A Quilombo Called Canudos - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 44

scrawny goats and little burros, also left their corpses on the parched land. The term fla-
gelados aptly captures the existential aura of the backlanders: the scourged ones.
Once the refugees arrived in towns, their circumstances did not necessarily improve.
They simply overwhelmed the local resources and were reviled or chased out, on to the
next settlement, maybe to die en route. In other places they encountered state-sponsored
programstoloadthemonboatsandshipthemtoSãoPaulo,Maranhão,orPará,akindof
national “middle passage” that delivered them into debt bondage. Certainly the horrible
conditions on these flagelado boats echoed those of the Atlantic slave ships, although
conditions may have been even worse since these people were not valuable commodit-
ies but starving “problems.” The boats were often not seaworthy, and many retirantes
(another term for drought refugees) died as overloaded vessels sank. Historian Gerald
Greenfield, who has provided the most thorough study of the 1877 Niño and its polit-
ics, notes that the boats that transported slaves as part of the interregional market to São
Paulo also carried drought victims. Mix-ups may well have occurred where free men
fleeing the backlands accidentally entered slave markets. 11
Another unfortunate destination was concentration camps mandated by Imperial
policy. Rather than having migrants polluting and overrunning cities with a “pestilent
presence” involving the disease, crime, and morality of the desperate, towns created de-
tention areas outside their borders. They were known locally as currais —“corrals” with
armed guards—where the retirantes lived rather less well than cattle, thrown together in
hovels with virtually no sanitation. These camps were petri dishes of disease, and many
died in their fetid confines. The currais continued to be used for the famished refugees
in drought times until 1942, 12 when with the emerging knowledge of Nazi Holocaust
camps, the similarities between groups of starving incarcerated undesirables— sertane-
jos and Jews—was too stark.
The New Middle Passage
The retirantes were not the only unwilling migrants. As the rains failed, so did many
farming enterprises, and among those who owned slaves, their most “liquid asset” was
their human chattel. While the importation of slaves had ceased in 1850, the rise of the
coffee industry in southern Brazil in the 1870s created a ravenous demand for work-
ers and animated a boom in unfree labor. Most vulnerable were the slaves of smaller
enterprises in the interior of the Northeast, the cotton and castor growers living on the
less productive margins of the Sertão. These were mostly native “creole” slaves, a pop-
ulation that actually considered itself Brazilian and had a sense of local identity in the
campo negro —the black countryside. 13 The market for coffee slaves was surprisingly
large: close to 100,000 slaves entered the Rio and Sao Paulo slave ports by boat from
1870 until 1888, according to the economic historian Roberto Slenes. 14 Robert Conrad,