Bullet ants and stolen land

The young indigenous man, bent double in pain, uttered a deep, heart-wrenching moan. The pain was unbearable. After a while he withdrew from the circle of chanting people and threw himself on the ground, keeping his swollen hands up in the air to avoid painful contact. I knew he was bringing shame on himself by showing so clearly that he was in agony.

Along with a dozen others, dressed mainly in Bermuda shorts and t-shirts, he was going through the ritual of the tucandeira. This is a rite of passage by which Sateré-Mawé youths make the transition from childhood to adulthood: enduring bites from scores of tucandeira (Paraponera clavata) – known in English as the bullet ant, because its bite causes pain comparable with that of being shot. The bite goes deep: the tucandeira’s fangs, which are so powerful that they can cut through tree branches, transmit the poison directly into the central nervous system, causing excruciating pain. The ensuing fever, sickness and swelling can last for several days, but those bitten eventually make a full recovery.

The ritual changes life irrevocably for the young men. They are expected to go through it at least 20 times in their lives, but the first time is the most important. They become grown up. They can now marry, have a say in the life of the community, take on leadership roles. After their first menstruation, Sateré-Mawé girls go through a more mysterious ritual that involves being left alone in a hut for a month, only seeing their mothers, who bring them food. They also emerge grown up, ready to marry.

The ceremony we witnessed took place in the village of Fortaleza, on the Andirá river deep in the Amazon forest, in the state of Pará, not far from the border with Amazonas state. The ritual is particularly important this year because a group of men and women from the community has decided to take the courageous step of occupying a stretch of remote forest, once inhabited by their ancestors, to provide their growing population with more land and to prevent the area being devastated by loggers and land thieves. They may face violence; the men believe that ritual strengthens their indigenous identity and makes them more courageous.

Rolling back the clock on rights

The Sateré people know that they won’t get support from far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in January this year and is wellknown for his hostility towards indigenous people. Some of them heard him say on television that he didn’t intend ‘to give a single centimetre of land’ to indigenous groups and even hoped to regain control of land recently secured by some. Worse still, he seems intent on destroying the indigenous Amerindians as a separate ethnicity, with distinct values and a different culture. Some of the younger people have smartphones and saw a comment the president made on his Twitter account: ‘Over 15 percent of national territory is demarcated as land in the hands of Indians and [communities set up by runaway