Canudos Campaign

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Canudos Campaign

Canudos Campaign, military action of 1896–1897, aimed at dispersing the backlands, religiously based community of Canudos in Bahia, Brazil. Republican authorities mistakenly thought that the messianic community headed by Antônio Conselheiro was a base for monarchist restoration, and a series of misunderstandings made it the object of a bloody campaign. In November 1896 and January 1897, two successively larger units of federal and state troops marched on Canudos. Both units were routed decisively.

Oddly, senior commanders ignored the after-action reports of the defeated officers and so planned their responses based on rumor and conjecture. As Canudos took on the press image of a monarchist hotbed, frustrated Republican extremists, called Florianistas after deceased acting president Marshal Floriáno Vieira Peixoto (d. June 1895), hoped that victory in Bahia would bring them back to power.

Ardent Florianista colonel Antônio Moreira César, leading 1,300 soldiers and state police and exuding overconfidence, refused a briefing from his unfortunate predecessor and attacked the now reinforced and well-entrenched townspeople on 2 March 1897. Moreira César had a reputation for violence and a willingness to shoot civilians. His impulsiveness and the lack of an army supply service led him to march through a hot, arid region without adequate water supplies. He was mortally wounded in an ill-considered attack made without an attempt to parley. Although well armed and occupying the high ground, the troops fled in panic after the colonel's death, abandoning their equipment and wounded to the townspeople.

The defeat coincided with President Prudente José de Morais's return from sick leave, a subsequent shake-up in army administration, and suppression of a revolt at the Rio de Janeiro military school. The extreme turbulence of 1897 saw four ministers of war and five adjutants-general. Forced recruitment filled the battalions ordered to advance on Canudos in two columns from Salvador and Aracajú under Generals Arthur Oscar de Andrada Guimarães, João da Silva Barbosa, and Cláudio do Amaral Savaget. The planned pincer attack failed and, in late June 1897, the troops were trapped on Favela Hill before the town. Soldiers' wives did a lively business selling hoarded food to the hungry. Women played roles on both sides in this disaster. On 14 July, the encircled units broke out, taking about 1,700 casualties in the process, but finally able to send requests for reinforcements. Engaged in daily combat, the soldiers slit the throats of over 2,000 prisoners.

Minister of War Carlos Machado de Bittencourt took charge of the reinforcements, but General Arthur Oscar's mismanagement was so unnerving that officers excused themselves from joining the expedition. The only general who would command the new battalions was Carlos Eugênio de Andrada Guimarães, Arthur Oscar's brother. State police from São Paulo, Pará, and Amazonas eagerly joined the fray. By the end of September, siege lines surrounded the town, where hundreds of dead lay unburied, as fifteen cannons fired at point-blank range. An assault on 1 October left 587 army dead or wounded, with perhaps as many as 5,500 townsfolk either dead or missing. The next day the first parley between the combatants produced the surrender of several hundred, mostly women and children. On 4 October dynamite bombs and kerosene eliminated the last resistance.

The fighting cost the army heavily; of the 9,542 officers and men sent to Canudos, 4,193 were wounded between July and October 1897, while the townsfolk dead were estimated in the thousands. The campaign showed the army to be ill-organized, ill-equipped, ill-trained, and ill-led, with deficient recruitment and supply systems, and a willingness to fire on those defined as "bad Brazilians." The dreary experience would be used in coming decades to justify military reforms.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Henrique Duque-Estrada De Macedo Soares, A Guerra de Canudos (1902).

Euclydes Da Cunha, Canudos (diario de uma expedição) (1939), and Rebellion in the Backlands, translated by Samuel Putnam (1944).

Tristão De Alencar Araripe, Expedições militares contra Canudos: Seu aspecto marcial, 2d ed. (1985).

Marcos Evangelista Da Costa Villeja, Jr., Canudos: Memórias de um combatente (1988).

E. Bradford Burns, "The Destruction of a Folk Past: Euclides da Cunha and Cataclysmic Cultural Clash," in Review of Latin American Studies 3, no. 1 (1990): 17-36.

Robert M. Levine, Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–1897 (1992).