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By Root 2076 0

private ownership of property is violated. He left me dumfounded by murmuring that all land belongs to the Good Lord Jesus, and that the Counselor is building the largest church in the world in Canudos. I tried to explain to him that it was not because they were building churches that the powers that be had sent soldiers to do battle with them, but he answered that it was precisely for that reason, since the Republic is trying to wipe out religion. I then heard, comrades, a strange diatribe against the Republic, delivered with quiet self-assurance, without a trace of passion. The Republic is bent on oppressing the Church and the faithful, doing away with all the religious orders as it has already suppressed the Society of Jesus, and the most notorious proof of its intentions is its having instituted civil marriage, a scandalous act of impiety when the sacrament of marriage created by God already exists.

I can imagine the disappointment of many of my readers, and their suspicions on reading the foregoing, that Canudos, like the Vendée uprising at the time of the French Revolution, is a reactionary movement, inspired by priests. It is not as simple as that, comrades. As you know from my last letter, the Church condemns the Counselor and Canudos, and the jagunços have seized the lands of a baron. I asked the man with the scar on his face if the poor of Brazil were better off during the monarchy. He immediately answered yes, since it was the monarchy that had abolished slavery. And he explained to me that the Devil, using Freemasons and Protestants as his tools, overthrew the Emperor Dom Pedro II, in order to restore slavery. Those were his very words: the Counselor has inculcated upon his followers the belief that the republicans are advocates of slavery. (A subtle way of teaching the truth, is it not? For the exploitation of man by money owners, the foundation of the republican system, is no less a slavery than the feudal form.) The emissary was categorical. “The poor have suffered a great deal but we shall put an end to that: we will not answer the census questions because the purpose of them is to enable the government to identify the freedmen so as to put them in chains again and return them to their masters.”

“In Canudos no one pays the tribute exacted by the Republic because we do not recognize it or acknowledge its right to arrogate to itself functions and powers that belong to God.” What functions and powers, for example? “Marrying couples and collecting tithes.” I asked what they used for money in Canudos and was informed that they allowed only coins with the effigy of Princess Isabel, that is to say, the coin of the Empire, but as this latter scarcely exists any more, in reality the use of money is gradually disappearing. “There is no need for it, since in Canudos those who have give to those who do not, and those who are able to work do so for those who are not.”

I told him that doing away with private property and money and establishing communal ownership of all things, in whatever name it be done, even in that of nebulous abstractions, is a daring and courageous act on behalf of the disinherited of this earth, a first step toward redemption for all. I also pointed out that such measures would sooner or later bring down upon them the harshest sort of repression, since the ruling class will never allow such an example to spread: there are more than enough poor in this country to seize all the haciendas. Are the Counselor and his followers aware of the forces that they are arousing? Looking me straight in the eye, without blinking, the man recited a string of absurd phrases to me, of which I give you a sample: soldiers are not the strength but the weakness of the government; when the need arises, the waters of the Vaza-Barris will turn to milk and its gorges to maize couscous; and jagunços killed in battle will be resurrected so that they will be alive when the army of Dom Sebastião (a Portuguese king who died in Africa in the sixteenth century) appears.

Are these devils, emperors, and religious fetishes the elements