Backlands (2 page)

As Walnice Nogueira Galvão has shown, da Cunha’s first writings on the Canudos situation were published long before he arrived in the region. In March 1897 he published the first of two articles in
O Estado de São Paulo
called “A nossa Vendéia.” The second would appear in July of the same year. Vendéia is the Portuguese name for Vendée, the region in west central France, on the Atlantic Ocean, where, in 1793, a peasant revolt against the newly formed revolutionary government took place, hoping to reestablish the monarchy that was brought down a few years before. Da Cunha, like most enlightened intellectuals of his time, was enamored with the ideals of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. In his view, the Canudos incidents were a Brazilian version of the Vendée episode: an attempt to undo the process of republicanism and, with it, democratization of the country. In those articles, da Cunha already uses the landscape and climate to explain the behavior of the
jagunço
, a term that in Portuguese is taken to mean “bodyguard” and is used as a synonym of
cangaceiro
. His approach at the time was that Conselheiro and his band were, in today’s terminology, terrorists. As his understanding of the circumstances evolved, he would transform that opinion, looking at the
jagunços
and the army as simultaneously victims and victimizers.

Fortunately, da Cunha didn’t see himself as a passive observer. He believed in the impartiality of reporters but not in sheepishly championing the government’s approach without a dose of analysis. It was that analysis that ultimately defined his style. Da Cunha trusted that what readers wanted was not only a firsthand account but an attempt to contextualize, from myriad perspectives, what he witnessed. To this day, the reasons that the Brazilian government took on the ragged band of have-nots moved by religious fervor are widely debated. The response might be reduced to four interrelated conclusions. The first two need to be seen against the backdrop of nineteenth-century ideas concerning the development of recently independent nations in Latin America. The first is strictly religious: The clash of the
jagunços
in Canudos was against a Catholic establishment that perceived them as pagan idol worshippers and thus barbaric. The battle, in this sense, had biblical undertones: It was the civilized urban dwellers, self-portrayed as favored by the Christian God, fighting the forces of primitivism. The second conclusion is about class and geographical location: In the nineteenth century the countryside was perceived as backward and the city as the source of progress.

In this sense,
Os sertões
might be seen as a companion to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s
Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism
(1845). The Argentine thinker, journalist, political commentator, and, ultimately, his country’s president, argued in his magnum opus—another canonical text in the region’s search for a collective identity—that since the gauchos, who as discomfited people are a product of their environment, were an obstacle to the consolidation of the nation as a modern state, there needed to be a strategic way to either eliminate them altogether or else integrate them in a way that didn’t interrupt the Europeanization of Argentina. And he perceived cities like Buenos Aires as agents of change and the pampas as bastions of primordial weakness. Da Cunha’s reportage is equally shaped by the Darwinist argument of his day: He portrays a struggle between Brazil’s past and future, between Catholicism, a Portuguese import, and an unruly indigenous society.

The third conclusion that might explain the government response to the Canudos revolt is strictly economic: The migration of followers to the village aggravated a shortage of manpower in the local farms and was seen as a threat to the region. And the fourth conclusion is ideological. Conselheiro was accused of taking sides in a political battle between the ex-governor and the incumbent governor in the state of Bahia, the heart of the backlands of northeastern Brazil. This is relevant because in 1898 there was a political battle going on in the country’s capital, Rio de Janeiro, between the
civilista
and Jacobino factions. The groups were split on the matter of presidential succession between the incumbent president, Prudente de Morais, and a military candidate.

A good journalist is always in the right place at the right time, but an influential journalist has the vision to see the long-lasting impact of those coordinates. In a stroke of luck, da Cunha became a reporter of the debacle and, in the process, wrote the ultimate chronicle of the Brazilian psyche. His engaging reportorial talents along with his erudition as a polymath have left us with a precious document that juxtaposes anthropology, sociology, religious and political analysis, and ecological disquisitions. Da Cunha himself claimed that this multiplicity was the major achievement of his book: “a full synthesis [
consórcio
] of science and art, more than any single aspect, is the highest expression of human thought.” After a stint in the army, he decided to pursue a career in journalism as a cultural commentator, publishing newspaper columns on current topics of the day. He had worked as a military engineer until returning to civilian life in 1896. After the government launched the Canudos campaign, da Cunha was assigned by
O Estado de São Paulo
to cover the campaign. It surely would not be the only newspaper covering the story (there was coverage in periodicals like
Gazeta de Notícias
,
O Paíz
, and
República
in Rio de Janeiro and
Diario de Notícias
and
Jornal de Notícias
in Bahia, the consensus being that the best reportage was produced by Manoel Benício of the
Jornal do Comércio
), but, in the long run, it would be the most influential.

Astonishingly, da Cunha did not leave Bahia to be embedded with the São Paulo Battalion until August 4, 1897. He stayed until the end of the campaign, witnessing the death of the last four defenders of Canudos on October 5, a day before the corpse of Conselheiro, who apparently had died of dysentery, was exhumed. In other words, while da Cunha, in
Os sertões,
pretended to cover the entire Canudos campaign, in truth he witnessed less than a month of the military operation. Later on, as his narrative took shape, he would attempt to cover up this deficiency in a number of ways. Among them was the research he did back in São Paulo for five years after the incidents, reading other reporters’ accounts, analyzing the connection between the Canudos dwellers and their psychological traits, and so on. His overcompensation is evident in the unbalanced structure of the book: Almost two-thirds is about everything but the campaign.

All modern nations are born from sacrificial blood. The atrocities da Cunha witnessed as reporter were beyond belief. Like the use of napalm in Vietnam by the U.S. Army, the Brazilian military spread kerosene on villages, then threw dynamite bombs on them, creating hellish scenes in which the Canudos population was burnt alive. The destruction of the villages and slaughter of the
jagunços
was proof that those in government, while supposedly in charge of safeguarding the population, will stop at nothing in order to perpetuate their power. He was among the first modern journalists to be a spectator to the excesses of the political machinery and to use eloquent words to describe what he saw. He was savvy enough to recognize that the citizenry isn’t easily gullible when it comes to state propaganda and that, as the radical American reporter I. F. Stone once said, “Every government is run by liars.” The journalist is an autonomous entity who, ideally, allows the citizenry to think critically. In that sense, da Cunha was a champion of an independent voice for the media in democracy. In Latin America the independent journalistic voice is an endangered species. The state pretends to tolerate it but will secretly seek to silence it at all costs, including death.

To build the narrative of
Os sertões
, he used book field notes he had kept as a journalist, which were eventually published as
Diario de uma expedição.
He worked while building a bridge in São José do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, where nowadays the wood hut in which he wrote is considered a national shrine. Although it was difficult to find a publisher for the finished manuscript, when the book was finally released, in 1902, it became an instant best seller. Educated Brazilians were eager to use the Canudos campaign to reflect on the limits of power. Conselheiro had become a satanic figure in the popular imagination. Was he a lunatic? Where did his motivations to create an autonomous state come from? What kinds of political partnerships had he established? Or was he just a hoodlum, and not the visionary some portrayed him as? Such was the success that da Cunha was asked to join the Brazilian Academy of Letters as well as the national Historical and Geographical Institute. A second edition was published in 1903. Since then there have been over fifty Brazilian editions, along with thousands of publications, in scores of disciplines, expanding on the work’s relevance.

The antecedents of
Os sertões
might reach as far as Flavius Josephus’s
Jewish War
, his chronicle of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, in particular the massacre in Masada. In our time, those who have felt its influence range from Stephen Crane to Winston Churchill, from Edward R. Murrow to Ryszard Kapuściński. In Brazil, da Cunha’s reportage has had lasting power. In 1994
Veja
, Brazil’s leading weekly magazine
,
conducted a poll that indicated that a majority of intellectuals in the country continued to view it as Brazil’s single most important book. Anthropologist Gilberto Freyre once suggested that da Cunha was “a social engineer animated by a political ideal.”

 

Euclides da Cunha was a man of contradictions, one whose public persona was the subject of adulation but whose personal life was marred by tragedy. He was born in Santa Rita do Rio Negro, then in the province of Rio de Janeiro, on January 20, 1866, into a family of Portuguese and Bahian extraction. The family had moved to Rio de Janeiro in the mid-nineteenth century, attracted by the economic opportunities of the coffee boom in the Paraíba Valley, but never attained the riches of the coffee barons, earning its livelihood as hardworking small farmers. His father, Manuel Rodrigues Pimenta da Cunha, a Bahian from the area near Canudos, was a cultured man and fostered a love of reading in his son. Eudóxia Moreira da Cunha, his mother, died when he was three. Da Cunha was raised by relatives and in boarding schools in Rio and Bahia. He attended the Colégio Aquino in Rio, where one of his teachers was the republican ideologist Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães, a follower of Auguste Comte and one of the leaders of the movement to depose the emperor and install the First Republic in 1889. It was at the school that da Cunha started his political writing in a youth publication titled the
Democrat
. He is portrayed by his biographers as a solitary man, somewhat morose and irascible, who spent most of his time alone, reading and studying.

Da Cunha chose to pursue a career as a military engineer while exercising other professional occupations, including, aside from journalism, that of surveyor and, for a brief time, teacher in the prestigious Pedro II Institute in Rio. He finished his education at the military school in Praia Vermelha, Rio de Janeiro, in 1892, with a university degree in mathematics, physical and natural sciences, and engineering and the rank of first lieutenant. In the early 1890s, he allied himself with the supporters of Floriano Peixoto. His first army assignment, from 1894 to 1895, was in Campanha, Minas Gerais, where he was engaged in public works, renovating a Catholic church facility for use by the army cavalry. At this time, he pursued his interest in natural sciences by reading and geological explorations that he conducted on his own. In 1895 he moved to São Paulo to work as a civil engineer in the Department of Public Works. He struggled with doubts about his military career and aspired to a position as chair of mineralogy and geology at the Escola Politécnica in São Paulo, but wasn’t successful. He left the military in 1896 and worked as a civil engineer for the state of São Paulo.

He was careless about his physical appearance. Some thought he looked like a Carirí Indian because of his long hair and pronounced cheekbones. Trained in the military school of Praia Vermelha, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, he was schooled in the precepts of republicanism, positivism, and social Darwinism. His idea of synthesizing “science and art” came from his readings of several European writers. Herbert Spencer’s influence on his scientific education is acknowledged by da Cunha, his work
First Principles of a New System of Philosophy
cited as a key reference for Brazilian intellectuals involved in the nineteenth-century debate on culture, race, and nature. Hippolyte Taine’s concept of “the honest narrators of history” was referenced in the preliminary note of
Os sertões
. Henry Thomas Buckle’s
History of Civilization in England
strongly shaped the environmental determinism that imbues
Os sertões
and that is translated in the division of the book into two parts: “The Land” and “The Battle.” Da Cunha was influenced by a host of other European and American thinkers, including Bryce, Renan, Ratzel, Gumplowicz, Gobineau, and the American geologist Orville A. Derby.

These readings reinforced da Cunha’s fatalistic sense regarding biological determinism, which in turn was counterbalanced by a romantic belief in the purity and strength of indigenous peoples. He was, at the same time, “poetic and scientific.” Still, although da Cunha was a product of the military, for all practical purposes he remained a pacifist, as the last third of his narrative attests. His virulent republicanism provoked him to insult the imperial minister of war while still a student, by throwing down his sword in front of him during a formal ceremony. The last third of
Os sertões
is in fact an impassioned panegyric against war. While he ranted against the new republican government, he was a nationalist with a belief in humankind and its interdependence on our planet. He claimed that a Brazilian race didn’t exist and that mixed races are inferior. Yet da Cunha celebrated the strength of the
sertanejo
, calling him the “core of our nationality, the bedrock of our race.”