2. A Grisly Tour
Police Colonel Joao Bezerra da Silva, in command of the operation that killed Lampiao, took the gang’s severed heads on a tour. The grisly trophies – decomposing despite efforts at preservation – attracted crowds wherever they were displayed. In Piranhas, Alagoas State, they were carefully arranged on the city hall’s steps, along with their weapons and equipment, and photographed. Afterwards, they were taken to Maceió and southeast Brazil. Doctors at the country’s main medical institute measured, weighed, and examined the bandits’ heads. The results led them to abandon a then-prevalent theory that a good man could not become a bandit, absent some physical abnormalities. The severed heads showed no signs of physical degeneration or anomalies, and were completely normal. The heads then went to Salvador, where they remained for six years at a university’s dentistry faculty. Eventually, the remains ended up in an anthropology museum, where they were exhibited for decades.
The fate of Lampiao and his comrades proved an effective salutary lesson. The leaders of many other bandit gangs rushed to turn themselves in, to avoid a similar fate, and the cangaceiro phenomenon sputtered to an end soon thereafter. For years, the families of Lampiao, Maria Bonita, and their fallen comrades, fought to give their relatives a dignified burial. A public pressure campaign to end the macabre public exhibit finally bore fruit with the enactment of a law in 1965 to bury the bandits’ remains. It met with fierce opposition: the grave of one of the campaign leaders’ father was dug up, the corpse’s head severed, and displayed in the same museum that exhibited the heads of Lampiao and his companions. The heads of Lampião and Maria Bonita were finally buried on February 6th, 1969, and those of the rest of the gang were interred a week later.
