This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Canudos was organized around a claim of religious rather than political or military authority. Antonio Conselheiro offered spiritual leadership the institutional Catholic Church, thinly staffed in the region, did not reach, and the settlement he built held property communally and refused to pay taxes it regarded as illegitimate, living under his own religious authority rather than civil law. Catholic bishops in the region publicly disavowed him even as his following grew among the rural poor, so Canudos drew hostility from church and state alike even before the army arrived.
No international body existed at the time or has since made a genocide or crimes against humanity determination for the campaign against Canudos, but later historians, Levine among them, describe the army's conduct in the final assault, killing surrendering defenders rather than taking prisoners, in terms of a state massacre. This atlas records that historical characterization rather than a formal determination, since none exists; what is not disputed is that a settlement built on lay religious authority and communal refusal of state control was destroyed outright by the forces of a young republic that had come to see it as a threat to its own legitimacy.