The same men

The colonel who allowed the sacking of Bagé in 1892 commanded at Canudos in 1897, and the Pacifier of 1895 ordered it.

There is a continuity between the South and the backlands that neither historiography usually traces, and it has two proper names: one a soldier, the other a civilian.

The soldier. Bagé, June 1892. General Joca Tavares, removed from his command, agrees to lay down arms on a single condition: that the civilian troops of the colonels Pedrosa and Totta shall not enter the city. The guarantee is given by Colonel Arthur Oscar de Andrade Guimarães, at the head of the federal forces. Tavares disarms his men. Then comes the telegram from Júlio de Castilhos: I withdraw my authorisation of the guarantees granted to General Joca Tavares, and instruct you not to oppose the march of the civilian forces — such is the recommendation of Marshal Floriano. Arthur Oscar departs, handing command of the garrison to Lieutenant Colonel Rabello de Vasconcellos with the information that the militias had been allowed in. The subordinate is left unable to act, and closes the windows of his office so as not to see what is running loose through the city.

The date matters more than it seems. If the sacking is of 1892, then the Federalist Revolution, which breaks out in 1893, is not the beginning of the violence: it is the answer to it. That is what the manifesto of Joca Tavares comes out of. Whoever inverts the order — the revolt first, the repression afterwards — is telling the history from the side of those who carried it out.

Five years later the same officer, now a general, commands at Canudos. And there he repeats, point for point, what he had done in the South: he gives his word that surrender will not cost lives, and has the survivors shot — old men, women and children. The scene of the decision is on record. He asks the Minister of War what to do with those who have surrendered. The answer is: we have no place for them. A word to the wise is enough — and the wise man shoots, to put those people in the place assigned to them.

In both episodes the structure is identical. Someone lays down arms because of a word given; the word obliges nothing; and the disarmament obtained by it is what makes possible what comes next. At Bagé the disarmed man was a general with his troops; at Canudos, starving backlanders come out of a settlement in ruins. The procedure did not change between 1892 and 1897.

The civilian. The Pacifier of 1895 and the man of Canudos in 1897 are the same Prudente de Morais. There was no pacification at all in the South: he merely withdrew the national Army from it, because the war was not good for business and São Paulo was hungry for resources, leaving the state in the hands of the castilhista dictatorship it had been fighting. Soldiers were left without a destination. The soldiers went to Bahia.

A quick affair was expected. It was not: the jagunços had faith, knew the ground and defended themselves well, and expedition after expedition nobody could finish them. Prudente was under threat of a coup — the military would not tolerate a civilian president, and a civilian president incapable of defeating poor backlanders was doubly lost. When defeat began to threaten his government, he asked the Minister of War to put an end to the thing at once. They ended it.

It is worth saying what that means without attenuation: a president preferred to exterminate a community rather than be seen as weak and lose his office. And that is how almost every massacre of State is made: someone needs a result, and does not ask about the method.

So the two continuities stand visible side by side — that of the man who executes and that of the man who orders. The second is the one that usually escapes, because Pacifier is a word that absolves all by itself.

Nor were these two the only ones. Carlos Telles, Thompson Flores, Tupi Caldas, Sampaio, Savaget — names that fought the federalists reappear in the backlands. This is not coincidence of career: it is the same force, moved from one theatre to another, with the same repertoire and the same methods. The word pacification, in the South, meant exactly this: the Army changed address.