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Hispanic American Historical Review 81.2 (2001) 309-342



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A "Visão do Sertão":
Party Identity and Political Honor in Late Imperial Minas Gerais, Brazil

Judy Bieber


In 1882 Antônio Gonçalves Chaves, a Liberal politician and magistrate from Montes Claros, an isolated rural community in Minas Gerais, was appointed president of the province of Santa Catarina. A political opponent celebrated his imminent departure in the following letter printed in a Conservative provincial newspaper:

With this step the imperial government has just provided an incalculable benefit to this unhappy comarca, removing the passionately partisan judge and local chief who never should have been a magistrate in this land. . . . May God (or the government) keep him there for many years if not always, to satisfy the president's vanity and the tranquility of the Conservative party in these parts, and send us a district magistrate who has neither pretensions to be a party chief here, nor have cousins, brothers-in-law, uncles, godparents.

It is not appropriate that this segment of the population of Minas Gerais continue under a colonial regime in which total authority is concentrated in fact in the hands of a presumptuous kinglet (regulo), who despotically tries to exercise feudal privileges in this small sertaneja captaincy, by right of conquest and birth. . . . His excellency, who was our president . . . knows how to fix the electorate, to fix elections and grant votes to his friends seated in the parliaments. He is even presumed to be capable, as it is said, of nullifying the freedom to vote in the comarca of Diamantina and the twentieth district. 1 [End Page 309]

This commentator employed pointed metaphors to attack the reputation of Chaves and his family. He likened Chaves to a tradition-bound lord claiming quasi-feudal privileges by referring to his region of influence as a colonial captaincy, rather than a judicial district of postindependence Brazil. For this writer, excessive nepotism constituted a regressive and shameful violation of modern constitutional principles and liberal institutions. He deemed manipulation of electoral procedures and denying citizens their constitutional right to vote equally reprehensible.

Why is the commentary of this rural spokesman significant? At first glance, it merely confirms widely accepted interpretations of the nature of electoral politics during the Brazilian Empire (1822-89). Chaves was guilty of nepotism, patronage, and fixing elections, activities that were held to be commonplace in Brazil's rural interior. That being true, why did rural citizens editorialize in print about an entrenched system that they were all but powerless to resist or alter? Why did they attempt to defend in discursive terms liberal principles that were violated routinely in practice?

This essay demonstrates the importance of the political press as a medium for rural citizens to develop a critique of patronage politics. I challenge existing scholarship that has tended to emphasize the traditionalism of the Brazilian interior, its cultural propensity to violence, and its inability or unwillingness to participate in political life beyond the level of patron-client relations or strategic interests. Patronage politics became an inescapable fact of life following the centralization of the Brazilian state under the Regresso (1837-41). At that time, a series of counterreforms all but eliminated locally elected municipal officials and replaced them with centrally appointed police and judicial authorities. In so doing, parties that assumed power at the national level had the power to remake municipal administrations. Therefore, it was in the best interests of local clients to assist their political patrons at election time by doing whatever was necessary in order to secure victory for the party that empowered them.

It has been assumed that rural citizens entered into patronage politics willingly due to stereotypes that held that inhabitants of the interior or sertão were incapable of change, embraced patronage as a fundamental organizing principle of daily life, and had a natural propensity to engage in violence. According to these biased views, sertanejos gave little weight to ideology and chose political patrons to maximize their self-interest. Numerous accounts of electoral corruption...

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