Tag: Brazil

Suspected cannibal in ‘bloody clothes’ arrested at Lisbon airport with ‘suspicious meat’ in luggage

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A Brazilian murder suspect and Dutch resident who police believe may have participated in “cannibal practices” was arrested at an airport in Portugal with a suitcase containing “suspicious meat” and bloodstained clothing.

Begoleã Mendes Fernandes, 26, was taken into custody at Lisbon Airport on Monday February 27, 2023, after getting off a flight from Amsterdam, where he was suspected of killing 21-year-old Alan Lopes a day earlier. Both the victim and suspect are of Brazilian descent. Fernandes was at first arrested on suspicion of travelling on falsified documents.

Portuguese media reported that pieces of meat were found inside a plastic bag packed into Fernandes’ luggage, and that the meat could be human flesh. The meat is still to be analysed in a laboratory, to determine its origin. The Portuguese Immigration and Border Services (Servico De Estrangereiros E Fronteiras or SEF) issued a statement:

“After contacting the authorities in the Netherlands, the country where he resided, it was confirmed that he was wanted on suspicion of committing a crime of murder that occurred on February 26, in Amsterdam, which led the judicial authorities of that country to issue, yesterday afternoon, a European Arrest Warrant for extradition purposes.
By indication of the Dutch authorities and the Lisbon DIAP, in addition to the documents that the suspect had in his possession, a bandage and clothes with traces of blood, a plastic package containing several pieces of meat and a mobile phone were seized, with the foreign citizen taken to the PJ’s Scientific Police Laboratory.”

Fernandes drew border officers’ attention because he had a bandage on his right hand and bloodstains on his clothing. He was scheduled to board a flight to Belo Horizonte in Brazil.

The police found the body of Lopes in his home on Vegastraat in Amsterdam at around 9:20 p.m. that Sunday after calls from his concerned friends. “It was clear that he died in a violent crime,” the police said in an initial statement. Specialists were deployed to the scene to do a forensic investigation.

The Portuguese daily newspaper Jornal de Notícias noted that

“The suspect claimed that he killed the victim because the latter forced him into cannibalistic practices.”

Lopes’ friends told Dutch daily paper Parool that they called the police after Fernandes messaged them to say that he had killed the young man. Several of Lopes’ friends received the voice notes at around 7:30 p.m. on Sunday. Marco Cunha (23) told Parool:

“He said that he tried to defend himself against Alan because he had pretended to be a cannibal. Other friends received the same vague message.”

The 26-year-old Fernandes, who described himself on Facebook as “2% genius, 98% crazy” made his initial court appearance in Lisbon and was placed in custody pending his extradition to the Netherlands.

Lopes was found dead Sunday night at a house in Amsterdam that he shared with his mother and sister, who were away at the time. According to Lopes’ friends, the young man was trying to help Fernandes, who worked as a delivery boy and had descended into drug-taking in recent months.

“He went crazy in a short time. He was on drugs, and it drove him crazy. His brain just stopped working.”

“Alan tried to help him. He had a big heart, even for the one who killed him,” Lopes’ mother, Antonia Lima (45), said to Parool. Her partner, Freek Posthumus (60), said that the young man was building a life in the Netherlands. “He was busy with his driver’s license and worked hard. I am convinced he had a bright future ahead of him.”

Kamila Lopes, the victim’s sister, told the news site Notícias ao Minuto that Fernandes was homeless and would stay with the family whenever he had nowhere to reside.

However, in an interview with the Portuguese television channel SIC, Fernandes’ mother, Carla Pimentel, suggested that her son may have killed Lopes in self-defence, according to the Portuguese-language news outlet RFI.

According to Pimentel, Fernandes was having dinner with the victim when Lopes offered him human flesh, and also showed him videos about cannibalism. The 21-year-old then allegedly tried to kill Fernandes.

The mom claimed that the meat found in her son’s possession in Lisbon was the same that was offered to him by Lopes, and that her son had kept it as evidence that he planned to hand to the authorities. Some reports are claiming that forensics have shown the meat is not from the body of the victim, Lopes, suggesting that the claims about cannibalism of a third person may be accurate.

Fernandes is expected to be extradited to the Netherlands sometime “this week” (i.e. week commencing 20 March). In the meantime, he has been locked in a jail cell in Lisbon airport for 22 hours every day for his own safety. According to tabloid Correio da Manhã, due to the media frenzy, he is now known as “the cannibal”, and authorities hope to “contain any untoward reactions with other inmates”.

2022 CANNIBAL NEWS and VIEWS

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What a year! These are some of the cannibalism stories, films and songs that arrived in 2022, with links back to the original reports, so that you can look up the ones that catch your interest, and so that this blog does not take all of 2023 to read.

January

  • A German man dubbed by the press the ‘cannibal teacher’ was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Stefan R., a 41-year-old maths and chemistry teacher, had apparently searched on the dark web for terms such as “long pig” and “fatten and slaughter people”. The man claimed his victim died of natural causes after a (presumably vigorous) sexual tryst, and he had removed the man’s penis “since my DNA could still have possibly been present due to the oral sex I performed”. In other words, he didn’t mind a bit of mutilation and perhaps cannibalism, but was concerned not to be “outed” as gay.
  • Djalma Campos Figueiredo, 46, was arrested in Brazil. He had been sentenced by the Court of Justice of Rondonia in the city of Porto Velho to 42 years in prison for several counts of aggravated murder but had escaped custody. The Civil Police alleged he would eat his victims’ eyes and ears and drink their blood.
  • Meanwhile, the Zamfara (NW Nigeria) State Police Command arrested a 57-year-old man, Aminu Baba, for allegedly eating and selling human body parts. Baba and three others were arrested after the murder of a nine-year-old boy. The Police Commissioner reported that Baba had “confessed that he usually ate the body parts and identified the throat as the most delicious part. He also sold some of the human parts to his customers.”

February

  • In Afghanistan, we discovered that the Taliban were rounding up drug addicts and putting them in rehabilitation centres to detox, which is a nice thought, except that they gave them little or no food (“cold turkey” does not count), so they apparently resorted to cannibalism.

April

We have been following the case of an Idaho man, James David Russell, who was accused of killing and eating a neighbour in September 2021. This was a big deal for us in Cannibal Studies, because Idaho is still the only state in the Union to have a law against cannibalism, a statute that hit the books in 1990, but has never been used. In April, Russell was deemed fit to stand trial.

  • In the Indian state of Assam, a man who had had perhaps more than a few drinks smelt cooking meat in a crematorium in a Hindu cremation ground. He helped himself to a few portions of the body, but was caught by villagers and handed over to police; but not before he had eaten about half of his purloined flesh.

May

  • A man calling himself The Chinese Zodiac Killer was arrested by the FBI in Jefferson County, New York for sending letters to media outlets, government offices including the White House, and other organisations, claiming he killed people and ate their flesh, and that he plans to kill more. He seems to have based his story on the Zodiac killer who terrorised California in the late 1960s. The original Zodiac Killer (who was not accused of cannibalism) was never caught, but this one was easily found, posting his threatening letters (what century is this again?) at the same letterbox he had previously used.

June

  • The case against James David Russell (see above in April) went to preliminary trial. Sadly, the judge threw out the charge of cannibalism, saying there was insufficient evidence to pursue it, and went with the rather more mundane offence of first-degree murder. Since this has a life sentence attached, the practical effect of dropping the cannibalism charge is negligible, but as the first cannibalism case in the USA, it would have been fascinating.
  • A rumour swept the Internet that the actress Anne Hathaway was a cannibal, based on a cryptic Tweet saying “police didn’t find human remains and evidence of cannibalism in her LA home that she sold in 2013.” We were all later astonished to discover the whole thing was a hoax.
  • The effects of the war in The Ukraine were starting to be felt in Europe and the UK (whose people often do not think it’s part of Europe). The Russians fell gladly on a statement from one Jeremy Clarkson (a car enthusiast) that “Hunger makes people eat their neighbours” to predict that the British will soon be a nation of cavemen feeding off each other. Of course, if you’ve ever been to a soccer match…
  • industrial/electronic music duo SKYND released their tenth song, called ARMIN MEIWES, about the German man who killed and ate a willing volunteer.
  • Back in the USA, the Utah County Attorney felt he had to go public to deny accusations that he and his wife are cannibals. Honest. I wouldn’t/couldn’t make this stuff up.

July

  • The New York Times raised the temperature of the culture wars with its review of several books, movies and TV shows about cannibalism, culminating in the (somewhat tongue in cheek) statement that “Cannibalism has a time and place… that time is now.” The right-wing press predictably jumped on the story accusing the NYT of everything from irresponsibility to Satanism.
  • Also in New York, Steven Spielberg whipped out his cell phone to record Marcus Mumford singing his new work, a haunting song called “CANNIBAL“. The song might be about love and lockdown, or it could involve child abuse.

August

September

  • DISCOVERY+ launched a three-part series called HOUSE OF HAMMER. The series explored allegations from various girlfriends of the actor Armie Hammer that he was a cannibal, or had at least threatened them with cannibalism. It also examined his relatives, many of whom seemed to be presented as even worse specimens than Armie.
  • Russia discovered the war was not going well in Ukraine, and started recruiting murderers and rapists to be sent to the front as reinforcements. Also – one cannibal, Yegor Komarov, whose man-eating exploits we learned about in December 2021.

October

  • In the Indian state of Kerala, there were allegations that a couple who ran a massage centre were bringing women home not so much for massages, but for human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism.
  • In the US state of Michigan, Mark David Latunski, who had been arrested in 2019 for killing and eating his Grindr date, finally came to trial and entered a plea of guilty.

November

  • Issei Sagawa, the “Kobe Cannibal”, died of pneumonia at the age of 73. Sagawa had killed and eaten a young Dutch fellow-student in Paris in 1981. He was found insane and sent back to Japan, where he was released and lived free ever since, making movies, writing books, and even becoming a restaurant reviewer.
  • Rapper Comethazine released Bawskee 5, the 12th song on which was called “CANNIBAL“.
  • Back in Brazil again! A patient in the Municipal Hospital of Nuovo Hamburgo in the state of Rio Grande do Sul attacked other patients, screamed and spat at people, and eventually chewed off his own fingers and toes. A witness said “while he was chewing his own meat, you could hear the crackling of bones in his mouth”.

December

  • Mark Latunski, 52, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on December 15 for the murder of his Grindr date three years previously. Kevin Bacon, 25, had been killed and mutilated by Latunski on December 24, 2019 at Latunski’s Bennington home. Latunski pleaded guilty in September to killing Bacon and eating one of his testicles, after stabbing him in the back and slitting his throat. In a victims’ impact statement, the victim’s father said “Evil does exist, and it touched us.”

On the screen

The big news on streaming television this year was Jeffrey Dahmer, the “Milwaukee Cannibal”, who took Netflix by storm with not one but two titles, despite having been killed by a fellow prisoner in 1994.

  • Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s docudrama called “MONSTER: THE JEFFREY DAHMER STORY“, which logged nearly two hundred million hours of watching in its first week of release
  • Joe Berlinger’s third series of CONVERSATIONS WITH A KILLER, featuring previously unheard defence attorney tapes of interviews with Dahmer.

Lots of new cannibalism feature films in 2022, some of which I will catch up with next year:

  • Luca Guadagnino’s BONES AND ALL, featuring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as teenage cannibals in a tender and gory road movie, has been getting heaps of publicity.
  • Mimi Cave’s FRESH is a charming romcom, until the knives come out. A fascinating insight into ultimate consumerism.
  • Leatherface came back (again!), this time older but no wiser. This is the ninth (!) instalment of the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE franchise, and went straight to Netflix.
  • John Ainslie’s DO NOT DISTURB depicts a couple renewing their romance by taking peyote, but finding that this particular variant of the drug awakens a taste for human flesh.
  • Leatherface came out to play again, this time as a fan-film prequel called THE SAWYER MASSACRE. Made on a shoestring but arguably superior to the other sequels and prequels.
  • Liam Regan’s EATING MISS CAMPBELL, in which a vegan, goth student falls in love with her new English teacher and develops a taste for human flesh.
  • Sean Patrick Flanery’s enjoyable road movie FRANK AND PENELOPE, in which a couple take on a cannibal cult in the wilds of Texas.
  • Timo Vuorensola’s JEEPERS CREEPERS REBORN, the umpteenth take on a supernatural tale of the demon who eats people and incorporates their bodies, but only every 23 years.
  • Fred Olen Ray’s PIRANHA WOMEN offers a totally believable story of women who turn into man-eaters because of an anti-cancer treatment.
  • THE MENU has Ralph Fiennes as a demented chef and Anya Taylor-Joy as the fly, as it were, in his menu plan. There is no obvious cannibalism involved in the movie, but there is some speculation on-line about the final cheeseburger.
  • ‘Ted Lasso goes cannibal’ in Adam Leader & Richard Oakes’ FEED ME, a jolly rant in which a grieving man wants to die, and a nearby cannibal wants to help him, but by instalment.

And now for something completely different

From out of the future, we have some new AI software of which Shital Shah, a senior research engineer at Microsoft, said:

ChatGPT is “a large language model that has been trained to generate human-like responses to text input.” In other words, you can ask it questions and receive (often) intelligent answers, rather than a series of links, like Google. You can try it for free (at the moment) here.

Naturally, I asked it questions such as “is meat murder” and it replied:

“Ultimately, whether or not eating meat is considered murder is a matter of personal belief and moral judgement.”

So, I barked back, like a prosector out for a conviction, “Where does that leave the cannibal?”

“Whether or not eating other humans is considered murder would also be a matter of personal belief and moral judgement. Most people would consider cannibalism to be morally reprehensible, as it involves the killing and consuming of another human being. However, there may be some individuals who do not see it that way, and their personal beliefs and moral judgement would dictate their view on the matter.”

The Internet has spoken, at last.

Two more cannibalism arrests in the FIRST TWO WEEKS of 2022

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Last week we looked at the case of the German cannibal Stefan R. who made the early 2022 news when was finally sentenced to life imprisonment for killing and probably eating a man he met on a dating site in September 2020. Justice takes its time. That was our first cannibalism news story for 2022.

Two weeks before THAT, I reviewed 2021 and declared it “THE YEAR OF THE CANNIBAL.” I guess that was tempting fate, since we now have three cannibalism stories in the news in the first two weeks of 2022. Looks like in 11.5 months, we may have to call 2022 the YEAR OF EVEN MORE CANNIBALS.

The German cannibal

Stefan R and mystery of the missing penis. Read about it here.

The Brazilian cannibal

Serial killer who ‘ate eyes and ears of victims’ captured in Brazil.

Djalma Campos Figueiredo, 46, was arrested in Brazil this week.  Figueiredo had already been sentenced to 42 years in prison for several other murders and was on the run.

9th Military Police Battalion officers (Brazil’s preventive police force) captured Figueiredo, 46, in the city of Cuiaba in Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, on Tuesday night, January 11. He had already been sentenced by the Court of Justice of Rondonia in the city of Porto Velho to 42 years in prison for several counts of aggravated murder. An arrest warrant for a pending sentence of 26 years and four months in prison was issued against him on September 30 last year. The total number of his victims is still unknown.

According to the Civil Police (Brazil’s investigative police force), Figueiredo would eat his victims’ eyes and ears and drink their blood after killing them. Most of the killings took place in and around the city of Ji-Parana, in the state of Rondonia.

The Nigerian cannibal

Meanwhile, the Zamfara (NW Nigeria) State Police Command arrested a 57-year-old man, Aminu Baba, for allegedly eating and selling human body parts.

Ayuba Elkana, the state Commissioner of Police, paraded the suspect before journalists on Thursday, where Baba stated that he had conspired with three other people, who usually sold the parts to him at the rate of 500,000 nairas per body (about $1,200 US).

The suspected accomplices were identified as Abdulshakur Mohammed, 20; Buba, 17; and Tukur, 14. The suspect and his collaborators were apprehended based on information from the public. Elkana said,

“On December 12, 2021, around 2pm, one Ali Yakubu Aliyu reported at the Central Police Station, Gusau, that his son, Ahmad Yakubu, 9, was missing. On December 28, 2021, around 9.30am, police detectives received an intelligence report with regards to the earlier report, that on the same date around 9am, the corpse of a human being was found in an uncompleted building at the Barakallahu area, Gusau, with the two hands and legs tied with rags, and the head covered with a polythene bag.”

An autopsy on the body found that some of the little boy’s body parts had been removed. Baba was arrested on January 4. The second suspect, Abdulshakur Mohammed, confessed that he had procured the body for Baba and received N500,000, the third time he had done so. Mohammed, Buba and Tukur had tricked a victim into going with them into an uncompleted building, where they killed him and removed his intestines, oesophagus, genitals and eyes.

Mohammed claimed that the parts were taken to Baba, who gave them N500,000.

Aminu Baba is a father of 19 and husband of three women, and a prominent businessman dealing in cars and other vehicles at Aminchi Motors Gusau. The police commissioner said Baba had confessed to the crime, adding that his admissions were assisting the police in the arrest of other members of his gang. He added:

“The suspect further confessed that he usually ate the body parts and identified the throat as the most delicious part. He also sold some of the human parts to his customers. Exhibits recovered from the suspect included intestines, oesophagus, penis and two eyes.”

The Nigerian daily Blueprint Newspaper thundered:

“By being vigilant, we could save lives of those who may be lured into the abyss and also protect the main victims whose blood will be used to water the fortune of their prosecutors.”

The carnival of cannibals

Brazil has been a centre of cannibal stories since the term was invented by Columbus, mispronouncing the name of the Caribs, a little further north in the Lesser Antilles. Brazil is the home of the Tupinambás, a nation for whom cannibalism has never been a source of shame. They were depicted in the film Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How tasty was my little Frenchman) and, rather less sympathetically, in slasher cannibal soft-porn movies like Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. Cannibalism as a metaphor for the rich exploiting the workers was presented in a Brazilian context in the 2018 movie The Cannibal Club. Away from the silver screen, a gang of people calling themselves “The Cartel” were sentenced recently for killing young women and selling their flesh in salgados (salty, deep-fried pastries).

Africa is also a favourite site for fantasies of cannibalism since colonial times. The movie District 9 portrays Nigerian criminal gangs who trade with captive aliens from another planet, and hope to learn how to use their weapons. They want to eat the protagonist of the movie, because he is turning into an alien. From the newspaper headlines, we had reports last year of a commercial driver in Ebonyi biting off and swallowing the fingers of a urban planning inspector, as well as a propaganda war over who was responsible for the cooked human carcasses found at the camp of a separatist group, the Indigenous People of Biafra.

Why are there so many reports of cannibalism these days? As we lurch from crisis to crisis, is our faith in the modern religion of humanism being eroded, so that we become just another prey animal for those who seek flesh? Is the voracious hunger that is the heart of modern consumerism overflowing the artificial walls of species?

Human pastries: Os Canibais de Garanhuns (The Cannibals of Garanhuns, Brazil)

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In 2012, police in Garanhuns, Brazil, arrested for murder Jorge Beltrao Negromonte da Silveira, his wife, Isabel Pires, and his mistress, Bruna Cristina Oliveira, who all lived together in a group they called “The Cartel”. Residing with the Cartel was a small child named Vitória, who had been the daughter of their first victim. In 2018, all three adults were found guilty and sentenced to decades in prison.

However, the worldwide public interest in the crimes did not stem from their murder of three young mothers, but from the fact that the Cartel stripped the flesh from the victims and baked them into salgados, salty, deep-fried pastries, which were then sold to the unsuspecting public. To the disappointment of the media, the pictures of the perpetrators showed them as three ordinary Brazilian people, not the monsters the public had expected.

Isabel Pires, left, Jorge Beltrao Negromonte da Silveira, and Bruna Cristina Oliveira

This case, one of about one hundred reported incidents involving cannibalism since the year 2000, is of particular interest because it incorporates many of the issues considered in this blog.

  1. Reports of cannibals from earliest times almost invariably labelled them ‘monsters’, the same term the media used in this case to describe the members of the Cartel. Silveira muddied this even further by accusing his mistress Oliveira of being a witch, who had tortured him and Pires into taking parts in “purification” rituals.
  2. Cannibalism has been a useful accusation against colonised peoples since the time of Columbus, and Brazil has been particularly singled out in the literature as offering indisputable examples of “savage” cannibalism. Gananath Obeyesekere, one of the foremost scholars of cannibalism, writes that he omitted a chapter on the Tupinamba of Brazil from his book Cannibal Talk, which casts significant doubt on the existence of systemic savage cannibalism, partly because of the passionate commitment of Brazilian scholars to the “empirical reality of conspicuous anthropophagy”.
  3. Contemporary narratives of cannibalism, particularly since Jack the Ripper, assume that there are psychogenic bases for the act; de Silveira was found to have written a book called Revelações de um Esquizofrênico (Revelations of a Schizophrenic).
  4. Unknowing cannibals are often described as “innocent” in that they are offered meat without recognising its provenance. The enduringly popular Sweeney Todd, the ‘demon barber of Fleet Street’, is supposed to have, in the late eighteenth century, murdered his customers and furnished their flesh to his accomplice, Margery Lovett, who turned them into meat pies for her unknowing but enthusiastic customers, just as the Cartel did with their salgados. In neither case were there any misgivings because, according to da Silveira, human meat tastes almost the same as beef.
  5. Reports of cannibalism usually leave readers hungry for explanations – the motivation of the act. The Cartel chose its victims partly on the basis that they were tackling overpopulation by killing off single mothers who were unable to care for their children. The Cartel had its own methods of selecting victims, involving not just their unmarried maternity but a set of rules provided by “spiritual entities” which determined which women were evil and should be killed, based on the numbers on their identity cards adding up to 666.
  6. At the heart of this case lies an ethical question: is there a fundamental difference between a salgado (salty) snack full of beef and one filled with human meat? The premise of arguments for such a difference is the concept of anthropocentrism, the belief that (some) humans can transcend their disowned yet undeniable animality, and attain a higher moral status than other animals, such that intentionally killing a human is ‘murder’ while killing other animals is considered commercial harvesting. This sometimes called “speciesism”, except that there has never existed a culture where humans honestly considered all other humans their equals, or sometimes just human narcissism.

Silveira was sentenced to 71 years in prison, while his wife received 68 years and his mistress 71 years and 10 months. This is on top of another conviction in 2014, where the trio were found guilty of killing Jéssica Camila da Silva Pereira. Silveira was sentenced to 23 years in prison for that murder, while his wife and mistress were each sentenced to 20 years.

References

Araújo, E. L. V. M. d. (2018). Estudo do Caso dos Canibais de Garanhuns. (Law thesis), Centro Universitário Tabosa De Almeida, Caruaru, Brazil. Retrieved from http://repositorio.asces.edu.br/handle/123456789/1548 

Haining, P. (2007). Sweeney Todd: The True Story of The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. London, Robson Books.

Hunter, B. (2018). “Cannibal killers served flesh-filled pastries to neighbours” Toronto Sun, (December 18). Retrieved from https://torontosun.com/news/world/cannibal-killers-served-flesh-filled-pastries-to-neighbours

Lam, K. (2018) “Cannibal trio sentenced for killing women, stuffing flesh into pastries”, New York Post, (December 17). Retrieved from https://nypost.com/2018/12/17/cannibal-trio-sentenced-for-killing-women-stuffing-flesh-into-pastries/

Obeyesekere, G. (2005). Cannibal talk : The Man-eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in The South Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Other fun cannibalism facts can be found at: thecannibalguy.com/category/cannibal-news/ and thecannibalguy.com/category/on-cannibals/

Eat the imperialists: HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMAN (Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês) – Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971

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Let’s get this out of the way – there is nudity. Lots of it and throughout the movie. Well, it’s set in pre-colonial Brazil, and the Indigenous peoples did not bother with a lot of clothes, so it’s historically accurate. To ensure authenticity, the actors and the crew were all naked, so that nudity would become natural. If that bothers you, please read the blog but skip the movie.

While it was refreshingly authentic, the nudity was also a problem. First, because the authenticity is somewhat diminished, as The New York Times critic pointed out, by the fact that the natives are “middle-class white Brazilians… stripped down and reddened up for the occasion”. Secondly, the film was refused entry to the Cannes Film Festival because of all the swinging dicks. In Brazil, the censors were eventually persuaded that the natives indeed did walk around naked, but remained vehemently opposed to the nude Frenchman, a telling comment on the racist distinction that the film was intending to expose.

So, the plot in a nutshell: the French and the Portuguese are fighting to control the rich lands of South America. Each has allied with local tribes who are at constant war with each other, often involving (so the European narrative goes) capturing and eating each other’s warriors.  The Tupinambás are allied with the French, while the Tupiniquins are allied with the Portuguese. The Frenchman of the title escapes his own command, is captured by the Portuguese, and is then captured by the Tupinambás, who are allies of the French, but believe him to be Portuguese, so intend to eat him. Got all that? – there will be a test.

Tupi custom involved bringing the captive into the community, feeding and homing him, and even finding him a wife, then eventually killing him in a ceremony that will allow them to capture his essence, bravery, speed, and so on.

This wide-spread belief about the Tupi comes from a European who was captured but then escaped in 1554, came back to Europe and wrote a book. His name was Hans Staden, and he was actually a German who was trying to get to India. But since it was the French who were invading South America at the time, the director changed his nationality.

De Bry’s engravings of Tupi cannibalism were “eaten up” by the Europeans.

Tupi cannibalism has a whole literature explaining it or denying it – William Arens claimed the ‘evidence’ was mostly based on Staden’s account, which contained several contradictions, and had been continually retold as if it had happened to new re-tellers. Other anthropologists such as Rene Girard explained Tupi cannibalism as a seamless explanation for the way culture and religion have evolved. The universal violence of the human species is redirected toward the outsider, who is taken into the tribe, but remains foreign enough to be killed as a scapegoat, to release the social pressure that would lead to endless internal revenge feuds. For many, Jesus became the ultimate scapegoat under this theory, even to the extent of insisting that his followers eat and drink wine and bread transubstantiated into his “blood and body” in the Eucharist ritual.

For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.

John 6:55

The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro proposed a ‘post-structural anthropology’ in his book Cannibal Metaphysics. De Castro sought to ‘decolonise’ anthropology by challenging the increasingly familiar view that it was ‘exoticist and primitivist from birth’, denying that cannibalism even existed, and so transferred the conquered peoples from the cannibalistic villains of the West into mere fictions of colonialism. Arguing that the ‘Other’ is just like us is to deny any separate identity and to return the focus of anthropology to that which interests us: ourselves. Rather than deny the existence of cannibalism, which allows a reclassification of the Amerindian peoples as like the colonialists, de Castro examines the details of Tupinamba cannibalism, which was ‘a very elaborate system for the capture, execution, and ceremonial consumption of their enemies’. This alternative view of Amerindian culture rejects the automatic assumption of the repugnance of cannibalism, which serves to either confront it or deny its existence.

Well, that’s pretty much where this film planned to go. Pereira dos Santos challenges the Eurocentric perspective which insists on a superior civilisation overcoming a primitive one. It is true that Tupi civilisation was destroyed by the slavery, smallpox and slaughter of the Portuguese who, the film tells us at the end, also wiped out their allies the Tupiniquins. The Tupi peoples are now a remnant, confined to small areas and currently being decimated by COVID-19.

But the chief, in the killing ceremony which promises the Frenchman’s body parts to his relatives (his wife will get his neck), tells the story as a mirror image:

“I am here to kill you. Because your people have killed many of ours, and eaten them.”

So the film asks: who were/are the cannibals? It does not fully succeed in telling this story, because the audience gets involved with the Frenchman’s story, instead of his captors. Pereira dos Santos lamented that the public:

“…identified with the French, with the coloniser. All spectators lamented the death of the hero. They did not understand that the hero was the indigenous, not the white, so much were they influenced by the adventures of John Wayne.”

Nonetheless, the binary of the colonised and the powerless occupied victims is so deeply embedded in our cultural stories that it is refreshing to see this mirror image version, where the indigenous win the battle, if not the war.

THE CANNIBAL CLUB – O Clube dos Canibais (Guto Parente, 2018)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films3 Comments

This is a movie about privilege – the rich literally eating the poor. It may be a metaphor, but it is particularly apposite to current Brazilian politics, where the destruction of the Amazon is threatening to kill and consume us all. But is there a nation, even a community, where someone is not eating someone else, if not literally then practically? The film was made in 2018, before President Jair Bolsonaro was sworn in and gave the green light for the burning of the Amazon rainforest. But the cannibalism of this club is not just political – it is about the consumption of the poor by those who own the wealth. It would have made the same points whatever the results of the election.

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Otavio (Tavinho Teixeira) and Gilda (Ana Luiza Rois) have a hobby – Gilda seduces members of their staff and Otavio watches from a distance then kills the worker with an axe as they both climax. They then prepare the meat for their dinner.

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A bit over a year ago, this blog looked at the film “Eat the Rich”, in which the workers fought back against their effete bosses. Pure fantasy of course; in reality, the rich eat the poor: they swallow their surplus labour, they squeeze rent from them, they sell them their shoddy products paid for by lending them money at ruinous rates, and they send their children off to war. Why not go the next step and literally cook them for dinner?

The rich also hang out together with other rich people, and despise the poor. Everything decadent is considered better and more desirable.

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The club in the title is an elite group of privileged and powerful men – women are not invited. For their pre-dinner entertainment, they sit and watch two performers have sex, during which they are beaten to death and subsequently served at the black-tie dinner.

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Their chairman is the influential politician Borges (Pedro Domingues) who rails against the depravity of those who threaten the traditional morality of Brazil, whom he describes as “poors, delinquents, pederasts and filthy scum”. That makes is awkward when Borges is seen by Gilda as he is being buggered by a servant.

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This puts Otavio and Gilda in peril – they have a secret that Borges will happily kill to conceal. But can they kill Borges first? In the funniest line of the movie, Otavio objects to Gilda’s murderous plan:

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Because to the rich, killing and eating the servants is no more murder than beheading a chicken. So they plan to get the new caretaker, Jonas (Zé Maria) to do the dirty work, then they will go through their ritual: Jonas will have sex with Gilda, then at the climax, Otavio will kill him with an axe.

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Of course, these things never go as smoothly as the conspirators wish.

It’s pretty slapstick cannibalism, which is a shame, because it’s a Brazilian film, and that should make it a bit more interesting – Brazil was the source of so many of the stories of cannibalism that early explorers brought back to shock the gentle folk of Europe and secure funds for journeys of colonialism and genocide. The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in his book Cannibal Metaphysics (2014), sought to ‘decolonise’ anthropology by challenging the increasingly familiar view that these stories were mere fictions of colonialism. Rather than deny the existence of cannibalism, which would simply reclassify the Amerindian peoples as ‘like us’, de Castro examines the details of Tupinamba cannibalism, which was ‘a very elaborate system for the capture, execution, and ceremonial consumption of their enemies’. This alternative view of Amerindian culture rejects the automatic assumption of the repugnance of cannibalism – instead, it owns the history or mythology. This could have been a far more interesting film if the cannibalism had been owned by all sides and interpreted as a unique identity, rather than just being a rather crude metaphor of class struggle.

The film got 57% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is not bad, but not good. The reviewer from Variety said

“A diverting, stylish, but ultimately rather trite satire whose social critique and grand guignol aspects never quite come to a full boil.”

By the way – check out the Cannibal Club in Los Angeles.

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No, I haven’t been there. I understand they do not have a vegetarian option.

Also, it’s a fake website. Sorry.

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