Brazil
Page 48
Instead of calling new elections as established by the constitution, the vice-president, Marshal Floriano Peixoto, simply claimed the presidency. Under his rule a new element was introduced into Brazilian politics, a form of Jacobinism that became known as Florianismo. The popular movement reached its height in Rio de Janeiro between 1893 and 1897.8 It was the first spontaneous political movement of the Republic, under the leadership of a president who galvanized the urban middle classes and the population in general by proposing an egalitarian regime, albeit one that could only be sustained by President Floriano Peixoto’s authoritarian military regime.
But the discontent in the navy had not abated and in September 1893 the second armada revolt broke out, commanded by officers demanding new elections. Considering the battles they had fought defending the empire, the navy and its officers resented being marginalized from the new government. Admiral Custódio de Mello promoted a naval uprising against President Floriano Peixoto to restore the prestige the navy had once enjoyed. For his part, the president was already dealing with the federalist revolution in the south, and he now had to defeat the armada. He managed to do this by 1894, although it left an open wound.9 President Floriano Peixoto was essentially governing under a state of siege, and had been nicknamed the ‘Iron Marshal’. Meanwhile, the federalist revolution became a bloody civil war that lasted from 1893 to 1895. The gaucho10 positivists of the Rio-Grandense Republican Party, who supported a state dictatorship, were pitted against the Federalist Party, whose members defended the 1891 Constitution, municipal autonomy and a centralized federal government.
New elections were called in 1894. The winning candidate was Prudente de Morais, of the Paulista Republican Party. His was the first civilian government of the Republic. The party was moderate and pragmatic: the objectives were to pacify the country and guarantee the interests of the São Paulo coffee planters, transforming the Jacobin republic into an oligarchic republic. Prudente de Morais managed to get his chosen successor, Campos Sales, elected, in 1898. From this point on, control of the federal government alternated between the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. In 1898, Campos implemented the ‘governors’ policy’ – or ‘states’ policy’ as he referred to it. This system established complete autonomy for regional elites, facilitated their manipulation of state deputy elections, and opened the federal coffers to meet their needs. In return, the central government required the states to support all federal decisions – political conflicts were to remain at the local level.11
The federal government was, from then on, controlled by Minas Gerais and São Paulo. The distribution of power in the Republic was regulated according to each state’s position in the federal hierarchy. The political strength of a state was determined by the size of its electorate and consequent representation in parliament. Furthermore, stability of the Republic depended principally on three elements: the state governors’ confining of political conflicts to their region; the federal government’s recognition of complete state sovereignty; and the maintenance of an electoral system characterized by fraud, despite measures to control local disputes. Fraud occurred in every phase of the electoral process – from the selection of the voters to the recognition of the winners. Some of the methods were notorious. The ‘stroke of the pen’ win dated back to the empire, and consisted of forging signatures and altering names on voting forms. The ‘decapitation’ technique was simply the refusal of the verification committee within the Chamber of Deputies to recognize the candidate, thus eliminating adversaries by annulling their election. The ‘tame vote’ – ‘voto de cabresto’ – became a culturally embedded political practice whereby loyal voters cast their ballot for the local chief. Lastly, the ‘corral electorate’ referred to an improvised building where voters were kept under watch and given a good meal, and only released upon the casting of their ballot, which was handed to them in a sealed envelope.12
The vote was seen as a currency of exchange and relationships of power began at municipal level. This was the origin of the phenomenon known as coronelismo.13 Colonel was the highest post in the hierarchy of the National Guard. With the founding of the Republic, the National Guard lost its military status, but the colonels maintained their political power in their municipalities. From this time on, coronelismo was the term used to refer to a complex system of negotiation between these local leaders (or bosses) and the state governors, who, in turn, negotiated with the president of the Republic. Coronelismo became one of the cornerstones of the traditional oligarchic structure based on the power of local individuals, generally the owners of farms and large estates.14
Thus the ‘colonel’ was a fundamental part of the oligarchic system. He gave his support to the government in the form of votes. In exchange, the government guaranteed his power over his dependents and rivals. This was accomplished mainly through the granting of public posts, which ranged from chief of police to primary-school teacher. Thus, the early twentieth-century Brazilian Republic was based on the exchange of favours and loans, favouritism, repression and negotiation. Seen from this angle, as the satirical magazines of the time pointed out, the country was little more than a large fazenda (plantation).
A BRAZIL OF IMMIGRANTS, A BABEL OF LANGUAGES15
With the abolition of slavery and the consequent upheaval in the labour system, the government embarked on a series of initiatives to attract immigrants, above all from Europe. Similar policies had been implemented during the empire, but the scope was now much wider. Faced with competition from countries such as Argentina, Cuba, Mexico and the United States, it was by no means easy for the Brazilian government to sell the idea of an ‘earthly paradise’. The large majority of immigrants were supposed to work in the fields; official colonies were established in the southern states and, above all, in the coffee-producing regions of the southeast. However, most of the immigrants ended up settling in the bustling towns, which were growing and where they would find a greater diversity of employment and services.
Enticed by the government’s propaganda, waves of immigrants – Poles, Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese (and, from the late 1910s, Japanese) – emigrated to Brazil. The poor and oppressed of Europe were drawn by the mythical abundance of the tropics. With the growth in the world population and the modernization of transport, large numbers of unemployed peasants were looking for work.16 It is estimated that more than 50 million Europeans abandoned their continent in the search for ‘freedom’ in the form of property and employment.
Although most of these emigrated to North America, 22 per cent of them – around 11 million – came to Latin America, of whom 38 per cent were Italian, 28 per cent Spanish, 11 per cent Portuguese and 3 per cent French and German. Of these, 46 per cent went to Argentina; 33 per cent to Brazil; 14 per cent to Cuba; and the rest were divided between Uruguay, Mexico and Chile.17 Between 1877 and 1903 around 71,000 immigrants came to Brazil, of which 58.5 per cent were from Italy. Between 1904 and 1930 this number increased to 79,000, with Portuguese immigrants accounting for 37 per cent of the total. In 1908 the first wave of Japanese immigrants arrived, adding to the diversity of cultures spreading across Brazil. And if the origins were different, all of them had in common the same desire: ‘to make it in America’.
From the outset the immigration process had distinctive characteristics. There were large areas of unoccupied land in the south of the country, so immigrants were offered small plots for farming. Whether the project was run by the government or by private enterprise, plots of between twenty and twenty-five hectares were sold in instalments, usually laid out along the waterways. But these colonies were extremely isolated, and the new settlers were subjected to innumerable adversities: attacks by Indians, hostility from the local population, and difficulty in selling their produce.
On the coffee plantations, however, especially in the state of São Paulo, the government or private landowners hired the immigrants directly to work on the land. Thus very few of the settlements in Espírito Santo, Rio Grande d
o Sul, Santa Catarina (the states where coffee was not grown) or Paraná prospered, whereas the number of immigrant workers on the coffee plantations increased. After pressure from the farmers, which began in the 1890s, the central government began to finance the influx of immigrants according to the increasing demands of the local economy. By 1900, the federal government had financed between 63 per cent and 80 per cent of immigrant arrivals. It was only after the turn of the century, with an increase in the Portuguese and Spanish populations in São Paulo, that the private sector took on this role. This was possible because urban-industrial activities intensified.
The immigrants’ financial difficulties began on the journey; they were exploited by intermediaries who overcharged them for the tickets. Crammed together in rundown ships, their cultural differences soon surfaced – and these became even more pronounced when they arrived in their new home. The immigrants were not only from different regions of the same country, but also came from rival countries with very different customs. Thus, their close proximity gave rise to constant conflicts: northern Germans fought with southern Germans; Japanese fought with Italians, Poles with Germans, and all of them with the Brazilians. They spoke different languages and dialects; all of them had difficulty adjusting to the local diet of beans, rice and coarse flour, as well as to the living quarters: rows of thatched houses built from mud bricks. Far from a homogeneous group, the newly arrived settlers stuck to their various customs. Some, like those from the northern regions of Italy, were used to living in towns. Others, like those from the Veneto region, simply readjusted the rural lifestyle of their homeland to Brazil. They substituted rice for polenta, learned about new fruits and vegetables, and waited patiently, breeding the animals they needed to make sausages and bacon, which they hung out to dry from the beams of their huts.
The Poles and the Italians, who were devout Catholics, did not take easily to the casual religious practices of their religion in Brazil. They reaffirmed their faith by decorating their houses with images of saints and patriotic symbols. Ideas about personal hygiene also differed between the groups. The Italians bathed once a week, merely scrubbing their hands and sweatiest parts of their body on a daily basis. They thought it odd that locals, with the abundance of water in Brazil, bathed in the rivers or washed in tubs every day; and equally unusual, the Japanese custom of bathing in groups, in ofuros. And that was not the only aspect of Japanese customs the others considered exotic. The Japanese seemingly cared solely about whether or not the rice was growing. They were not interested in soaking dried meat to make it soft and apparently did not realize that dried cod, too, needed soaking to remove the salt. Nor did they eat the beans or coarse flour. Unlike most of the Europeans, they generally did not prioritize improving their houses; they did not tend to decorate them. All of their money was saved for relatives or for a much dreamed-of return to Japan.18
Despite all the difficulties, the majority of the immigrants ended up adapting to life in Brazil. Certain aspects of their different faiths were shared. Herbalists and faith healers went from farm to farm, filling the void that was left by the lack of doctors and medicines. There were three ‘remedies’ for a host of ills: cod liver oil for purification; Epsom salts for gas and constipation; and castor oil was an effective purgative. From Rio Grande do Sul to the farms in São Paulo there was demand for these miraculous medicinal products, and when nothing worked, the solution was to delve further into prayers and the healers. In Bahia these tasks were performed by the ifás – the intermediaries of the Orishas – using herbs from Africa. The same was the case in the north, where Amerindian traditions lived on, including the generalized use of hallucinogenic plants. The combinations of all these traditions produced a whole medicine cabinet of mestizo prescriptions.
Nevertheless, by the beginning of the 1930s, transatlantic immigration had reduced considerably. In 1927, for example, immigration to Europe was much greater than immigration to anywhere else. Even so, a number of governments began to restrict immigration: first the United States, and shortly thereafter, Brazil. Between 1917 and 1924 the United Sates limited the number of immigrants; President Getúlio Vargas adopted the same policy in December 1930. The Brazilian president’s motive was to control what historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda called the ‘disorganized mass of foreigners’ who were thought to be responsible for unemployment among Brazilians.19
But the mixture of peoples in Brazil had changed forever. In São Paulo today you might eat pizza on a Sunday night, enjoy a pasta lunch on Saturday, followed by an evening meal of kebabs and tabbouleh, or maybe chop suey. Paulistas buy their bread from the Portuguese bakery on the corner and season their salad with Spanish olive oil. Perhaps it was the writer, poet and engineer Juó Bananère (pen name for Alexandre Marcondes Machado, a Paulista with no Italian ancestry) who best expressed this uncommon mixture. He wrote his works using the patois spoken by the Italian colony in São Paulo. In his parodic La divina increnca (The Divine Confusion), published in 1915, he referred to himself in dialect as a ‘Gandidato à Gademia Baolista de Letras’. In standard Portuguese the reference would have been to a Candidato à Academia Paulista de Letras – that is, a candidate to the Paulista Academy of Letters.
A NEW LANDSCAPE: CITIES AND THEIR INDUSTRIES
Between 1880 and the 1930s there was a dynamic transformation in Brazilian society. The new configuration was the direct result of increased population and Brazil’s aggressive policy to attract foreign immigrants prior to President Getúlio Vargas’s restrictions. In addition, Brazil’s First World War policy of import substitution, combined with the crisis in agriculture, stimulated the growth of Brazil’s cities and industry.
The population of Brazil grew by an average rate of 2.5 per cent per year. The population of towns with 50,000 inhabitants or more rose by 3.7 per cent; and of those with 100,000 or more, by 3.1 per cent. Specifically, during the first decade of the Republic the rural population fell by 2.2 per cent and the urban population rose by 6.8 per cent. Urbanization was a reality that had come to stay and it was rapidly changing the face of Brazil. Nevertheless, the country’s economy was still overwhelmingly agricultural. According to the 1920 census, of the 9.1 million people in the work force, 6.3 million (69.7 per cent) worked in agriculture; 1.2 million (13.8 per cent) in industry; and 1.5 million (16.5 per cent) in other services.
There were only a few large cities.20 These included Rio de Janeiro (the ‘heart’ of the Republic), São Paulo (its ‘head’) and, a few years later, Brazil’s first planned city, Belo Horizonte, ‘created in the Republic’s own image’.21 These three cities controlled the country’s resources and established beyond doubt the economic predominance of the southeast. Although the initial aim of the immigration policy had been to provide rural labour, with the crisis in agriculture and the growth of the towns many immigrants moved to urban areas. The new opportunities and specialized professions attracted them. Apart from farm labourers, immigrants worked as bricklayers, bakers, shoemakers and shopkeepers, diversifying the number of services offered in the towns.
There was also large-scale internal migration as a result of the gradual dismantling of the slavery system. Between 1872 and 1900 the population in the northeast decreased. This was because slaves were transferred from the sugar and cotton plantations there to coffee plantations in the southeast. The droughts of the 1870s led to a further wave of migrants from the northeast to Rio de Janeiro, which was like a magnet due to the ample offer of employment in federal and state government institutions.
The three southern states, Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, also attracted many migrants, as did specific regions in the north due to the booming rubber trade in the Amazon. With new developments in transport, latex was in high demand; hordes of workers escaped the poverty of the northeast and penetrated the forests throughout the vast Amazon region in search of rubber to extract. The ‘rubber era’ was short-lived, ending in the 1910s, but it left its mark on the capital, Manaus. The city was tran
sformed into the most important metropolis of the north with elegant avenues, theatres and bourgeois customs. The wealth of the state seemingly appeared from one day to the next.
The government now set about modernizing and improving the cities to represent the new Republic: refurbished public buildings, newly created suburbs for the poor, public transport and new state buildings.22 During the period known as the ‘regeneration’, President Rodrigues Alves (1902–6), hoping to civilize the city, appointed a team of technicians to transform Rio de Janeiro into a modern showpiece for the new Republic. The team was given unlimited powers and they came up with a three-pronged strategy: the modernizing of the port, entrusted to the engineer Lauro Müller; improved public health and sanitation, under the leadership of Dr Oswaldo Cruz; and urban reform. The engineer Pereira Passos, who was familiar with Baron Haussmann’s project for the remodelling of Paris, was put in charge of this last initiative. A parallel and complementary measure was to expel the poor population from the central region, to rid the city of slums. The black writer Lima Barreto, himself an inhabitant of the Carioca suburbs and an important critic of the events of that time, referred to the period as the dictatorship of the ‘bota-abaixo’ (tear down). And in fact, houses, tenements and cheap hotels (‘zungas’23 or ‘caixotins humanos’24) were all demolished.25
From the 1870s onward the city of São Paulo underwent a socioeconomic, urbanizing, physical and demographic transformation. Due to the prosperity of the coffee plantations and the gradual abolition of slavery, it became an important commercial and financial centre: the ‘coffee metropolis’. Public electric lighting was installed, a public tram system was built, and the famous Butantã Institute, which produced serums from snake poison, was founded. New avenues were constructed, old avenues extended, squares and public gardens refurbished and opened. São Paulo’s ‘high society’ adopted new habits: shopping at fashionable stores, going to horse races, and spending the evenings at balls or at the theatre. It should be recalled though that the São Paulo urbanization process meant both the ‘embellishment’ of the city and the expulsion of poverty. If the city infrastructure altered with the opening of new districts and elegant streets, such as the Avenida Paulista, modest houses and slums were destroyed in order to extend and expand new streets, avenues and squares.