In Brazil’s backlands, decades-old feud continues to claim lives

FLORESTA, Brazil — The little priest leans in, as though to make a confession. The subject is forbidden, but tonight he will talk. “A violencia,” he says.

The violence of his account seems impossible.

This small town, called Floresta, blooms in Brazil’s sertao, a wild and arid land. On its surface, Floresta is all pinks and yellows and purples, its facades covered with thick layers of paint. The houses stand in rows around a tree-lined square, and in the center sits a church.

But a decades-long feud between two powerful families here has killed scores of residents, young men trading their lives away one at a time for bits of family honor. There’s an invisible line through the town that marks each family’s territory, and it runs through the church sanctuary: on one side, Ferraz; the other, Novaes.

There’s a noise at the door. The priest sits upright.

A squad of elite federal troops, wearing black body armor and toting assault rifles, enters the rectory. The men nod to the priest, then walk toward the rooms they have commandeered for sleeping each night. They traipse through, letting their weapons hang slack, relieved to have survived another patrol. The government sent them to this far-flung town as a buffer, a walking demilitarized zone.

After they close their doors, the priest nods and whispers, “Violencia.”

***

It’s hard to say when the feud began. The people involved rarely speak of it, even among themselves. A man with blood from both sides — a Ferraz-Novaes — shrinks away from discussing it in public. He echoes the priest: “Forbidden.”

But after midnight, he says, he will meet for a drink and talk about A Luta, The Struggle.

Some say it started about a quarter of a century ago; others say its origins are older than the country itself.

To visit the sertao is to travel into Brazil’s history. Modern Brazil has big plans; it will host soccer’s World Cup in two years and the Summer Olympics two years after that. The sertao, or backlands, doesn’t feature in tourism literature. It encompasses parts of eight states in the country’s northeast, isolated and far from the famous southern cities. But its harsh terrain and sunburned people are far more entwined with Brazilian identity than are the beaches of Rio de Janeiro or the skyscrapers of Sao Paulo.

Brazil is larger than the contiguous United States, which made it an unwieldy colony for the Portuguese crown. To fend off the encroaching Spanish and Dutch, the king assigned vast tracts of land to nobles and endowed them with the military rank of capitao and eventually coronel. Soon each of these landowners became a kind of rural king.

After Brazil won its independence in 1823, the inaccessibility of the sertao insulated it from the reach of the law. The towns and villages of the region continued to live by the word of the landowners, a system still called coronelismo.

As time passed and more patriarchs divided the land, two contending families often emerged in a single town. In Exu, in Belem de Sao Francisco, in Patos, revenge became a slow-motion epidemic, killing men in single file.

In Floresta, the rivalry started as merely political and remained peaceful for a long time. In 1913, the town set out to elect its first mayor, and each of the two ruling families, Ferraz and Novaes, put forward a candidate. The Ferraz man won, setting the conflict in motion.

At City Hall, rows of portraits of politicians line the walls; every mayor has been either a Ferraz or a Novaes.

Beyond politics, the two families worked together against a common enemy: their environment. Floresta has a population of 26,000, but it is scattered over more than 1,400 square miles. A spiny brush called caatinga covers the countryside, clawing at cattle, horses, men. Cowboys stitch together leather armor to protect their bodies. The sun beats down, boiling their blood, whether Ferraz or Novaes.

But then the rivalry took a turn toward death.

One day in 1991, a young Ferraz man discovered that someone had stolen his custom-made saddle. A few days later, he encountered a Novaes man using the fateful saddle. He pulled the rider down from his horse and called him a ladrao, thief.

The accused Novaes gathered a few well-armed relatives and returned to kill the Ferraz accuser, setting off the complex machinery of revenge and counter-revenge. When a man was slain, the responsibility to find and kill the perpetrator fell to his nearest male relative. If no one could identify the exact perpetrator — if he had hired a hit man, for instance — the avenger would kill the most likely suspect. Sometimes that might happen quickly; sometimes it might take years.

Women did play a role in feuds throughout the sertao, refusing to leave their homes for months or years after a killing, lamenting the loss of their fathers and brothers, displaying the dead man’s blood-stained clothes. But assassins never targeted women, the elderly or children. Only the men.

So far more than 40 family members have died in the feud.

The entire town suffers, though. The hundreds of Ferraz and Novaes family members make up a minority in Floresta, but everyone else depends on their favor or does business with them or teaches their children. And friends and associates of the families — locals say as many as 20 — have died in peripheral violence.

***

On April 23, 1992, the mayor heard a commotion outside his home, in Floresta’s town square. Mayor Francisco, as everyone called him, was a Ferraz. He knew the feud had escalated since the saddle incident. Finally, it had reached him.

As he ran outside, pistol in hand, his son ran inside.

“His son was supposed to die,” says Nego Novaes, who now heads that family. He looks the part of a godfather, with his shirt unbuttoned to his torso, revealing silver hair and tanned skin. He sits in the moonlight in his courtyard and remembers the Ferraz mayor with begrudging admiration. “He was brave. He came out with his pistol.”

The assassins gunned down the mayor and, a few months later, finished the job by killing the son.

The pace of the feud accelerated as the relationship of the families to the land changed.

Younger family members discovered that the sertao was a perfect environment for growing a new crop: marijuana. They started carrying higher-caliber guns and hiring shooters who never missed.

Floresta sits at the center of what Brazilian sociologists call the Marijuana Polygon, where the economy includes, or depends on, a roaring drug agriculture. Landowning families keep collecting the harvest as they always have; only the crop has changed.

Young Ferraz and Novaes family members now leave, traveling enormous distances to escape the violence. Mayor Francisco’s youngest surviving son, Tacio Ferraz, moved 1,500 miles south to Sao Paulo. His father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather were all mayors; he works as a graphic designer.

When he visits home, Tacio stands out in his running shoes and T-shirt — and his subtle rejection of Floresta’s machismo. “It seems like time has stopped here,” he says.

Still, change is coming. Cafes in Floresta have begun installing small satellite dishes so that customers can watch the news. Unfortunately, the news is from places like Brasilia or Rio, no more relevant to Floresta than news beamed from Jupiter. Local updates come a couple of times a day, when a man with a public address speaker strapped to the top of his car drives past.

The worst news travels by mouth, Tacio says. A family member told him by phone that his father had been killed in the feud. A couple months later, news came of his brother, killed in the public square.

Sometimes months or even years pass between killings, and both sides settle into a sort of cold feud in which one side simply does not acknowledge the other exists. They travel long verbal distances to avoid naming the opposite family.

There is now a Ferraz Club and a Novaes Club in town. The families struggle for control of the local hospital, suspicious that any doctor employed by one side will not treat the other.

Over the decades, each side developed a persona. A policeman from Floresta volunteers his wordless impression. He says, “Ferraz,” then pretends to smoke a cigarette with detached cool, flipping the pages of an invisible book. Then he says, “Novaes,” draws himself to full height, swells his chest and thumps it with a fist.

A family leader named Augusto Ferraz keeps a book on his coffee table, one he commissioned to photographically explore Floresta’s elaborate architectural details. It contains his poetry, written in equally ornate verse. He’s warm and garrulous, and likes to entertain guests in his old and beautiful home.

He loves economics and cinema as well, but above all, he says, he loves Floresta. And he wants to see it wrenched from the control of the current mayor. “A schoolteacher, very nice, but unprepared,” he says. And a Novaes.

Her name is Rosangela, but everyone calls her “Mayor RoRo,” which in Portuguese sounds like “HoHo.” Four years ago, after three decades of uninterrupted Ferraz rule, she successfully ran for mayor.

Detractors, and even some supporters, say she is merely a front for her husband, Gato. Because the rules of the feud preclude killing women, the theory goes, he can insulate himself by administrating through his wife.

In the October election, the Ferraz family plans to take back control of the town.

“You should come to our rally tomorrow night,” Augusto says. “We will be announcing our man for mayor.”

***

The festival of Sao Joao makes an ideal time to ignite a political fire.

It happens in the last week of June, the biggest festival in Brazil’s north, much larger here than Carnival. Flags decorate the town by day, bonfires by night. Meals become feasts. Children set off enormous artillery-like firecrackers. People from farms scattered across Floresta’s acreage make their way to the town center. It’s an ideal time for a political rally.

Outside City Hall, family and friends of Mayor RoRo wait in the square. At last, her sleek, black car appears. She steps out and greets supporters with a kiss to each cheek. She has a powerful bearing, the look of a colonial Portuguese aristocrat.

She bases her campaign, she says, on the slowing of murder between the families. But what about the special operations troops throughout the city? Are the families still set against each other?

She hesitates, and then: “Yes ...”

Her husband, dark-haired and dapper, steps physically into the conversation. “This woman moves anywhere in Floresta without fear,” he says. She retreats to greet more well-wishers, and he continues, “She has wide support throughout the town. She is safe.”

Beyond Gato’s shoulder, an industrial spotlight sweeps the sky, calling the Ferrazes to their own rally. They’re meeting in the enormous courtyard of the family club, where the scene is less subdued.

An aluminum scaffolding suspends a lighting rig over a large stage. Hundreds of Ferrazes turn out, cheering, singing, chanting. Family members greet one another with an old-fashioned kiss to each cheek beneath an enormous disco ball.

As each speaker takes the stage, a fusillade of fireworks lights the sky until the mayoral candidate, Oscar Ferraz, stands for his turn. The Portuguese diminutive for Oscar is Caca, and a master of ceremonies booms over the sound system, “Ra, ra, ra! Meu prefeito e Caca!”

As Caca stands, fog billows from somewhere beneath the stage, cannons fire silver confetti over the audience and the sound system pumps out a tune written for the occasion: Mayor Caca, the singer belts out, will do right by the family.

The candidate raises his hands high overhead, and there’s no speech necessary: The Ferraz audience leaps and cries out, cheering their man. “Ra, ra, ra! My mayor is Caca!”

***

Lili Novaes hasn’t left her home in 10 years, people say. She lives mostly in her kitchen, where she developed a magical recipe for doce de leite, a candy that melts hearts.

She opens her front door and apologizes.

“I cook less at my age,” she says. “I have no candy right now.”

The sertao’s most famous candy maker is an old woman now, with burnished skin and silver hair pulled into a bun. She lowers herself onto a sofa. “I love to make my candy for the people,” she says. She uses “people” in a broad, political sense. The People. But not quite all the people; she doesn’t sell to the Ferrazes.

She talks a moment about how the doce de leite she cooks brings happiness into the hard existence in the sertao, and then suddenly her eyes go liquid. She’s crying. She rises from the sofa and moves down a hallway to three photos hanging on the wall. “My sons,” she says.

They have each died in The Struggle.

She touches each of their faces. One, two, three. “I miss them,” she says.

It seems no one has told her the news.

Last month in Sao Paulo, an assassin tracked down her fourth son.

***

Nego Novaes, the head of his family, reclines in his courtyard throne. “Yes, I know about Sao Paulo,” he says.

A feud is a terminal disease carried in the blood. It does not end until the population dies, or someone cures the condition.

Brazil is rising in the world, asserting itself, claiming a position among the industrial nations. But the sertao exists in an old Brazil, where development and democracy and rule of law are still only shoots emerging from inhospitable soil.

There’s an election in October and coronelismo is losing its grip. Is that enough to ensure peace between the families?

“We need an agreement,” Nego says. “I would sign an agreement, but the other side ...” He waves a hand. “Never.”

The families have struck truces in the past. But both sides acknowledge violence could erupt here at any moment. Can the violence end?

The old man raises a crooked finger to the sky.

“Only God can stop it.”

matthew.teague@latimes.com

Twitter: @MatthewTeague