Seu Júlio

Julio de Almeida, known as Seu Júlio, was a capoeirista who became the last prisoner of the infamous Cândido Mendes penal colony on Ilha Grande. Born in Petrópolis in the mountains above Rio de Janeiro, he drifted to the "Cidade Maravilhosa" as a teenager, surviving through small jobs before turning to crime on the beaches of Copacabana and Flamengo.

Before his imprisonment, Júlio lived in the Catacumba favela, perched on the hills overlooking Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas. There he practiced capoeira, running, and boxing with "nortistas"—migrants from Bahia who had brought their fighting traditions south. Among his training partners was "a friend known as Boa Viagem," who would also end up at Dois Rios.

"I stole, I killed, all to survive," Júlio later admitted. In 1958, at age 27, he was sentenced and briefly imprisoned in Rio before escaping. After recapture, he received a harsher sentence of 28 years for theft, murder, and attempted escape. He was sent to the Colônia Correcional de Dois Rios—nicknamed the "Caldeirão do Diabo" (Devil's Cauldron)—where alcoholics, beggars, homeless, and capoeiristas from across Brazil were imprisoned.

In 1963, Júlio returned to Dois Rios with a sentence exceeding 60 years. Despite his criminal past, he earned trust through good behavior and began working in the prison kitchens, eventually cooking for over 1,000 inmates. The kitchen was a coveted and dangerous position—as he later testified, it functioned as "the entry point for drugs and guns."

During his decades at Dois Rios, Júlio encountered legendary figures of Rio's underworld. He met Madame Satã when both traveled to Rio de Janeiro to testify in court proceedings. He described Satã as "effeminate" with "a similar body to mine, a little bit taller, a bit lighter skinned... a tranquil girl, calm, she wasn't aggressive... very skilled in her work... she washed clothes, all the business with the director's clothes... she bred pigs."

At the colony, the fighting art was called "tiririca" rather than capoeira. As Júlio explained in a 2012 interview at age 82: "capoeira and tiririca mean one thing only, it depends a lot on the teacher and the lightness, the instruction—that was different from capoeira." His account revealed that older prisoners with fighting knowledge transmitted techniques to younger inmates while deliberately avoiding the stigmatized term "capoeira."

When the Cândido Mendes Penal Institute was demolished by explosives in 1994, Júlio was released. A former resident described the detonations as "an atomic bomb exploded in my heart." With nowhere to go, Júlio chose to stay in Vila Dois Rios, the only home he had known for decades. He lived there with his family, making periodic trips to check in with a judge, eventually gaining definitive freedom in 2014.

In his final years, Júlio worked as a guardian of the prison ruins, sitting on the terrace of Teresa da Silva's café with the crumbling walls of Cândido Mendes visible behind him. More than a century after the prison's inauguration, "the old man no longer seemed to pay attention" to its terrible reputation. He died in 2018, sixty years after first arriving on the island he had once tried to escape.

Seu Júlio's 2012 interview, documented by the Contemporary Capoeira project, remains an invaluable primary source for understanding the transmission of capoeira/tiririca in Rio's prison system and the informal training that occurred in the favelas surrounding Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas during the mid-twentieth century.