In the vastness of a desert, without shadows or contours, a glint of dust on the horizon is enough to spark panic. The men, their faces streaked with ocher paint, grabbed ceremonial sticks used as weapons of war. In the background, the children screamed, ran and sought comfort in the eyes of the mothers and anxious elders, their shoulders hunched. But soon, the rumor of an attack faded away. It was only a passing car, lost on the road. The village breathed a sigh of relief, until the next plume.

Kurusu Amba, located at the edge of Brazil's Central-West region, is barely a speck on the map consisting of just a handful of plastic and branch tents. Within, the Guarani-Kaiowa Indigenous people sleep on mattresses laid directly on the ground, despite the cold. There is no electricity or running water, only what they can draw from a pesticide-saturated stream. Beneath a tarpaulin, the head of a white-bearded wild boar was cooking over an improvised fire pit. The animal had taken nearly 10 hours to harpoon, and the hunter was armed with nothing but a simple spear and suffers from an eye disease.

But the endless blue sky is heavy with threats. The most important one is the threat posed by the hired guns working for the farmers, called the capangas, who are quick on the trigger when it comes to driving out Indigenous people. "We live in fear. White people shoot at us with rifles almost every day," said Celia Perreira, a 27-year-old Kaiowa woman whose face was painted jet black. At the first sign of danger, everyone runs to hide in the thickets. "We stay there all night without moving, surrounded by scorpions and snakes," she said.

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