[Brazil] Guerillas

Scene of a violent confrontation between Brazilian government troops and the Botocudo indigenous people of Minas Gerais. From 1808, under the reign of the Prince Regent John VI, the colonial authorities launched a military offensive known as the “Just War” against the native peoples of the Doce River, which crosses the captaincies of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo. Officially motivated by the desire to put an end to inter-ethnic conflicts and cannibalism, this policy had as its real objective to enslave and exterminate the indigenous populations, representing a regression with respect to previous colonial policies. These actions continued during the first years of the imperial period (1822-1889), until 1831. Several violent confrontations took place, especially in 1824, when the German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas was in Brazil. Although he was not a direct witness to these events, he denounced them in his travel account, lamenting the man-hunt to which the indigenous people were subjected and the indiscriminate massacres that resulted, often affecting women and children. This policy accelerated the extermination of numerous native peoples of Minas Gerais, already weakened by centuries of exploitation and slavery at the hands of the gold prospectors. Although this lithograph is a later and indirect reconstruction of these massacres, it contributed to revealing these atrocities to the European intellectual elite. Our example, titled “Guerillas”, comes from the German edition of Rugendas’s travel account, published in 1836 and known as the “Little Rugendas”; it is a very rare piece, since the lithographs of this artist were only included in the first two French and German editions of his work.