Braço Forte, Mão Amiga

An Alternate History of Brazil

The Paraguayan War

The Paraguayan War profoundly altered the course of Brazilian history. It began with Brazilian armed intervention in the Uruguayan civil disorders provoked by the fighting between two political factions: the ‘Colorados’, supported by Brazil, and the ‘Blancos’, backed by the Paraguayan president, Francisco Solano López. The Paraguayan intervention in behalf of the Blanco faction materialized in a declaration of war against Brazil in March 1865.

Francisco Solano López.

The Paraguayans launched two offensives against Brazil. The northern expedition successfully occupied the main population centers of the Mato Grosso: Coimbra, Alburquerque, Corumbá, Miranda and Dorados fell in a matter of weeks.

Paraguayan soldiers killed in the battle of São Borja, 1865.

The main offensive, however, was launched against the Brazilian field army in Rio Grande do Sul. López, informed by Justo José de Urquiza, governor of the Argentinean province of Corrientes, about the Brazilian-Argentinean rapprochement, wisely decided to concentrate his forces against Brazil, and used the longer but safer route through Misiones and the Uruguay River to reach Rio Grande do Sul.

On June 11, the Brazilian Navy succeeded in engaging Paraguayan ships in the Battle of Riachuelo on the Paraná River. The Paraguayan saw themselves trapped between Brazilian troops stationed in Rio Grande and the Paraná River. After an unsuccessful maneuver to link with the second column of the Paraguayan Army, the Paraguayan forces in Rio Grande do Sul, encircled and with supplies quickly diminishing, surrendered to the popular Brazilian marshal -the Duke of Caxias- after six weeks of battle. Paraguay’s best troops yielded for almost nothing.

After their defeat in São Borja, Paraguay adopted a defensive strategy: abandoned Brazilian soil and defended during three years the strategically placed fortress of Humaitá. During these years, which caused enormous losses in men and material for the Imperial Brazilian Army, a number of young Brazilian officers questioned their own loyalty to the Imperial institution and its leaders' widespread corruption, inefficiency and nepotism. The officers felt that they were better prepared to rule the country than was the nobility: the hellish campaign of Humaitá, which extended from November 1865 to September 1868, only served to increase sympathies for republicanism among the officers corp.

Among the ideological currents which influenced these officers was the philosophy of the French positivist Auguste Comte, who believed in an ideal government led by an intellectual elite, not by hereditary nobility; and speculated about the possibility of total secular power and the separation of church and state. Comte's endorsement of universal education also appealed to military officers. His ideas, which stressed order and progress, spread throughout Latin America; in Brazil, through the Escola Militar de Realengo, they gave civil and military elites a rationale for advocating an end to monarchy and the establishment of a strong republican system, which would speed Brazil's development and enlarge its place in the world.

Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, Duke of Caxias.

In September 1, 1866, the Brazilian Field Marshall, Luís Alves de Lima e Silva –the Duke of Caxias- was killed in the course of an attack against the Paraguayan trenches at Curuzú. With Brazilian troops still heavily engaged in the attack against the Paraguayan fortress of Humaitá, the unfortunate death of the popular leader, and his replacement with the inept Baron of Porto Alegre only radicalized the field officers, who launched a campaign to undermine the support for the Empire among the troops.

The defeat of the demoralized Brazilian forces at the hands of the machete-armed Paraguayans on September 22, 1866, near Curupaití was the trigger for a mutiny of the Brazilian troops. Without great fear of reprisal, due to the weak rule of the Emperor Dom Pedro II, several units retired to the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul, where loyal units engaged them in battle. In November 20, 1866, the small rebel force was annihilated near the town of São Borja, but the fratricide fight served to enrage even more the Army’s leaders against the government.

In the home front, several factors combined to create an anti-monarchic atmosphere. The traditional rivalry between the aristocratic Navy, favored by the government, and an Army composed mainly of commoners and even slaves provoked a rift in the Imperial command that separated the Army leadership from the Imperial government, and served as an obstacle for the operations against Paraguay and worsening the already bad logistical situation.

But it was the mobilization crisis of the war what really separated the Army from the government, and almost cost Brazil the war. Popular resistance and bureaucratic intransigence thwarted the limited conscription system: the Army saw itself forced to rely on volunteers. Most of these were free men who signed on to escape hunger, unemployment, homelessness and the penal system. But paltry wages, spartan conditions, brutal treatment, and the terribly obvious fact that the machete-armed Paraguayans were creating a whole generation of amputees meant that the volunteers were few and their numbers were steadily diminishing. By the third year of the war, the government had been forced to ‘liberate’ scores of convicts and manumit hundreds of slaves to fight in the front.

Undoubtedly, the matter of the slaves was one of the most important factors in the Army revolt against the monarchy. The active abolitionist movements operating in Rio and São Paulo stimulated massive slave breakouts. With increasing frequency, fresh troops, badly needed in the front, were used instead to recapture thousands of fugitive slaves: the Army bitterly complained about the use of his men as capitães do mato (forces dedicated to control the plantations’ slaves). By the end of the war, the Army simply ignored Rio’s request for more troops to deal with the fugitives.

The increasing contact with slaves served to convert several Army officers, not only to republicanism, but to abolitionism too: the ‘Ceará Incident’, where Colonel Sena Madureira refused to transport the slaves selected in the province of Ceará to be send to the front, was a clear example of the radicalization of the Army. The fact that several officers, including the popular general Deodoro da Fonseca, supported Colonel Sena Madureira, was a sign of things to come.

Finally, an increasingly nationalist Brazil saw itself became saddled with huge debts, amounting by the end of the war to over 300 million pounds sterling, and with the possibility of having a French, the unpopular Count D’Eu, as probable successor of Dom Pedro II in his condition of husband of the Princess Isabel.

In May 24, 1866, after the bloody battles of Corrales and Tuyutí, López offered the Brazilian government a pacific resolution of the conflict in a secret meeting with the Baron of Porto Alegre. The offer was rejected, but not before it became public: the already strong opposition to the continuation of the war among the troops and the Brazilian public only grew, leading to a widening of the gulf between the Army officers, the nation, and the Emperor.

Brazilian troops in Asunción, 1869.

The war continued until Asunción, the Paraguayan capitol, was captured in June 2, 1869. The increasing discontent among the Brazilian Army’s ranks forced the Brazilian government to offer terms to the Paraguayans, who rapidly accepted them. The dreary and unpopular four-year ordeal was finally over. A shattered Paraguay was forced to cede the territory between the rivers Branco and Apa and the territory of Misiones Occidentales, and to pay a large indemnity in cattle, mate and other agricultural products.

The last-hour cancellation of the Victory Parade in Rio was an ominous sign of the wide gulf formed between Rio and the military.

The Republican Coup d’Etat and the Civil War

But the victory wasn’t enough to quell the rebellious spirit of the Army: the Republican Party, founded in 1867 and until then a minuscule political force, become overnight a force with tens of thousands of supporters, among them large numbers of war veterans and abolitionists. The Army, convinced of the ineptitude of the Imperial government, decided to take control of the country: several army officers, led by Marshall Deodoro da Fonseca, proclaimed Brazil a republic during a semi-clandestine Assembly in the city of Uruguaiana, in the place which is known today as the Praça da República. It was clear then that the tiny representation of civilian republicans meant that the coup was to be lead entirely by the Army.

A good number of veterans joined the conspirators’ already large force, which proceeded to constitute the seasoned Republican Army. The rebel forces advanced towards Petrópolis, location of the Emperor’s summer palace, in a failed attempt to put him under arrest. But the Cabinet, controlled by the Count of Ouro Preto, had managed to create a small force of National Guards, and foolishly used it in a vain attempt to stop the Republican Army. The battle of Sorocaba, where the Republican Army annihilated the forces loyal to the Emperor, was the beginning of the short and nebulous conflict known as the Civil War.

Dom Pedro II

By August 1870 the republicans, counting with the support of most of the military and the economic elite (who felt that they did not need the Empire to protect their interests), captured the city of Bahía, the last bastion of the monarchy. The Emperor, facing defeat, convinced the Council of State to accept the resignation of the cabinet and accept the conformation of a new cabinet constituted by republicans, convinced that a republican cabinet would stop further bloodshed. This was the catalyst of the rift between the “Young Republicans” and the “Old Republicans”: the former wanted a complete revolution along positivist, republican and progressive ideas, while the latter, supported by the powerful landlords, was conformed with the transformation of Brazil into a conservative oligarchic republic.

Young Republicans’ artillery near Rio, 1872.

The crisis generated by the division between the republicans only deepened when an influent group among the Old Republicans were convinced by the Count of Ouro Preto to change sides and supported the pro-monarchical movement, the latter then waging their own conflict against the Young Republicans’ troops. A Navy mutiny lead by the commanders Custódio de Mello and Saldanha da Gama, who occupied the capitol with their forces only worsened the situation. The death in battle of Marshall Deodoro da Fonseca, leader of the Old Republicans, was a moral booster for the Young Republicans, who chose Manoel da Fonseca Lisboa as their commander in chief.

The multisided conflict finalized in 1872, when the Young Republicans recaptured Rio de Janeiro from the Navy’s hands, and forced the Old Republicans and the monarchists to surrender by the end of that year: the Emperor left the country in December 20 1872. In January 1873, the new government announced to the nation that the country was now a federal republic, under the name of Federal Union of Brazil. The first act of the new government was the promulgation of a Carta Republicana (Republican Constitution), which abolished slavery, separated church and state, transformed the former provinces into federal states, expropriated the Imperial patrimonies and the Church’s properties and divided them among the former slaves and dispossessed peasants. Other radical reforms were swiftly decreed.

The Velha República

From 1872 to 1898 the Velha República (Old Republic) was completely dominated by the armed forces. Marshal Manoel da Fonseca Lisboa headed the provisional government in 1872 and became the first president of Brazil in 1873. The first decade of military rule was marked by political turbulence, including revolts and uprisings, generally led by conservative elements opposed to the radical measures already taken by the Army, specially the abolition of slavery. Instituted without compensation for the slave owners, emancipation alienated the powerful landed interests from the government, and large sections of the Roman Catholic clergy were hostile to the government for the expropriations suffered by the Church. Many leading people longed for the return of the monarchy.

Italian immigrants arriving to São Paulo, 1898.

But those same measures allowed the population and economy to expand at unprecedented rates. National production increased by more than 900 percent. A network of railroads was constructed and thousands of European migrated to Brazil in these years. In the realm of foreign affairs the military government was actively following the British lead, while at the same time it was hostile to neighboring regimes which tried to encroach territory claimed by Brazil.

The revolts were frequent these years. From veterans who couldn’t readapt to civilian life, to angry conservatives, to Indian uprisings, the military found plenty to do besides ruling the country. The bloody rebellion of the warlike M’Bayá tribe; and principally, the Quebra-Quilos revolt discredited the Army. The Quebra-Quilos (Kilo-Breaking) revolt started in the sleepy town of Iguaraçu, Pernambuco, where once prosperous smallholders were now squeezed by the fall in cotton prices after the U.S. Civil War: the frustrated smallholders commenced a jacquerie that swept the interior of Paraiba and Pernambuco. Even when the property destroyed was not much (the rioters broke newly adapted standard metric scales in markets in rural towns, thus the name of the revolt), the cruel repression of the rioters, justified as “an exemplary punishment” badly discredited the Army.

A religious dispute between the government and the Vatican, and the controversial Recruitment Law of 1874, instituting the draft, only worsened the situation.

In November 1898 a revolt under the leadership of the influent Catholic priest João Carvalho forced the military to call elections, signaling the end of the Velha República.

The Nova República

The Nova República (New Republic) was characterized for its political turbulence, due essentially to the lack of national democratic traditions and experience.

The first years of the New Republic were marked by the stagnation, and even retrogression of the political conditions in Brazil. The new Constitution guaranteed the exclusion of the majority of the Brazilian people. The adoption of the precept that the illiterate has no right to vote marginalized most of the population, specially the slaves recently liberated, amounting to one and a half million in a total population of ten millions. The new government stimulated electoral fraud due to the fact that the vote wasn’t secret and the government itself counted the votes. In a few years, elections and farce became synonymous: a card game where the outcome was knew beforehand.

Rapidly the real power was exerted by the interior landlords, who controlled their electoral districts with an iron hand. Peasant revolts become frequent, and the country saw itself in the abysm’s edge. Meanwhile, the appalling conditions of the growing urban proletariat facilitated the apparition of socialist and Marxist movements among it. Some historian argue that fear to Communism was the reason which impulse the Army to precipitate a war with Bolivia.

War with Bolivia

During the Old Republic, the government also conducted a military reorganization. The Army's poor performance in the Paraguayan War led officers and politicians to legislate reforms. Their principal concerns included the lack of adequate training and the need for a more modern reserve system to facilitate rapid mobilization.

Warship “15 de Novembro”, 1898.

General Hermes Rodrigues da Fonseca, Commander in Chief of the Army after the death of Marshal da Fonseca Lisboa, and noted Germanophile, made sure that the Army training and troop readiness were improved and its weaponry modernized along German lines. The focus on training and field exercises began to make a perceptible difference in army discipline and performance. Army desertion and crime rates began to decline slightly. Improving conditions and shorter service contracts attracted more volunteers.

If Brazil hoped –the Army strategist reasoned- to mobilize an army capable of warding off potential European aggressors (or its increasingly powerful regional rival Argentina), it had to have a modern army, with a manpool as large as possible. Since most poor Brazilians did not attend public schools, the draft became a way of socializing a larger proportion of the lower classes and providing them with a primary education. In this way is how the Army became a ladder for social advancement.

Besides, the consensus among the military that conscription would help resolve a variety of threats to national strength and unity: the Army promoted itself as a masculine eugenic motor for improving the health, hygiene, intelligence, discipline, and sense of national identity among a broader cross-section of Brazil's racially and ethnically diverse population.

Brazil and Bolivia had maintained a border dispute since the days of the recognition of Bolivian independence in 1831. Brazil claimed the eastern half of the Acre territory; while Bolivia and Paraguay were still disputing the sovereignty over the territory of El Chaco. These disputes’ intensity ranged from civilized discussions in diplomatic meetings to bloody border battles.

By 1908, the Acre territory had become an important source of rubber production in addition to its riches in wood and mate. Despite the fact beyond a doubt that Acre belonged to Bolivia, it already had a numerous Brazilian population. The Army incited the Brazilians living in Acre to declare independence. A heavy-handed Bolivian attempt to control the region administratively failed when the Brazilian Army declared its duty to defend the Brazilians living there. While Rio and La Paz were initiating a negotiation process that envisaged the option to purchase Acre, the Brazilian Army occupied the disputed territory, expelling first the Bolivian troops and later the few Bolivian citizens living there. With no option but to face the Brazilian Army, Bolivia declared war on Brazil in November 1908.

Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Armistice Day, 1909

The war was mercifully brief: nine moths of terrible battles in the jungles and the Chaco arid terrain. The Amazonian riverine fleet, created in 1898, rapidly transported the Brazilian troops to Acre, from where the Brazilian moved southwards after securing the territory, and proclaiming the annexation of Acre to Brazil. The terrible crossing of the Mato Grosso eventually allowed Brazil to occupy the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, where they waited the forces coming from the south: Paraguay had chosen this moment to declare war on Bolivia, and advanced trough El Chaco towards Santa Cruz. All the Bolivian offensives aimed to avoid the union of the two invading armies were unsuccessful.

Bolivian prisoners of war, 1909.

With the eastern half of its territory occupied and with the combined forces of Brazil and Paraguay preparing an offensive against Sucre, aimed to divide the country in two, Bolivia contacted the Brazilian government through its embassy in Buenos Aires, asking for an armistice. Britain, who was seeing with preoccupation the Brazilian advances into Bolivia, and having heavy investment in the Bolivian mines, pressured Brazil and Paraguay to moderate their original demands, which included the Bolivian cession of the eastern half of the country. Negotiations between La Paz and Rio de Janeiro were resumed and finally, in November of 1910, the Treaty of Petrópolis was signed: Bolivia ceded the disputed territories of Acre (north of the Madre de Dios river) and El Chaco to Brazil and Paraguay respectively; Bolivia was guaranteed an indemnification of two million pounds sterling as a compensation for these territories; and Brazil and Paraguay renounced to make any other claim over Bolivian territory.

The war had several effects on South America and Brazil: a system of alliances appeared, with Argentina and Uruguay formed a defensive coalition aimed against Brazil, which exerted a sort of informal protectorate over Paraguay. Chile and Brazil enjoyed close relations due to their common hostility against Argentina, while fears of Brazilian hegemony provoked a rapprochement between Perú and Argentina. Brazilian belligerence had isolated the country, and forced the post war government to look after better relation with its neighbors, and such policy conducted to closer relations with Venezuela and Ecuador, and support to these countries in their border disputes with Perú and Colombia, respectively.

The successful, short war also created the political conditions adequate for an Army takeover in Rio: this time, however, the Army decided to act behind the umbrella of the Partido Nacional Brasileiro (Brazilian National Party, lead by the retired General Ferdinando Moreira Umanzor), in order to exert its power through a more legitimate way. Finally, the war increased the interest of Washington in South American events, and eventually Washington’s stand towards Brazil, in the commercial and political fields, became tougher. From then on, the debate on the pros and cons of aligned relations with the United States would swell in the Brazilian diplomatic and political milieu.

The Great War

During the years 1909 and 1910, the arbitrary policies and methods of the Conservative Party’s president São-Tiago Ferrando aroused strong congressional opposition, especially from the Partido Nacional Brasileiro and the incipient but rapidly growing Partido Socialista Brasileiro. In November Ferrando dissolved the Congress and assumed dictatorial powers. An immediate military revolt forced him to resign in favor of Vice President Prudente José de Moraes Barros.

Order was gradually restored in the country during the administration of Moraes, and the ascent to the Presidency of Moraes Barros in 1914 marked the nation's ascent to international recognition: after the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, rising demand in foreign markets for Brazilian coffee, rubber, and sugar considerably relieved the economic difficulties of the country.

When in July 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, starting the Great War, all Brazilian political and military factions prepared to sit out the war, because nobody at the time could be sure who would win. Preoccupied for its necessity to pull ever more ships to Europe, the British admiralty tried to convince the Foreign Office to ask Brazil for help. But the opposition of the United States, added to the pressure imposed over the Brazilian government by the Army, which bitterly opposed intervention in the European war, convinced Rio and London that the Brazilian domestic situation was not the best for Brazil to participate directly in the war.

Brazilian troops arriving to the port of Santos, 1917.

In 1917 Britain, preoccupied by the menace of the U-boats and the moral crisis developing among the ranks of the French Army, asked Brazil to participate directly in the war in Europe. This time, the Navy and the civilian government wanted -for different reasons- to intervene in the war: the government wanted to strengthen its domestic position, shaky as a consequence of German attacks on Brazilian shipping (the ships Paraná, Lapa, Tijuca, Macau and Acarí), while the Navy wanted to learn more from operational combat against modern foes, and from working together with the British.

Brazil severed diplomatic relations with Germany in June 1917, and in August Brazil entered the war on the side of the Allies. With Austria-Hungary, as she had only minimal interests in South America, Brazil sought to maintain peaceful relations as long as possible. The same can be said about the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.

The Brazilian Army, 1914:

Standing force of 250.000 men:

19 infantry divisions,

4 cavalry brigades,

3 field artillery brigades,

6 heavy artillery regiments and a signals brigade

Fully mobilized: 1.5 million men

The Brazilian Navy, 1914:

2 dreadnought battleships,

2 fast battle cruisers,

14 pre-dreadnought battleships 13 cruisers ,

13 light cruisers,

7 old cruisers,

9 gunboats, 50 destroyers,

31 torpedo boats,

13 submarines.

460,000 tons.

The Brazilian Navy organized a squadron and send it to reinforce the Russian Fleet in the Baltic, and also sent to the Mediterranean one old light cruiser and 8 new destroyers with which acquired practice in modern anti-submarine warfare. Brazil deployed two armored cruisers and 12 new destroyers to Malta in September, 1917.

However, the Allies, specially France, were not enthusiastic at all about an eventual participation of its Brazilian ally in the land battles of the Western Front. The French held the Brazilian army in the utmost contempt –despite its good performance in the Bolivian War- and considered the American power an absolutely worthless ally. But the carnage on the Western Front convinced the Allied command that the Brazilians could be of some use in the Turkish front. After the declaration