The penal colony of Clevelândia, located in the current district of Clevelândia do Norte, Amapá, functioned from 1924 to 1926 in the extreme north of Brazil, bordering French Guiana. It was installed in the "Cleveland Colonial Nucleus", an agricultural colony founded in 1922, and received a total of 946 to 1,630 prisoners. 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 homeless, capoeiras, and minors caught on the streets). They came from Paraná, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Amazonas and Pará. In addition to these, the colony's population was made up of Brazilian Army guards, employees, traders and settlers, the last three totaling 204 inhabitants at the end of 1926. At the beginning of 1927, the Washington Luís administration allowed the prisoners to return.
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. In response to the tenentist military revolts, the government had imposed a state of emergency and overcrowded prisons. Miguel Calmon, then Minister of Agriculture, offered the location, as it was the most remote agricultural colony in the country. 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. The first ship with prisoners arrived at the mouth of the Oyapock River on 26 December 1924.
The sudden expansion of the colony's population overloaded the agricultural center's infrastructure. 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. The prison's workforce carried wooden logs to the sawmill, weeded the fields, built public facilities and worked in the pau-rosa mills. Military personnel who swore loyalty to the government performed technical and bureaucratic functions. 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. According to the official report Journey to the Cleveland Colonial Nucleus, out of 946 prisoners, 491 died and 262 escaped.
Press censorship suppressed the matter until the first months of 1927, when the prisoners returned and the penal colony became a front page topic, described as a "green hell" by the opposition and a "very common agricultural colony" by government supporters. Its history was permanently associated with president Artur Bernardes. It was remembered by anarchists and forgotten by historiography, for which it became the subject of its first major study only in 1991. Historians have characterized the penal colony as a forced labor camp or even as a concentration camp.
Creation
The agricultural colony
Prisoners' memoirs often confuse Clevelândia with its wider region, Oiapoque, then part of the state of Pará and currently in Amapá. Oiapoque is located on Brazil's border with French Guiana and was an area of territorial disputes with France until its definitive incorporation into Brazilian territory in 1900. The region was considered an empty space, and its occupation had been studied by Brazilian authorities since the 1890s. In 1919, the Brazilian Congress approved senator Justo Chermont's proposal to found national patronages and colonies along the Oyapock River. Chermont warned the government against smugglers who took advantage of the lack of policing, inspection and military defense in that area. Colonization would eliminate French influence from the region and ensure Brazilian sovereignty.
The colony was established on the right bank of the Oyapock River, 15 kilometers from the military post of Santo Antônio, a few kilometers upstream from the village of Martinica. Both were part of the municipality of Amapá in the district of Demonti, whose total population was more than 1,150 in the 1920 census. The village of Saint-Georges was on the opposite (French) side of the river. The first settlers, refugees from the drought in Northeastern Brazil, arrived in May 1921. According to Rocque Pennafort, the population was made up of two distinct groups, one that accompanied colonel Chico Pennafort and the other of families from Ceará brought from Belém by the government. 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. The healthiness of the region was attested to by a report signed in 1922 by the director of the Rural Prophylaxis Service of Pará. On 5 May 1922, the "Cleveland Agricultural Center" was inaugurated, named after Grover Cleveland, president of the United States who arbitrated the Palmas border dispute between Argentina and Brazil.
The chief engineer, administrator and founder of the village was Gentil Norberto. Clevelândia was mean to be the "model area for a civilizational project". The urban area of the nucleus was planned, an unprecedented feat for towns in the region. 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. But the initial enthusiasm was lost and settlers who were unsuccessful with agriculture migrated to Martinica, where they found work in the pau-rosa mills. On 31 December 1926, the population, excluding prisoners and guards, was 204: 127 settlers and 77 employees and traders.
Transformation into a penal colony
The federal government of president Artur Bernardes (1922–1926) transformed Clevelândia into the largest destination for its political prisoners, in a context of a lasting state of emergency, overcrowded jails, mass arrests and internal exile. 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. By article 80 of the General Provisions of the Brazilian Constitution of 1891, in force at the time, the president could, during a state of emergency, resort to exile to maintain law and order. In the case of Clevelândia, an additional justification was a constitutional provision that gave the federal government control over the border strip necessary for national defense.
According to Bernardes, the idea of deporting prisoners to Clevelândia was not his, but that of his Minister of Agriculture, Miguel Calmon, or Gentil Norberto. According to former minister Calmon, "the government only deported to Clevelândia as a last resort and forced by habeas corpus requests to the Supreme Federal Court, which did not allow the prisoners to be kept here" [on prison ships and islands in Guanabara Bay], and "those deported to Clevelândia were prisoners who had the worst records and no special title to recommend them".
Miguel Calmon offered Bernardes lands under his Ministry of Agriculture's administration with room to receive prisoners: Ilha das Flores, the colonial centers of Paraná and Santa Catarina and the agricultural centers of Paraíba, Piauí, Pará (i.e. Clevelândia) and Amazonas. According to him, Ilha das Flores and Clevelândia would be the only viable ones, as the others were in territories at risk of revolts or the governors of their respective states did not want to host political prisoners.
Clevelândia was the most remote agricultural colony in the entire country, guaranteeing the isolation of prisoners and the impossibility of legal defense before courts. The prisoners would be punished for their crimes while also contributing to the occupation of the border region. 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). This type of punishment in inhospitable regions can be compared to Devil's Island in French Guiana, the Italian domicilio coatto (confinement on islands in the Mediterranean), the Argentine prison in Ushuaia and the Russian gulag. Clevelândia was so isolated there was no direct telegraphic connection to Belém; until the construction of a radiotelegraph station in September 1926, communication passed through French Guiana to Paris and from there to Recife and Belém.
Points of view
The events in Clevelândia did not reach the press as a whole, which was under censorship during the state of emergency declared by the Bernardes government. Public opinion only had a superficial understanding of the events. Opposition deputies in the Chamber denounced many abuses that occurred during the state of emergency, but did not mention Clevelândia. The newcomers did not know what awaited them. The news only started to come out in September 1925, when a letter from Domingos Braz was published in the Lisbon anarcho-syndicalist newspaper A Batalha. In December 1925, another letter was published by the newspapers La Antorcha, from Buenos Aires, and O Syndicalista, from the Workers' Federation of Rio Grande do Sul. The government denied the accusations.
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. Government and opposition newspapers debated what the real conditions of the place were at the beginning of 1927, when the prisoners had already been amnestied. The opposition can be exemplified by the newspapers O Combate and A Nação, which represented the interests of the Democratic Party of São Paulo, tenentists and the Workers and Peasants Bloc, as well as A Plebe, representing the anarchists. The defenders of former president Bernardes and his government can be found in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Paiz. Justo Chermont's newspaper reported on the beauty and good climate of Clevelândia, and Gentil Norberto would publicly defend the place.
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. The play was well received by the public in São Paulo. In Mr. Slang e o Brasil (1927), writer Monteiro Lobato interpreted Clevelândia as the possible destination of the country's thinking minds. Lobato wrote of doctor Belisário Penna: "He has done so much good for his land and will do so much more that - write what I'm going to say: he will end up in Clevelândia".
The opposition denounced the "horrors" and the "Clevelandian hecatomb", "the extermination of prisoners" and "the crimes of the Bernardes government". The contemporary press and historiography associate Clevelândia with exile and demographic emptiness. 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. The colony entered anarchist memory as a symbol of oppression, the "Brazilian Bastille".