Before the new Brazilian army can take…

Before the new Brazilian army can take shape, however, it is used in 1897 to destroy the religious community of Canudos in the sertdo of Bahia, which the Jacobins think mistakenly is a hot-bed of monarchist sedition.

The Rio de Janeiro government, which seed monarchists everywhere, throws a force of ninety-five hundred against a population of perhaps thirty thousand. Some four thousand one hundred and ninety-three soldiers are wounded between July and October 1897, and the townspeople are killed, taken prisoner, or flee.

Canudos is erased in the same fashion that native villages had been and continue to be erased.

Although the campaign's symbolic value as a defense of the republic fades as the reality becomes known, it remains a powerful warning to marginal folk throughout Brazil that they will not be permitted to challenge the hierarchical order of society.

In this sense, Canudos is a step in creating mechanisms of social control in the postslavery era.