Abstract Northeastern Brazil is, within the present knowledge of historical and instrumental seismicity, one the most seismic active areas in intraplate South America. Seismic activity in the region has occurred mainly around the Potiguar basin. This seismicity includes earthquake swarms characterized by instrumentally-recorded events ≤ 5.2 mb and paleoseismic events ≥ 7.0. Our study concentrates in the Joao Câmara (JC) epicentral area, where an earthquake swarm composed of more than 40,000 aftershocks occurred mainly from 1986 to 1990 along the Samambaia fault; 14 of which had mb > 4.0 and two of which had 5.1 and 5.0 mb. We describe and compare this aftershock sequence with the present-day stress field and the tectonic fabric in an attempt to understand fault geometry and local control of seismogenic faulting. Earthquake data indicate that seismicity decreased steadily from 1986 to 1998. We selected 2,746 epicenters, which provided a high-quality and precise dataset. It indicates that the fault trends 37° azimuth, dips 76°–80° to NW, and forms an alignment ∼ 27 km long that cuts across the NNE–SSW-trending ductile Precambrian fabric. The depth of these events ranged from ∼ 1 km to ∼ 9 km. The fault forms an echelon array of three main left-bend segments: one in the northern and two in the southern part of the fault. A low-seismicity zone, which marks a contractional bend, occurs between the northern and southern segments. Focal mechanisms indicate that the area is under an E–W-oriented compression, which led to strike–slip shear along the Samambaia fault with a small normal component. The fault is at 53° to the maximum compression and is severely misoriented for reactivation under the present-day stress field. The seismicity, however, spatially coincides with a brittle fabric composed of quartz veins and silicified-fault zones. We conclude that the Samambaia fault is a discontinuous and reactivated structure marked at the surface by a well-defined brittle fabric, which is associated with silica-rich fluids.