Introduction

In Latin America, despite recent setbacks, the claims for autonomous and, in many cases, cross-border territories continue to grow through the emergence of plurinational States, with the plurinational constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador, and constitutional reform in Colombia and Venezuela, which recognize the rights of indigenous peoples. As a mark of a modern colonial capitalist system, the borders of modern States deterritorialized indigenous “nations” and universally imposed the same exclusive and delimited territorial pattern on their ancestral territories of use and occupation, generating limitations to effective territorial appropriation. Actions involved not only the limitation of ancestral territories but also their conquest, fragmentation, reduction and territorial containment.

According to the Initiative on Indigenous Territory and Governance,¹ currently, there are 108 cross-border indigenous peoples in Latin America that inhabit territories spanning two or more countries. The cross-border dynamics and intercommunity activity of the Guaraní are expressed in ancestral territorialities that include kinship relations, interethnic ties, sociopolitical and cultural associations, bartering, enchantment, myths and worldviews different - and often opposed - to the prevailing ethnocentric practices in the modern State.

This text analyzes the struggle of the Guaraní Nation for land and ancestral continental territory as part of an indigenous decolonization movement along Latin American borders. These interstate indigenous peoples of Latin America struggle for recognition of their status as transterritorial peoples, with free movement and reterritorialization between States. In the search to look beyond the Eurocentric vision of studies in Latin American border zones, beyond institutional and functional issues, this research focused on the experience of Guaraní cross-border peoples who fight for their territory and inhabit the ancient tekoha (territories) at the border of Brazil with Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. This is expressed in the words of indigenous Guaraní Kaiowá women from the Apyka'i camp on the border of Brazil and Paraguay: “For us, the Guaraní, there is no border. We live in the tekoha” (Apyka'i Camp, on the edge of Highway 463, Dourados, Brazil, 2019).

These cross-border dynamics have acquired a character of reterritorialization of an r-existence (existing to resist) centered on autonomy, self-determination, interculturality, and the reaffirmation of historical identity, among other demands. Also possible to observe in this struggle are the interethnic Latin American ties through the formation of networks of different indigenous peoples, for example, the Continental Council of the Guaraní Nation (Consejo Continental de la Nación Guaraní, Ccnagua) founded by the Guaraní on the border of Brazil with Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.

The implications of the border in the autonomist struggle of ethnic groups, the disparities in the size and the status of the regularization of ancestral lands and, with them, the difficulties for r-existence in different patterns of reterritorialization are considered. The different strategies, depending on the geographical scales of reterritorialization adopted by the peoples in the countries, change the game of how the (inter)national border is activated. These multiterritorialities not only demonstrate the tension between indigenous peoples and the modern colonial State (and their “internal coloniality”) but also reveal the enormous complexity of the current struggles for r-existence, which involve global action of big capital (especially neoextractivist activities, such as agribusiness) to the diversity and internal contradictions of indigenous peoples themselves.

In addition to the methodological strategy, the article is organized in the following sections: first, the Guaraní concept of territory, tekoha, is described; second, the Guaraní Nation and Oguata territoriality are described; third, the Guaraní Continental Encounter and the creation of the Continental Council of the Guaraní Nation (Ccnagua) are analyzed. The last two sections discuss the emergence of plurinational States and the possibilities and limits for the recognition of the transterritorial and cross-border Guaraní. Last, the final thoughts on the results obtained in the article are presented.

Methodological strategy

The methodological strategy adopted was qualitative in nature and was constructed from the perspective of “emancipatory research” (with the subjects and not on the subjects), descriptive and dense, through an ethnography of the border. As proposed by ^{Smith (1999}), “emancipatory research” builds toward the decolonization of Euro-Western methodologies that have suppressed and appropriated indigenous knowledge. We suggest that this approach is necessary as a political and educational practice in research with indigenous peoples against colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism and to promote their self-determination. This methodological strategy is developed as a tool for the struggle for the demarcation of ancestral territories and for the resistance of indigenous groups against the imposition of the colonial borders of the State, neoextractivism, violence and conflict.

For this, ethnography is used as a field technique and ontological commitment, as proposed by ^{Ingold. For the British anthropologist (Ingold, 2017}, p. 223), “the objective of ethnography (...) is to produce a description (...) of life as it is truly lived and experienced by people in a given place and time”. That is why it is important “to study with people, not to study them; this study is not so much ethnographic as educational”, and therefore, this “work consists of corresponding with them, not speaking for them” (p. 222). Thus, ethnography “is not a data collection technique but an ontological commitment” (p. 225).

In this ethnographic ontology, in addition to exploring the indigenous concepts of tekoha and oguata, fieldwork was conducted in traditional occupations to experience r-existence among the Guaraní at the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. For this, it was essential to spatialize indigenous ancestral territoriality (understood as a community of belonging by multiple existents or ways of being) so as not to reify the territories of these peoples as something static in time and defined a priori by the borders of the States (^{Anzaldúa, 1987}).

In addition to a dense bibliographic and documentary review, empirical material was collected through fieldwork in indigenous reserves, through interviews, informal dialogs, observation (which varied from observer to participant) and extensive notes in conflict zones. Twelve indigenous people were interviewed, and ethical precepts were followed. To formalize the research, the researcher attended some face-to-face meetings held by the extended families (tey'i), with the purpose of introducing himself and requesting authorization to conduct the research. The interviews were conducted between 2016 and 2019. The instrument used in the research was a semistructured interview script for individual and group application. The interviews were generally informal through conversations. The intention was to have conversations where the participant felt at ease, prioritizing qualitative elements and not the quantification of data. Some informal dialogs were recorded in a field diary, and others were recorded. In addition, through previous contact with a Guaraní family, it was possible to obtain information about daily life in the reserves (such as the Dourados Indigenous Reserve) and in the tekoha recovery camps (such as the traditional territory claimed by Apyka'i) with women, men and children.

Tekoha

In the tekoha, the Guaraní struggle and protect their rights against the modern and colonial borders of the States. Tekoha is a dense indigenous concept. In Guaraní, teko is life, way of being, and culture and means space and territorialization. Tekoha designates the territory in which the Guaraní territorialize and expresses the way of being Guaraní. It is where life is possible. The Guaraní were not nomads in the past, nor are they in the present. The Guaraní are farmers who inhabit the tekoha. A good way of being, a good state of life, harmony between nature and the members of the community, sufficient food, health and peace of mind define “good living”. “Good living” in the tekoha is formed by the teko porã. The territorial dynamics in the tekoha and the relationships of reciprocity construct the Guaraní’s life experience. Tekoha is a common notion among the Guaraní of Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina and expresses their historical process of territorialization and ancestral territoriality, of the “good life” and of the “land Without evil”:

The tekoha is, for all the Guaraní, whether they are Mbyá, Avá Guaraní or Pãi/kaiowá, in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil or Paraguay, the place of the teko, that is, the place of being, of habit and custom, of the system itself, of the family and politics, of the economy and religion. It is the place “where we are what we are”. This place is where the condition of teko porã, good living, is possible; this is what colonialization has sought to systematically destroy through the usurpation of indigenous territories, the destruction of the environment, the private accumulation of goods, the disintegration of the social system and the secularization of the elements of religious life. (^{Melià, 2016}, p. 25)

In Brazil, the concept of tekoha seems to have emerged from the anticolonial struggles as a counterpoint to the advance of the modern agricultural frontier and, starting in the 1970s, began to refer to the spatiotemporal dimension (material and symbolic) of the Guaraní and Kaiowá framework of life and was called the “traditionally occupied territories” in the Constitution of 1988 (^{República Federativa do Brasil, 1988}). This indigenous category acquired a political connotation in the sense of giving visibility and resonance to the struggles that demand the recovery of indigenous territories expropriated in the processes of exploitation-colonization-modernization.

Thus, by recognizing the tekoha as their traditional and ancestral territory, it is possible to affirm that the Guaraní are characterized as cross-border indigenous peoples. The tekoha is a territory that existed before the borders in Latin American countries at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The situation of the Guaraní on the border of Brazil and Paraguay underwent profound changes shortly after the War of the Triple Alliance or the Guasú War (1864-1870), whose effects reached the villages on the borders of Brazil with Bolivia and Argentina, which were home to indigenous families seeking refuge.

Therefore, these indigenous peoples that make up the Guaraní Nation inhabit ancestral territories and transit and regularly cross the colonial political-administrative boundaries imposed by the States. Currently, on the Latin American borders, the Guaraní are reconfiguring their territorialities from this colonial space to rebuild their own world, the tekoha, in the struggle for traditional territories. Their worldview is exercised through territoriality and ancestral transit, in close relationship with their territory as a space of practices, life and struggles (^{Quintero Weir, 2011}). In contemporary Guaraní territorialities, popular knowledge is produced that generates alternative and decolonized spatial practices as a path toward communal and anticapitalist r-existence “against the borders of modern colonial States” (^{Clastres, 1974}).

The Guaraní Nation and Oguata territoriality

In Latin America, some indigenous peoples have questioned the hegemonic concept of borders and the limits of modern colonial States, for example, the transterritorial and cross-border experience of the Guaraní Nation. It is common for indigenous movements to refer to their ethnic groups as the “Aymara Nation”, “Quechua Nation”, and “Guaraní Nation”, among others. The indigenous nation as self-determined and autonomous implies recognition by the States where these peoples territorialize. In this process, it is important to recognize the plurinationalities, or pluriethnicities (^{Duprat, 2012}), in the composition of plurinational States. These indigenous nationalities affirm their existence beyond the borders of the modern and colonial State and are superimposed on them by questioning and decolonizing the territorial and cultural unity of the countries. This presupposes the inclusion of other forms of life that are within the limits of the national territory and beyond, hence the importance of valuing and stimulating plurinational experiences so that the demands of indigenous nations of an autonomous territory - including cross-border territories - under the command or self-government of an ethnic group are recognized.

In this movement of decolonizing colonial borders, the Guaraní and Kaiowá of the Brazilian State of Mato Grosso do Sul built intense alliances and formed networks of struggle, resistance mechanisms for political articulation and solidarity actions. These networks are part of a regional organization - the Guaraní Nation - formed by indigenous people who share the ancestral territory of South America.

The Guaraní Nation is located in Bolivia (Chirigano and Western Guaraní), Brazil (Ñhandeva, Avá Guaraní, Chiripá, Kaiowá, Mbyá, Aché, and Avá Katú), Argentina (Mbyá, Aché, Avá Katú), Paraguay (Chirigano, and Western Guaraní) and Uruguay (Mbyá, Aché, and Avá Katú). According to ^{Equipe Mapa Guaraní Continental (2016)}, it is estimated that the Guaraní Nation is composed of 280 000 people who live in 1 416 communities, villages, and urban neighborhoods in family nuclei, from the Atlantic coast to the Andes (Figure 1). The largest population is concentrated in Brazil, with 85 255 people, followed by Bolivia, with 83 019, Paraguay, with 61 701, and Argentina, with 54 825 (Table 1).

Figure 1 The Guaraní in South America 

The Guaraní Nation shares an ancestral and continental territory that is currently dissected and fragmented by the colonial borders of modern States and superimposed on current areas of agribusiness. However, the Guaraní configure their cosmology (their world) from a large ancestral and continental territory, the indigenous territorialities (oguata) in networks─what they call multi/transterritorialities of resistance─(^{Haesbaert & Mondardo, 2010}), to therefore build intense political alliances, strengthen kinship relations, denounce violence and the murders of indigenous leaders and strengthen the articulations of struggle for land territory and defense of their territory in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. The problems with respect to Guaraní territoriality involve the geography formed by State borders and the current expansion of corporate territories of agribusiness. Guaraní territoriality is redesigned in the struggle for defining traditional territories (tekoha), in the demography of the groups as their populations increase or decrease, and in the movement of indigenous groups across national borders.

The Guaraní Nation shares the same language, with regional differences forming the subgroups Pãi-Tavyterã, Mbyá, Nhandéva and Chiripá (Brazil), Chiriguano (Bolivia), Pãi-Tavyterã, Avá Katú, Mbyá, Aché, Guaraní Ocidentais, and Nhandéva (Paraguay), Mbyá and Avá Guaraní (Argentina), as well as the same cosmopolitics. This population also shares the plundering and violent heritage of colonization and the imposition of borders that have divided, fragmented and diminished its tekoha from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. In Latin America, compared to other contexts of the world periphery, decolonial thinking is situated within a certain ontological or pluriontological perspective (^{Haesbaert, 2021}). In a certain Latin American decolonial perspective, this knowledge of the border should dialog with the practices of indigenous peoples to subvert State-centered thinking and highlight ontological struggles such as those of the Guaraní. Ancestral territories (tekoha) are, therefore, addressed through r-existence, in which resistance is strengthened against threats to life while affirming existence through the coexistence of multiple forms of being, in the worlds of life (human and nonhuman). These multiple compositions of complex interrelations between humans and nonhumans lead us to understand the configuration of other worlds, of multiple ontologies, of a multi- or pluritoriality─or even of a pluriverse (a world where many worlds fit). Thus, the relationship among decolonial thinking, border conditions and the ethnopolitical struggles of indigenous peoples for a pluriverse allows broadening the geostrategic horizon for the recognition of the rights of the Guaraní Nation in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina and to combat violence and criminalization of the border.

Therefore, we cannot forget that this colonial geo-historical context is marked by extractive, plundering, violence, slavery and patriarchal economic exploitation (^{Svampa, 2019}), carried out in the name of the constitution of the modern world system (^{Wallerstein, 1984}). Due to these evils, in the contemporary era, the Guaraní Nation faces similar problems in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, such as the struggle for life, for land and territory and against human rights violations.

Even with the territorial limits defined by the States that fragmented the territories they traditionally occupied, the indigenous people of the Guaraní Nation maintained exchange, reciprocal relations, kinship, marriages, political articulations of resistance, and the dynamics of mobility through a territory that is central to their territoriality. As ^{Benites (2014}) states, in this worldview, the earth is always expanding:

The Kaiowá’s and Guaraní’s view of the world is born from traditional spiritual logic. When they say that the earth is always expanding, they refer to their own traditional mobility (...) oguata (walking, going, moving), which are ways of occupying space, so as not to be attached to the same place, a condition granted by God Himself. The appearance of the land, through the song and dance of the Ñanderu, demonstrates to the Kaiowá and the Guaraní their own form of territorial occupation (^{Benites, 2014}, p. 35).

In Guaraní cosmology, there is a transition between different teko, modes of existence, modes of being, relational modes of being, nhandereko. Life depends on this transit, teko; the transit between different teko, nhandereko; the transit between bodies; and transit done in moderation. These variations in the ways of being, teko, are constructed in “walking” (^{Melià, 1991})─the territoriality with its rituals composed of prayers and songs─for the “social reappropriation of nature” (^{Leff, 2006}) of the tekoha ecosystem. Therefore, at each moment of social struggle, indigenous peoples use different spatial strategies, opening and closing, dispersion and agglomeration, to demonstrate that the ethnic boundaries of their ancestral territories (tekoha) have different degrees of malleability in the relationship with the Other (enemies or allies).

In this cosmology built by walking, in the coming and going between traditional territories, the Guaraní expand their ancestral subjectivity and assume the character of struggle for their territoriality.

On the border between Brazil and Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, the territory became a device of resistance for the Guaraní peoples. The decolonization movement of contemporary Guaraní builds various forms of struggle, requiring the recognition of their ancestral continental territory and the exercise of their territorialities between modern colonial States.

Guaraní Continental Encounter and the Continental Council of the Guaraní Nation (Ccnagua)

To the Guaraní, the border means a space of social struggle, as proposed by ^{Mezzadra and Neilson (2016}). The alternative territorializations in the struggles guide the direct and collective actions of the groups in battle against agribusiness farms to recover their traditionally occupied territories - tekoha. In 2006, the Guaraní Nation took an important well-articulated step in this movement by organizing an organic political space of international cooperation for building political alliances to consider the situation of the Guaraní people in four countries: Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. That year, the first Guaraní Continental Encounter was held in the municipality of São Grabriel, Brazil, with more than 1 000 representatives participating, whose objective was to mobilize the memory of the struggles to strengthen the resistance.

In 2007, to keep the momentum of the continental movement going, Guaraní Continental Encounter II was held in the municipality of Porto Alegre, Brazil, with the theme “Guaraní People: Great People. Life, land and future”. At the event, in addition to the sharing of common violations, the debate on the struggle for land was central, highlighting the importance and need for the demarcation of traditional territories within the countries.

Guaraní Continental Encounter III, in the city of Asunción, Paraguay, was attended by the then president of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo, and the vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera─the latter, one of the main articulators of the Bolivian plurinational State. With the theme “Land, territory, autonomy and governance”, the event addressed common issues related to continental Guaraní to give rise to dialogs, songs and speeches by religious leaders (ñanderu) of the five countries that “made the moment very emotional and full of dignity”. The meeting had the support of indigenous organizations such as the Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi), the National Coordination of Indigenous Pastoral of Paraguay (Conapi), the National Aboriginal Pastoral Team of Argentina (Endepa) and the Network of Private Entities at the Service of Indigenous Peoples (Par).

At this meeting, the Continental Council of the Guaraní Nation (Ccnagua) was created, with the objective of being a political space for collective decisions and building an agenda of struggle from the local bases of each country, focused on indigenous peoples and organizations. A statute was also developed to be voted on by the assembly to strengthen the political organization of the Guaraní Nation:

In accordance with the principles of respect and consensus, traditional in our cultures, we seek to reach the deepest spirit of the authorities, national and international, and all the citizens of the places that inhabit our thoughts with these words:

Consider the following: the Guaraní Nation has always had its own territorial space, the “Yvy maraê'y” or Land Without Evil, that extrapolates its borders. From the worldview of the Guaraní Nation, the parts of our ancient cultures, fire, air, earth and water, constitute one and are vital elements for life; the sacred land is life for our peoples. The Guaraní Nation, from its worldview, has always sought to avoid confrontation with those who have appropriated its territory, in a violent way in most cases. Since the demarcation of national borders, the Guaraní Nation has been fragmented and geopolitically divided into ethnic groups, communities, peoples, and families, a condition that has significantly weakened its spiritual, cultural and linguistic progress as a nation. Transnationals and/or multinationals, with the support of the different governments of the day, do not respect the customary and collective rights of the Guaraní Nation, destroying territories and expelling communities. The different governments do not meet the demands of the Guaraní Nation despite the existence of national and international norms that protect and promote the rights of indigenous peoples, such as the OIT (International Labour Organization) Convention 169, the United Nations Declaration and national laws, constitutions and laws of States. An example of the above is that the Brazilian Judiciary authorizes the evictions of communities of the Guaraní Nation from their territories, contrary to the laws that protect them, a failure of the Brazilian government to comply with article 231 of its Federal Constitution on land demarcation. Likewise, the Argentine government fails to comply with Law 26.160 “on the emergence of indigenous community land” for territorial demarcation. In Argentina, they intend to sell Lot 08 of the Yaboti Biosphere Reserve, recognized by UNESCO in 1992, to a foundation with European funds, when two communities of the Guaraní Nation live in these ancestral lands. The Guaraní Nation in Paraguay suffers constant losses of its ancestral territory as a result of the lack of effective policies aimed at defending it. There are numerous communities that live in subhuman conditions, without minimum conditions of physical security, health and food. In Bolivia, the demand for territory by the Guaraní Nation has not yet resulted in full titling of the lands they occupy. The massive and constant destruction of natural resources by transnational companies is indiscriminately deteriorating the forest heritage in Guaraní territory in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, generating irreparable damage, making them suffer the effects of climate change, for which they are not responsible. The construction of binational hydroelectric plants (Itaipú and Yaceretá) in Guaraní territory, without consulting our nation, has produced not only irreparable environmental damage but also violations of the territorial, cultural and religious rights of the Guaraní Nation. We demand from the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay recognition as the Guaraní Nation and transterritorial and cross-border status and therefore the same rights to health, education and work in the four countries. We demand that the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay constitutionally recognize the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and ILO Convention 169. (^{Ccnagua, 2010, p. 1}).

Starting in 2016, organized by indigenous peoples, researchers and supporters, the first Guaraní Ethnology International Seminar: Dialogs and Contributions, was held at Universidade Federal da Grande Dourados (UFGD), in Dourados, Brazil. In 2019, Guaraní Ethnology International Seminar II: Knowledge Networks and Collaborations, was held at Universidade da São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, Brazil. Both events were attended by indigenous people from Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, providing spaces for Guaraní dialog.

The following provides a chronology of the events that involve the struggle for the continental sacred territory of the Guaraní Nation:

In this political articulation among the continental Guaraní, the demands for the construction of networks of struggle and solidarity that lead to the strengthening of the indigenous movement are reaffirmed. The strength of this political articulation runs through the construction of the common and autonomous integration and cross-border cooperation of the Guaraní Nation in a fragmented Latin American indigenous territory.

The agendas of struggle imply the demarcation and expansion of traditional territories and ratify the importance and necessity for good living (teko porã) within the transterritorial and cross-border dynamics of the Guaraní people, in which mobility is a fundamental, if not central, component of these territorialities through the secular networks woven and, thus, require the free movement of family members between countries. The political representation of the Guaraní Nation is based and articulated in the cosmology of the Land Without Evil; seeks to draw the attention of States to respect their way of life by differentiating the defense of life, dignity and rights of peoples; and demands

from the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, the recognition of the Guaraní Nation and its status as transterritorial and cross-border peoples and therefore with the same rights to health, education and work in the four countries (^{Ccnagua, 2010, p. 1}).

The pendular movement that the Guaraní and Kaiowá of Mato Grosso do Sul carry out in traditional lands on both sides of the international border between Brazil and Paraguay has led to conflict. Mobility in ancestral territory is fundamental to Guaraní cosmology. In this travel, the indigenous people move between Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. However, the borders between these territorial States were demarcated and delimited at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and since then, they have been artificially imposed on the Guaraní Nation.

Traditionally, the Guaraní travel through their ancestral territory and build their form of social, cultural and territorial organization, as recounted by an indigenous interviewee:

I was born in Brazil, but I was born in Paraguay, but I was also born in Argentina. For me, the Guaraní do not have a flag. On the other side, there is already another country, but for me, it is not a country. When a child is born in Brazil, they are also born in Argentina. Because the water in this river is very large, it is different. The water flows over something firm, but it is not necessary to differentiate the countries. (Guaraní kaiowá, Tey Kuê, Caarapó, Brazil, December 5, 2019)

In Brazil, along the 17 000 kilometers of borders, there are a great variety of situations that involve cross-border indigenous people. It is not simply about the indigenous people who live near or on the border but also about the people who constantly cross these political-administrative boundaries. In addition, the struggle for land and territory is part of what creates the dilemma of national, modern and colonial borders. According to the ^{Terras Indígenas no Brasil site (2019)}, there are 192 lands along Brazilian border areas in varied phases of land regularization (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Indigenous lands in the Brazilian border zone 

During fieldwork in the municipality of Paranhos, in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, which borders the municipality of Ypejhú, Paraguay, it was observed that the Guaraní Ñandeva built links with the communities of the Paraguayan side within a radius of 100 km. They traveled between the communities by car, motorcycle and bicycle along secondary roads. These indigenous communities maintained cosmopolitical relationships that strengthened the struggle for land-territory, kinship ties, material exchange, friendship and leisure (fishing in Paraguay), among other activities. In addition, Guaraní and Kaiowá movements to recover the tekoha are found along the border zone.

In Mato Grosso do Sul, on the border of Brazil with Paraguay and Bolivia, given the territorial situation of exception and social insecurity, since the 1970s, “bottom-up” “decolonial biopolitics” has been produced by initiatives to coordinate and mobilize the Guaraní and Kaiowá resistance leaders and to recover the ancient guasu tekoha in the border zone between Brazil and Paraguay. In this indigenous movement, great religious rituals (jeroky guasu), great meetings between communities (Aty guasu), the assembly of women (Kuñangue Aty Guasu) and the RAJ (Retomada Aty Jovem) stand out. These spaces of cosmopolitical representation link the ancestral territorialities of religious and political leaders who act in a network, connect extended families and collectively organize demands and needs. In this way, they circulate information and denounce the threats and violence they suffer to reinforce the territorial struggle.

The Guaraní Continental ethnic-political project is a way to unify and articulate the demands and claims of the Guaraní Nation. Importantly, Guaraní territoriality is based on ñhandereco (our way of being, of living). They argue that this movement occurred prior to the definition of boundaries between countries that overlap and cut into the territoriality of the Guaraní Nation. This argument allows recognizing, at present, the transterritorialities superimposed on the borders of territorial States, in this coming and going or transit by way of and through the tekoha. These territorialities of transit─transterritorialities─transcend the limits of the States in South America where the Guaraní Nation is territorialized. This allows the development of political alliances and coalitions of groups to demand free transit through cross-border territories and the shared regulation of their rights in the four countries.

These Guaraní cosmopolitics─the exercise of walking─have, through alliances, a privileged political space for dialog, prayers, songs and the construction of demands and claims. In smaller political units, forms of council develop─the Continental Council of the Guaraní Nation (Ccnagua)─at the local level and based on the communities of each country as an articulated network of indigenous cosmopolitics extended to Latin American integration and cooperation. The multiplicity of the Guaraní Nation implies indigenous forms of political-cosmopolitanism. The strategies of struggle are guided by the cosmology of each people, by group decisions, and in the autonomous forms of territorial organization, there is a knowledge that stems from ancestry.

The Guaraní Nation spurs cross-border cooperation through the territorialities of r-existence. The Guaraní peoples of Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina seek, with this mechanism of resistance, to break with the “coloniality of power and knowledge” (^{Quijano, 2005}) through bottom-up knowledge, mobilization and political articulation. To promote Latin American integration and cooperation with the Guaraní, it is essential to broaden the political bases and construct proposals for articulation that go beyond the imposition of the political-administrative limits defined and demarcated by the borders of the territorial States. In this anticolonial struggle, there is a path of “politicized ethnicity” for the recognition of indigenous plurinationalities, as proposed by ^{García Linera (2010}, p. 164).

In this dilemma of State borders for the Guaraní Nation, there are challenges and perspectives on current issues of indigenous rights in Brazil. The mobility of indigenous peoples in their traditional territories does not obey the borders of nation States. In this struggle for the rights of integration and cooperation of cross-border indigenous peoples, movement through their ancestral territory is essential for preserving their cosmology, reciprocal relationships, kinship, political alliances and marriages, among other customs. In this sense, the norms of the United Nations (UN) and the International Labour Organization (^{OIT, 1989}) (article 32 of Convention 169) stand out, ensuring the right of peoples to transit through ancestral territories in border zones. However, one of the limits to this possibility of integration with indigenous peoples is that, in addition to contradicting themselves, the governments of States deny those agreements and constitutional conventions ratified by the countries in which they are inserted as well as their public policies and international cooperation structured in border zones (^{Duprat, 2015}).

The struggle of the Guaraní Nation seeks to recognize the experiences of plurinational States such as Bolivia and Ecuador. The Guaraní of Bolivia, for example, have advanced toward the recognition of the self-determination (self-government) of the peoples, the autonomy of their traditional territories, and the construction of indigenous autonomy (^{García Linera, 2006})─political, food, energy, educational, and cultural─and the recognition of cultural diversity, based on the grammar of interculturality (^{Walsh, 2008}). The autonomy of indigenous peoples seeks to overcome the coloniality of power that acts as a normative device, such as territorial sovereignty of the State. Therefore, along the path of plurinationalism, other nations, such as indigenous peoples, can coexist inside and outside the State territory. Plurinational States generates conditions for the existence of other territories of life.

Plurinational States

The territorial problem of an indigenous presence in State border zones highlights the importance of understanding this imposition of limits on ancestral territories and in the analysis of indigenous peoples before, after and between these modern colonial borders. State borders not only arbitrarily divide traditional territories and, with them, the biomes/ecosystems of life but also impose national identities as hegemonic territorialities and, at times, dominant over local and regional indigenous identities, both individual and collective.

With the imposition of State borders, there has been a broad and profound reordering in the territories of indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples, former residents of this area that later came to be classified and called the border zone between Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, found themselves, strangely, in spatiotemporal contexts of nationalities that were imposed on their ethnic groups. This conjunction of national identities and indigenous territorialities transformed these border zones into areas of friction, conflict and confrontation.

The borders of nation States, as components of sovereignty (^{Raffestin, 1986}), authority and discrimination (^{Domenech, 2020}), became territorial devices of contradictory constitutional norms for policies, on the one hand, developmentalists, on the other hand, indigenistas, and the control of coming and going, i.e., the transit between traditional territories in bordering areas. The border of nation States and indigenous territories along the borders of Brazil with Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina is problematic because it disrupts the traditional Guaraní territory that extends continentally, with a substantial number of subgroups and extended families involved in a process of ancestral territorialization.

Due to the frequency of violence (^{Clastres, 1980}) and the neoextractivist and neodevelopmentalist projects in Latin America (^{Gudynas, 2012}), it has not been easy for indigenous peoples to live and inhabit border zones of modern/colonial States. The borders of Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina were formed, for the most part, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in successive and different political periods of monarchies, empires, and republics, through wars, dictatorships and coups. This demonstrates the complexity that indigenous peoples and, in this case, the Guaraní, their territories and territorialities pose for the border zones.

During this period, the State, after delineating these borders, sometimes together, sometimes not, put into practice various nation-building projects that gave rise to policies of territorial delimitation or territorialization through “internal colonialism” (^{González Casanova, 2006}) to “integrate”, by assimilating into the body of the nation, different peoples and cultures, such as the Guaraní, into the national identities that they wished to impose as homogeneous, colonial and modern. In the process, in Brazil, for example, the constitutive socioterritorial diversity of the country was denied, with the consequent suppression of the original rights of indigenous peoples to the traditional lands and territories they inhabited in favor of a self-declared white and national ethnocracy.

However, in Latin America, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the struggles and demands of indigenous peoples gave rise to a new constitutionalism (^{Svampa, 2016}). This Latin American constitutionalism occurred in the wake of the so-called progressive cycle, which followed the authoritarian, antidemocratic and dictatorial regimes in the region and which was constituted, based on social struggles, in the recognition of ethnically plural constitutions of the countries, with the emergence of “indigenous States”, so-called plurinational States, with the plurinational constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador and the constitutional reforms of Colombia and Venezuela, which recognize the rights of indigenous peoples. This recognition of plurinationalities and pluriterritorialities has responded to the secular demands of the indigenous peoples of the region (^{Hurtado, 2012}; ^{Arvelo-Jiménez, 2012}).

Although uneven in the region, it was at this moment that these South American governments adopted territorial policies of collective rights, such as the struggle for the demarcation of lands, that recognize the millennial presence of different indigenous peoples. For this, it is essential to contextualize how, in these Latin American international border areas, the moment of implementation of public policies occurred, leading from social struggles to policies of territorial recognition of indigenous peoples in Brazil.

Faced with this Latin American framework of indigenous social struggles and the emergence of plurinational States and constitutional reforms, the Guaraní peoples have managed, although unevenly based on the countries, to maintain portions or fight for their traditional territories in the border zones consolidated throughout the twentieth century in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.

In the Brazilian case, however, this recognition is flawed because the indigenous peoples that occupy the border are counted based on a territorial criterion. The territorial criterion refers to the recognition and registration of traditionally occupied lands in accordance with the policy practiced by the Brazilian State in compliance with Article 231 of the 1988 Federal Constitution (^{Da Silva, 2018}). The indigenous peoples of recovered tekoha camps, such as the Guaraní of the Brazilian State of Mato Grosso do Sul, are not counted and, therefore, are not recognized. The areas that are in the process of identification are also not yet recognized, as well as the indigenous people who are/live in urban areas (cities) in border areas, such as Mato Grosso do Sul and the neighboring municipalities on the border of Brazil and Paraguay. This demonstrates the limits in recognizing the presence of indigenous peoples in border areas or in situations of cross-border contexts.

Indigenous lands influenced by the border zone, whose extent varies in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, but that are not limited to that zone nor are inscribed in the border zone between those countries converge in this transterritorial dynamic. With respect to the Brazilian State, this demand of the transterritorial and interstate Guaraní peoples, as well as the indigenous peoples of the country, is due to the lack of a specific policy that recognizes the territorial rights of indigenous peoples in border zones.

The Guaraní peoples’ demand from the Brazilian, Paraguayan, Bolivian and Argentine States reflects the urgent need to define a shared territorial policy for the protection of these peoples and their territories. These indigenous peoples have been critical of the policies adopted by the current governments of these countries, especially in Brazil, where the recognition of indigenous lands and national parks has served much more to inscribe indigenous territories in “securitization policies” (^{Silva & Pereira, 2019}), plunder territories (^{Harvey, 2004}), exploit natural resources and integrate, by assimilation, with national culture, all in the name of national sovereignty. For the recognition of lands/territories, the endowment of rights and the expansion of citizenship, the Guaraní who inhabit these territories in border areas demand the status of transterritorial and cross-border peoples.

The Guaraní, as ethnically differentiated populations in the border zones of the Brazilian, Paraguayan, Bolivian and Argentine States, demand to be grated the rights to and the management of their traditional territories, tekoha, to strengthen the struggle for land through indigenous autonomy in these contexts and through constitutional rights in their countries, in their own terms, as would be desirable.

The territorial issue surrounding the borders of these countries was generated by State interests of a developmental nature. The control of border zones by the State effects, in particular and in a damaging way, indigenous peoples. However, it is important to remember and clarify that indigenous peoples, as minorities differentiated from nationals for centuries, are further harmed by foreignization (^{Mondardo, 2018}). In Mato Grosso do Sul, this situation serves as an argument by farmers to try to delegitimize the national identity of Brazilian indigenous peoples and, consequently, discredit their struggle for ancestral territories by considering them “Paraguayans”. That argument would justify them not having ancestry in Brazilian territory and generate “political mobilization” through “moral panic”, as one interviewee alluded during the fieldwork, that would support the rhetoric that “Paraguayan Indians would be invading Brazilian lands and those of Mato Grosso do Sul”.

This situation brought to light the violence of this discriminatory practice as a political claim in the case of the Guaraní cross-border indigenous peoples, making it evident that the policies of border control, most recently with the securitization of the Brazilian borders with Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, negatively affect their ancestral practices of mobility and strategies of migratory territorialization.

At the beginning of the 20th century, in Brazil and in the State of Mato Grosso do Sul, the governments tried to confine and sedentarize the Guaraní and Kaiowá indigenous people in small indigenous reserves. Contrary to what the State intended, the Guaraní continued to transit through traditionally occupied lands, tekoha, regardless of the national and internal borders imposed and superimposed on their territories. This arbitrary imposition of borders ignored the historical and cultural territorialization that indigenous people maintain with their ancestral territories. Based on a perspective of legal pluralism, the recognition of the Guaraní in the four countries seeks to promote citizenship and social justice for the inhabitants on more than one side of the border.

The possibilities for and limits of the recognition of transterritorial and cross-border Guaraní

The transterritorial and cross-border Guaraní peoples of Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina draw, in this sense, migratory geostrategies in areas of ancestral mobility/territoriality, with the instrumentalization of kinships and alliances, to take advantage of different public policies that recognize their citizenship in the four countries.

The transit, mobility and migration of the Guaraní peoples in the border zones reveal an interethnic system characteristic of plural territorial societies. The direction that the migratory processes of the Guaraní groups has taken is characterized by opportunities for survival in these border zones, marked by frequent violence by neoextractivist economies (plundering of natural resources) in which transnational problems such as drug trafficking, armed conflict, and illegal mining, among other practices, create spatial dynamics that accentuate the so-called ethnic segmentation of the labor market and push various social minority groups to informal and even illegal activities.

Therefore, based on the political and economic context of the country, an opposite migratory flow of the indigenous population can come from Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. To understand the dynamics of universalist public policies, one must understand the multiple scales, i.e., local, regional and international, of the cross-border game. Regarding indigenous struggles on the borders of the four countries, it is important to consider the issue of different strategies depending on scale: from the local (“indigenous land”, sometimes very small, as in the Brazilian State of Mato Grosso do Sul; or municipal, as in the case of the struggle for municipal autonomy in Bolivia), State (Brazil/provincial/Argentina) and departmental (Paraguay and Bolivia) levels to the national and international levels. This complexity of spatial sectioning changes the scale. The (inter)national border “forces” this articulation of the interstate and transnational scales. Hence, it is important for the Guaraní peoples to activate the transterritorial condition. This cross-border game gives rise to highly variable border dynamics in which indigenous peoples live and demonstrates the complexity of the territorial contexts in which indigenist public policies and legislation have influenced land.

It is important to clarify that indigenous peoples are territorialized beyond the dyads of nation States. Therefore, the Guaraní ancestral territory presents a supranational situation. In Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, the Guaraní have made little progress in the amount of indigenous lands claimed. In some areas, such as Brazil and Paraguay, they have even withdrawn. In the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, demarcated indigenous lands are small, and therefore, the recovery of the policy of recognition of the tekoha is urgent and necessary.

In Brazil, the struggle is intense, both by agribusiness entrepreneurs and farmers who try to possess indigenous lands and by indigenous people who seek lands that historically have very strong roots because their ancestors are buried in the ancient tekoha. This struggle of the Guaraní in Mato Grosso do Sul has not changed much because they have not been able to expand their lands. The Guaraní tried to resist the minimum established by law as indigenous land in the border area. In the indigenous lands of Paraguayan side there has also been a decrease in indigenous lands, especially in older departments that experienced Brazilian migration and agribusiness territorialization, such as in the Department of Alto Paraná.

Interestingly, the demand by the Guaraní for Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil to recognize transterritorial and cross-border peoples is also related to their own indigenous language. In Paraguay, this is more important because in this country, the Guaraní language is part of the national identity. The Guaraní language is the official language, along with Spanish, although many indigenous people have been discriminated against and dismissed in recent years by the entry of thousands of Brazilians into the departments bordering Brazil, mainly to cultivate soy.

In the fieldwork carried out in 2019 in the Department of Alto Paraná, Paraguay, in an area inhabited by Brazilian farmers, it was observed how indigenous lands have been practically devastated. Many traditional indigenous areas have been converted into crops. In the eastern Paraguayan forest, on the border with the State of Paraná and with Mato Grosso do Sul, the forest has been almost entirely destroyed for agribusiness plantations, mainly by Brazilians.

This provides an example of an experience within the rural indigenous world on the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. It seeks to show how this game occurs, first, between territories-zones and territories-networks because each zone is indigenous land delimited by the Guaraní, some on the Paraguayan side, others on the Brazilian side, others on the Bolivian side, and others on the Argentine side, and built by ancestral mobility corridors. Thus, the presence of the Guaraní is represented by one continental territory, crossing borders that were later demarcated. The Guaraní Nation has always had its own territorial space, the “Yvy maraê'y” or Land without Evil, which exceeds the borders of States. This large single zone (tekoha guasu) of the Guaraní was cut off by the borders of the four countries.

In another ancestral territorialization, before State borders existed, the Guaraní achieved, due in part to the ecological configuration of the Brazilian Pantanal and Paraguayan Chaco, a much more continuous and extensive area in terms of surface.

Final considerations

This work has illustrated the struggle of the Guaraní peoples regarding the recognition of territorial rights that challenge the traditional and Eurocentric conceptions of borders, territorial limits and territory. Although they are still dominated by State territoriality and homogenizing and universal power relations, with absolute limits/borders, these movements find gaps in the legal system and utilize multiple scales (e.g., the UN and the ILO), proposing other relational logics of territorial limits and articulations beyond the limits imposed by States.

As has been shown, some indigenous peoples, in this case the Guaraní of the Brazil-Paraguay-Argentina-Bolivia border, demand recognition of their status as transterritorial peoples in the face of the deterritorializing experiences imposed by the hegemonic power of domination over nature that endanger their very own existence by threatening the tekoha, the territory for good living. For them, defending autonomous reterritorializing dynamics of r-existence (resisting to exist as a way of being), in a multiple and relational conception of territorial limits, means managing a set of conditions, including ecological ones, that guarantee the survival of the Guaraní peoples in their struggle for land and territory and to have the same rights, in the search for social justice, in the four countries.

This condition of cross-border and transterritorial peoples must be understood as an ethnopolitical reterritorialization of r-existence that is proposed and assumed, as has been seen, first, by the indigenous peoples themselves and, above all, for their territory of practices, knowledge and ancestral memory, the tekoha. Finally, the struggle for the tekoha, shared by the Guaraní on the Brazil-Paraguay-Argentina-Bolivia border, is a way to strengthen the r-existence of these peoples for dismantling the State border model that is responsible for this exclusionary universalism and that does not recognize, in these four countries, the already legally accepted territorial right to their lands of traditional occupation.

The Guaraní peoples seek to break with this idea of the territory-State zone and move from one side of the border to the other and politically assert their rights as transterritorial peoples. The Guaraní, in this struggle, spatialize the ancestral indigenous territoriality (understood as a community of belonging by multiple lives or ways of being) so as not to reify the territories of these peoples (tekoha) as static in time and defined a priori by the limits of modern colonial States.

Transterritoriality, in this case, is transformed into a category that is also part of the practice of these groups, of their daily space and of their regulations because they want to change the norm that establishes this division of zonal States by promoting, through the territory-network that they build, when going and coming from one side of the border to the other, the consolidation of this transterritoriality. If this condition of transterritorial and cross-border peoples is recognized, which is their objective, these peoples could share the most advanced autonomist experiences, as in Bolivia. If transterritorialities are recognized by States, the Guaraní will be assured of moving from one State to another without problems, without territorial discontinuity. Faced with this aim, the border is not seen as an obstacle, a barrier, an obstruction, but as a transit, continuity and ancestral experience for the Guaraní peoples that, for the nonindigenous, especially those involved in agriculture, is already a lived reality.

The Guaraní struggle for land and territory involves decolonization movements with respect to the borders of Brazil with Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay. The decolonization of borders questions the hegemonic structures that construct the myth of a border as the only legitimacy and exclusivity of a territorial State. This movement brings to the fore the narratives and knowledge produced by indigenous peoples who have begun to rework, position and defend their traditional territories of occupation to confront and dispute hegemonic groups. These subaltern groups, by decolonizing the borders of States, demonstrate that international relations between these territorial entities need to be decolonized by arguing that the territorialities in these areas are much more plural and democratic based on the worldviews of the cultures.

In the formation of State territory, indigenous people were silenced and invisible. Therefore, reconstructing the memories of the struggles is fundamental for a critique of inclusive and exclusive national identity. In addition, in modern science, these subjects were placed in subaltern conditions. This tour through the political-administrative border allows us to decolonize territories - to recover the old tekoha - and to build spaces of hope. The indigenous, the oppressed in this process of construction of the territorial State, are not only what oppressors produce; they also produce struggle and resistance. The Guaraní Nation, which inhabits ancestral cross-border territories, demands regular transit in border areas through multi/transterritorialities of r-existence (existing to resist). The Guaraní and Kaiowá analyzed are found on the socioterritorial margins of the Brazilian border with Paraguay─in a Latin American space─but they build lines of flight in strategies of struggle for territorial autonomy.

By resisting new forms of colonialism, violence by the State, corporations and militias, and violence against individuals, as has been demonstrated, these people struggle to be recognized as citizens who can exercise their rights, including cross-border and transterritorial conditions. To overcome this imposed condition of territorial denial, this zone of nonbeing, of nonexistence, the line as a people-territory must be affirmed and conquered through ancestral territorialities. The struggles are, then, for better living conditions and to reverse the imposed territorial colonial logic of a demographic vacuum, plunder, destruction, genocide, ethnocide and ecocide.

Against the denial of rights or the deconstitutionalization of the State and in direct opposition to the dispossessing and neoextractivist dynamics of neoliberal globalization, the Guaraní forge cross-border and transterritorial scales of struggle. In the transit through the borders of Brazil with Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, the scales are remade and constructed by plural powers - concrete and symbolic - through the effective capacity of organization, mobilization and political articulation through collective actions. The decolonization of power by subordinates forms different scales of political, strategic and concrete effectiveness.

The struggles for indigenous territories unleash territorialities with respect to the continuity of indigenous peoples. The tekoha is a project, in a concrete and symbolic sense, of a time and space of hope and dreams for the Guaraní. It is possible to affirm that the struggles for indigenous territories are a project for the future. A recovered tekoha heralds utopia and reveals the birth of space. There is belief in the potentiality of ancestry, re-enchantment, life stories, practices and Guaraní resistance in the struggles for the decolonization of the border. This implies recognizing a plural world where the transterritorialities of struggle and resistance can exist, not “only” coexist, in the borders of hope.