For sixteen years Virgulino Ferreira da Silva was the most wanted man in the backlands of northeastern Brazil. From 1922, when he took command of a band of cangaceiros, the armed outlaws of the semi-arid sertão, until July 1938, his groups moved across seven states, from Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte in the north to Bahia and Sergipe in the south. He went by the name Lampião, and under that name he appeared in the newspapers of Recife, Rio de Janeiro and New York. Killings of villagers, landowners and police were laid at his door and at the door of the men who rode with him.
He was never tried for any of them. The courts of Pernambuco, the state of his birth, opened criminal proceedings against him as early as 1922, and in at least one case a judge found the prosecution's complaint well founded and committed him for trial. None of those cases ever reached a verdict. He could not be summoned, because he had no fixed address, and every step was taken in his absence. In law he died an accused man. One of the cases against him was finally closed in October 1997, almost six decades after his death, on the ground that the time allowed for punishment had long since run out.
He was born, probably in 1898, at Vila Bela, the town now called Serra Talhada, in the sertão of Pernambuco. His birth certificate spells his first name Virgolino, with an o, and that is the spelling the Pernambuco courts used when they named him as an accused.
His family's life came apart in a dispute over land. His family and a neighboring family accused each other of encroaching on their ground and of stealing animals, and in 1916 the quarrel turned violent. The Ferreiras left the district, but the feud followed them. Two of his brothers were drawn into it with him.
Between 1920 and 1921 his father was killed by the police of the state of Alagoas. He later presented that death as the reason he became an outlaw, and many writers have accepted the explanation. Historians who have worked through the documents are less sure. The documents show that he and his older brothers were already involved in crime before their father died, and that the police action was itself a response to what the brothers had done. The vengeance he swore was never carried out against the people he blamed.
The brothers first joined bands led by other men. The most important of these was the group of Sebastião Pereira, known as Sinhô Pereira, a cangaceiro chief who had been an outlaw since 1907. In 1922 Pereira, unwell and advised by the priest Padre Cícero Romão Batista of Juazeiro do Norte, left the backlands, and command of the band passed to the young man from Vila Bela.
He proved a capable leader. He could read and write, and within a short time he had gathered other bands under his authority as well as his own. A historian who interviewed many of the survivors has described the organization at its height as about 150 men: a core group of 22 that traveled with him, and ten smaller groups of eight to twelve men each, spread across the sertão. Among the killings attributed to him in these years is that of the informant who had denounced his father to the police.
The crimes attributed to his groups over the following sixteen years included cattle theft, looting, kidnapping and murder, among others, carried out against farms and towns in seven states. The band also took money to spare places and people from harm, and accepted protection and supplies from landowners, the coronéis who ran the politics of the interior, in exchange for favors of its own.
The earliest known court case to name him as an accused comes from the judicial district of Belmonte, in the Pernambuco sertão. It is a homicide prosecution opened in 1922, the year he took command, against a co-accused and against Virgolino Ferreira da Silva and others. The handwritten file is held by the Memorial da Justiça of the Tribunal de Justiça de Pernambuco, the state's court of justice, which has scanned it and published it in five parts.
Several of the deaths attributed to the band in 1925 can be fixed to a place and a month. In May 1925 three people were killed in the village of São Caetano, in the municipality of Floresta, Pernambuco, and the band and its leader were later charged with those deaths. In August and September of the same year, in villages on the border between Pernambuco and Alagoas, at least seven people were killed. They were poor people who had no quarrel with the band. Among the dead were at least one child and one unarmed older man. One of his brothers died in the cangaço in July of that year.
The killing of Antônio Maninho at Sítio Nunes, in the municipality of Flores, Pernambuco, produced one of the best documented of the cases against him. The case is recorded in the court archive as Processo Criminal nº 1928.04.30, brought by the Justiça Pública against him and other cangaceiros.
The accused were never questioned. Because they lived, in the language of the file, in a place uncertain and unknown, the court could not serve them, and the case went forward without them.
The prosecution over the three deaths at São Caetano shows how the Pernambuco justice system dealt with men it could not reach. The police did not open their record of the case until December 3, 1927, more than two years after the killings. The Ministério Público, the public prosecutor's office, filed its complaint, the denúncia, against the cangaceiros on February 20, 1928.
The whole of the evidence-gathering stage took place in the absence of the accused. On July 23, 1928, the court issued a sentença de pronúncia, the Brazilian ruling that finds a prosecution's case strong enough to send the accused before a jury, and upheld the complaint against the cangaceiros. No jury ever sat. The men named in the ruling were never brought before the court.
The file stayed open for almost seventy years. On October 17, 1997, the case was finally closed on the ground of prescrição da punibilidade, the lapse of the time within which the state may punish an offense. By the court's own reckoning the time limit had expired in 1948, ten years after the principal accused had died.
The Belmonte, Flores and São Caetano files are not the only ones. The court archive of Pernambuco also holds proceedings over the band's first armed clash, over events at Maniçoba, Lemos, Serra Vermelha, the Sítio de Bom Sucesso, Santa Cruz and Serra Grande, and over two killings named in the file titles: the deaths of José Nogueira and of Cândido Ferraz. Two criminal cases from the district of Flores, one running from 1927 to 1997 and the other from 1928 to 1931, were transcribed and published by the court's own journal in 2011. In each, the Justiça Pública is the prosecuting party and Virgolino Ferreira da Silva and others are the accused.
None of these cases produced a trial. The judges of the interior were members of the local elites, and their rulings often followed the interests of the coronéis. But the files show that the courts were not absent from the sertão. Complaints were filed, witnesses were heard and committal rulings were made. What the courts could not do was bring a nomadic band into a courtroom.
In March 1926 he rode into Juazeiro do Norte, in Ceará, with 49 men and was greeted by a crowd of about 4,000. He was there at the invitation of local politicians allied with Padre Cícero, to whom he was devoted. They wanted the band for the Batalhões Patrióticos, the irregular forces then being raised to fight the rebel Prestes Column. He was promised the rank of captain. He used the title for the rest of his life, although he never formally held it. While in Juazeiro he spoke of having good friends everywhere he went.
The band left private property in Juazeiro untouched, out of respect for the priest. The episode showed how far his protection reached. Governors and police chiefs were hunting him in one state while political figures in another treated him as an ally.
In 1927 the band suffered its heaviest defeat, at Mossoró in Rio Grande do Norte. The chief of police of Pernambuco stated that year that no man of the sertão had joined the band in 1927, and that only fourteen cangaceiros remained with their chief.
He rebuilt. From the late 1920s he spent about ten years in Bahia and Sergipe, where pressure from Pernambuco could not easily reach him. In 1929 the Força Pública of Bahia had its first clash with him, at the town of Queimadas, and from then on the Bahia force made his capture its main task.
The killings attributed to the band went on. In October 1929 he was held responsible for the deaths of nine men outside Juazeiro, in Bahia, after he had threatened a road-building project there. In December 1929 the band killed seven police officers who had already surrendered. In 1930 his companion, a woman from Bahia, joined the band, the first woman to become a member of the cangaço. In October 1935, in revenge for cangaceiros killed by a civilian militia, the band killed two more people.
The campaign against him became a test of whether the states of the northeast could work together. Each state's police had once stopped at its own border, and a band that crossed a state line was safe from the force that had been following it. On December 15, 1922, in Recife, Pernambuco, Ceará, Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte signed an interstate police agreement, a convênio, that let the flying columns of police, the volantes, operate across their common borders. Under it, Pernambuco based its volantes in the towns of Triunfo and São José do Belmonte. A Pernambuco law of May 16, 1924 raised the state force to 2,500 soldiers.
The agreements were never easy. Officers quarreled over command when the forces of two states met, and Pernambuco and Bahia exchanged complaints over a joint operation in 1927. A clause of the 1922 agreement against those who sheltered outlaws, the coiteiros, was left vague, and in practice it was used against small landowners living in remote places. After the revolution of 1930 the federal government of Getúlio Vargas took a harder line, and in 1932 more than two dozen army officers were commissioned to serve in the volantes of Bahia. On July 12, 1935, a new agreement brought in Bahia, Sergipe and Alagoas as well.
He was killed by police forces in Sergipe on July 28, 1938.
His death ended the cangaço as an organized force. The cangaceiros still at large across the northeastern states scattered. Some left the region to try for a life outside crime, and others gave themselves up to the police in exchange for an amnesty offered by the Vargas government. The Bahia force's last major action against a band came in 1940.
No count of the people he killed has been established, and no court ever tested any of the accusations against him. The killings in the court files were charged against him together with other members of the band, and in most of the deaths attributed to the cangaço it is not established whether he was present or gave the order.
His own account of how he came to the cangaço, as a son avenging a father killed by the police, is contested. Historians have shown that he and his older brothers were already involved in crime before their father's death, and one study of the period describes vengeance as his alibi rather than his cause.
1898: Born, probably in this year, at Vila Bela (now Serra Talhada), Pernambuco.
1916: A land dispute between his family and a neighboring family turns violent.
1920 to 1921: His father is killed by the police of Alagoas.
1922: Takes command of the band of Sebastião Pereira; a homicide case naming him as an accused is opened in the district of Belmonte, Pernambuco.
December 15, 1922: Pernambuco, Ceará, Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte sign an interstate police agreement in Recife.
May 16, 1924: A Pernambuco law raises the state force to 2,500 soldiers.
May 1925: Three people are killed at São Caetano, Floresta, Pernambuco.
August to September 1925: At least seven people are killed in villages on the Pernambuco and Alagoas border.
March 1926: Enters Juazeiro do Norte, Ceará, with 49 men; is promised the rank of captain.
1927: The band suffers its heaviest defeat, at Mossoró, Rio Grande do Norte.
December 3, 1927: Police open their record of the São Caetano case.
February 20, 1928: The public prosecutor files the denúncia in the São Caetano case.
July 23, 1928: The court issues a sentença de pronúncia against the accused in the São Caetano case.
1929: First clash with the Bahia force, at Queimadas.
October 1929: Nine men are killed near Juazeiro, Bahia.
December 1929: Seven police officers who had surrendered are killed.
1930: His companion joins the band.
July 12, 1935: Bahia, Sergipe and Alagoas join a new interstate police agreement.
October 1935: Two people are killed in revenge for the deaths of cangaceiros.
July 28, 1938: Killed by police forces in Sergipe.
1948: The time limit for punishment in the São Caetano case expires.
October 17, 1997: The São Caetano case is closed by prescrição da punibilidade.