Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Once again, Brazil managed a bloodless transition. The push came from the
army, detachments led by Deodoro da Fonseca (1827-92) meeting no resistance
when they occupied Rio on November 15, 1889. They invited the royal family to
remain, but Dom Pedro chose exile, boarding a ship to France where he died two
years later. Deodoro, meanwhile, began a Brazilian tradition of ham-fisted military
autocracy. Ignoring the clamour for a liberal republic he declared himself dictator
in 1891, but was forced to resign three weeks later when even the army refused to
support him. His deputy, Floriano de Peixoto (1839-95), took over, but proved
even more incompetent; Rio was actually shelled in 1893 by rebellious warships
demanding his resignation. Finally, in 1894, popular pressure led to Peixoto
stepping down in favour of the first elected civilian president, Prudente de
Morais (1841-1902).
Coffee with milk - and sugar
The years from 1890 to 1930 were politically undistinguished but saw large-scale
immigration from Europe and Japan rapidly transform Brazil. They were decades
of swift growth and swelling cities, which saw a very Brazilian combination of a
boom-bust-boom economy and corrupt pork-barrel politics. Coffee and rubber , at
opposite ends of the country, led the boom. They had very different labour forces.
Millions of nordestinos moved into the Amazon to tap rubber, but the coffee workers
swarming into São Paulo in their hundreds of thousands came chiefly from Italy.
Between 1890 and 1930 over four million migrants arrived from Europe and
another two hundred thousand from Japan. Most went to work on the coffee estates
of southern Brazil, but enough remained to turn São Paulo into the fastest-growing
city in the Americas. Urban industrialization appeared in Brazil for the first time,
taking root in São Paulo to supply the voracious markets of the young cities
springing up in the paulista interior. By 1930 São Paulo had displaced Rio as
the leading industrial centre.
More improbable was the transformation of Manaus into the largest city of the
Amazon. Rubber turned it from a muddy village into a rich trading city within a
couple of decades. The peak of the rubber boom , from the 1870s to the outbreak of
World War I, financed its metamorphosis into a tropical belle époque outpost, complete
with opera house. Rubber exports were second only to coffee, but proved much more
vulnerable to competition. Seeds smuggled out of Amazônia by Victorian adventurer
Henry Wickham in 1876 ended up in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, and the resulting
plantation rubber pushed wild Amazon rubber out of world markets. The region
returned to an isolation it maintained until the late 1960s.
Political development did not accompany economic growth. Power was
concentrated in the two most populous states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais,
which struck a convenient deal to alternate the presidency between them. This way
of ensuring both sets of snouts could slurp away in the trough uninterrupted was
called “ café com leite ” by its opponents: coffee from São Paulo and milk from the
mineiro dairy herds. In fact, it was coffee with milk and sugar: the developing
national habit of the sweet cafézinho in the burgeoning cities of the south provided
a new domestic market for sugar, which ensured support from the plantation
oligarchs of the Northeast.
1889
1894-1930
1896-97
Monarchy overthrown by a
military coup led by General
Deodoro da Fonseca, who
becomes Brazil's first president
The política do café com leite : the
presidency is controlled by coffee
oligarchies from São Paulo and
Minas Gerais, alternately
The community of Canudos
is brutally crushed by the
government
 
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