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COMMENTARY

Echoes of Canudos: The Brazillian State Massacre 120

Years Later
Rodrigo Lima | January 20th, 2018

This past October marked the 120th anniversary of Brazil’s biggest state-sponsored
massacre. The War of Canudos took place between 1896 and 1897 and took the lives of
35,000 people, including men, women, and children. Amidst the civilians killed, at least 500
indigenous Kiriri died. According to the anthropologist Edwin Reesink (with whom I spoke
over the phone), they were fighting with bow and arrow.

Like many before and after, the villagers of Canudos decided to defend their way of life to Supporter Updates
the death, rather than surrender to the new Brazilian Republic. Having been converted to
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Christendom in the 17th century by the Jesuits, they decided to join the battle thanks in part
to the charismatic personality of Antonio Conselheiro (a local missionary that had founded
the Canudos village). Social factors also played a role. As Reesink tells us: “The Kiriri were
Subscribe
at their lowest point in history, they had trouble with the whites, suffered oppression and
discrimination.” Brazil, Canudos, massacre,

A crucial moment in the Kiriri’s decision to fight in the war was Conselheiro’s expedition on
their territory to gather wood to build his church. Accompanied by numerous men,
Conselheiro himself traveled more than 100 kilometers in order to get the wood. The Kiriri
considered it “the world’s biggest joy” to have the priest pass through, according to Reesink.

Confirming the prophetic phrase that, “If goods don’t cross borders, troops will,” the War of
Canudos started in June of 1896 with a trade dispute. When Conselheiro ordered some
wood to build his church from a merchant in the city of Juazeiro, the mayor alerted local
republican authorities, fearing that the priest could try to get the wood by force.

This hysteria snowballed into fears that Canudos was resisting the Republic and fomenting
a monarchist uprising. This was a mischaracterization of the independence of Canudos,
however. Those people were only fighting for their right to sovereignty and self-
determination, a battle that many peoples still struggle through these days.

What happened then was Brazil’s biggest slaughter, with more than 35,000 people dead.
The Canudos people succumbed and men, women, and children who resisted the Brazilian
army were beheaded. The whole village was devastated, no building was left standing. The
Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha, wrote “They were beheaded. Their bodies burnt. They
were then lined up, along the roadside, their heads regularly spaced, facing towards the
road’s way.”

Not all of the Kiriri took part in the conflict yet, even for those that survived, the losses they
suffered were irreparable. The last shamans that spoke their language were killed in action,
weakening their link to the encantados, supernatural entities with whom the Kiriri believe
they can speak and who help them through their political, social, and territorial struggles.
Besides the religious trouble brought to them by the warfare, survivors often found that their
land had been occupied by whites while they were absent, some of which still hasn’t been
returned to their hands.

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner, named this episode The War of the
End of the World, in his famous book that recalls the war. The village was even swallowed
by the Cocorobó river as if to suppress any hope that it might someday be recomposed.

Canudos was the victim of total warfare, modernity’s typical kind of war, in which only
defeating your enemy isn’t good enough, you need to exterminate him, erase him off the
face of the Earth. The concept of total war, originally coined by the Prussian general Carl
von Clausewitz in his famous military treatise On War (Von Kriege), has been replicated in
many conflicts throughout the world. It’s frightening, however, that the Brazilian government
was one of the few regimes to apply this approach to its own people. We don’t need
barbarian invasions, we’re our own Huns.

The history of the War of Canudos became internationally known due to Euclides da
Cunha, who wrote Rebellion in the Backlands, describing the conflict. Though originally an
engineer, Euclides always fought alongside the oppressed, writing social critiques on the
news under the pseudonym “Proudhon.” He was also an abolitionist years before slavery
was finally banned. His life and his writing on the War of Canudos reflect the destruction of
a total war state.

Rebellion in the Backlands has been compared to Homer’s Iliad: it is the foundation of a
culture, the beginning of a literature, and the inventor of a nationality. Originally a romantic
writer influenced by Victor Hugo, Euclides’ prose would be transfigured by what he says in
Canudos. After witnessing the disaster in Canudos, his writing style becomes expressionist,
denouncing the atrocities perpetrated by the Republic. “Euclides is part of a generation
deluded by the Republic,” explains the researcher Francisco Foot Hardman. The writer had
been expelled from the Military School of Praia Vermelha after breaking his saber during a
military parade, protesting against the monarchy. He once defended the Republic, but he
couldn’t defend the undefendable. In Rebellion in the Backlands, Euclides “denounces the
crime of nationality,” says Hardman. After the Canudos catastrophe, his belief in order and
progress seems to recede: “It isn’t barbarism that threatens us, it’s civilization that terrifies
us,” says the book.

Canudos still survives. Not only in the popular imagination, but echoed in our daily lives.
Analyzing our contemporary political scene, including the atrocities that take place daily in
our favelas, Hardman says that “the backlands are here, the backlands are among us.”
Maybe, in some way, we’re all still looking for Antonio Conselheiro. One can only hope,
however, not to face the same fate of Canudos last four standing resistants: when faced
with rifles, “Canudos didn’t surrender.”

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