Guarani leaders die in seed-sharing crash

Guarani leaders Tiago Karaí, 34, and Kerexu Laudiceia Benites, 31, died with their two children and four other community members in a road accident on August 14. A semitrailer carrying maize for industrial agriculture struck their car as they traveled between Indigenous territories.

The group from the Tekoa Kalipety settlement was on a journey to visit relatives and share traditional seeds. Tiago Karaí and Laudiceia Benites were traveling with their children, Tadeu, 14, and Luna, 7; Tiago's sister, Kerexu Cleonice Honório dos Santos; and two other Kalipety members, Ileo Benites and Genilson Euzébio Karay Mirim. The truck driver fled the scene.

Reclaiming and Restoring Tenondé Porã

Tiago Karaí grew up in the Tenondé Porã Indigenous Territory. He first worked as a teacher of Guarani language and culture, believing children needed to know both their own heritage and non-Indigenous ways. In 2013, he helped families reclaim ancestral lands within Tenondé Porã, moving onto former eucalyptus plantations to build settlements like Tekoa Kalipety.

Families cleared fields for diverse crops. They brought back dozens of varieties of jety, the Guarani sweet potato, from visits to other villages. They used the non-native eucalyptus timber to build houses and planted native trees in its place. The settlement grew to around two dozen families.

Community Leadership and Cultural Work

Laudiceia Benites taught philosophy and history and advocated for Guarani-language education. In Kalipety, she studied traditional medicines and helped maintain the family's prayer house. She hosted visitors from other Indigenous communities, exchanging knowledge on remedies and planting methods.

Tiago's sister, Cleonice, was a ceremonial singer and a principal midwife for the territory. She helped revive the practice of giving birth within the Indigenous territory and organized women's gatherings. Both Tiago and Laudiceia were active in the campaign for the full recognition of Tenondé Porã's roughly 16,000 hectares of land.

Holding Corporations and Government Accountable

Tiago Karaí served as an executive coordinator for the Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa. When a commercial freight railway was expanded through their lands, he helped form an Inter-Village Committee to hold the operator accountable. The company, Rumo, had resisted mitigation measures.

To force dialogue, community representatives bought shares in Rumo to gain entry to a 2019 shareholders' meeting. "Our intention is not to make money," Tiago explained at the time. It was to acquire "the right to speak, to bring the reality into the assembly." Their action allowed communities to help redesign the company's Indigenous mitigation program.

A similar struggle occurred over the Cinturão Verde Guarani, a proposed municipal policy for land restoration and cultural support that languished for years. By 2021, Tiago was openly challenging the city's unfulfilled promises of formal dialogue.

A Final Journey for Seeds and Solidarity

At home, Kalipety families restored forest while growing food, protecting tributaries of the Capivari River. Tiago welcomed visitors but was wary of tourism turning village life into a spectacle. He was recently troubled by conditions in Guarani communities in western Paraná with little land. He told a colleague he planned to return there in November with more people from Tenondé Porã. He said that at home, demarcation allowed families to pray, sleep, work, and cultivate fields. In Paraná, "people aren't even eating well or sleeping well or able to grow crops."

The family's last journey was part of the same network of visits that had replenished Kalipety's fields. Anthropologist Tatiane Klein, a friend of the family, noted a bitter detail to Mongabay: the semitrailer that killed them was loaded with maize. Industrial commodity agriculture collided with a journey devoted to traditional seeds.