tacuru City Council to announce the “universalization of the service” of basic sanitation. The mayor stated that the funds went to “priority projects”, but nothing was done with the top truck that recently stopped circulating for mechanical problems and helped supply the village-distant 35km from the city headquarters.
The problem, an expression of the bureaucratic-latifundity character of the old Brazilian state, is spread in the state. Just under two months ago in Dourados - a city 200 km from Tacuru - the inhabitants of the villages Jaguapiru and Bororo also blocked a highway due to lack of water . While other villages in the state report the same situation, the State Government announced, at the end of February, at its official site, that "awaits the position of the Union to send solution to water shortage in the villages." It is the classic position of the ruling classes, who play their responsibilities to each other. Not that Luiz Inacio's government has no responsibility for it. On the contrary, your “Privatist bias” in indigenous health , as the Missionary Indigenous Council (CIMI) denounced, it certainly has part of it. Even the indigenous people know this and some posters quoted Weib Tapeba, the Secretary of Indigenous Health of the Ministry of Health.
A few days before the highway block, other data added to the problem of lack of water. According to the local monopoly Mediamax , based on 2022 census data, 27,000 indigenous people in the MS do not even have a bathroom - sometimes using only one hole in the floor or just with the toilet - and another 12,500 shared common bathrooms for various houses. Among the “critical situations” investigated by the newspaper, including the city of Tacuru, which, alongside Japorã and Paranhos, has more than 20% of the municipality's indigenous population with a lack of bathrooms. This situation of the basic sanitation of the indigenous people, however, is just another aggravating problem of the broader problem of lack of access to land. After all, Sasoró's indigenous people do not completely enjoy the hectares demarcated for them and still receive residents of other territories, such as the indigenous people who are expelled from their reference , like Pyelito Kue, in the neighboring city, where there is a wide open conflict since last year .