The Republican Era of Brazil

The Republican Era, 1889-1985
The history of the republic has been a search for a viable form
of government to replace the monarchy. That search has lurched back
and forth between state autonomy and centralization. The constitution
of 1891, establishing the United States of Brazil (Estados Unidos
do Brasil), restored autonomy to the provinces, now called states.
It recognized that the central government did not rule at the local
level, that it exercised control only through the local oligarchies.
The empire had not absorbed fully the regional pátrias ,
and now they reasserted themselves. Into the 1920s, the federal
government in Rio de Janeiro would be dominated and managed by a
combination of the more powerful pátrias (São Paulo,
Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, and to a lesser extent Pernambuco
and Bahia). After the revolution of 1930, the trend would be strongly
toward absorption of the pátrias , reaching a peak in the
New State (Estado Novo) of 1937-45. Centralization extended into
the smallest remote villages as the nation-state's bureaucracy and
power grew to previously unknown levels. Renewed autonomy would
come with the constitution of 1946 but would disappear under the
military regime. The constitution of 1988 once again restored a
degree of state autonomy but in the context of a powerful, all-embracing
nation-state. In the 1990s, the pátrias are more folkloric
vestiges than autonomous centers of power.
The history of the republic is also the story of the development
of the army as a national institution. The elimination of the monarchy
had reduced the number of national institutions to one, the army.
Although the Roman Catholic Church continued its presence throughout
the country, it was not national but rather international in its
personnel, doctrine, liturgy, and purposes. By the time of the 1964
coup, the political parties were not national parties; they were
oriented more along regional, personalist (personalism--see Glossary),
and special-interest lines. Only in the struggle to reestablish
civilian rule in the 1980s did a fitful process of creating national
parties take shape. Thus, the army was the core of the developing
Brazilian state, a marked change from the marginal role that it
had played during the empire. The army assumed this new position
almost haphazardly, filling part of the vacuum left by the collapse
of the monarchy and gradually acquiring a doctrine and vision to
support its de facto role. Although it had more units and men in
Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul than elsewhere, its presence
was felt throughout the country. Its personnel, its interests, its
ideology, and its commitments were national in scope (see The Military
Role in Society and Government, ch. 5).
The republic's first decade was one of turmoil. It appears to be
a pattern of Brazilian history that seemingly peaceful regime changes
are followed by long periods of adjustment, often scarred by violence.
Years of "regime change" in 1889, 1930, and 1964 introduced
protracted adjustment that involved some authoritarian rule. Curiously,
because the violence occurred over long periods, usually without
overturning the government in Rio de Janeiro or Brasília,
Brazil acquired an undeserved reputation for having a nonviolent
history of political and social compromise.
The Old or First Republic, 1889-1930
The founders of the Brazilian republic faced a serious question
of legitimacy. How could an illegal, treasonous act establish a
legal political order? The officers who joined Field Marshal Deodoro
da Fonseca in ending the empire were violating solemn oaths to uphold
emperor and empire. The officer corps would eventually resolve the
contradiction by linking its duty and destiny to Brazil, the motherland,
rather than to transitory governments. In addition, the republic
was born rather accidentally: Deodoro had intended only to replace
the cabinet, but the republicans manipulated him into fathering
a republic.
The Brazilian republic was not a spiritual offspring of the republics
born of the French or American revolutions, even though the Brazilian
regime would attempt to associate itself with both. The republic
did not have enough popular support to risk open elections. It was
a regime born of a coup d'état that maintained itself by
force. The republicans made Deodoro president (1889-91) and, after
a financial crisis, appointed Field Marshal Floriano Vieira Peixoto
minister of war to ensure the allegiance of the military. Indeed,
the Brazilian people were bystanders to the events shaping their
history. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the United
States, much of Europe, and neighboring Argentina expanded the right
to vote. Brazil, however, moved to restrict access to the polls.
In 1874, in a population of about 10 million, the franchise was
held by about 1 million, but in 1881 this had been cut to 145,296.
This reduction was one reason the empire's legitimacy foundered,
but the republic did not move to correct the situation. By 1910
there were only 627,000 voters in a population of 22 million. Throughout
the 1920s, only between 2.3 percent and 3.4 percent of the total
population voted.
The instability and violence of the 1890s were related to the absence
of consensus among the elites regarding a governmental model; and
the armed forces were divided over their status, relationship to
the political regime, and institutional goals. The lack of military
unity and the disagreement among civilian elites about the military's
role in society explain partially why a long-term military dictatorship
was not established, as some officers advocating positivism (see
Glossary) wanted. However, military men were very active in politics;
early in the decade, ten of the twenty state governors were officers.
The Constituent Assembly that drew up the constitution of 1891
was a battleground between those seeking to limit executive power,
which was dictatorial under President Deodoro da Fonseca, and the
Jacobins, radical authoritarians who opposed the Paulista coffee
oligarchy and who wanted to preserve and intensify presidential
authority. The new charter established a federation governed supposedly
by a president, a bicameral National Congress (Congresso Nacional;
hereafter, Congress), and a judiciary. However, real power was in
the regional pátrias and in the hands of local potentates,
called "colonels" (coroneis ; coronelismo --see Glossary).
Thus, the constitutional system did not work as that document had
envisaged. It would take until the end of the decade for an informal
but real distribution of power, the so-called politics of the governors,
to take shape as the result of armed struggles and bargaining.
Article 14 on the military was particularly important for the future.
It declared the army and navy to be permanent national institutions
responsible for maintaining law and order and for ensuring the continuance
of the three constitutional powers. Officers insisted on the statement
of permanent status because they feared that the elites would disband
their services. The armed forces were to be the moderator of the
system, and military officers were Brazil's only constitutionally
mandated elite. The article also required the military to be obedient
to the president but "within the limits of the law." Thus,
the armed forces were to obey only if they determined a presidential
order to be legal. Oddly, military officials were less than enthusiastic
about discretionary obedience, which they saw as subversive; the
civilian politicians, however, wanted it as a check on presidential
power. Interestingly, the constitutions of 1934 and 1946 kept the
discretionary clause unaltered. However, the 1937 constitution of
the dictatorial Estado Novo, which was a military regime in civilian
dress, put the military securely under obedience to the president.
In the election that followed the adoption of the new constitution
in 1891, Deodoro da Fonseca and Floriano Peixoto were elected president
and vice president, respectively, but with the former gaining only
129 votes and the latter 153. The first president, Deodoro da Fonseca,
had difficulty adjusting to sharing power with Congress and, in
imperial fashion, dissolved it in November 1891, provoking rebellions
in the navy and in Rio Grande do Sul. To mollify the opposition,
he resigned in favor of Vice President Peixoto (acting president,
1891-94). Peixoto, known as the "Iron Marshal" (marechal
de ferro ), ousted all the state governors who had supported Deodoro,
provoking violence in many parts of the country. One of the bloodiest
of these struggles was the civil war that exploded in Rio Grande
do Sul in 1893 and soon spread into Santa Catarina and Paraná,
pitting former monarchist liberals against republicans. Concurrently,
the fleet in Guanabara Bay at Rio de Janeiro challenged Peixoto,
and the naval revolt quickly became linked to the struggle in the
South. Peixoto's diplomat in Washington, Salvador de Mendonça,
with the help of New York businessman Charles Flint, was able to
assemble a squadron of ships with American crews, which proved decisive
in ending the standoff in Guanabara Bay. The United States government,
interested in Brazilian commerce and in the republic's survival,
permitted this mercenary effort to occur and sent several cruisers
to provide a barely concealed escort. This was the first documented
American intervention in Brazil's internal affairs, and significantly
it was organized privately.
Deodoro da Fonseca's dissolution of Congress, his resignation,
Peixoto's assumption of power, and the outbreak of civil war split
the officer corps and led to the arrest and expulsion of several
senior officers. Although the power struggles that produced the
fighting in Rio Grande do Sul during 1893-95 were local in origin,
Peixoto made them national by siding with republican Governor Julio
de Castilhos. The savage combat and the execution of prisoners and
suspected sympathizers, in what historian José Maria Bello
called the "cruelest of Brazil's civil wars," was shameful
on both sides. Peixoto's fierce defense of the republic made him
the darling of the Jacobins and from then on a symbol of Brazilian
nationalism. In November 1894, because of his ill health (he died
in 1895) and the military's disunity, Peixoto turned the government
over to a spokesman for the agrarian coffee elite, São Paulo
native Prudente José de Morais Barros, also known as Prudente
de Morais, the first civilian president (1894-98). Prudente de Morais
negotiated an end to the war in the South and granted amnesty to
the rebels and the expelled officers. He weakened the army's staunchest
republicans and sought to lower the military's political weight.
He promoted officers committed to creating a professional force
that would be at the disposal of the national authorities, who would
determine how it was to be employed. A General Staff (Estado Geral),
established in 1896 on the German model, was to shape this new army.
However, before the new army could take shape, it was used in 1897
to destroy the religious community of Canudos in the sertão
of Bahia, which the Jacobins thought mistakenly was a hot-bed of
monarchist sedition. The Rio de Janeiro government, which saw monarchists
everywhere, threw a force of 9,500 against a population of perhaps
30,000. Some 4,193 soldiers were wounded between July and October
1897, and the townspeople were killed, taken prisoner, or fled.
Canudos was erased in the same fashion that Indian villages had
been and continued to be erased. Although the campaign's symbolic
value as a defense of the republic faded as the reality became known,
it remained a powerful warning to marginal (marginality--see Glossary)
folk throughout Brazil that they would not be permitted to challenge
the hierarchical order of society. In this sense, Canudos was a
step in creating mechanisms of social control in the postslavery
era.
Canudos affected the political scene immediately when a returning
soldier, the foil in a high-level Jacobin conspiracy, attempted
to assassinate President Prudente de Morais but killed the minister
of war instead, thereby acting as a catalyst for rallying support
for the government. The abortive assassination made possible the
election of Manuel Ferraz de Campos Sales (president, 1898-1902).
In the army, the attempt consolidated the hold of generals who opposed
Floriano Peixoto and were interested in professionalizing the institution.
The turmoil of the 1890s and particularly Canudos suspended the
military's capability to exercise the moderating role that it supposedly
inherited from the monarchy. By 1898 the rural-based regional oligarchies
had regained command of the political system. Their fiscal policies
reflected their belief that Brazil was an agricultural country whose
strength was in supplying Europe and North America with coffee,
rubber, sugar, tobacco, and many natural resources. Brazil produced
75 percent of the world's coffee. With competition increasing, however,
prices fell continually, causing the government to devalue the currency
against the British pound. This devaluation forced up the price
of imported goods, thus lowering consumption and government tax
revenues from imports. Those shortfalls led to suspension of payments
on the foreign debt, and the generally poor economy caused half
of the banks to collapse. The oligarchy responded to the situation
by attempting to preserve its own position and by limiting national
industry and infrastructure to that necessary to support the agricultural
economy. The society that the economy underlay was one in which
the elites regarded the majority of the people merely as cheap labor.
The elites encouraged immigration to keep labor plentiful and inexpensive,
although they also wanted to "whiten" the population.
They considered public education of little use and potentially subversive.
The political system that took shape at the beginning of the twentieth
century had apparent and real aspects. There was the constitutional
system, and there was the real system of unwritten agreements (coronelismo
) among local bosses, the colonels. Coronelismo , which supported
state autonomy, was called the "politics of the governors."
Under it, the local oligarchies chose the state governors, who in
turn selected the president.
The populous and prosperous states of Minas Gerais and São
Paulo dominated the system and swapped the presidency between them
for many years. The system consolidated the state oligarchies around
families that had been members of the old monarchial elite. And
to check the nationalizing tendencies of the army, this oligarchic
republic and its state components strengthened the navy and the
state police. In the larger states, the state police were soon turned
into small armies; in the extreme case of São Paulo, French
military advisers were employed after 1906.
The "politics of the governors" kept a relative peace
until the end of World War I. Urban Brazil, the one foreigners saw
from the decks of ships, prospered. But there was no integrated
national economy. Rather, Brazil had a grouping of regional economies
that exported their own specialty products to European and North
American markets. The absence of overland transportation, except
for the mule trains, impeded internal economic integration, political
cohesion, and military efficiency. The regions, "the Brazils"
as the British called them, moved to their own rhythms. The Northeast
exported its surplus cheap labor and saw its political influence
decline as its sugar lost foreign markets to Caribbean producers.
The wild rubber boom in Amazônia lost its world primacy to
efficient Southeast Asian colonial plantations after 1912. The national-oriented
market economies of the South were not dramatic, but their growth
was steady and by the 1920s allowed Rio Grande do Sul to exercise
considerable political leverage. Real power resided in the coffee-growing
states of the Southeast (Sudeste)--São Paulo, Minas Gerais,
and Rio de Janeiro--which produced the most export revenue. Those
three and Rio Grande do Sul harvested 60 percent of Brazil's crops,
turned out 75 percent of its industrial and meat products, and held
80 percent of its banking resources.
One factor that eventually would draw "the Brazils" closer
together was the heightened sense of nationalism that developed
among the urban middle and upper classes before World War I. This
sense of nationalism can be explained partially by the Brazilian
elite's focus on Rio de Janeiro as the center of their world. Although
the national government was weak, it was still the source of prestige
and patronage. Rio's sanitation projects and its remodeled downtown
(1903-04) were soon copied by state capitals and ports.
The elites had reason to think that Brazil's status in the world
was rising. In 1905 the archbishop of Rio de Janeiro received Latin
America's first cardinalate. Brazil hosted the Third Pan-American
Conference, raised its Washington legation to an embassy (1904),
sent a notable delegation to the Second Hague Peace Conference (1907),
gained possession via arbitration of hundreds of thousands of square
kilometers of disputed territory, established the Indian Protective
Service, tied together the far reaches of the country via telegraph,
and purchased two of the world's largest dreadnoughts for its navy.
Many cheered writer Afonso Celso when he asserted that the era was
"the dawn of our greatness . . . . We will be the second or
first power of the world."
However, the enthusiasm was not sufficient to overcome the resistance
of Brazilians of all levels to military service. When an Obligatory
Military Service Law was enacted in 1908, it went unenforced until
1916. Military service was unappealing because members were called
on continually to take up arms. During the presidency of Marshal
Hermes Rodrigues da Fonseca (1910-14), nephew of Deodoro da Fonseca,
turmoil spread across Brazil. In 1910 sailors protesting extreme
physical punishments in the navy seized the new dreadnoughts São
Paulo and Minas Gerais and some smaller vessels in the bay at Rio
de Janeiro and threatened to bombard the city. Hermes da Fonseca
was forced to grant the rebels their demands and to give them amnesty.
The image of national stability with which the earlier Campos Sales
administration had tried to dazzle foreign bankers also was shattered
by a series of military interventions, known as the Salvations,
that replaced a number of state governments. The national government,
somewhat against Hermes da Fonseca's inclination, sponsored what
amounted to coups d'état against state governments in Sergipe,
Pernambuco, Alagoas, Pará, Piauí, Bahia, and Ceará.
In disorderly fashion, one oligarchic alliance substituted for another,
often with an army officer in charge. In the disastrous case of
Bahia, the local army commander bombarded the governor's palace
and surrounding buildings. In 1911 São Paulo's French-trained
Public Force (Força Pública) and civilian Patriotic
Battalions saved the city from similar federal intervention.
Struggling to keep control of the army, Hermes da Fonseca replaced
the minister of war three times in sixteen months and forced the
retirement of about 100 colonels and generals. But to keep them
from rebelling, they were all retired at higher ranks and salaries.
The Brazilian political system was not so much one of compromise
as of co-optation. With this internal army purge, the Salvationist
Movement spent itself, and the tide turned away from federal military
interventions to replace dominant regional oligarchies toward neutrality
or preserving the status quo. The movement can be seen as a messy
attempt to reduce state autonomy and to heighten the power of the
central government.
Meanwhile, the vision of Brazilian order and progress as seen by
the urban elite, intellectuals, and newspaper editorials was challenged
again by the supposedly anarchic sertão , this time in the
South. In August 1914, as world attention focused on the outbreak
of war in Europe, a very different conflict burst forth in the Contestado
region of Santa Catarina. A popular rebellion, also known as the
Contestado, confronted the "colonel"-dominated socioeconomic
and political system. Where the Salvationist Movement aimed at substituting
one oligarchy for another, the Contestado rebels rejected the national
system and wanted to remake their part of the Brazilian reality.
As with Canudos, the response of state and federal authorities was
pulverizing violence.
The region's economy was based on livestock, the collection of
maté, and lumbering. Its social structure concentrated wealth
and power in the hands of a few "colonels," around whom
lesser landowners were arrayed. Most families lived at the sufferance
of those men or had shaky land titles. A jurisdictional dispute
between Santa Catarina and Paraná arose because each state
issued deeds to the same land. The no-man's-land attracted fugitives
from throughout Brazil. The construction of the São Paulo-Rio
Grande do Sul Railroad and the timbering and colonization operations
of United States capitalist Percival Farquhar added foreign elements
to the already volatile mix. The Brazil Railroad and the Southern
Brazil Lumber and Colonization Company forced Brazilians off their
expropriated lands, imported European immigrants, and sawed away
at virgin pine, cedar, and walnut trees. People whose families had
lived in the region for a century suddenly saw their lands rented
or sold to others. As if that were not enough, in 1910 the threat
of war with Argentina loomed, and authorities speeded the railroad's
construction and expanded labor crews to about 8,000. In this environment
of tumultuous destruction of the forests, social tensions rose with
evictions and the sudden introduction of foreigners and modern technology.
The local "colonels" secured their own interests, abandoning
their customary paternalism and leaving the mass of people adrift.
The Contestado was afflicted with a collective identity crisis,
which caused many to turn to messianic religion as solace.
The people of the Contestado followed a local healer, Miguel Lucena
Boaventura, known as José Maria, who soon died in a confrontation
with Paraná Military Police. His followers refused to accept
his death, however, and believed that he was either alive or would
rise again. His story mixed with the Luso-Brazilian belief in supernatural
assistance in desperate times. This phenomenon, called Sebastianism,
transformed the submissive population, accustomed to acting only
with the "colonel's" approval, into a resolute fighting
force. Their attacks on the railway and lumbering operations and
the failure of negotiations with federal authorities led to an escalation
of hostilities in 1912 and a fierce military campaign that in 1915
involved 6,000 troops, modern artillery and machine guns, field
telephones and telegraph, and the first use of aircraft in a Brazilian
conflict. The fighting was spread over a wide area, and the many
redoubts of about 20,000 "fanatics," as the army called
them, made suppression slow and difficult and also revealed the
military's weaknesses. The number of casualties was uncertain but
sizeable, and henceforth the army maintained a garrison in the region.
The Contestado was subdued by the end of 1917.
Army reformers, a key group of whom returned from training in Germany
by the end of 1913, wrote commentaries on the campaign in the new
military monthly, A Defesa Nacional . They regarded the Contestado
as "an inglorious conflict that discredited our arms."
They blamed the republic for its "lack of elevated political
norms, the abandonment of thousands of Brazilians . . . segregated
from national society by the lack of instruction, by the scarcity
of easy means of communication, by the want of energy, and by the
poverty of initiative that, unhappily, has characterized the administrations
generally since the time of the monarchy." They warned military
leaders that "the lesson of the Contestado" was that the
army's passivity in accepting poorly conceived political measures
would only damage it "morally" and would bring Brazil
"the most funereal consequences."
The Contestado joined Canudos as an important component in the
army's institutional memory. Veterans played meaningful roles in
military and national affairs in the next decades. Within a few
years, the reformist critique would be part of the thinking that
underlay the tenente or lieutenants' revolts of the 1920s, beginning
with the Copacabana Revolt in 1922. The Salvationist Movement and
the Contestado drew the army and the central government deeply into
the internal affairs of the states, thereby whittling away at their
coveted autonomy. The era's legacy of political intervention and
suppression of dissent muddied the army's mission and self-image,
but it amplified the power of the central government (Rio de Janeiro).
The growing power of Rio de Janeiro was reflected in Brazilian
foreign affairs under the guidance of José Maria da Silva
Paranhos, the Baron of Rio Branco, who served as foreign minister
from 1902 to 1912, under presidents Francisco de Paula Rodrigues
Alves (acting president, 1902-3; president, 1903-6), and Afonso
Pena (1906-9), Acting President Nilo Peçanha (1909-10), and
President Hermes da Fonseca. His vision shaped both the boundaries
of the country and the traditions of Brazilian foreign relations.
In the heyday of international imperialism, he was instrumental
in negotiating limits over which the great powers were not to intrude.
He argued for military reform to back up energetic diplomacy, and
he began the process of moving Brazil out of the British orbit and
into that of the United States. The latter was taking half of Brazil's
total exports by 1926, but Brazil still owed Britain over US$100
million in the mid-1920s. British banks financed the country's international
commercial exchange, and British investors provided 53 percent of
the total foreign investment until 1930. But by the late 1920s,
United States banks held nearly 35 percent of the foreign debt.
Rio Branco's goal, which was pursued by his successors, was to diffuse
the country's dependency among the powers so that none could intervene
without being checked by another. Trade and financial ties with
the United States were increased at British expense, and these would
be balanced by military links with Germany and then France. France
would continue for decades to provide a cultural model for the elites.
The Rio Branco years were the basis for what became known as the
Itamaraty tradition (named after the building that housed the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs in Rio de Janeiro), but not every administration
grasped its purpose. Some confused its tactical aspects--reliance
on foreign loans and investments, Pan-Americanism, and alliance
with the United States--with its essential substance, the quest
for independence and national greatness.
World War I found Brazil with nearly half of its army committed
in the Contestado. The war in Europe was traumatic for the army,
which was then beginning a reorganization under the influence of
thirty-two officers who had recently returned from service in German
army units. A German military mission had been expected, but pressure
from São Paulo and from Paris resulted in a mission contract
with France instead. Economics, Washington's decision to enter the
war, and German submarine attacks on Brazilian merchant ships pulled
Brazil into the conflict on the Allied side. The military mobilized,
but the generals, feeling over-committed and ill-prepared, declined
to send troops to Europe.
Pan-Americanism provided some outlet for Brazil's international
status pretensions, but the period between the world wars often
found its neighbor Argentina suspicious of harmless improvements
in Brazil's armed forces. Brazil's obligatory military service,
its construction of new barracks, its purchases of modern weapons,
and its contracts for a French military mission and a United States
naval mission were viewed by military officials in Buenos Aires
as threatening. Brazilian leaders wanted their country regarded
as the most powerful in South America but understood that the public
would not accept, and the constitution outlawed, a war of aggression.
Regardless of what the Argentines thought, the military was not
prepared to wage a foreign war. Tension between Argentina and Brazil
and maneuvering for greater influence in Paraguay and Uruguay have
been characteristic of their relations since the War of the Triple
Alliance.
The interwar years in Brazil saw an increase in labor agitation
as the economy expanded, industrialization and urbanization stepped
up, and immigrants flowed into the country. Coffee overproduction
by the turn of the century had provoked subsidization programs at
the state and national levels that helped the planters but could
not prevent the decline in the economy's capacity to pay for imported
manufactured goods. Local industry began to fill the gap. World
War I restricted trade further, and Brazilian industrial production
increased substantially. The government stressed the need for more
industrial independence from foreign producers and stimulated import
substitution, particularly in textiles. Many of the factories were
small, with an average of twenty-one workers. In 1920 about a million
urban workers were concentrated in Rio de Janeiro and São
Paulo. Brazil was just beginning to develop its industrial base,
but it was still mainly an agricultural country with 6.3 million
people working the soil.
The living conditions of urban workers were bad. Housing, transportation,
sewerage, and water supply trailed far behind the rapid population
growth and produced serious public health problems. The clean-up
campaigns at the beginning of the century struck at the high incidence
of yellow fever, malaria, and smallpox in Rio de Janeiro, Santos,
and Northeastern seaports. The city centers were made safer, but
the workers who crowded into sordid "beehives" (cortiços
--small crowded houses) and favelas (shantytowns) suffered all sorts
of ailments.
The federal and state governments subsidized immigration from Italy,
Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Japan to provide workers for the coffee
plantations. However, many immigrants soon fled the rough conditions
in the countryside for better opportunities in the cities. They
flooded the labor pools, making it difficult for unions to force
factory owners to pay better wages. Women, who were the majority
of workers in the textile and clothing industries, were frequently
active in organizing factory commissions to agitate for improved
conditions, freedom from sexual abuse, and higher pay. Strikes had
occurred in 1903, 1906, and 1912, and in 1917 general strikes broke
out in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Recife, Santos, and Porto
Alegre. Because the mentality of the industrialists was rooted in
the slavery era and emphasized their well-being over that of the
commonwealth and because they functioned on a thin profit margin,
they tended to fire workers for striking or joining unions. The
industrialists also blacklisted troublemakers, employed armed thugs
to keep control inside and outside the factories, and called on
the government to repress any sign of labor organization. There
were no large massacres of strikers, as occurred in Mexico and Chile,
but the physical violence was marked.
Some advocates of reform were heard. For example, economic nationalists
like Roberto Simonsen argued for improved pay incentives to prevent
individual workers from unionizing. During the 1920s, the Roman
Catholic Church, as part of its effort to revive its status, organized
the Young Catholic Workers and preached the example of the Holy
Family accepting "the will of Providence, in pain and in happiness."
By 1930 church societies, private charities, factory-sponsored recreational
clubs, and government agencies strove for more control over workers'
organizations and leisure time.
During the Old Republic, Brazil changed at a frightening rate.
As its population increased 162 percent between 1890 and 1930, it
became more urbanized and industrialized, and its political system
was stretched beyond tolerance. Concern over the resurgence of labor
activity in the late 1920s was one of the factors that led to the
collapse of the Old Republic in 1930 and to the subsequent significant
change in labor and social policy.
Data as of April 1997
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