It's like dying a little more each day': Brazilian family tells what it's like to wait on Death Island for their son to meet his fate, In the run down three-star hotel where the family stays in Cilacap, opposite 'Death island' in southern Indonesia, Marlise Gularte de Cavalho describes what it's like waiting to see whether her cousin Rodrigo will be executed.
'For our family it is like dying a little every day,' she told Daily Mail Australia, 'it is hard to stay strong but you must.'
The executions last month on Nusakambangan Island - where Rodrigo is being held on death row - of five foreigners, including fellow Brazilian Marco Archer, and the scheduled executions of the Bali Nine duo Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, has turned up the heat for the Gulartes.
'It is alarming,' Ms de Cavalho said, sitting anxiously in her hotel as she waited to return home after her latest visit.
'We are in shock. It would be better to know he would be in jail ten, 20 years even, more than not knowing when, if, this is going to happen.'
Ms de Cavalho, who had taken time off from the wedding and party business she runs with her husband in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, said she had travelled in her past as a Club Med representative - even spending a year on Lindeman Island in Queensland - but that she and her family dreaded the trip to Indonesia.
But they could not abandon Rodrigo.
'You come here and then you have to return to your life, but we are always waiting and that is what is terrible.'She has spent the past few weeks with Rodrigo's other cousin, Angelita Muxfeldt, and his mother Clarisse Muxfeldt taking the police ferry almost daily to visit Nusakambangan.
There they find 42-year-old Rodrigo in the relatively clean surrounds of the island's newest prison, Pasir Putih, which lies not far from one of its famed white sand beaches.
Angelita described the agony of waiting to find out whether her beloved cousin will face the firing squad as she sat alone in her hotel in in the port town of Cilicap.
'It's a torture for our family. Ten years in prison and then like in Bali you shoot them?'
She had just farewelled her aunt, Rodrigo's distraught 70-year-old mother Clarisse Muxfeldt, who may have made her final trip to see her son on Nusakambangan or 'death' island.
'She wants to come back but I don't know. We must look after her now,' Angelita said.
'I must stay here and fight to have him transferred off the island.
Angelita described Gularte as more like a brother than a cousin.
'He was such a lovely little boy. He is kind and gentle and that's what got him into trouble.
'It is unbelievable that they could shoot him here.
'When we found out there was no time it was such a rush to get here - no time to pack pictures of him.' Rodrigo has been on the island for seven of the 11 years since he was arrested with two other Brazilians bringing six kilograms of South American cocaine into Indonesia, secreted in surfboards.
As his devastated family have been insisting, to this day, Gularte is a paranoid schizophrenic who fell prey to drugs in his teens and to a Brazilian drug cartel in his early thirties.
He was so deluded, that when he was arrested he told Indonesian police his two fellow couriers had nothing to do with the scheme. They were sent home. A year later, he was sentenced to death.
Now, when Marlise and her family visit him, on the prison island, he tells them he doesn't believe that he will be executed.
He insists a manned satellite
over Nusakambangan is stalking him and voices in his head tell him he won't be executed because 'the voices say the death penalty has been abolished'.
'For the two hours we are there I guess he would talk lucidly for about 10 minutes,' Marlise said.
Rodrigo is suspicious of Marlise 'because he thinks there are two of me ... the good Marlise and bad Marlise and he has to be careful of the bad'.
Angelita tried for years to make Rodrigo aware of the danger he was in, but afflicted by delusions he would tell her it 'was all a trick'.
'Now I don't tell him because he is calm and not frightened. Perhaps it ia better that way.'
The family is pinning its hopes on a recommendation by their lawyers that Rodrigo is taken from the island and placed in a hospital on the mainland to be psychiatrically assessed.
'The idea of it makes him scared. He thinks what could save him is the danger, ' Angelita said.
She said Rodrigo wanted to stay in the maximum security Pasir Putih priaon the island where other inmates were 'like family to him' and the guards 'like him'.
'He is a gentle man and wants to help everyone he can, he said.
'He doesn't realise execution could really happen.'
The family hired a government professor of psychiatry to examine Rodrigo in prison on Nusakambangan. The prison governor sent the professor's written diagnosis of Gularte's schizophrenia to the Indonesian Attorney General H.M. Prasetyo, but it was rejected.
'They say no,' said Ms de Cavalho, 'they won't listen, the president has the power over people's lives that should only be God's.'
Under Indonesian law, a mental health disease can provide for clemency in death penalty cases.
The Indonesian authorities told the Gularte family only a government doctor's diagnosis would be considered for Rodrigo's possible reprieve.
'What can we do?' Ms de Cavalho said. 'People have been very kind to us here.
'The Indonesian people we have spoken to, do not support the death penalty and I do not believe the majority of Indonesians do.
'But this waiting it is so heavy on the soul.'
Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan are likely to be moved from their Bali jail cells this week, with builders under orders to speed up construction of more isolation cells on the execution island.
Ms de Cavalho said if their families did, like her, end up in a hotel room in Cilacap waiting to take the ferry to death island that they 'must be as strong as possible and keep their faith'.
'It is in the hands of God.'
'For our family it is like dying a little every day,' she told Daily Mail Australia, 'it is hard to stay strong but you must.'
The executions last month on Nusakambangan Island - where Rodrigo is being held on death row - of five foreigners, including fellow Brazilian Marco Archer, and the scheduled executions of the Bali Nine duo Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, has turned up the heat for the Gulartes.
'It is alarming,' Ms de Cavalho said, sitting anxiously in her hotel as she waited to return home after her latest visit.
'We are in shock. It would be better to know he would be in jail ten, 20 years even, more than not knowing when, if, this is going to happen.'
Ms de Cavalho, who had taken time off from the wedding and party business she runs with her husband in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, said she had travelled in her past as a Club Med representative - even spending a year on Lindeman Island in Queensland - but that she and her family dreaded the trip to Indonesia.
But they could not abandon Rodrigo.
'You come here and then you have to return to your life, but we are always waiting and that is what is terrible.'She has spent the past few weeks with Rodrigo's other cousin, Angelita Muxfeldt, and his mother Clarisse Muxfeldt taking the police ferry almost daily to visit Nusakambangan.
There they find 42-year-old Rodrigo in the relatively clean surrounds of the island's newest prison, Pasir Putih, which lies not far from one of its famed white sand beaches.
Angelita described the agony of waiting to find out whether her beloved cousin will face the firing squad as she sat alone in her hotel in in the port town of Cilicap.
'It's a torture for our family. Ten years in prison and then like in Bali you shoot them?'
She had just farewelled her aunt, Rodrigo's distraught 70-year-old mother Clarisse Muxfeldt, who may have made her final trip to see her son on Nusakambangan or 'death' island.
'She wants to come back but I don't know. We must look after her now,' Angelita said.
'I must stay here and fight to have him transferred off the island.
Angelita described Gularte as more like a brother than a cousin.
'He was such a lovely little boy. He is kind and gentle and that's what got him into trouble.
'It is unbelievable that they could shoot him here.
'When we found out there was no time it was such a rush to get here - no time to pack pictures of him.' Rodrigo has been on the island for seven of the 11 years since he was arrested with two other Brazilians bringing six kilograms of South American cocaine into Indonesia, secreted in surfboards.
As his devastated family have been insisting, to this day, Gularte is a paranoid schizophrenic who fell prey to drugs in his teens and to a Brazilian drug cartel in his early thirties.
He was so deluded, that when he was arrested he told Indonesian police his two fellow couriers had nothing to do with the scheme. They were sent home. A year later, he was sentenced to death.
Now, when Marlise and her family visit him, on the prison island, he tells them he doesn't believe that he will be executed.
He insists a manned satellite
over Nusakambangan is stalking him and voices in his head tell him he won't be executed because 'the voices say the death penalty has been abolished'.
'For the two hours we are there I guess he would talk lucidly for about 10 minutes,' Marlise said.
Rodrigo is suspicious of Marlise 'because he thinks there are two of me ... the good Marlise and bad Marlise and he has to be careful of the bad'.
Angelita tried for years to make Rodrigo aware of the danger he was in, but afflicted by delusions he would tell her it 'was all a trick'.
'Now I don't tell him because he is calm and not frightened. Perhaps it ia better that way.'
The family is pinning its hopes on a recommendation by their lawyers that Rodrigo is taken from the island and placed in a hospital on the mainland to be psychiatrically assessed.
'The idea of it makes him scared. He thinks what could save him is the danger, ' Angelita said.
She said Rodrigo wanted to stay in the maximum security Pasir Putih priaon the island where other inmates were 'like family to him' and the guards 'like him'.
'He is a gentle man and wants to help everyone he can, he said.
'He doesn't realise execution could really happen.'
The family hired a government professor of psychiatry to examine Rodrigo in prison on Nusakambangan. The prison governor sent the professor's written diagnosis of Gularte's schizophrenia to the Indonesian Attorney General H.M. Prasetyo, but it was rejected.
'They say no,' said Ms de Cavalho, 'they won't listen, the president has the power over people's lives that should only be God's.'
Under Indonesian law, a mental health disease can provide for clemency in death penalty cases.
The Indonesian authorities told the Gularte family only a government doctor's diagnosis would be considered for Rodrigo's possible reprieve.
'What can we do?' Ms de Cavalho said. 'People have been very kind to us here.
'The Indonesian people we have spoken to, do not support the death penalty and I do not believe the majority of Indonesians do.
'But this waiting it is so heavy on the soul.'
Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan are likely to be moved from their Bali jail cells this week, with builders under orders to speed up construction of more isolation cells on the execution island.
Ms de Cavalho said if their families did, like her, end up in a hotel room in Cilacap waiting to take the ferry to death island that they 'must be as strong as possible and keep their faith'.
'It is in the hands of God.'
