Brazil’s Nordestino outlaw tradition and the Pennsylvania desperado
A murderer was on the loose. The cold-blooded killer had stabbed his girlfriend 38 times in front of her two small children and was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. On August 31, 2023, the murderer escaped Chester County Prison outside Philadelphia by defying gravity and scrambling spider-like between two walls of an entryway to get to the roof, ran across the roof, climbed a fence and managed to get through razor wire to run free. When details emerged, it was revealed that Danelo Cavalcante was a Brazilian from the state of Pernambuco. My Brazilian husband muttered, “crazy Nordestinos.” Brazil’s Nordeste (Northeast) has a long outlaw tradition. I said: “Danelo? Wouldn’t it be Danilo?”
First of all, let me be very clear: I am not admiring this guy, a remorseless psychopath who brutally murdered his girlfriend because she discovered he was wanted for murder in Brazil. He was charged with homicide in 2017 in the state of Tocantins in Brazil’s interior; allegedly Cavalcante shot a man dead in a public square because the man hadn’t paid him for repairing his car. Having a warrant out for his arrest in his home country, he managed to enter the United States and blend into a community outside Philadelphia. What caught my attention was how consistent Cavalcante’s escapades were with the cangaçeiro tradition of Brazil’s Northeast.
The Northeast region of Brazil spans a swath of territory north of Rio and south of the Amazon along the coast and deep into the interior, including the states of Bahia, Sergipe, Alagoas, Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte and Ceará. This is a harsh and arid land characterized by leafless scrub vegetation called caatinga, sometimes referred to as “the white desert.” In the 19th and early 20th centuries, wealthy landowners ruled like potentates while lesser mortals were consigned to grinding poverty, and bands of outlaws roved as nomads across the land, robbing and pillaging to wrest control for themselves. The romanticized version of the cangaceiros is that they were Robin Hoods, taking from the rich and giving to the poor, “social banditry.” In turn, the poor hid them from the landowners and their mercenaries.
Cangaceiros wore leather despite the heat, to protect themselves from the thorny brush. Their garb included hats and bandoliers loaded with ammunition across both shoulders. They were self-sufficient and sewed their own clothing, embellishing the leather with coins, other pieces of metal and colored ribbons. Embellished gloves completed the look. Their weapons were rifles, revolvers and peixeiras: long, thin “fish-filleting” knives they used to dispatch victims by stabbing downwards between the neck and collarbone. They prided themselves on murderous efficiency.
The most famous of all cangaceiros was Lampião, whose band of marauders dominated the Northeast interior from 1920 to 1938. He was born Virgulino Ferreira da Silva in 1897 in the state of Pernambuco, one of nine children of a subsistence farmer. Virgulino never went to school but was literate and was apparently an avid reader later in life, seen in photographs wearing glasses and holding the O Globo newspaper. As often happened in the hinterlands, his father got into blood feuds with neighboring families and the family moved several times. Virgulino’s father died in a shootout with police in 1921 and his son took up the life of an outlaw with the name of Lampião. It is said he earned the name, meaning “oil lamp,” because he was so fast with a bolt-action rifle that at night it looked like he was holding a lamp.
Lampião commanded a band of up to 100 marauders, and far from being an idyllic Robin Hood figure he systematically terrorized the countryside, torturing, maiming, raping, fire-branding and murdering countless souls. He became a larger than life figure in Brazilian cultural history, like Jesse James or Pancho Villa. In 1930 he was joined by a female partner, who was married to someone else but left her husband for Lampião. Maria Bonita (“pretty Maria”) joined him in his escapades, and they had a child together who was later raised by Lampião’s brother. Women who joined the cangaceiros were called cangaceiras, and they were just as bloody and murderous as their male counterparts. Maria Bonita elevated Lampião’s reputation to violent romance like Bonnie and Clyde in the US, whose homicidal crime spree lasted from 1932 to their death in an ambush in 1934. The parallels of the times, the desperation of the Great Depression and the bitter life in Brazil’s Northeast, make sense. Lampião and Maria Bonita were gunned down in an ambush in 1938. But the enduring legacy of gangster chic lives on in Brazilian popular culture.
Danilo (as the Brazilian press spells it) Cavalcante stands just five feet tall and weighs 120 pounds, and if he is small in stature, he is obviously large in brutality. His escape from Chester Prison touched off a two week manhunt with reported sightings of the escapee on critter cams and Ring digital doorbell cameras. The first night he was at large a homeowner woke up to a noise downstairs in the kitchen and made a mental note that he should have repaired the lock on the French door. He toggled a light switch to warn the intruder and the intruder toggled the light in the kitchen in response, casually walking through the living room and leaving the house. During his rambles Cavalcante managed to get new boots, a duffel, a backpack, and a hoodie, and to shave his easily identifiable beard. On September 11th he entered a homeowner’s garage and stole a .22 caliber rifle and ammunition. Somehow he moved in and out of the perimeter established by police and US marshals. His capture finally came on September 13th (an unlucky date) when a heat sensor detected movement and a Belgian Malinois K-9 subdued him for the team of officers.
Celebrating the capture, police officers gathered for a group photograph with the escapee and the dog, an unseemly memento that is at best in poor taste and at worst is forbidden in time of war by the Geneva Convention. When Lampião and Maria Bonita and their gang were gunned down in 1938, their heads were severed from their bodies and put on display throughout the Northeast of Brazil. So I guess it’s all relative.
Photo credit:
http://brasilianafotografica.bn.br/brasiliana/handle/bras/5253
Benjamin Abrahão com Maria Bonita e Lampião no sertão nordestino, nas proximidades do Rio São Francisco. ABRAHÃO, Benjamin. Benjamin Abrahão com Maria Bonita e Lampião. 1936. Fotografia, p&b. Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro.