The War of the End of the World

The Counselor and Canudos

Antonio Conselheiro — “the Counselor” — was a real historical figure. Born Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel around 1830, he wandered the backlands of northeastern Brazil for decades, preaching, repairing churches, and gathering followers among the desperately poor and marginalized population of the sertão. He was not a fraud or a cynical manipulator: his faith appears to have been genuine, his asceticism real, and his appeal to the dispossessed of the backlands genuine and profound.

In the 1890s, Conselheiro and his followers established themselves at a settlement called Canudos, in the remote backlands of Bahia. At its peak, Canudos housed perhaps thirty thousand people — fugitive slaves, indigent landowners, deserters, the sick and the desperate and the faithful — making it the second-largest settlement in Bahia after the state capital. The community operated on principles of religious communalism that made no provision for the taxes, conscription, and civil registration that the new Brazilian republic was trying to impose.

Vargas Llosa’s portrait of Canudos and the Counselor is the beating heart of the novel. He renders the community from the inside — its daily life, its hierarchy, its particular mix of Catholic orthodoxy and popular religious syncretism, the devotion of the Counselor’s followers and the quality of their belief. The novel does not condescend to the community or treat its faith as primitive: it takes seriously the dignity that Canudos offered to people whom Brazil’s official society had rendered non-persons. The Counselor himself is rendered as complex rather than simply saintly — driven, possibly mad by the end, but also genuinely inhabited by something that his followers were not wrong to respond to.

The Republic and Its Army

The new Brazilian republic, established in 1889, saw in Canudos a monarchist conspiracy — an attempt to restore the Emperor and undo the republic. This interpretation was almost certainly wrong: Conselheiro’s hostility to the republic was religious (he opposed its separation of church and state, its civil marriage, its new taxes) rather than dynastic. But the interpretation served the republic’s need to frame its campaign as political rather than as what it actually was: the violent suppression of a community of the poor who had declined to be governed.

Four military expeditions were sent to destroy Canudos. The first three were humiliated. The backlands fighters — many of them veterans of the frontier, skilled with the terrain, and motivated by genuine faith — defeated professional soldiers who were operating in an environment they did not understand against an enemy they could not comprehend. The fourth expedition, a massive force with modern artillery, finally succeeded in 1897. Canudos was annihilated. Its survivors — women, children, the old — were killed after the settlement fell. The official count of the dead ranges from fifteen to thirty thousand.

Vargas Llosa traces the escalation with meticulous care. Each defeat of the republican army produces not reflection but intensification — more troops, more artillery, more certainty that this community of religious mystics must be a sophisticated military conspiracy. The republic cannot understand what Canudos is, because understanding it would require acknowledging that the republic’s own modernizing mission is not universally desired and not universally beneficial. The gap between the republic’s self-understanding and the reality of its campaigns is Vargas Llosa’s central subject.

Based on da Cunha

Vargas Llosa’s source for The War of the End of the World was Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, published in Brazil in 1902 and translated into English as Rebellion in the Backlands. Da Cunha was a military engineer who covered the fourth expedition as a journalist and produced, from that experience, one of the foundational works of Brazilian literature — a book that is simultaneously history, sociology, natural science, and tragedy.

Vargas Llosa openly acknowledged his debt to da Cunha, and incorporated a version of da Cunha himself into the novel as a nearsighted journalist whose glasses are broken early in the campaign and who must reconstruct what he witnesses partly from touch and sound. The choice is both a tribute and a meditation on the limits of historical witness: da Cunha’s account was extraordinary, but it was also partial, conditioned by his perspective, and required the novelist’s imagination to complete.

What Vargas Llosa invented — the interior lives, the love stories, the texture of daily experience — sits so naturally alongside the documented history that the seam is invisible. The novel received the Peruvian National Prize for Literature and was widely considered the major Latin American novel of the 1980s. When the Nobel Prize arrived in 2010, The War of the End of the World was cited alongside Conversation in the Cathedral as evidence of Vargas Llosa’s range and ambition.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Vargas Llosa’s most epic work and one of the great historical novels of the twentieth century. Set in Brazil, it is really about Latin America’s unresolved collision between modernity and everything that modernity excludes.