Grande Seca
[13] El Niño years are characterized by below-average rainfall in the semiarid zone, which typically averages at 800 mm annually but is concentrated in a brief time period sometimes shorter than two months.
[17] Additionally, sertanejos could not take advantage of any functional irrigation systems which they could use to store and ration water, due to lack of both government interest in the region and agricultural knowledge on the part of the farmers.
[18] The intensive, ill-suited monoculture and the absence of a robust network of artesian wells, dams, and reservoirs rapidly exacerbated the issues the Great Drought created.
Ironically, during the early stage of the Great Drought there was abundance of dried beef, but that was the case only because people were killing cattle before the animals became totally unusable.
[26] The motivations behind this preference are not totally clear, but Leff and Deutsch blame the racial attitudes on the part of coffee planters who regarded sertanejos as lazy and less productive.
The domestic market was underdeveloped due to lack of credit and the total self-sustainability of farmers, villages, and cities whose primary sources of food were subsistence agriculture and cattle herding.
Coffee, however, made a grand entrance in the early 1900s and grew rapidly, due to, among other factors, the lack of notable competitors around the world, in contrast to the global sugar and cotton industries.
[30] The product, produced almost exclusively in the three Southeastern provinces of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais, drove sugar and cotton prices down, dragging the Northeast's economy toward decline shortly before the drought.
Hence, the inability of the Brazilian government to implement infrastructure projects in many areas of the country was due to the suffocating nature of foreign debt—most of which was tied to Britain—, the primitive banking system, and the volatility of its export income.
Some citizens in the provinces that were less affected, such as Pernambuco, created public subscriptions and sent the money and other relief items collected to the victims through ships without being charged for the transportation.
[37] The dominant scientific discourse of the time stated that the climate of tropical countries made people lazy and unintelligent and allowed disease to fester.
[6] Written by American naturalist Herbert Huntingdon Smith, the article described harrowing scenes of "living skeletons",[6] crowded huts filled with migrants, and even cannibalism.
[48] In January 1878, Joāo Lins Vieira Cansaçāo de Sinimbu, a liberal from Pernambuco, assumed the role of prime minister and created a program for public relief.
[54] As the refugees started to gather in the coastal cities, the government implemented another policy that sent the sertanejos to be used as cheap labor in the Amazon, for the extraction of rubber, and in the southeast, for the coffee production.
[56] This governmental organ focused mainly on increasing water storage infrastructure, but even today the system continues to be insufficient to promote relief during drought.
[61] During the Great Drought, the refugees' workforce was employed the development of hydraulic projects, such as dams, weirs, and reservoirs, as well as railroad lines, under contracts with the private sector.
"[63] Smith also states, in an article written for the New York Herald, that "by the 20th of December, [1878] the death rate was 400 per day" in Fortaleza, a popular city for emigration within Ceará.
[6] But, as asserted by the Wellington Post, Fortaleza did not provide sanction for all: "at least 200,000 refugees," were forced to "encamp about the larger town," where the "famine mortality… [had] reached twenty per day.
In 1878, the midst of the drought, smallpox resurfaced in Ceará, where the thousands of desperate emigrants wedged in refugee camps posed a prime environment for the transmission of disease.
Another cause of discrepancy may be related to Ceará's faulty census in the 19th century, which often omitted the majority of children born pardo because their fathers were unknown, (which is suggestive of masters impregnating their slaves).
Additionally, since these children were born pardo, it can be assumed if they reached adulthood, they did not hold high socioeconomic status, signifying a higher susceptibility to the disastrous effects of the drought.
[55] Smith's observations of the refugees illustrate their dire means of travel: Overall the roads there came streams of fugitives, men and women and little children, naked, lean, famine-weak, dragging wearily across the plains...
After contracting and spreading the disease within the plantation, workers then left the Amazon and returned to the Northeast carrying the parasite and introducing the first cases of Leishmania braziliensis to the state.
[75] Though some of this success may be credited to the natural abundance of Hevea trees, the tapping costs became substantially lower as thousands of wretched Cearenses entered the labor force.
[74] Though a select few – public officials and rubber barons – profited greatly from the manipulation of cheap labor, the starvation stricken survivors' fortune continued to worsen.
An article posted by the Center for Disease Control speculates that the appearance, and eventual spread, of L. braziliensis is credited to immigrants returning from rubber plantations.
[2] Though the introduction of the disease was over a century ago, L. braziliensis remains salient: nine Brazilian states report upwards of 1,000 cases per year, with the majority occurring in Ceará.
[85] Beyond the use of reservoirs – which rarely maintain necessary water storage – a wide array of initiatives have been contrived to minimize the impacts of droughts: "resettlement in the Amazon… integrated rural development programs, credit, education, and health care and promoted non-agricultural income.
"[86] Although there are currently "public efforts to seek a long-term solution to drought", the afflicted areas still experience environmental issues—lack of agriculture and water shortages—as well as "clientelism" and "widespread corruption and political manipulation.
[89][90] Also, when it comes to the formulation of public policies, the provinces in the northeast did not have enough political voice in the National Legislative Assembly, as their seats in the senate were constrained by their small population in comparison to the other southeastern states.
