Wikipedia

Penal colony of Clevelândia

The penal colony of Clevelândia, located in the current district of Clevelândia do Norte, Amapá, functioned from 1924 to 1926 in the extreme north of Brazil, bordering French Guiana. It was installed in the "Cleveland Colonial Nucleus", an agricultural colony founded in 1922, and received a total of prisoners that ranged from 946 to 1,630 individuals. The prisoners included enemies of president Artur Bernardes' government (tenentist rebels, militant workers and anarchists) and common prisoners (criminals from the "scum of society", poor peoples, capoeiras, and minors caught on the streets). They came from Paraná, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Amazonas and Pará. In addition to these, the colony's population was made up of Brazilian Army guards, employees, traders and settlers, the last three totaled 204 inhabitants at the end of 1926. At the beginning of 1927, the Washington Luís administration allowed the prisoners to return.

Workers on one of the colony's rivers in 1925

The original agricultural colony was already losing its inhabitants to neighboring Martinica (present-day Oiapoque) in 1924, when the Bernardes government needed a remote and isolated prison. In response to the tenentist military revolts, the government had imposed a state of emergency and filled the prisons. Miguel Calmon, then Minister of Agriculture, offered the location, as it was the most remote agricultural colony in the country. The colony has precedents in the governments of Floriano Peixoto, who deported prisoners to the Amazon, and Rodrigues Alves, in the period after the Vaccine Revolt, as well as in other penal colonies around the world. The first ship with prisoners arrived at the mouth of the Oyapock River on 26 December 1924.

The sudden expansion of the colony's population overloaded its agricultural center's infrastructure. Testimonies from prisoners recorded precarious accommodation and usually unpaid work in hot, humid and unhealthy conditions, as well as threat of violence from guards and some common criminals. The prison's workforce carried wooden logs to the sawmill, weeded the fields, built public facilities and worked in the pau-rosa mills. Military personnel who swore loyalty to the government performed technical and bureaucratic functions. In June 1925, soldiers from the Public Force of São Paulo, defeated in the battle of Catanduvas during the Paraná Campaign, brought an epidemic of shigellosis, which killed hundreds of prisoners along with other diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. According to the official report Journey to the Cleveland Colonial Nucleus, out of 946 prisoners, 491 died and 262 escaped.

Press censorship suppressed the matter until the first months of 1927, when the prisoners returned and the penal colony occupied the front pages of newspapers. The government's opposition described Clevelândia as a "green hell", and government supporters as a "very common agricultural colony". Clevelândia was permanently associated with president Artur Bernardes. It was remembered by anarchists and forgotten by historiography, being the subject of the first major study only in 1991. Historians have characterized the penal colony as a forced labor camp or even as a concentration camp.

Creation edit

The agricultural colony edit

 
A football match in front of the administration house

The prisoners' memoirs often confuse Clevelândia with the region where it was located, Oiapoque, at the time belonging to the state of Pará[1] and currently to Amapá. Oiapoque is located on Brazil's border with French Guiana and was an area of territorial disputes with France until its definitive incorporation into Brazilian territory in 1900.[2] The region was considered an empty space, and its occupation had been studied by Brazilian authorities since the 1890s. In 1919, the Brazilian Congress approved senator Justo Chermont's proposal to found national patronages and colonies along the Oyapock River. Chermont warned the government against smugglers who took advantage of the lack of policing, inspection and military defense in that area.[3][4] Colonization would eliminate French influence from the region and ensure Brazilian sovereignty.[5]

The colony was established on the right bank of the Oyapock River, 15 kilometers from the military post of Santo Antônio,[6] a few kilometers upstream from the village of Martinica.[7] Both were part of the municipality of Amapá in the district of Demonti, whose total population was more than 1,150 in the 1920 census.[8] The village of Saint-Georges was on the opposite (French) side of the river.[9] The first settlers, refugees from the drought in Northeastern Brazil, arrived in May 1921.[6] According to Rocque Pennafort, the population was made up of two distinct groups, one that accompanied colonel Chico Pennafort and the other of families from Ceará brought from Belém by the government. The region was believed to be an "Eldorado" of fertile lands, presented in government propaganda by photographs of giant cassava and sugar cane trees.[10] The healthiness of the region was attested to by a report signed in 1922 by the director of the Rural Prophylaxis Service of Pará.[11] On 5 May 1922, the "Cleveland Agricultural Center" was inaugurated, named after Grover Cleveland, president of the United States who served as arbitrator in the Palmas issue between Argentina and Brazil.[6]

The chief engineer, administrator and founder of the village was Gentil Norberto.[12] Clevelândia should be the "model area for a civilizational project".[13] The urban area of the nucleus was planned, an unprecedented feat for the towns in the region.[14] Until 1924, a two-story building was built for the administration, a school with two classrooms, a hospital, infirmary, immigrant hostel, telegraph office, sawmill, church, several residences and 28 kilometers of local roads.[6] But the initial enthusiasm was lost and settlers who were unsuccessful with agriculture migrated to Martinica, where they found work in the pau-rosa mills. On 31 December 1926, the population, excluding prisoners and guards, was 204: 127 settlers and 77 employees and traders.[15]

Transformation into a penal colony edit

 
Location of Clevelândia on a 1933 map of the Oyapock River

The federal government of president Artur Bernardes (1922–1926) transformed Clevelândia into the largest destination for its political prisoners,[16] in a context of a lasting state of emergency, overcrowded jails, mass arrests and degredados.[17] Tenentists, defeated in their armed revolts against the government, militant workers (including anarchists), common criminals and "undesirables" removed from the streets of Rio de Janeiro had Clevelândia as a prison from 1924 onwards.[16] By article 80 of the General Provisions of the Brazilian Constitution of 1891, in force at the time, the president could, during a state of emergency, resort to exile to maintain law and order.[11] In the case of Clevelândia, an additional justification would be a constitutional provision that gave the federal government control over the border strip necessary for national defense.[18]

According to Bernardes, the idea of deporting the prisoners to Clevelândia was not his, but that of his Minister of Agriculture, Miguel Calmon, or Gentil Norberto.[19] According to former minister Calmon, "the government only deported to Clevelândia as a last resort and forced by habeas corpus requests to the Supreme Federal Court, which did not allow the prisoners to be kept here" [on prison ships and islands in Guanabara Bay] , and "those deported to Clevelândia were prisoners who had the worst records and no special title to recommend them".[20][21]

Miguel Calmon presented to the president establishments of the Ministry of Agriculture with room to receive prisoners: Ilha das Flores, the colonial centers of Paraná and Santa Catarina and the agricultural centers of Paraíba, Piauí, Pará (i.e. Clevelândia) and Amazonas. According to him, Ilha das Flores and Clevelândia would be the only viable ones, as the others were in territories at risk of revolts or the governors of their respective states did not want to host political prisoners.[18]

Clevelândia was the most remote agricultural colony in the entire country, guaranteeing the isolation of prisoners and the impossibility of legal defense before courts.[21][22][23] The prisoners would be punished for their crimes while also contributing to the occupation of the border region.[24] The measure has precedents in republican Brazil, also in the equatorial jungle, when hundreds or even thousands of individuals were deported to Tabatinga, Xingu, the upper Rio Branco and Acre during the government of Floriano Peixoto and in the post-Vaccine Revolt. This type of punishment in inhospitable regions can be compared to Devil's Island in French Guiana, the Italian domicilio coatto (confinement on islands in the Mediterranean), the Argentine prison in Ushuaia and the Russian gulag.[25] The isolation was so great that there was no direct telegraphic connection to Belém; Until the construction of a radiotelegraph station in September 1926, communication passed through French Guiana to Paris and from there to Recife and Belém.[26]

Points of view edit

 
A Plebe issue on 12 February 1927, presenting the "great crimes of the bourgeoisie" that occurred in Oiapoque

The events in Clevelândia did not reach the press as a whole, which was under censorship during the state of emergency declared by the Bernardes government.[27][28][29] Public opinion only had a superficial understanding of the events.[30] Opposition deputies in the Chamber denounced many abuses that occurred during the state of emergency, but did not mention Clevelândia.[31] The newcomers did not know what awaited them. The news only started to come out in September 1925, when a letter from Domingos Braz was published in the Lisbon anarcho-syndicalist newspaper A Batalha.[32] In December 1925, another letter was published by the newspapers La Antorcha, from Buenos Aires, and O Syndicalista, from the Workers' Federation of Rio Grande do Sul.[33] The government denied the accusations.[30]

Only at the end of Artur Bernardes' term and the state of emergency did the story resonate with public opinion and the big and small press brought testimonies from survivors.[28][34][35] Government and opposition newspapers debated what the real conditions of the place would be at the beginning of 1927, when the prisoners had already been amnestied. The opposition can be exemplified by the newspapers O Combate and A Nação, which represented the interests of the Democratic Party of São Paulo, tenentists and the Workers and Peasants Bloc, as well as A Plebe, representing the anarchists. The defenders of former president Bernardes and his government can be found in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Paiz.[36] Justo Chermont's newspaper reported on the beauty and good climate of Clevelândia, and Gentil Norberto would publicly defend the place.[37]

The play Clevelândia (1927), by Euclides de Andrade, criticized the First Brazilian Republic in a humorous tone from the point of view of a caipira arrested in São Paulo for saluting the revolutionaries in 1924. The play was well received by the public in São Paulo.[38] In Mr. Slang e o Brasil (1927), writer Monteiro Lobato interpreted Clevelândia as the possible destination of the country's thinking minds. Regarding the doctor Belisário Penna, Lobato wrote: "He has done so much good for his land and will do so much more that - write what I'm going to say: he will end up in Clevelândia".[39]

 
Official propaganda photograph showing a settler and the cassava root harvested on his plot

The opposition denounced the "horrors" and the "Clevelandian hecatomb", "the extermination of prisoners" and "the crimes of the Bernardes government".[40] The contemporary press and historiography associate Clevelândia with exile and demographic emptiness. Expressions such as "green hell", "Brazilian Siberia", "garden of torments", "exile of plague and death", "pestilent jungles" and "inhospitable place" were common in the newspapers.[41] The place entered anarchist memory as a symbol of oppression, the "Brazilian Bastille".[42]

The revelations put the government press on the defensive.[43] In the article "The demagoguery industry and the Clevelândia bonanza", the newspaper criticized opposition publications.[44] The newspaper softened the image of the place,[45] calling it a "very common agricultural colony"[46] and a "peaceful cassava plantation".[47] Reversing the accusations, it asserted that "those who today cry out with an olive branch in hand, for general peace, were the ones who lit and fueled the fire of rebellion that has been drenching the national territory in blood for so many years",[48] and that "if there had not been a revolution the government would not have been forced to take some severe measures".[47]

For historian Carlo Romani, historiography let the history of Cleveland fall into oblivion.[49] The official silence about the region was broken by the Brazilian Army Library itself with the publication of Clevelândia do Norte, by priest Rogério Alicino, in 1971.[3] Alicino had an affinity with the interests of the State and relied on official documents.[50] His book dedicated only five pages to the penal experience;[51] according to Romani, "the first extensive work on the episode was a chapter in Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro's book", Estratégias da ilusão: a revolução mundial e o Brasil (1922-1935) (1991).[52] Pinheiro focused on state repression and social struggles.[53] Local historians stick to the official history, seeking to prevent the history of Oiapoque from being tainted by the short time in which the prison camp existed.[54]

Alexandre Samis, author of Clevelândia: anarquismo, sindicalismo e repressão política no Brasil (2002), had a similar perspective to Pinheiro. He and Romani have an ideological affinity with anarchism or libertarian socialism.[55] For an additional historian of Clevelândia, Edson Machado de Brito, Pinheiro, Samis and Romani presented, each in their own way, the penal colony as a "milestone of the resistance's defeat". He, on the other hand, emphasizes that dissent survived the exile of part of its militants in Clevelândia.[56] Samis presents the exiles as citizens imprisoned without trial, while Brito recalls the revolutionary danger that these dissidents represented to the State.[57]

Deactivation edit

 
At Artur Bernardes' funeral in 1955, "the survivors of Clevelândia ask for forgiveness for having rebelled against such an honest government and such a worthy president"

The Washington Luís administration, which had succeeded Artur Bernardes, ordered the release of the prisoners in 1927.[58] On 14 January, O Combate reported a new wave of deportees to Clevelândia aboard the steamship Vasconcellos, but on 25 January it published that the prisoners had been amnestied. The last disembarkation of Clevelândia prisoners in Rio de Janeiro, according to the newspaper, was on 22 February 1927, aboard the steamship Macapá. According to the testimony of these prisoners, others remained in Clevelândia due to their health condition.[59] The topic occupied the front page of newspapers for the first three months of 1927.[13] The communist Octávio Brandão, a witness to the prisoners arrival, saw yellowish, thin and weak survivors, with diseased livers and swollen feet.[60]

Artur Bernardes earned the nickname "Clevelândia President" and remained associated with the penal colony. At his funeral, in 1955, a wreath was left with the words: "The survivors of Clevelândia ask for forgiveness for having risen up against such an honest government and such a worthy president", a possible irony on the part of his detractors.[61]

Some of the prisoners integrated into the local community and have descendants in the current population of Clevelândia.[62][63] The town of Martinica expanded continuously, was renamed Oiapoque and in 1945 became the seat of the new emancipated municipality. The Cleveland Colonial Center was extinguished in 1936 and its assets were transferred to the Ministry of War, which transformed Clevelândia into a military colony in 1940.[64] The location currently hosts the Special Border Company of the 34th Jungle Infantry Battalion.[65] There is no visible material legacy of the penal colony, apart from possible burials in the São Carlos cemetery.[66] The closed army archive in Clevelândia holds documents from various periods, including those from the penal colony.[63]

See also edit

References edit

Citations edit

  1. ^ Braga 2013, p. 227.
  2. ^ Brito 2008, p. 7-9.
  3. ^ a b Heller 2006, p. 151.
  4. ^ Braga 2013, p. 228.
  5. ^ Brito 2008, p. 12.
  6. ^ a b c d Heller 2006, p. 152.
  7. ^ Romani 2011, p. 507.
  8. ^ Romani 2011, p. 519.
  9. ^ Romani 2011, p. 520.
  10. ^ Romani 2011, p. 506-508.
  11. ^ a b Meirelles 2002, p. 442.
  12. ^ Brito 2008, p. 55.
  13. ^ a b Samis 2013, p. 1.
  14. ^ Romani 2011, p. 504.
  15. ^ Romani 2011, p. 507, 509-510.
  16. ^ a b Assunção 2014, p. 84-85.
  17. ^ Gasparetto 2018, p. 266, 269.
  18. ^ a b Heller 2006, p. 153.
  19. ^ Brito 2008, p. 63.
  20. ^ Santos 2006, p. 466.
  21. ^ a b Romani 2011, p. 511.
  22. ^ Brito 2008, p. 34.
  23. ^ Romani 2003, p. 115.
  24. ^ Brito 2008, p. 81.
  25. ^ Romani 2003, p. 120-121.
  26. ^ Meirelles 2002, p. 631.
  27. ^ Brito 2008, p. 14-15.
  28. ^ a b Heller 2006, p. 167.
  29. ^ Melo 2009, p. 15.
  30. ^ a b Meirelles 2002, p. 632.
  31. ^ Gasparetto 2018, p. 275-276.
  32. ^ Braga 2013, p. 230-231.
  33. ^ Heller 2006, p. 162.
  34. ^ Brito 2008, p. 41.
  35. ^ Gasparetto 2018, p. 274.
  36. ^ Brito 2008, p. 42-45.
  37. ^ Aragão 2011, p. 206.
  38. ^ Melo 2009, p. 16.
  39. ^ Carvalho 2019, p. 74.
  40. ^ Brito 2008, p. 45.
  41. ^ Brito 2008, p. 65-66.
  42. ^ Braga 2013, p. 226.
  43. ^ Brito 2008, p. 48.
  44. ^ Brito 2008, p. 47-48.
  45. ^ Brito 2008, p. 67.
  46. ^ Brito 2008, p. 52.
  47. ^ a b Brito 2008, p. 47.
  48. ^ Brito 2008, p. 51.
  49. ^ Brito 2008, p. 36.
  50. ^ Brito 2008, p. 27.
  51. ^ Braga 2013, p. 217.
  52. ^ Romani 2011, p. 512.
  53. ^ Brito 2008, p. 30.
  54. ^ Romani 2011, p. 513-514.
  55. ^ Brito 2008, p. 32, 36.
  56. ^ Brito 2008, p. 47, 78.
  57. ^ Brito 2008, p. 34-35.
  58. ^ Heller 2006, p. 163.
  59. ^ Brito 2008, p. 77-78.
  60. ^ Heller 2006, p. 156-157.
  61. ^ Samis 2013, p. 2.
  62. ^ Romani 2011, p. 518.
  63. ^ a b Brito 2008, p. 79.
  64. ^ Romani 2011, p. 518-521.
  65. ^ "Companhia Especial de Fronteira, sediada em Clevelândia do Norte (AP), completa 80 anos de história". Noticiário do Exército. 2020-06-18. Retrieved 2024-04-17.
  66. ^ Romani 2003, p. 118.

Bibliography edit

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