Brazzil Jorge Amado and, more recently, Paulo Coelho may be the most widely read Brazilian writers in the world but the
most highly regarded book by a Brazilian is, undoubtedly,
Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha. This fascinating work, published
100 years ago1, tells the story of how, towards the end of the
19th century, the recently-established Republican government
tried to put down a revolt in the arid
backlands—sertão—of the northeastern state of Bahia led by a religious mystic known
as Antônio Conselheiro.
In 1893, he settled in an abandoned hamlet called Canudos and within a few years had attracted around 20,000
followers. In 1896 a petty incident with merchants in a nearby town over a supply of wood to build a new church led to a row
which eventually led to accusations that Canudos was a hotbed of monarchism. Clashes occurred between the local and state
militias, in which the backlanders emerged victorious, finally led to the government in Rio de Janeiro mounting expeditions to
defeat what they claimed was a bastion of monarchism.
The backlanders proved formidable enemies and defeated every force sent against them and even killed the
commander of the first expedition. The "rebels" defied the federal forces until 1897 when a 5,000-strong army blasted Canudos to
pieces and killed almost all those inside. The charismatic Antonio Conselheiro, described by Cunha as a madman, died of
hunger after being wounded in an artillery attack, before the army took control of the ruined town.
It is not an easy book and I quickly abandoned attempts to read it in the original Portuguese and turned to an
English version "Rebellion in the
Backlands" 2. Cunha was a military engineer and this shows in his painstaking descriptions of
the terrain, which the federal armies marched through and the rebels used to inflict deadly ambushes. The book is full of
military terminology, which can be confusing and uninteresting to a non-soldier. The pages are filled with the names of officers,
battalions and incidents as though Cunha were writing the official dispatches. Sub-headings like "The Cannonading", "The
Enemy Continues to Fight Back" and "In the Field Hospital" are scattered throughout the book. Can you imagine the feelings
of relatives of the soldiers on reading a sentence like this: "At one side, stretched out on the bare ground with the sun
beating down upon them, were the bodies, rigid in death, of a number of officers—those of Lieutenant Colonel Tupy, Major
Queiroz, Sublieutenants Raposo, Neville, Carvalho, and others."
He is methodical in his approach to the whole story, starting with a description of the topography and the
prehistoric formation of the land which, millions of years later, was to be the breeding ground of the backlander and the backdrop to
the drama of Canudos. He describes the flora and fauna, not in the lyrical terms of a fine writer like H.E. Bates or in the awed
way Charles Darwin describes his first encounter with the Brazilian forest, but in the same matter-of-fact style.
The geology and geography fascinate him because he sees that it was this terrain which shaped the rebels. A hard
environment created a hardy people. For Cunha, the backlander—or
jagunço as he calls him—was a member of a different race from
other Brazilians and he devotes great space to describing this human product of centuries of breeding starting with the
original mixture of Indian, Portuguese and African. It is no longer fashionable to discuss race in the same way as people did a
century ago and, of course, Cunha has been accused of racial stereotyping and racism. It is always easy to criticize the way
people behaved in the past according to the standards of today. The reader can make up his own mind from this description of
prisoners and their conquerors. "
There were few whites or pure Negroes among them; an unmistakable family likeliness in all these faces pointed to
the perfect fusion of three races. The legitimate
pardo (mixed-race, my italics) predominated, a mixture of Chaffer,
Portuguese and Tape Indian—bronzed faces, stiff and straight or curly hair, unshapely torsos. Here and there would be with
perfectly correct lines, pointing to the admixture of a higher racial element. And round about them were the victors, separate and
disparate, proteiform types, the white man, the black man, the
cafuso (mixture of Indian and black), and the mulatto, with all
graduations of coloring. There was a contrast here; the strong and integral race thus reduced, within this square, to the indefinable
and pusillanimous mestizos, wholly broken by the struggle." Personally, I see more irony than "racism" there. Cunha then goes on to describe how the "integral" Brazilians were
tortured and murdered by the vengeful troops. For a military man like Cunha the connivance of the officers in this butchery was
as bad as the slaughter itself. One of the last sub-headings is a tribute to the backlanders and rebuke to the military _
"Canudos did not Surrender". There can be few sadder scenes in literature than this description. "Canudos did not surrender. The
only case of its kind in history, it held out to the last man. Conquered inch by inch in the literal meaning of the words, it fell
on October 5, towards dusk—when its last defenders fell, dying every man of them. There were only four of them left: an
old man, two other full-grown men, and a child, facing a furiously raging army of 5,000 soldiers."
Although Cunha makes it clear that he is on the side of the government—referring to "our" troops and the
"enemy"—his candid description of military blunders and atrocities may have ended up costing him his life. He was shot dead by
an army officer in Rio in 1909 at the age of 43.
One of the points he makes in the book is that the Brazilian elite, by which he meant those who lived in the
populated coastal regions, had nothing in common with the backlanders. It is in this sense that Cunha was trying to show that
these backlanders were a different race from the other Brazilians who knew nothing about them. This ignorance and arrogance
led to the eventual destruction of Canudos. The elite saw the proclamation of the Republic in 1889 and the separation of the
church and state as progressive steps but to the backlanders they were crimes against religion.
The new state used a steamroller to crack a nut but the steamroller was a slow lumbering inefficient instrument and
the nut had a harder shell than expected. The final victory was hollow and even today the wounds have not healed. As a
captured Celtic warrior is said to have said of a defeat by the Romans: "They create a wilderness and call it peace."
What a pity Cunha is not around to write about today's Brazil and the presidential campaign because he would find
that much of the same social misunderstanding is still around. The current presidential campaign shows the same divide
between the "elite" and the "forgotten" Brazilians, the backlanders of the
21st century. The "elite" live around or near the coast in
big cities like Rio, São Paulo and Recife, or in rich inland agricultural areas like Minas Gerais, Paraná or Mato Grosso.
The forgotten Brazilians live in backland areas of the Northeast or the vast territories of the Amazon. Look at the
itineraries of the presidential candidates and see how often they visit places like Rondônia and Acre. Their stomping grounds are
the familiar pattern of the southern states of São Paulo, Rio, Minas Gerais, Paraná, etc. plus some important Northeastern
states. Token visits will be made to more isolated spots, but as soon as possible the candidates are back in familiar areas.
At the same time, these "forgotten" Brazilians are not only to be found in isolated areas. Millions of them live in the
urban centers, generally in favelas (shantytowns). These
favelas are as "free" of officialdom as Canudos was over 100 years
ago. Whereas Canudos was in the hands of a religious fanatic, the
favelas are governed by criminals who exploit the
residents by turning their children into drug addicts, and rob and kill at will.
The criminals are well organized and impossible to eradicate. The gang leaders become role models for the young.
Every so often the police or the military carry out highly-publicized large-scale operations to capture leaders. We saw an
example recently in Rio's Rocinha favela when around 1,000 members of the security forces tracked down Elias Maluco (Crazy
Elias) the leading suspect in the case of a journalist, Tim Lopes, who was kidnapped and brutally murdered while covering a
story in the favela.
The PT state government wasted no time in claiming the glory for this arrest but it is difficult to see anything to
glory in. The arrest or death of individual gangsters will not end the control the gangs have over millions of people. Not only
are local people frightened but also so is society as a whole, including the police. Recently all the shops and banks in a
large part of northern Rio obeyed a demand by drug traffickers to close as a sign of respect for a gang leader who had been
killed in prison. During the funeral, TV journalists and police cameramen obeyed warnings not to film the event.
No matter who becomes president the gang leaders will continue to thrive. This is because, unlike the rebels at
Canudos, they pose no threat to the political structure. In fact the gangs thrive on corruption within the police and among
politicians. This means that for the unfortunate
favela dwellers, no expeditionary force will march in one day and root the gangsters
out. During the two decades (1964 to 1985) in which the military ruled Brazil, the security forces stamped out any armed
political resistance yet after almost two decades of democracy they are incapable of stamping out blatant criminal rebellion.
1 The site of the Estado de São Paulo newspaper has a special section _ in Portuguese dealing with the 100th
anniversary of the books' publication _ www.estadao.com.br/sertoes/
2 Rebellion in the Backlands, University of Chicago Press, 1944
John Fitzpatrick is a Scottish journalist who first visited Brazil in 1987 and has lived in São Paulo since 1995. He
writes on politics and finance and runs his own company, Celtic Comunicações -
www.celt.com.br, which specializes in editorial
and translation services for Brazilian and foreign clients. You can reach him at
jf@celt.com.br
© John Fitzpatrick 2002
This article was originally published in
Infobrazil, which can be read at
www.infobrazil.com
Politics
October 2002
Canudos 100
What a pity Euclides da Cunha is not around to write about
today's Brazil and the presidential
campaign because he would find
that much of the same social misunderstanding is still around.
John Fitzpatrick
