Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a Nineteenth-Century City 9780804765534

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Poliuing Rio de Janeiro

A POLICEMAl'l \r ·ntermane!1te)

POLIUING

Rio de Janeiro Repression and Resistance

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 1 993

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1993 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University

CIP data appear at the end of the book

F RoN TIs

PIEcE : Lithograph from a collection by the Ludwig and Briggs studio in Rio de janeiro, 1846-49· From Briggs, The Brasilian Souvenir.

Published with the assistance of the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University

To the people of Rio de Janeiro, who have resisted.

Preface

T

his book began, as many others have, by accident. While spending 1g8o-81 as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, I began to explore local archives in Florian6polis. Having completed a major project on the social history of European immigration to Sao Paulo, and knowing that Santa Catarina had also been a center of immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I intended to research the comparative aspects of the immigration experience in those two regions of Brazil. In the state archive of Santa Catarina, I found that one of the largest documentary collections was that produced by the local police system. Beginning in the 184o's and running to the end of the empire in 188g, the chief of police of the province submitted frequent reports to the provincial governor, including information on personnel matters, the daily activity of police patrols, the results of investigations and judicial proceedings, and the jail population. This diverse and detailed record formed a fascinating image of certain aspects of life in the city and surrounding region, including several small communities that shared the island of Santa Catarina with the capital city of Florian6polis (known until 1893 as Desterro), and on the adjacent mainland. I have long been interested in the possibility of recovering as much as possible about those people often left out of official history or relegated to marginal stereotypes. Rather than providing a win-

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Preface

dow on the lives of people in the lower levels of Santa Catarina society, however, the police view was more like that seen through a lens or a prism. By selectively focusing on specific types of behavior in circumscribed locations by certain categories of people, police records revealed bits and pieces of everyday life refracted by their physical presence and institutional mandate and their informal relationship to the rest of society. The police system, in turn, was shaped by the legal and political system, the class structure, and the ideological and cultural context in which it was created and put to work. As is the case with many other types of historical documents, what the records revealed about the society that produced them was far beyond their ostensible purpose. I became immersed in the world of the police on the streets of Florian6polis in ways that local historians best appreciate, but then faced a problem. Florian6polis had the institutional apparatus due its status as a provincial capital, but as an isolated, marginal, and stagnant town of some twelve thousand inhabitants in the nineteenth century it could not be taken as typical of major urban centers. Furthermore, its institutions were established by the national government in Rio de Janeiro, and hardly ever with the specific concerns of Florian6polis in mind. To study the police system, the people the police affected, and their relationship, it was clear that I would need to broaden the inquiry. I thought I would compare Florian6polis (a provincial backwater) with Rio de Janeiro (the national capital) and Sao Paulo (an expanding commercial and administrative center). Background reading and exploratory research in the archives of the latter two led me to the conclusion that Rio was a case study in itself because of its relevance as a focus for political and social issues, as something of a laboratory for institutional and procedural experimentation, and as a major population center. In Florian6polis the police chief reported the activities of street patrols to the governor. In the national capital his counterpart reported them directly to the minister of justice of the empire, and they were eventually transferred to the National Archive in Rio de Janeiro, established in 1838 as a dependency of the ministry of justice. Those records, complemented by material from other Rio archives and library collections and placed in a comparative, conceptual, and interpretive context, became the basis for this book. I have generally resisted the temptation to link repression and

Preface • ix resistance in the nineteenth century explicitly to more recent events, particularly the military regime of 1964-85 and the continuing phenomena of urban riots, gang activity, street crime, and police violence in Rio de Janeiro. Such matters were never far from my consciousness as I researched and wrote this book, but to do justice to them would require another study, filling the gap from 1889 to more recent times. For those interested in the contemporary scene, however, this book might serve as something of a benchmark and starting point, relevant in two ways. First, the political role of both the military and civilian police in the 1964-85 regime has much deeper historical roots. And second, regarding social war and the institutional response, as well as rivalries among branches of the police system, and the general relationship between police and urban society, the continuities from more than a century ago are striking. I thank Cornell University and the Brazilian Fulbright Commission for enabling me to dedicate an extended period to archival research during mid-1986 and the 1987-88 academic year; Carlos Hasenbalg of the Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiaticos, Conjunto Universitario Candido Mendes, for providing a point of contact for research in Rio de Janeiro; Peter Fry for facilitating that connection and for sporadic advice and assistance beginning twenty years ago; Jose Murilo de Carvalho, Marcos Bretas, and Eduardo Silva of the Funda