36.4: Brazil

36.4.1: The Old Republic

The First Brazilian Republic, or Old Republic, covers a period of Brazilian history from 1889 to 1930 during which it was governed a constitutional democracy. Democracy, however, was nominal in the republic. In reality, elections were rigged and voters in rural areas were pressured to vote for their bosses’ chosen candidates. If that method did not work, the election results could still be changed by one-sided decisions of Congress’ verification of powers commission (election authorities in the República Velha were not independent from the executive and the Legislature, but dominated by the ruling oligarchs). As a result, the presidency of Brazil during this period alternated between the oligarchies of the dominant states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. The regime is often referred to as “café com leite,” or “coffee with milk,” after the respective agricultural products of the two states.

Brazil’s Old Republic was not an ideological offspring of the republics of the French or American Revolutions, although the regime would attempt to associate itself with both. The republic did not have enough popular support to risk open elections and was born of a coup d’etat that maintained itself by force. The republicans made Field Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca president (1889-91) and after a financial crisis, appointed Field Marshal Floriano Vieira Peixoto the Minister of War to ensure the allegiance of the military.

Flag of Brazil, November 15-19, 1889: The first Brazilian flag used after the monarchy’s fall.

Rule of the Landed Oligarchies

The history of the Old Republic is dominated by a quest to find a viable form of government to replace the preceding monarchy.  This quest swung Brazil back and forth between state autonomy and centralization. The constitution of 1891 established the United States of Brazil and granted extensive autonomy to the provinces, now called states. The federal system was adopted and all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government in the constitution were delegated to the states. Over time, extending as far as the 1920s, the federal government in Rio de Janeiro was dominated and managed by a combination of the more powerful Brazilian states: Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, and to a lesser extent Pernambuco and Bahia.

As a result, the Army developed as a national regulatory and interventionist institution within the republic. The sudden elimination of the monarchy left it as Brazil’s only viable, dominant institution. Although the Roman Catholic Church maintained a presence, it remained primarily international in its personnel, doctrine, liturgy, and purposes. The Army even began to eclipse other military institutions such as the Navy and the National Guard. The armed forces, however, were divided over their status, relationship to the political regime, and institutional goals. Therefore, the lack of military unity and disagreement among civilian elites regarding the military’s role in society prevented the establishment of a long-term military dictatorship within the country.

The Constituent Assembly that drew up the constitution of 1891 was a battleground between those seeking to limit executive power, which was dictatorial in scope under President Deodoro da Fonseca, and the Jacobins, radical authoritarians who opposed the coffee oligarchy and wanted to preserve and intensify presidential authority. The constitution established a federation governed supposedly by a president, a bicameral National Congress, and a judiciary. However, real power rested in the hands of regional patrias and local potentates, called “colonels”. There was a constitutional system as well as the real system of unwritten agreements (coronelismo) among the colonels. Under coronelism, local oligarchies chose state governors, who selected the president.

This informal but real distribution of power emerged as a result of armed struggles and bargaining. The system consolidated the state oligarchies around families that were members of the old monarchical elite, and to provide a check to the Army, the state oligarchies strengthened the navy and state police. In larger states, state police evolved into small armies.

In the final decades of the 19th century, the United States, much of Europe, and neighboring Argentina expanded the right to vote. Brazil, however, moved to restrict access to the polls under the monarchy and did not correct the situation under the republic. By 1910, only 627,000 eligible voters could be counted among a total population of 22 million. Throughout the 1920s, only between 2.3% and 3.4% of the total population could vote. The middle class was far from active in political life. High illiteracy rates went hand in hand with the absence of universal suffrage or a free press. In regions far from major urban centers, news could take four to six weeks to arrive. In this context, a free press created by European immigrant anarchists started to develop during the 1890s and 1900s and spread widely, particularly in large cities.

Latifundio Economies

Around the start of the 20th century, the vast majority of Brazil’s population lived in semi-feudal communities. Because of the legacy of Ibero-American slavery, abolished as late as 1888 in Brazil, there was an extreme concentration of landownership reminiscent of feudal aristocracies: 464 great landowners held more than 270,000 km² of land (latifúndios), while 464,000 small and medium-sized farms occupied only 157,000 km². Large estate owners used their land to grow export products like coffee, sugar, and cotton, and the communities who resided on his land would participate in the production of these cash crops. For instance, most typical estates included the owner’s chaplain and overseers, indigent peasants, sharecroppers, and indentured servants. As a result, Brazilian producers tended to neglect the needs of domestic consumption, and four-fifths of the country’s grain needs were imported.

Brazil’s dependence on factory-made goods and loans from technologically, economically, and politically advanced North Atlantic countries retarded its domestic industrial base. Farm equipment was primitive and largely non-mechanized. Peasants tilled the land with hoes and cleared the soil through the inefficient slash-and-burn method. Meanwhile, living standards were generally squalid. Malnutrition, parasitic diseases, and lack of medical facilities limited the average life span in 1920 to 28 years. Without an open market, Brazilian industry could not compete against the technologically advanced Anglo-American economies. In this context, the Encilhamento (a “boom and bust” process that first intensified, and then crashed, in the years between 1889 and 1891) occurred, the consequences of which were felt in all areas of the Brazilian economy for many decades following.

During this period, Brazil did not have a significantly integrated national economy. The absence of a big internal market with overland transportation, except for mule trains, impeded internal economic integration, political cohesion, and military efficiency. Instead, Brazil had a grouping of regional economies that exported their own specialty products to European and North American markets. The Northeast exported its surplus cheap labor, but saw its political influence decline in the face of competition from Caribbean sugar producers. The wild rubber boom in Amazônia declined due to the rise of efficient Southeast Asian colonial plantations following 1912. The national-oriented market economies of the South were not dramatic, but their growth was steady, and by the 1920s, that growth allowed Rio Grande do Sul to exercise considerable political leverage. Real power resided in the coffee-growing states of the Southeast—São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro—that produced the most export revenue. Those three and Rio Grande do Sul harvested 60% of Brazil’s crops, turned out 75% of its industrial and meat products, and held 80% of its banking resources.

Struggles for Reform

Support for industrial protectionism increased during the 1920s. Under considerable pressure from the growing middle class, a more activist, centralized state adapted to represent the new bourgeoisie’s interests. A policy of state intervention, consisting of tax breaks, lowered duties, and import quotas, expanded the domestic capital base. During this time, São Paulo was at the forefront of Brazil’s economic, political, and cultural life. Known colloquially as a “locomotive pulling the 20 empty boxcars” (a reference to the 20 other Brazilian states) and Brazil’s industrial and commercial center to this day, São Paulo led the trend toward industrialization with foreign revenues from the coffee industry.

With manufacturing on the rise and the coffee oligarchs imperiled by the growth of trade associated with World War I, the old order of café com leite and coronelismo eventually gave way to the political aspirations of the new urban groups: professionals, government and white-collar workers, merchants, bankers, and industrialists. Prosperity also contributed to a rapid rise in the population of working class Southern and Eastern European immigrants—a population that contributed to the growth of trade unionism, anarchism, and socialism. In the post-World War I period, Brazil was hit by its first wave of general strikes and the establishment of the Communist Party in 1922. However, the overwhelming majority of the Brazilian population was composed of peasants with few if any ties to the growing labor movement. As a result, social reform movements would crop up in the 1920s, ultimately culminating in the Revolution of 1930.

Attributions

• The Old Republic
  • “Latifundium.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “First Brazilian Republic.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Brazilian_Republic. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Coronelism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronelism. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Flag_of_Brazil_15-19_November.svg.png.” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Brazil_15-19_November.svg. Wikimedia Commons Public domain.