Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World (1981)

So the War of Canudos was an incident in Brazil the 1890s. The emperor had recently been deposed and a Republic installed; this did not sit well with a lot of people, and this guy started an eschatological religious movement which started a village in the north called Canudos. The government was not happy about this and there were a series of bloody skirmishes the upshot of which--naturally--was that the village was wiped out and almost everyone killed. Whee.

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