Originally published in Portuguese by Agencia Publica, on May 15, Read the original in Portuguese. As a journalist, she has covered topics ranging from the story of Tibetan refugees in Northern India to the massacre of indigenous people in Colombia. She is also the co-author of four books about human rights violations. Lara Norgaard is an editor, journalist, and translator. A graduate of Princeton University B.
Artwork by Feliciano Lana She departed one day before her birthday. She was short, wore tight-fitting clothes and flip-flops, and her dark hair brushed her shoulders. But Maria was just passing through. At her funeral, her family remembered how they had come down the river during the school holiday, a time when indigenous people of different ethnicities leave their villages in order to run errands in the city.
It was there that Maria had met her boyfriend, a soldier. But by the end, Maria had grown sad: she and her boyfriend had broken up. She was strange, on edge. Her family said she even hallucinated.
Her parents had been happy that the relationship ended. No one had ever met the soldier. They had never seen his face. He would hide in the shadows, they said, the ones cast by the little homes stacked one on top of another in a small slum in Dabaru, the neighborhood where they lived, one of the poorest in the city. His face was always covered by the darkness of night. Was he black, was he whiteβwas he one of us? Maria had spent Saturday afternoon and evening drinking on the riverbank with her older brother and their friends, and then, early morning on Sunday, March 1st, she suddenly started to transform.
She became aggressive. All they could see was something dark, a shadow that stood in her place. A dark being. He sobbed, distressed. Maria shut herself in the other room, slamming the door. Through an opening in the wall, they watched Maria find a rope and hang herself. Immediately afterwards, the door opened. She was already dead. In , there were This corresponds to twenty people dying by suicide that year, even more than the previous year, which recorded sixteen suicides.
