Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa (CGY)

Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa is an Indigenous organisation that unites Brazil’s Mbya and Avá Guarani people in the struggle for their land.

Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa brings together and represents Guarani people living in the South and South-eastern regions of Brazil. The Guarani is one of the largest Indigenous groups in Brazil, but has less demarcated territory than any other Indigenous Peoples. Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa has supported the Guarani people to defend their rights, mobilise, maintain their culture, and support their struggle to defend territorial rights since 2006.

© Juliana Mindua

The Guarani’s Yvyrupa, or traditional territories, were occupied freely before the arrival of non-Indigenous people, when artificial borders did not separate the Guarani from each other and encompass the Atlantic Forest, the Cerrado and the Pampa biomes. Today, these devastatingly fragmented and threatened biomes are on the frontline of the struggle against environmental destruction and human rights violations. If this frontline is destroyed, it will greatly increase the vulnerability of other biologically and culturally intact landscapes across the country, including in the Amazon.

Despite the extreme levels of marginalisation and discrimination faced by the Guarani, they have shown astonishing collective strength in maintaining their culture, to which keeping agroecological practices and preserving sacred seeds are central tenets.

Through Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa, the Guarani have built an organisation based on the Guarani’s way of life, in which collective decision-making and listening to leaders and elders guide political strategy and action. As well as many regional and state coordinators, Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa has four elected tenondé’s (general coordinators), who determine the activities of the organisation based on these principles, and by following the Guarani nhandereko (loosely be translated as a life plan which was collectively developed).

Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa organises its struggle for land along three strategic approaches:

1. Institutional strengthening
2. Political and cultural strengthening
3. Defence of Indigenous land and human rights through CGY’s in-house legal team of advisors.