Pitt Latin American Series

Recompense after Repression, 1895-2010

Ann M. Schneider

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780822988526
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In 1895, forty-seven rebel military officers contested the terms of a law that granted them amnesty but blocked their immediate return to the armed forces. During the century that followed, numerous other Brazilians who similarly faced repercussions for political opposition or outright rebellion subsequently made claims to forms of recompense through amnesty. By 2010, tens of thousands of Brazilians had sought reparations, referred to as amnesty, for repression suffered during the Cold War–era dictatorship. This book examines the evolution of amnesty in Brazil and describes when and how it functioned as an institution synonymous with restitution. Ann M. Schneider is concerned with the politics of conciliation and reflects on this history of Brazil in the context of broader debates about transitional justice. She argues that the adjudication of entitlements granted in amnesty laws marked points of intersection between prevailing and profoundly conservative politics with moments and trends that galvanized the demand for and the expansion of rights, showing that amnesty in Brazil has been both surprisingly democratizing and yet stubbornly undemocratic.

PART I

AMNESTY AS RECOURSE, 1890S–1910

PROLOGUE

TWO ADMIRALS

ADMIRAL EDUARDO WANDENKOLK, 1892

In June 1892, from a remote outpost in the Amazon, Navy Admiral Eduardo Wandenkolk wrote a letter pleading that Brazilians “must know the inhumanity with which the political prisoners sent to Tabatinga are being treated.” Wandenkolk and thirteen others had been banished to Tabatinga, near the border of Brazil with Colombia and Peru, by Floriano Peixoto, the “Iron Marshal.” His letter reported that the local governor prohibited any aid or comfort to the exiles, “no matter what authority requests it or the individual’s state of health.” None of them could become ill, Wandenkolk concluded, “without it being a death sentence.”¹

Two months earlier, on April 6, 1892, Wandenkolk signed his name to the “Manifesto of the Thirteen Generals” denouncing Floriano’s assumption of power as unconstitutional and calling for immediate elections for a new president. Until Floriano seized power, Wandenkolk had been the minister of the navy and a senator in the first Congress of the new Republic of Brazil.² The constitution to which Wandenkolk and the others appealed, in fact, had been put in place less than fifteen months earlier. In response to the manifesto against him, Floriano declared martial law in Rio de Janeiro (the capital city), suspended Congress, and ordered the immediate arrest and forced retirement from the military of eleven of the thirteen generals who had signed the manifesto, together with many other civilian and military figures. Within a week, dozens of detractors, including many of the signers of the manifesto, were either sent into exile to the far reaches of the Amazon region or detained in military forts.³

More than two decades before his banishment, Wandenkolk had been a decorated officer in the 1865–1870 Paraguayan War, a costly war that pitted Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay against the expansionist project of the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López. The war effort, complicated by unsavory imperial politics in Brazil, left an indelible mark on the Brazilian military as an institution. During the intervening years between the war and the events of 1892, Wandenkolk and his fellow war veterans were witness to and part of a transformation of the military, especially in its role in politics and governance. They rose in both rank and prestige over the next decade, feeling increasingly emboldened to involve themselves in imperial politics. In the 1880s, many of them, including Wandenkolk, joined a brewing conspiracy to oust the monarchy and establish a republic. Their coup was completed in 1889. A constitution signed in 1891 then consolidated the new form of government.

The recipient of Wandenkolk’s 1892 letter sent from Tabatinga was Rui Barbosa. Barbosa had been one of the civilian conspirators against the monarchy in Brazil. He also was the primary author of the 1891 constitution, the first minister of finance in the republic, and a senator in the first Congress. In the years that followed, from 1893 to 1895, he would be a political exile himself. (In contrast to Wandenkolk, Barbosa spent his exile in Europe and Argentina, not in the Amazon.) Within days of the arrests and banishments in April 1892, Barbosa filed a petition for habeas corpus to the Supremo Tribunal Federal (Federal Supreme Court), a court established by the 1891 constitution to be the highest in the land. It named the thirteen generals and thirty others who had been either detained or banished by decree. The court, itself under threat from Floriano, denied the writ in late April and upheld the legality of Floriano’s action as permissible under martial law.⁴

The somber, if not resigned, tone of his June letter aside, Wandenkolk did not perish in Tabatinga. By August 1892, martial law had been suspended, and Congress reconvened. The representatives quickly passed an amnesty for those “implicated in the events that resulted in the executive decree . . . declaring martial law.”⁵ Wandenkolk returned to Rio de Janeiro where, in June 1893, he assumed the presidency of the Navy Club and continued his opposition to Floriano. A month later, he commandeered the packet boat Júpiter in Buenos Aires, picked up weapons and ammunition, and set its course to the bay of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, where a local civil war had taken on decidedly national proportions.

Along the way Wandenkolk issued a proclamation calling for the navy to join the fray fighting against both Floriano and the state government of Rio Grande do Sul. His move was seen as an attempted coup, aiming “to depose the President . . . [and] subvert . . . the constitutional order of the Republic.”⁶ He and other rebels held the port for five days but ultimately were captured off the coast of Santa Catarina and imprisoned under military jurisdiction aboard the cruiser República. Wandenkolk was transferred to a prison in the Fort of Conceição, atop a hill in downtown Rio de Janeiro. From there, he had a bird’s-eye view of a full-blown navy revolt against Floriano that would unfold just weeks later, in September 1893, in Guanabara Bay.⁷ It had been less than eighteen months since he signed the Manifesto of the Thirteen Generals.

During the year that followed, politics took a turn in Brazil when an election brought a civilian to the presidency. Prudente de Morais, a planter from São Paulo, was inaugurated in November 1894. By the following July, Floriano had died and Congress was in the midst of negotiating the terms of an amnesty for those involved in the civil war in Rio Grande do Sul and the navy revolt in Rio de Janeiro. The amnesty became law in October 1895. Wandenkolk then retook his senate seat. Two years later, in October 1987, Prudente de Morais revoked Floriano’s 1892 decree that had forcibly retired Wandenkolk and others. Wandenkolk returned to active duty as a navy officer, a position in which he remained until his death in 1902. Nearly two generations later, in 1945, the Brazilian navy honored Wandenkolk with the establishment of the Admiral Wandenkolk Center of Instruction for Officers of the Corps of Engineers. The motto of the center is “Here professionals of the sea are formed.”⁸

Wandenkolk can rightly be thought of as belonging among the founding fathers of Brazil. Yet outside of the center for instruction that bears his name, his life is referenced only in history books and almost nowhere else. In comparison to another rebellious seaman who would soon follow, Wandenkolk’s story has stayed static and firmly in the past. The story of that other seaman, João Cândido, continues to be a dynamic touchstone in the history of race in Brazil. Just seventeen years after Wandenkolk commandeered a ship in revolt, Cândido did the same. Following their respective revolts, both seamen were arrested and imprisoned. Both were also subsequently amnestied. The similarities between them end there, however. Their lives, and more precisely the contrasts between them, are bookends, of sorts, to a larger history about amnesty and rights in the early years of the period known as the First Republic in Brazil.

“ADMIRAL” JOÃO CÂNDIDO, 1910

On Christmas Day 1910, João Cândido and one other survivor were removed from a small prison cell on the Ilha das Cobras (Island of Snakes) near Rio de Janeiro. Fourteen other men imprisoned with them in the same cell had perished the night before. In a nearby cell another two survived the night, but eleven more had died. The bodies of the deceased were secretly buried. The imprisoned men, twenty-nine in total and all sailors in the Brazilian navy, had been arrested on Christmas Eve for allegedly violating terms of a 1910 amnesty. By some accounts, Cândido spent that torturous night in the very same cell in which the eighteenth-century revolutionary figure Tirandentes had been held prior to his execution. The two cells had become toxic during the hot night, having been disinfected with quicklime shortly before their arrival. The prisoners inhaled poisonous particles, which killed all but four of them by asphyxiation.⁹

Cândido was actually a helmsman, not an admiral. He was sent to a naval apprentice school at a young age and then enlisted in the navy by the time he was sixteen years old. He learned to read and write and was trained in complicated navigational skills. At some point, he also learned to embroider. His skill and work in the craft became the topic of academic discussion in the late 1990s, itself a testament to the continued resonance of this story of Black sailors in revolt nearly a century earlier.¹⁰ Prior to the revolt he would lead, Cândido had been among sailors sent to England to receive specialized training and to be part of the crew that would bring home two new super dreadnaughts. The state-of-the-art ships promised to elevate Brazil’s navy to be among the most technologically sophisticated.

In November 1910, however, the navy began preparations to sink those very ships when more than two thousand men (nearly half of all enlisted sailors) joined a revolt aboard the two new dreadnaughts and other ships. The sailors—many of whom, like Cândido, were one generation removed from slavery—demanded “liberty” and the abolishment of lashing as punishment aboard ships. Unlike Wandenkolk, who called for the ousting of the sitting head of state, Cândido demanded simply that sailors no longer be whipped. The fleet kept cannons aimed at Rio de Janeiro for four days. Cândido came to be called “Admiral” in the press and elsewhere, sardonically by many, after an anxious Brazil witnessed his successful maneuvering of the impressive ship within the Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro during the revolt.¹¹

The navy prepared a counterattack at the same time that Congress, through an emissary, negotiated a resolution that promised both to abolish lashing and to grant an amnesty to the rebel sailors. Barbosa, the same jurist to whom Wandenkolk had directed his 1892 letter, led the charge in Congress in support of an amnesty. Any relief the sailors may have felt in the negotiated resolution, however, was fleeting. Mistrust reigned on both sides. Weeks later, a second revolt erupted. Cândido, among others, remained loyal to the institution. Nonetheless, hundreds were arrested, including Cândido, and scores were summarily dismissed from the navy. In addition to the twenty-five who died in the two cramped cells on Christmas Eve, more than two hundred others spent that same evening aboard a merchant marine ship on their way to a forced exile in the Amazon region. Many did not survive the voyage. Those who arrived faced uncertain fates in dire conditions laying telegraph wires or working for rubber barons. Just two decades after the abolition of slavery, those in positions of power and influence were terrified by the fact that Black sailors had been capable of commandeering ships and aiming cannons at the city of Rio of Janeiro. They further abhorred that the Brazilian government had granted amnesty to the rebel sailors as part of the negotiated disarmament. Cândido spent months in prison before ultimately being acquitted of the charges against him.¹² He spent much of the rest of his life in poverty.

THE ARC OF AMNESTY, 1890S–1910

The institution of amnesty and, in particular, the person of Rui Barbosa stitch together the histories of Wandenkolk and Cândido, although these follow decidedly divergent trajectories. Barbosa received Wandenkolk’s letter from Tabatinga. He also filed the habeas that was denied to Wandenkolk by the Federal Supreme Court in 1892. Years later and under different circumstances, Barbosa argued in Congress in favor of granting amnesty to Cândido and the rebel sailors aboard the new dreadnaughts. Once news broke of the fate of the mostly Black sailors banished to the Amazon, his was a leading voice condemning the government. Yet, a more ominous thread also runs between the trio of Wandenkolk, Barbosa, and Cândido. In 1890, Barbosa, together with Wandenkolk (then minister of the navy), drafted a new naval code permitting punishment of up to twenty-five lashes per day, and more if deemed necessary in the “prudent discretion of the commander.”¹³ Just before the revolt in 1910, a fellow seaman aboard the ship that Cândido would commandeer was subjected to a punishment of two hundred lashes.

During this brief twenty-year period from 1890 to 1910, which encapsulated the resistance mounted and the consequences endured first by Wandenkolk and then by Cândido, amnesty was planted and took root as an institution in Brazil. The particularities of each of their histories formed points on what would be an early arc of expansion and retraction in the reliance on and reliability of its guarantees. In the earliest months and year of the republic, when Wandenkolk and his counterparts challenged the authoritarian rule of Floriano, it would have been impossible to predict that amnesty, among other possible mechanisms, would emerge as a primary recourse to demand individual rights, however such rights were understood.

Yet it is precisely during this period that amnesty becomes this tool. Beginning in earnest with the 1895 amnesty granted under Floriano’s successor, Prudente de Morais, many relied on the measure to make demands for certain protections and guarantees. In litigation and subsequent debates, amnestied individuals argued that the duty of the state did not end with the mere decreeing of an amnesty but, rather, also extended to restoring those who were amnestied to the positions and prestige they had once held. The arc of amnesty as a key resource for such demands ended, however, in reaction to what many viewed as dangerous overreach in the extension of such rights to Black sailors. Another two decades would pass before amnesty returned as the mechanism sought and granted to solve political strife. Only after a revolutionary movement brought Getúlio Vargas to power in 1930 does amnesty again factor prominently in the history of national conciliation and political consolidation.

To be sure, the appeal of amnesty—and more important, its linkage to restitution—was not a foregone conclusion but nonetheless occurred during the early years of the republic. This emergence of amnesty as an institution to secure rights and corresponding duties is traced in the following chapters, where the position of Wandenkolk and his colleagues is contrasted with that of Cândido’s and his fellow sailors. The judicial and other maneuvers of one of Wandenkolk’s elite compatriots, Army Marshal José de Almeida Barreto, are examined in chapter 1. Like Wandenkolk, Almeida Barreto was a senator and a signer of the Manifesto of Thirteen Generals against Floriano in 1892. Also like Wandenkolk, he was fired from his position (he had been a minister on what was then the highest military court) and banished to the Amazon region. Within a year of his exile, however, Almeida Barreto filed a civil suit for restitution. His attorney, Rui Barbosa, appealed to constitutional guarantees and made eloquent arguments about the imperative to balance power in the new republic. In this case, Barbosa included amnesty as an afterthought in articulating the obligation of the state for restitution to its citizens.

In hindsight, these arguments in 1893 were nonetheless a dress rehearsal for a lawsuit Barbosa filed two years later, on behalf of a group of nearly four dozen military men who had been dismissed as deserters for having taken part in the rebellions against Floriano. Their story is told in chapter 2. These military men sued the state over the terms of the 1895 amnesty that provided for their eventual return to military service but only after an interim period of two years. Barbosa argued that the two-year suspension amounted to a penalty and was thus the very inversion of amnesty. His arguments were ultimately unsuccessful in the courts but persisted as a foundational narrative in the decades that would follow. Indeed, in large-scale mobilizations for amnesty that occurred during the latter-half of the twentieth century, allusions abound to the debates and demands that surrounded the 1895 amnesty. A common trope about amnesty in Brazil, in fact, credits those debates with delineating the mechanism of amnesty as intrinsically linked to restitution.

Finally, the history of Cândido and some of his fellow sailors is told in chapter 3. On a spectrum with the 1895 matter, the case of the mutinous Black sailors and their fate shows the force of the legacy of slavery and some of the limits of amnesty at that time to pacify and conciliate. The debates in Congress and in subsequent judicial proceedings about the Black sailors contrast starkly with those that had occurred over a decade earlier with regard to the four dozen military men who had filed a lawsuit over the 1895 amnesty. For those amnestied by the 1895 decree, adherence to notions of entitlements resonated, even if they did not wholly prevail. Less than a generation later, appeals to matters of basic dignity for the Black sailors had far less purchase. The saga of the sailors, however, remained a salient topic in history for generations to come.

Although amnesty fell out of fashion temporarily following its extension to the Black sailors, it nonetheless became firmly instituted in Brazilian politics during this period. As protagonists of this history, Wandenkolk and his colleagues, Cândido and his fellow seaman, and Barbosa, their shared advocate, all left their mark on the struggle to define rights and citizenship in Brazil. Their failures as much as their succe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction: The Calculus of Restitution in Brazil
• Part I—Amnesty as Recourse, 1890s–1910
• Part II—The Bureaucratization of Amnesty, 1930s–1940s
• Part III—Amnesty and Transitional Justice, 1979–2010
• Epilogue: The Política of Amnesty in Brazil
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index