“Cruzada de Sangue”: um estudo sobre uma quadrilha de bandidos na fronteira meridional do Brasil, 1880 – 1892

Abstract

A gang of bandits operated on the southern border of Brazil, more specifically in the southern region of the province of São Pedro, during the 1880s. Among the crimes committed by the group were theft of objects and money, robberies and murders. The episode of capture and death of the leader of the gang, a farmer called Juvêncio Rodrigues Pereira, is recounted to this day by some residents of the town of Palma, a rural area in the municipality of Arroio Grande, Rio Grande do Sul. With the use of Oral History methodology we narrate this fact and, based on it, we seek to understand the trajectory of Juvêncio Pereira. We then began to locate information about the other members of the gang in newspapers of the time, criminal proceedings and registry records up to 1892. We sought to discover the networks of solidarity that the criminals and relatives involved in the crimes had, problematizing the links between the subjects. During the research, we tried to highlight the debate around the historian Eric Hobsbawm's concept of “social banditry” and analyzed the causes that generated violence in the geographical space delimited for our study. Finally, we use the Comparative History Problem as a methodological tool for a better understanding of the topic.