Febrônio Índio do Brasil is remembered in Brazil less for what a court decided about him than for what it did not decide. He was accused of killing two young people in Rio de Janeiro in August 1927. He was not convicted of those killings. A judge found that he could not be held criminally responsible, and ordered him interned in the city's Manicômio Judiciário, the judicial asylum, where he was entered in the register as the first patient. He died there, in the care of the state, in 1984. For more than five decades he was among the longest-held people in the Brazilian prison and asylum system, and his case became a reference point in debates about psychiatry, race and the law.
The date of his birth is given most often as January 14, 1895, and the place as São Miguel de Jequitinhonha, in the interior of Minas Gerais, now the town of Jequitinhonha. A study of his case by Luiz Morando says that this is the most likely date, and a regional newspaper in Espírito Santo gave the same one. He was the second of fourteen children. His birth name appears in the literature as Febrônio Ferreira de Matos, and in other places as Febrônio Simões de Matos; the surname "Índio do Brasil" was one he adopted later, and he used a long list of other names in the course of his life.
His father is described as short-tempered and violent, and he was beaten at home. At about twelve he ran away. The accounts agree on the general route: towns in the interior of Minas Gerais, among them Diamantina and Belo Horizonte, and then Rio de Janeiro, which he is said to have reached at about fourteen, probably around 1909. He was by then living by odd jobs and small deceptions.
From about 1916 he was a regular in Rio's police files. The charges recorded against him were small ones: fraud, extortion, theft, robbery and vagrancy. The psychiatric literature that later grew up around him counted dozens of arrests between 1912 and 1927, nine entries at the Casa de Detenção, the city's detention house, and convictions on three of those occasions.
In 1920, held at the Colônia Correcional de Dois Rios on Ilha Grande, a penal colony off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state, he began to read the Bible. He said that he saw a vision there, a woman who named him the "Filho da Luz," the Son of Light, and gave him a mission to announce that God had not died. From this point his fraud and his religion ran together.
After leaving the colony he passed himself off as a dentist and then as a doctor. Morando places this work in Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais between 1921 and 1926, and records that in the course of it he caused the death of a woman in childbirth. A historian quoted by a regional newspaper in Espírito Santo says he spent about two months in that state in 1926, using the name Bruno Gabina in Mimoso do Sul and fleeing within days of two deaths of children among his patients. No charge for any of these deaths is on record, and they are treated in the section on disputed points.
In 1926 he published a short work called As Revelações do Príncipe de Fogo, a religious text of some sixty-eight pages. It appeared in Rio de Janeiro without an author's name on the cover and was printed at his own expense; it was written, according to the critic Carlos Augusto Calil, while he was held on Ilha Grande. Mário de Andrade kept what is now the only known surviving copy and annotated it. The Swiss-born poet Blaise Cendrars, who came to know of the book, cited it in his own writing. Other Brazilian writers of the period, including Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, read it as well.
In October 1926 he was detained at the foot of Pão de Açúcar, the granite peak at the mouth of Guanabara Bay, in circumstances the police found suspicious. He was sent to the observation ward of the national psychiatric hospital and diagnosed as mentally ill, and he was released a few weeks later. The psychologist Guilherme Gutman, of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, who studied the medical record, counts two admissions to the hospital's observation pavilion before the killings, in October 1926 and in February 1927.
Two young people were killed in Rio de Janeiro in August 1927. Both deaths were in the district of Jacarepaguá, on the western side of the city. Morando dates them August 13, for Alamiro José Ribeiro, and August 29, for João Ferreira. They were two separate events, sixteen days apart.
Alamiro José Ribeiro was about twenty, according to Gutman and to the journal articles by William Vaz de Oliveira and by Pedro Álvares and Arthur Ferreira. Calil gives his age as seventeen. João Ferreira was a boy. Álvares and Ferreira, and Morando, give his age as ten; Calil as eleven; Oliveira as fourteen. The families identified Febrônio, according to Álvares and Ferreira, and Calil writes that the father of one of the victims recognized him in the police files as the man responsible.
The press began reporting on the first death on about August 17. Newspaper coverage over the following weeks was heavy and, as Morando describes it, serialized like a novel, appearing in Correio da Manhã, O Jornal, O Paiz and A Noite.
Febrônio was arrested on August 31, 1927, and taken to the Casa de Detenção. Morando gives September 2 as the date of his confession. The Ministério Público, the public prosecutor's office, formally denounced him on September 19, 1927.
He did not stand by the confession. He denied the charges and said the statement had been taken from him by violence at the police station. His young defense lawyer, Letácio Jansen, who had recently graduated in law in Recife and was about twenty, took up the same argument and took the case without a fee. Jansen said that the witnesses seemed to have memorized their statements, and he questioned how a tobacco pouch that belonged to the victim's brother-in-law had come to be attributed to Febrônio and written into the confession.
By the end of September the case had become a national story. A magazine, Fon-Fon, reported on the tattoo on his chest that read "Eis o filho da lux." Reporters wrote that he was a degenerate and a danger. Mothers in Rio, Gutman records, began to use his name to frighten children, with a refrain that became a catchphrase: "Aí vem o Febrônio!" A parody of a Carnival march about him was performed in 1928.
Jansen did not rely only on the argument about the confession. He asked for his client to be sent to a manicômio judiciário, arguing, in the words Morando quotes, that as a madman the state could neither indict him nor convict him. He chose not to seek habeas corpus, saying he was certain his client was mad. The prosecutor, Leonardo Smith, took the opposite position. He argued that Febrônio was feigning insanity, that religious mysticism was common among uneducated people and was no sign of madness, and that his behavior could be explained by his upbringing in the interior. He also objected to the idea of committing him for life, which he said Brazilian law did not provide for, and asked for a second expert opinion.
The first medical opinions came from outside the court. On October 15, 1927, the newspaper O Jornal published a study by two doctors, Murilo de Campos and Leonídio Ribeiro, who had examined him and recorded his dreams. Ribeiro later drew on the case in a book of 1938.
The official examination was done by Heitor Carrilho, the psychiatrist who directed the Manicômio Judiciário, which had no registered inmates before Febrônio. The judge appointed him. Febrônio was held for observation, and sources differ on the year of the examination, 1927, 1928 or 1929, and on the date of the report; Gutman dates it to February 1929, and Oliveira says it was published in 1930 in the Arquivos do Manicômio Judiciário do Rio de Janeiro. Carrilho diagnosed a "psicopatia constitucional," with what he called moral insanity and delusions of a mystical kind. He cited Krafft-Ebing and read Febrônio's drawings and his relations with his father and mother in psychoanalytic terms. His conclusion, quoted in several of the studies, was that Febrônio's "capacidade de imputação se acha prejudicada ou dirimida," his capacity to be held responsible was impaired or removed, and that he should be kept apart "ad vitam," for life, in an establishment for delinquent psychopaths, for "defesa social," the defense of society.
The judge, as one study names him, was Ary de Azevedo. He rejected the prosecutor's request for a second expert report. The decision, as Gutman quotes it from a 1956 compilation, ordered: "Mando que (...) seja ele internado no Manicômio Judiciário desta cidade," followed by "Sem custas." The date of the decision is not on record; Calil places the committal in 1929 and Morando gives June 6, 1929.
Legally, the outcome was not a conviction and not a sentence. The authors of the 2022 Memorandum study describe him as the first person in Brazil to be judicially declared not criminally responsible; the term used is "inimputável," also written "irresponsável." Calil called the committal the equivalent of a life sentence imposed without a trial. The institution was later renamed the Hospital de Custódia e Tratamento Psiquiátrico Heitor Carrilho.
He was entered in the register as number 00001, and later writers call him the oldest prisoner in Brazil. He spent more than fifty years in the institution, and Gutman, citing Xavier, gives the last fifty-seven of his life there.
Calil reports that he was treated with convulsive shock therapy and electroshock. He tried repeatedly to have the decision revised, in letters and through his brother, and was always refused. A later medical report, cited by Oliveira from about the twenty-ninth year of his confinement, noted that the maximum prison term for any crime in Brazil was thirty years. The anthropologist Peter Fry visited him in 1982, when, Oliveira writes, he was eighty-six and had been confined for fifty-five years.
From February 5 to 9, 1935, Febrônio was a fugitive for four days. Calil writes that the escape "haunted" the Carnival of 1935.
He died on August 27, 1984, at the age of eighty-nine, in the Hospital Central of the Rio de Janeiro prison complex, of pulmonary emphysema and myocardiosclerose, according to Gutman. Morando gives the same date and cause and says he was still interned.
The case produced a body of writing out of proportion to the facts. Cendrars interviewed him and published reports on him in the Paris newspaper France-Soir, and the Brazilian modernists Mário de Andrade, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Prudente de Morais Neto engaged with his book. A stage play, a documentary by Sílvio Da-Rin released in 1984, literature and Carnival songs followed. Morando shows how the Belo Horizonte press in 1934 used him as the model for a later suspect, Guaraci do Nascimento, whom it called an imitator of Febrônio.
Several other accusations attached to his name; no charge or verdict for them is on record. The case dossier, Calil notes, swelled with allegations that were not proven, among them a phantom company and the possible killing of a dentist. The Espírito Santo deaths of two children in 1926, told by a historian in A Tribuna in 2022, and the death of a woman in childbirth, told by Morando, are in the same position. In January 1927 a young detainee, Djalma Rosa, died at a Rio police station; Barros and Oliveira refer to the death, with differing accounts; no outcome is on record.
The ages of the two August victims differ between accounts. The dates of the confession, the examination, the report and the committal also differ. Oliveira's conference paper says the court "declared him imputável and interned him," which conflicts with the other studies, which describe a finding of non-responsibility. The place of death is given as the prison complex's central hospital by Gutman and as the Manicômio Judiciário by others.
January 14, 1895 (most likely): born in São Miguel de Jequitinhonha, Minas Gerais.
About 1907: leaves home at twelve.
About 1909: reaches Rio de Janeiro.
1916: begins to appear in police files for petty offences.
1920: held on Ilha Grande; the vision of the Son of Light.
1921 to 1926: works as a false dentist and doctor.
1926: publishes As Revelações do Príncipe de Fogo.
October 1926: admitted to the observation ward of the national psychiatric hospital; released within weeks.
February 1927: second admission to the observation pavilion.
August 13, 1927: Alamiro José Ribeiro is killed.
August 29, 1927: João Ferreira is killed.
August 31, 1927: Febrônio is arrested.
September 2, 1927: he confesses; later retracts, saying violence was used.
September 19, 1927: denounced by the Ministério Público.
October 15, 1927: O Jornal publishes the examination by Campos and Ribeiro.
1927 to 1929: Heitor Carrilho examines him.
1929 (June 6 in one account): judge orders him interned in the Manicômio Judiciário.
February 5 to 9, 1935: four days as a fugitive.
1982: Peter Fry visits him.
August 27, 1984: dies in Rio de Janeiro.