Ricardo Beliel's 'Memórias Sangradas' Documents Cangaço History Through Oral Testimonies and Archival Photos

Journalist and photographer Ricardo Beliel's book 'Memórias Sangradas: vida e morte nos tempos do cangaço' reconstructs the history of the cangaço movement that dominated Brazil's northeastern sertão from 1920 until its annihilation in 1938. The publication, supported by Rumos Cultural and published by Editora Olhares, is built from nine trips between 2007 and 2019, covering 11,000 kilometers across seven states. Beliel, accompanied by his wife, artist and filmmaker Luciana Nabuco, recorded testimonies from 43 nearly centenarian descendants of the era, preserving the semantic integrity of their speech. The work intertwines his journalistic perspective with these oral histories and incorporates both his own photographs and archival images discovered in the interviewees' homes, including those from the 1920s and 1930s. These historical photographs, some by figures like the Lebanese Benjamin Abrahão who filmed the band in the 1930s, are reproduced with their time-worn marks intact. The project began in 2007 with a report for the European magazine Geo, which triggered memories of Beliel's childhood, where his history teacher mother narrated Brazilian cultural stories, including those of authors Graciliano Ramos and Rachel de Queiroz. The cangaço saga, led by figures like Virgolino Ferreira (Lampião) and Maria Bonita, was definitively crushed by Getúlio Vargas's troops in the 1938 Battle of Angico in Sergipe.