A Quilombo Called Canudos - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 48

El Niño droughts emptied out the countryside—not only pathetic small-scale holdings
but even substantial properties. The 1880 El Niños had been so devastating that animal
stocks and backwoods populations had not recovered, and thus the well-watered flat-
landsinthebendoftheVasaBarrisRiverwereattractivetosquatters,pilgrims,refugees,
and “vagrants.” Canudos was an abandoned ranch owned by one of the most powerful
oligarchs of the region, the Baron of Jeremoabo, Cicero Dantas Martins, and seems to
have been a quilombo even before it became a utopian community. Da Cunha wrote that
thevicarofCumbê,whohadministeredintheAltoSertãoin1876andgonetoCanudos,
reported that clustered all around it was “an idle and suspect population, armed to the
teeth.” In a short space of time, beginning in 1893, “it would be transformed into the
mud-walled Troy of the jagunços .” 34
Canudosemergedasaneconomicandculturalspaceofmultipleethnicities inpartbe-
causeitprovidedaccesstolandexactlywhentheenormoustraditionaloligarchicd'Avila
and Brito holdings made virtually everyone outside their clans a squatter. Other than the
massiveholdingsofthesefamilies, onlyabout1-5percentofthetotalareaofBahiawas
in formal tenure, and such lands were mostly on the “sugar” coast or near Salvador. 35
The reality was that the monopoly on land and access to it was the best way to coerce
labor in the absence of slavery.
People may have been nominally free, but the land became captive. Brazilian slavery
had provided provisioning grounds where subsistence and small surpluses were gener-
ated, but there was no guarantee of access to these plots after slavery's demise. Indeed,
no institutional arrangements at all were made for the economic life of post-abolition
slaves. In the United States, forty acres and a mule sometimes staked ex-slaves. Nothing
wasprovidedinBrazil. Thesocial pacts,suchastheywere,between landownerandcul-
tivator were changing profoundly, and alienation of traditional land rights was one such
change. Almost overnight, a huge landless class was created in the backlands.
Access to land after abolition was mediated by the “coronels” through sharecropping,
corvée,renting,andgrazingshares,aswellaswagework.Accesstolandsoftenrequired
extra work on the owner's cash crops regardless of other agreements. This was known
as sujeição —subjection—and the term aptly defined the social transactions.
Historian Monica Dantas has described the agrarian and social history of Itapicura,
one watershed over from Canudos, a place that sent most of its population to the “rebel”
city. Dantas reviews how small farms became more precarious after abolition: access to
land was contracting, labor demands increased while rural oligarchs ignored their ob-
ligations, and the flimsy “safety nets” of backlands society were ignored or dissolved.
Farmers were increasingly vulnerable, and many of the households had lost their men to
the last pulse of slavery. Bolstering livelihoods became more problematic as enclosures