The Violent Land [antikvár]

Blood Fertilized These Lands* The cacao lands, a region embracing all of the southern part of the state of Bahia in Brazil, were fertilized with blood. They were conquered foot by foot in ferocious struggles of indescribable violence. They were barbarous lands, where banditry and death, implacable hatred and the cruelest revenge flourished; there was a time when they were the symbol of anti-culture and anti- civilization in Brazil. Men had set out to conquer the forest, to clear it and transform the landscape and the economy of a vast area. But those who set out were many, and they went armed. As though there were not land enough and to spare for all, they fought one another, disputing each foot of that humid earth, ideal for the planting of cacao. At the very time that the seedlings were being planted, crosses were being set up to mark the spots where the brave had fallen, victims of ambushes or of encounters between hired gunmen. All this happened only the other day, at the end of the past century, at the beginning of the present. When I was five or six years old, in 1917 and 1918, shootings were the daily fare of *This foreword was written by Senhor Amado especially for this new edition of The Violent Land, which was first published in English in 1945.