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Stringing together a nation
Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the construction of a modern Brazil, 1906-1930
By Todd A. Diacon Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3249-3
Chapter One
STRINGING TOGETHER A PEOPLE AND A PLACE
To travel across the world's fifth-largest country in 1900 demanded much time, tremendous stamina, and great patience. Indeed, such a trip was nearly continental in scope, as Brazil occupies one half of South America's land mass and is larger than the United States minus Alaska. Such a journey meant traveling thousands of miles, for the country spans 2,700 miles at its widest point, while 2,500 miles separate its northern and southern borders. Brazil is a colossus; its size is surprising. Most of the countries of Europe together would fit easily within its borders. Marshall Eakin's ingenious observation that "the major cities of northeastern Brazil are physically closer to West Africa than to neighboring Peru and Colombia" is as shocking as it is true.
Assigned to command telegraph construction in the western state of Mato Grosso, the young army officer Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and his crew departed Rio de Janeiro on 21 July 1900. By rail they traveled to Araguari, in the state of Minas Gerais, which was the final stop on the Mogiana Railroad. On 29 July they began their march across the state of Goias, where they were joined by fifty soldiers of the Twentieth Infantry Battalion in the town of Goias Velho. Thirty-sixdays later, on 19 September 1900, the men reached Sao Lourenco, Mato Grosso, their final destination-the trip from Rio had taken almost two months.
The other route between Rio de Janeiro and Mato Grosso involved an "immense river detour," to cite Warren Dean's nicely turned phrase. On this route one sailed down the Atlantic coast from Rio de Janeiro, then up the Parana and Paraguay Rivers, such that when traveling from one Brazilian state to another the visitor was forced to pass through three foreign countries: Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. The journey lasted thirty days if connections with steamships were good, compared with the forty-five days immigrants spent traveling from Japan to Brazil in the 1920s. Once in Mato Grosso, travelers often faced equally lengthy trips just to move about within the state. In 1900 Mato Grosso comprised nearly 15 percent of the total land area of Brazil. Covering 1.4 million square miles, Mato Grosso was roughly the size of Alaska, although it has since been split into two states: Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul.
In a land the size of Brazil, time and space could conspire to create baffling situations for federal officials at the turn of the twentieth century. Such was the case in 1914 in the southern state of Santa Catarina, where the Brazilian army was fighting a bloody war against millenarian rebels. Seeking to enlist local residents in the fight against the rebels, an army commander invited Francisco Pires, a local landowner of some means, to visit army headquarters. Soldiers raised the Brazilian flag and played the national anthem on the parade grounds while Pires was in the commander's office. The landowner reportedly raced to the window and expressed great puzzlement over what was happening before his eyes. Incredibly, he had never seen the Brazilian flag nor heard the national anthem, even though both had been adopted decades earlier!
These episodes suggest that in 1900 Brazil was a country but perhaps not a unified country, if by that one means "the land ... to which a person owes allegiance." For federal officials stationed and living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's vast interior could seem like a foreign country, separated by enormous distances and varied beliefs and allegiances. Of course, the opposite was also true, with the lives of interior residents having about as much to do with Rio de Janeiro as they did with Paris, Berlin, or Tokyo. Connecting these two Brazils would be Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon's lifelong challenge. Via a single, lonely telegraph line he hoped to incorporate the faraway lands and peoples of the interior into the urban, coastal nation governed from Rio de Janeiro.
Stringing Together a People
Rondon was part of a generation of Brazilians that pressed for reforms during the final thirty years of the nineteenth century. Whether it be the abolition of slavery (1888), or the overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy (1889), change was the goal of this generation. It sought reform in part, the historian Emilia Viotti da Costa argues, because of new ideologies imported from Europe; but more important, she continues, those newideologies resonated with Brazilians because they addressed the dramatic changes engendered by the expansion of world trade and Brazil's increasing incorporation into the world market as an exporter of tropical agricultural products. The expansion of export agriculture drew once isolated interior lands into the nation's economic orbit. Agriculturalists even further inland then began to produce for expanding urban markets. As a result, economic "development (urbanization, immigration, improvements in transportation, early manufacturing industry and capital accumulation) provoked social dislocations: the emergence of new social groups and the decline of traditional elites.... [As such] the political hegemony of traditional landed and commercial oligarchies had become anachronistic obstacles to progress by the 1870s and 1880s."
Brazil's dismal performance in the Paraguayan War (1865-1870) added to the perceived need for change. At the beginning of the war the Paraguayans cut Brazilian access to the Paraguay River, thereby demonstrating the isolation of the Brazilian west. Land travel to the theater of war at times was difficult, if not impossible. Troops were hard to mobilize, and logistical nightmares haunted Brazil's war effort. The Paraguayan soldiers were better equipped and better trained and were supported by Paraguay's surprisingly well-developed industrial base. Even though Brazil eventually won the war, it "raised fundamental questions about whether their own ill-integrated society was ready to join the race to modernity."
Influential Brazilians traced their country's problems during the war to a lack of civic spirit or national pride. In other words, they felt there was something defective in the Brazilian "nation." Perhaps the problem was that no unified set of beliefs united Brazilians into a single people with a shared vision. The nation, then, would have to be built, or at least refashioned, into something new and modern. A homogenous identity was to replace the panoply of customs, cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds. As the Brazilian philosopher Marilena de Souza Chaui notes, the nation would have to include "an empirical reference (territory), and imaginary reference (a cultural community and a political unity via the State), and a symbolic reference (a field of cultural signifiers ...)." Urban intellectuals and political leaders asserted their right to create that identity.
Julyan Peard observes that "imitation was a strategy that many Latin Americans adopted for resolving anxieties central to new nations." In Latin America this meant that intellectuals looked to Europe for clues and ideas on how to construct a supposedly modern nation. Prominent nineteenth-century European thinkers argued that one race (one people) comprised the nation, and they believed that "intermediary groups or minorities destroyed [it]." In Brazil, nation building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus became primarily an elite-led attempt to create one "people" (povo), or one race or national "type." Yet, Brazilian intellectuals faced a dilemma, for to be "modern was to be white and European, but most Brazilians were neither."
An initial solution to this seeming dilemma was to promote the massive immigration of European, and hence, white, settlers. Brazilian scientists accepted the racial hierarchies of social Darwinism and hoped that European immigrants would help "whiten" Brazil's population, thus producing a "modern" nation. The problem for Brazilian intellectuals, however, was that European racist theories argued that any mixture of whites and nonwhites would produce inferior people. Given Brazil's sizable nonwhite population and long history of miscegenation, this seemingly doomed the country to perpetual inferiority. Ingeniously, Brazilian intellectuals rejected the Europeans' condemnation of miscegenation (but maintained their emphasis on racial hierarchies) by employing a version of Lamarckian eugenics to assert instead that over the course of generations the "superior" white genes would "triumph" in Brazil.
According to Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, race has always been a component of nation formation in Brazil. Gradually, however, Brazilian cultural thinkers moved away from defining whiteness as the goal of any modern nation toward a celebration precisely of the mestico as the symbol of Brazil. Brazilians formed a strong, unified nation, this school of thought argued, precisely because of the union of three great races: blacks, whites, and Indians. And with the inclusion of the latter, Doris Sommer notes, Brazilians truly could proclaim their independence from Portugal, for what could be more "Brazilian" than to be Indian?
Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon subscribed wholeheartedly to the latter attempt to create a Brazilian people and, hence, a Brazilian nation. To be sure, he spent much of his time directing the construction of telegraph lines, roads, bridges, and other projects, yet he also spent much time, perhaps even more time, energy, and thought, on implementing plans to incorporate peoples of different ethnic and racial backgrounds (especially Indians) into one shared nation. Building such a nation, however, first required that the isolation of vast regions of the country be overcome. As an officer in the Brazilian army, Rondon felt he was well placed to do this, because the army, along with the Catholic Church, was the only truly national institution in Brazil at that time. In other words, to build a particular kind of nation, leaders would have to extend the reach of the Brazilian government over those who, like the perplexed landowner in Santa Catarina, recognized none of the symbols of the nation or its government.
Stringing Together a Place
To speak of the expanding power of the federal government in Brazil in the 1890s and early 1900s will strike students of Brazilian history as odd. After all, the men who overthrew the centralized Brazilian monarchy in 1889 did so in part because they felt that the central government did not respond to their needs vis-a-vis the expansion of agricultural exports and international trade. As a result, those who established the Brazilian Republic, such as the coffee barons from the state of Sao Paulo, passed the Constitution of 1891 and created a decentralized federation with strong states' rights. Individual states could now contract foreign loans directly, without any input from or interference by federal officials. All public lands, which were controlled by the central government in the empire, passed to the control of individual state governments. With new powers of taxation, the state of Sao Paulo began to raise more revenues than the federal government! Under the new republican structure, local landowners were largely left alone to rule in the interior.
Recently, scholars have begun to argue that the federal government attempted to assert its power during the decentralized Old Republic (1889-1930). This central state activity increased because of the spectacular growth of commercial agriculture in Brazil, which increasingly required national regulation and organization. It also resulted from the attention that commercial expansion drew to the vast, sparsely populated hinterlands, especially to Brazil's international borders, and the calls for increased security measures for those lands. Furthermore, periodic rebellions in the interior meant that large numbers of central state representatives, in the guise of soldiers and their officers, occupied interior lands, and thus expanded the central government's authority there, at least temporarily.
This incorporation of faraway lands and peoples was quite possibly the primary activity of the Brazilian central state during the Old Republic. Incorporation combined both nation- and state-building activities because expanding state control over these lands would expose residents to the coastal Brazilian nation and would lead eventually to their transformation into modern Brazilians. Nowhere is this combination more evident than in the federal government's public-health campaigns of the early 1900s.
Physicians and scientists such as Oswaldo Cruz and Carlos Chagas played a key role in nation building, for they sought to improve the nation by improving the health of its citizens. Convinced that Brazilians were not condemned to perpetual racial inferiority, they argued instead that the nation's problems, its backwardness, poverty, and the sickly nature of its population, resulted from diseases that could be cured. Brazilians were not inherently inferior, despite what European intellectuals claimed. Instead, they were sick, and thus for public health officials "illnesses became the crucial problem for constructing nationhood."
Improving the nation's health, Cruz and Chagas argued, required strong, centralized, and coordinated actions by federal authorities (i.e., the expansion of central state power). The extreme federalism of the Old Republic, they argued, resulted in halfhearted, poorly funded, and redundant programs by the individual states. Brazilians could be redeemed, but only via a national public-health campaign led by federal officials. Cruz, Chagas, and their colleagues used the findings from their own public health expeditions to press successfully for the creation of a federal public-health service in 1919.
That the effort to construct a unified Brazilian nation required the expansion of the central state's power can also be seen in the recruitment activities of the Brazilian army. Early twentieth-century supporters of a universal conscription law, such as Federal Deputy Alcindo Guanabara, argued that an army of invigorated conscripts would help the central government establish effective control over Brazil's interior and would thus serve as "an engine of national integration," as Peter Beattie put it. Mandatory military service would also become an extended civics lesson, in essence, by distilling "an ennobling and unifying sense of patriotic identity to be carried throughout Brazil's vast territorial extremities by reservists." Mandatory military service, it was argued, would incorporate different groups and produce a shared, national identity. Furthermore, it would improve the health of poor Brazilians, thereby strengthening the nation.
That interior peoples and lands remained far removed from urban, coastal Brazilians, and vice-versa, can be seen from two examples from the state of Mato Grosso. Paraguay initiated the Paraguayan War by invading southern Mato Grosso in 1865. Incredibly, officials in Rio de Janeiro only learned of the invasion six weeks after the fact, and throughout the war news from the front took weeks to reach the national capital. Twenty-four years later, on 15 November 1889, officers and soldiers in Rio de Janeiro overthrew the Brazilian monarchy and declared the republic. Yet, given the difficulties of communication with the far west, residents of Cuiaba, the capital of Mato Grosso, did not learn of these events until a month later.
More than anything, the Paraguayan War demonstrated that the national government needed to establish a system of rapid communication with the far west. The telegraph, a relatively new technology, promised to do just that. It promised to conquer long distances with relative ease. It alone, Laura Maciel notes, "was capable of lassoing the states, for it could sew them together, thereby avoiding the disintegration [of Brasil]." Indeed, she continues, the telegraph promised to serve as a kind of "metallic highway" between the coast and the interior. Only after such infrastructure development, Brazilian President Afonso Pena noted in 1906, would the vast hinterlands of the country open to the circulation of agricultural and industrial products. As Rondon himself put it, the expansion of central state authority via telegraph construction was necessary for the progress of the Brazilian nation, for "wherever the telegraph goes, there people will experience the benefits of civilization. With the establishment of order ... the development of man and industry will follow inevitably, for commerce will connect continuously the societies [of the coast and the interior]."
The Wired Nation
The telegraph promised to extend the reach of the central state across Brazil, and its construction became a matter of national security in the aftermath of the Paraguayan War. For this reason, an early U.S. observer of the Brazilian telegraph system noted, the government never considered allowing private industry to develop the telegraph in Brazil. It was, and would remain, a state-owned and -operated endeavor. That the first telegraph line built in Brazil (1852) linked the Imperial Palace with military headquarters was no coincidence.
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Excerpted from Stringing together a nation by Todd A. Diacon Excerpted by permission.
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