Violence in Northeast Brazil: Land, Power & Resistance in the Sertão

Bahia, Pernambuco, Ceará, Paraíba, Maranhão, Piauí, Rio Grande do Norte, Alagoas and Sergipe do not share one identical historical trajectory. Neither do the different landscapes inside those states.

Zona da Mata, Agreste, Sertão, Recôncavo, Cariri and coastal cities developed through different combinations of agriculture, ranching, commerce, labor systems, climate and political power.

Historian Denis Bernardes notes that even the formation of the Northeast as a socially and politically perceived region was historical rather than timeless. In the nineteenth century, contemporaries often still spoke more broadly of the “North” in opposition to the “South,” while particular regional identities and inequalities were being articulated.^[1]

In English, sertão is often rendered as backlands or hinterland. In discussions of Northeast Brazil, it frequently evokes the semi-arid interior. But historically the word has had broader and shifting meanings, often marking interior spaces understood from the perspective of coastal or colonial centers.

It therefore should not be treated as an automatic synonym for:

That last distinction matters because literature, journalism and cinema have often helped fix images of the sertão as dry, archaic and violent. Those representations are part of Brazilian cultural history, but they should not be mistaken for natural properties of the region.

The sertões were not empty spaces waiting for Portuguese settlement. Many Indigenous peoples already occupied and moved through these territories when colonial expansion accelerated.

As ranching, missions and colonial settlements moved inland, conflicts intensified. Historians traditionally grouped a long series of heterogeneous wars under the colonial label “Guerra dos Bárbaros”. Research on the period instead emphasizes multiple Indigenous peoples, different colonial fronts, shifting alliances and conflicts tied to conquest of the sertões between roughly the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century.^[2][3]

Calling the conflicts simply a war between “Portuguese settlers and hostile tribes” repeats the perspective of colonial authorities. Indigenous groups used warfare, alliances, negotiation, movement and other strategies to defend territory and survive a rapidly changing political landscape.

Indigenous forced labor and enslavement were important parts of early colonial Brazil. Portuguese law periodically restricted Indigenous enslavement, but those restrictions contained exceptions and were repeatedly contested or circumvented.

Research on the sertão of Rio Grande, for example, documents Indigenous enslavement within the colonial frontier and connects it directly to the broader wars of conquest in the Northeast.^[3]

At the same time, the forced migration of enslaved Africans expanded enormously through the Atlantic slave trade, especially as sugar production grew. African slavery eventually became dominant in many sectors of colonial economic life, but the transition cannot be explained by one royal decision or one motive.

It involved warfare, epidemics, colonial law, missionary interests, planters, merchants, the profitability of the Atlantic trade and the changing labor demands of different regions.

The history of the sertão cannot be understood only through sugar plantations.

As coastal plantation economies expanded, cattle ranching became increasingly important in the interior. Herds supplied meat, leather, animals and transport to colonial economies, while ranching required large areas of land. That expansion helped push colonial occupation farther into Indigenous territories and created new routes, settlements and forms of local power.

Studies of Northeast Brazil’s social formation emphasize the importance of different labor and property relations across the sugar zone, agreste and sertão, as well as the enduring political effects of land concentration.^[1]

Large landholdings did not automatically produce one identical political order everywhere. But control over land could also mean control over work, water, credit, protection and access to institutions—especially where formal state capacity was weak or distant.

Enslaved Africans and their descendants resisted slavery in many ways: negotiation, escape, rebellion, legal claims, religious and cultural organization, everyday refusal and the creation of quilombos.

Colonial authorities frequently treated autonomous Black communities as threats and organized expeditions to destroy them. Describing those confrontations simply as “violence caused by quilombos” reverses the context: slavery itself was a coercive system, and flight was one response to it.

The Biblioteca Nacional’s historical material on Black resistance treats quilombos as one among multiple strategies through which enslaved people challenged captivity.^[4]

Long before the First Republic, wealthy landowners and local political families could exercise power that extended beyond property ownership. In areas where courts, police and administrative institutions had limited reach, conflicts could be mediated—or intensified—through kinship networks, patronage, private armed men and personal authority.

Research on nineteenth-century Brazil shows the broader importance of armed private and seigneurial practices in political life, illustrating how formal state authority could coexist with local coercive power rather than simply replace it.^[5]

This older pattern is important, but it should not automatically be called coronelismo. That word belongs more precisely to a later political system.

Coronelismo is most closely associated with the political order of Brazil’s First Republic. Local bosses—often landowners or powerful merchants—could mobilize voters and exchange political support with state and national elites.

The word coronel referred historically to ranks connected to the National Guard and later became a political label for local bosses. FGV’s historical dictionary describes elections during the First Republic as heavily controlled by regional political chiefs, with practices such as curral eleitoral and voto de cabresto, sometimes enforced by armed jagunços.^[6]

Coronelismo helps explain certain forms of coercion and political dependency, but it should not become a catch-all word for every powerful landowner in Brazilian history.

No—not by itself.

Drought can destroy harvests, kill livestock, raise food prices, intensify migration and sharpen disputes over water and employment. But those effects depend on how land, water, wealth and political power are distributed.

A semi-arid climate does not produce a violent culture. Two communities can experience the same drought very differently if one has secure land, water infrastructure, savings and state support while another does not.

Historical discussions of the Northeast’s formation show that major droughts interacted with labor systems, migration, land concentration and regional political claims rather than acting as a simple environmental cause of social conflict.^[1]

The cangaço is one of the most mythologized subjects in the history of the sertão. Groups of armed cangaceiros crossed parts of the Northeast, especially from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s. Lampião and Maria Bonita became the most internationally recognizable names.

Popular memory often forces the cangaço into one of two simple stories:

Neither story is sufficient. Scholarship on the cangaço shows a much more complicated landscape of banditry, revenge, family conflict, extortion, alliances, protection networks and relations with local elites. Cangaceiros could fight a powerful coronel in one context and depend on protection from another in a different context.^[7][8]

Coiteiros and volantes

Two words help reveal how the cangaço functioned socially:

One of the least internationally known popular uprisings in nineteenth-century Brazil helps show why conflicts between poor rural communities and the State cannot be dismissed as “ignorance.”

In Pernambuco, Paraíba and neighboring areas, resistance developed against new rules for civil registration and census-taking. A rumor spread that the measures were really a Lei do Cativeiro—a law intended to enslave free poor people after the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1850.^[9]

In Pernambuco the movement is often called Guerra dos Marimbondos; in Paraíba, Ronco da Abelha. Participants included poor free farmers and other rural residents, and protests involved tearing down official notices, confronting authorities and demanding suspension of the measures.^[9]

The fear of enslavement was not simply fantasy in a society where illegal enslavement, re-enslavement, forced recruitment and insecure freedom remained real possibilities. MultiRio’s historical synthesis explicitly warns against treating the participants as politically passive or merely “fanatical.”^[9]

The Quebra-Quilos uprising is often summarized as peasants rebelling because Brazil adopted the metric system. That is memorable—but incomplete.

The major wave began in Fagundes, Paraíba, in 1874 and spread into other provinces. Protesters destroyed or rejected standardized weights and measures, but grievances also involved new fees and taxes, the growing reach of government administration and fears connected to military recruitment.^[10][11]

The metric system had been legally introduced earlier; the revolt emerged when those rules became entangled with everyday markets, taxation and other state policies. FAPESP’s historical review describes the movement as a popular protest against implementation of the metric system that was met with harsh repression.^[11]

By the mid-twentieth century, rural conflict increasingly took organized political forms around labor rights, land tenure and agrarian reform.

The Ligas Camponesas expanded from Pernambuco and became one of the best-known rural movements in Brazil before the 1964 military coup. Historical studies of peasant resistance identify Pernambuco as a major center and connect the leagues to broader struggles for rural rights and reforma agrária.^[12]

João Pedro Teixeira and Elizabeth Teixeira

In Paraíba, the league at Sapé became especially important. Rural leader João Pedro Teixeira was assassinated in an ambush in 1962. His widow, Elizabeth Teixeira, continued the struggle and later became one of the best-known witnesses to the repression of rural movements before and after the coup.^[13][14]

And then Brazilian cinema enters the story

Eduardo Coutinho began filming Cabra Marcado para Morrer in 1964 as a dramatized project about João Pedro’s life, with peasants connected to the movement participating in the production. The military coup interrupted filming. Coutinho returned years later and transformed the project into a documentary about memory, dictatorship, the Teixeira family and what had happened to the people involved.^[15]

That makes the film one of the strongest bridges between Brazilian agrarian history and Brazilian documentary cinema.

Not by itself.

Contemporary lethal violence involves structures that cannot be reduced to colonial conquest, coronelismo or cangaço: organized crime, illicit markets, firearms, policing, prisons, urban inequality and territorial disputes all operate in modern institutional and economic settings.

Current data also change rapidly from state to state. The 2026 Brazilian Public Security Yearbook reports 40,775 intentional violent deaths nationally in 2025 and shows very different state trajectories, with some Northeastern states registering declines and others increases from the previous year.^[16]

That alone should make us suspicious of statements such as “the Northeast has always been violent.” Modern violence is dynamic, geographically uneven and shaped by present-day institutions.

Revolta vs. levante

The two words can overlap. Revolta is very common in the conventional names of historical movements; levante often emphasizes the act of rising up collectively.

Useful sentences for discussing the history

The history examined here contains real and repeated violence. Colonial forces fought Indigenous peoples for territory. Slavery relied on coercion. Powerful local families used armed men. Cangaceiros killed, robbed and extorted. Police and military forces repressed movements. Rural organizers were assassinated. Poor free people sometimes took up arms against the State.

But those episodes do not form one continuous cultural personality.

They emerged from different conflicts over territory, enslavement, land, labor, taxation, political authority, elections, state expansion and access to rights.

The more accurate historical conclusion is therefore not that Northeast Brazil inherited a timeless culture of violence. It is that the region contains a long record of struggles over who could control land, command labor, exercise political power and define legitimate authority.