Política dos Governadores

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Política dos Governadores

Política dos Governadores, practice employed during Brazil's Old Republic (1889–1930) that enabled the president and certain powerful governors to make important decisions without any "outside" interference. In a broader sense, it was the policy whereby all government incumbents sought to maintain each other in power indefinitely.

In early 1900 President Manuel Campos Sales instituted the política as a means of ensuring that the president would always have a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. To achieve this end, he pushed two procedural changes through the chamber. One effectively gave the president control of the chamber's credentials committee. The second required that a majority of county councils in each congressional district certify the winner's vote. Since the establishment party at the state level supported local politicians and vice versa, this was another safeguard against the entry of noncompliant deputies into congress.

Campos Sales introduced the política to guarantee congressional support for fiscal and monetary policies required for the Rothschild funding loan (1898), which consolidated Brazil's external debt. These included such unpopular measures as raising taxes, decreasing both the currency in circulation and government expenditures, and placing a lien for Rothschild on customs collections. Thus the política was an adaptation of formal democratic structures to political conditions in a neocolonial economy.

The practice of mutual support by incumbents continued throughout the Old Republic and was associated with the domination of politics by the president and the governors of Minas Gerais and São Paulo. The inability of opposition groups to obtain office except by revolution, coupled with the exclusion of urban middle and working classes from power through rural bossism (Coronelismo), contributed to the demise of the 1891 Constitution in 1930.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuel Ferraz De Campos Salles, Da propaganda à presidência (1908), pp. 236-250.

Francisco De Assis Barbosa, "A Presidência Campos Sales," in Luso-Brazilian Review, 5, no. 1 (1968): 3-26.

Joseph L. Love, Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882–1930 (1971), pp. 95-96, 109-124.

Boris Fausto, "Brazil: Social and Political Structure, 1889–1930," in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 5, edited by Leslie Bethell (1986), pp. 779-829.