A few years after the republic was established, in a remote and isolated area in the interior of the state of Bahia, a place that had been developing or more or less languishing without communication with the rest of the country, there was a rebellion against the republic...The interesting thing was that nobody could understand what was going on because in the mind of the elite, the political, intellectual, military elite of the country, it was simply unthinkable that there was a rebellion of poor people against something that had been created precisely for their benefit...
It was at this moment that the progressive intellectuals of Brazil began to play a fundamental role. Because they could not understand what was happening, they did what all intellectuals do when they fail to understand something: they invented a theory...What is really fascinating is that this theory, an imaginary creation of the politicians and intellectuals of westernized Brazil, took shape little by little and became an incontrovertible reality, something so obvious that nobody thought of falsifying or criticizing it...
All the rebels were killed; it was one of the most horrible massacres in Latin American history, and it was said that at least forty thousand people were killed by the Brazilian army...Euclides da Cunha was one of the first Brazilians to understand that something very tragic had happened, that a terrible misunderstanding lay behind this social tragedy...What he showed in his book is that importing institutions, ideas, values, and even aesthetic tendencies form Europe to Latin America is something that can have very different consequences, something that can produce unexpected results.
He explained the rebellion, for instance, as a deformation of religious ideas that were imported to Brazil and imposed on this community of peasants...That was the driving force behind the rebellion, the religious idea that evil was in Brazil and that the Christians, the authentic Christians, should fight against this scourge...
For the people in the region, Canudos, the civil war, was [100 years later] still present and very much alive because it was the most important and perhaps the only important event in their lives. All families there had some parent or grandparent who had been in the rebellion...It was amazing to see how all the problems that had been behind Canudos were still there in the region...
It was because the newspapers said certain things about Canudos, because speeches were made and then published, because lectures were given about what was happening, that all this national misunderstanding was possible.
--Mario Vargas Llosa, author of The War of the End of the World, "a novel of reciprocal fanaticisms"
# posted by Jay Taber : 3:57 PM
