Penal colony of Clevelândia

They included enemies of president Artur Bernardes' government (tenentist rebels, militant workers and anarchists) and common prisoners (criminals from the "dregs of society" and the homless, capoeiras, and minors caught on the streets).

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.

This 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.

Testimonies from prisoners recorded precarious accommodation and usually unpaid labor in hot, humid and unhealthy conditions, as well as threat of violence from guards and some common criminals.

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.

The region was believed to be an "Eldorado" of fertile lands, presented in government propaganda by photographs of a giant cassava root and a long sugar cane stalk.

[14] Until 1924, a two-story administrative building, a school with two classrooms, a hospital, infirmary, immigrant hostel, telegraph office, sawmill, church, several residences and 28 kilometers of local roads were built.

[15] 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 internal exile.

[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 their prison from 1924 onwards.

[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 (1891–1894) and in the post-Vaccine Revolt period (1904).

[30] Only at the end of Artur Bernardes' term and the state of emergency did the story resonate with public opinion and the mainstream and alternative press brought testimonies from survivors.

[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.

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.

[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".

[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".

[58] The lowest number used by Pinheiro and Samis is 946, provided by the report Journey to the Cleveland Colonial Nucleus, presented by Oldemar Murtinho, director of the Secretariat of State Section to the Minister of Agriculture in 1926.

According to Romani, this first group included 250 military personnel and another 150 people arrested in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo since the revolt on 5 July to early December.

[76] What the police called "undesirables" included both common criminals (thieves, murderers, scoundrels and swindlers, the "dregs of society") as well as beggars, capoeiras and minors removed from the streets as a policy of "social prophylaxis".

[4] According to Atílio Lebre, a Portuguese prisoner embarked in Rio de Janeiro, the food on the ship consisted of a little mate and a biscuit, in the morning, and "a dish with black-eyed peas and one hundred grams of poorly cooked green meat", for the main meals.

Soldiers and officers who swore loyalty to the government, abandoning their revolutionary convictions, were given the best jobs, closer relations with the small local elite and greater freedom.

[34][87] Gentil Norberto, in his defense of the colony, stated that only common criminals had been forced to work, and for only four and a half hours a day, cleaning the headquarters and other services, and received cigarettes and small wages.

The heaviest labor weeding the fields and carrying logs from the river to the sawmill; these tasks were initially reserved for common criminals and later shared with Catanduvas veterans.

[86] The Agricultural Center sought an image of a civilized public office,[82] but the services it offered were designed for a few hundred volunteers and were overwhelmed by the arrival of a much larger number of prisoners.

[40] Prisoners were punished with the "ox navel" (a type of whip), the paddle and the "hot refrigerator" or "cafua", a space with zinc roof tiles in which only one person could fit, who suffocated in the heat.

[105][115] Some criminals, such as "Colonel Bahia", "Za-la-mort", "Rio Grande" and "Padeirinho", were allowed free passage through the village, which they traveled with the guards to physically discipline other prisoners.

[72][116] In an episode narrated by the anarchist Domingos Passos, "Colonel Bahia" slapped an old bricklayer, nicknamed "Constructor", for his delay in arriving at the meal, resulting in a hemorrhage.

Augusto da Silva Ramalho reported to O Combate that he was arrested for no reason and he and his companions "received orders to work, always watched by the colony's military garrison, who mistreated them at the first speech".

[117] Mateus Felix de Moura, a former sergeant in the Public Force of São Paulo, described a diet based on "hard beans, with large pieces of rotten and tasteless meat".

[119] Everardo Dias described the survivors as "weak, thin, yellowish, without courage, without spirit and without vitality", in whose "scarred, wax-colored faces only the eyes stood out... they looked like mummies".

[96][120] Oldemar Murtinho's report, which aimed at a positive presentation of the colony, described the prisoners as "ragged and sad" men, who walked like "those condemned to death who are heading to the gallows, slowing their pace", "giving the impression that malaria made them useless for the rest of their lives".