6 ideas
Da Cunha argues that the sertão's geology, drought cycles and caatinga vegetation directly shaped a distinct human type, making land, then people, then conflict a single causal chain. The war cannot be understood without first understanding the terrain, because the terrain produced both the backlander's endurance and the army's defeats.
The backlander, isolated for centuries from coastal influence, forms a stable mestizo type adapted to hardship: outwardly awkward and slouching, but capable of sudden, titanic energy when roused. Da Cunha famously calls him 'before all else, a strong man,' inverting the racial theories that framed him as degenerate.
The coast and the interior are read as living in different historical epochs, so that the Republic's war against Canudos is a modern civilization attacking its own unassimilated past. The conflict becomes a collision of time periods rather than a mere rebellion, with the coast imposing institutions it never tried to understand.
Da Cunha concludes that the campaign was not the suppression of a monarchist plot but a crime, since the Republic killed citizens it had neglected, using the rhetoric of civilization to justify massacre. The misreading of a religious community as a political threat turned an internal failure of integration into a war of extermination.
The Republic sent four successive military expeditions, including Colonel Moreira César's column, which collapsed after his death, before finally razing Canudos in October 1897 with thousands of troops and artillery. The defenders fought to the last and the settlement never surrendered, with its final defenders being an old man, two adults and a child.
The caatinga's thorny scrub, heat and lack of water fought alongside the jagunços, wearing down conventional troops trained for open European-style battle. Guerrillas who blended into the land could ambush columns at will, showing that military superiority on paper dissolves when the environment favors those adapted to it.