- Who are the Guarani and how they live today.

The Guarani are a Native population of South America, in a territory today divided between Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and northern Argentina; in Brazil, they live in 7 States with a total of 46,000 people, belonging to three main communities:

- Kaiowa (the largest one, whose name means: "Forest People")

- Nandeva

- M'bya

This people has always been deeply religious, with a spiritual leader in each community, elected for his personal prestige and good qualities, and a house dedicated to the cult and the prayers.

They have always lived in symbiosis with the Amazon forest, taking from it what they need, but now, in Brazil, they are suffering the worst moment of their history with their forest, in the largest part, cut or burned to be replaced by soy and sugar cane cultivations and ranches for intensive cattle breeding. In the Mato Grosso do Sul, they occupied a forest land of 350,000 Km2, some decades ago.

Today, especially in Brazil, they live in residual areas, most of them are refugees in their same land, in poor campsites along the streets, chased away from their villages by the attacks of farmers who want more and more land and forest to "consume". These thieves of land have killed many Guarani leaders in the recent years, like Marcos Veron, killed in 2003 at 70 years of age, beaten by the men of the local ranchers.

Not by chance, among the Guarani in Brazil, there's the highest suicides rate of Latin America, because they are losing their identity, together with their forest and the traditional activities they performed.

- History.

Before the arrival of the Spanish, their history is scarcely known because the Guarani hadn't a written tradition, but only oral tales. we know the Guarani started to inhabit the regions where they live today and the southern Brazil in the V century B.C. have been a relatively nomadic people across the forest, with a main myth; that of "the land without evil", a sort of paradise where people can leave without pain and worries and it's possible to become immortal. So, they have frequently travelled across the forest looking for this happy land in which they didn't expect to find gold like the Spanish or Portuguese invaders.

When they formed stable communities, the Guarani lived in scattered and independent villages formed by 4-8 communal dwellings, each one inhabited by about 100 persons. They depended on agriculture (mainly corn and manioc), fishing, hunting and gathering in the forest.

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