Caldeirão de Santa Cruz do Deserto

[1] José Lourenço Gomes da Silva was born in Pilões de Dentro, in the state of Paraíba, in the middle of the 19th century.

Padre Cícero decided to house Zé and the pilgrims on a large farm called Caldeirão dos Jesuítas, also located in Crato, where they started working together again and created an egalitarian society based on religion.

[1][2] The elite of Crato believed that the religious community offered a threat to the latifundia, the exploitation of the peasants and the power of the Catholic Church, which was very conservative and linked to the local leaders.

On September 11, 1936, civil and military police entered the village, but failed to find Zé, who had hidden in the Araripe mountain range.

[5][6] The government sent Captain José Bezerra and 11 police soldiers from Juazeiro do Norte to spy on the people of Caldeirão, but they were discovered and confronted by a group of peasants.

The rumour reached Meneses Pimentel, the governor of Ceará, who asked for support from the Minister of War, Eurico Gaspar Dutra.

Every year, hundreds of Catholics gather at dawn to attend the Caldeirão da Santa Cruz pilgrimage as a way of recovering Zé's story and remembering the victims who died at the site.

Besides the annual pilgrimage, a project called Caldeirão Hoje aims to keep the memory of the place vivid and transform the area into a tourist attraction recognized throughout the Northeast.

[8][9][10] In 2008, the NGO SOS Direitos Humanos filed a public civil action against the government of Ceará and the Brazilian Army asking the authorities to reveal the location of the mass grave, exhume the bodies and compensate the families of the dead and the remaining survivors, as well as including the massacre in the official history.