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Satire by the magazine Cabrião, 23 December 1866. The caption reads: "Police officer: My dear, we are in need of people. If the singles flee to the woods, there's no remedy other than come to the married's bed. The orders we have are tight!

The so-called "blood tribute" (Portuguese: tributo de sangue) was how forced recruitment into the Brazilian Armed Forces was known until the implementation of mandatory military service based on the Sortition Law in 1916. An older law had already established the military sortition in 1874, but the popular resistance from the list-breakers prevented its implementation, and forced recruitment continued to exist in practice. In this model, the incorporated effectives were small. Soldiers were professionals, sometimes serving for up to 20 years, and were not sent into reserve at the end of their service. Not all soldiers and sailors were forced into service, as there were volunteers. The government had a low degree of bureaucratization and outreach over the population, leaving the administration of recruitment to the influence of local elites. The Imperial Brazilian Army had little control over the process. The impressment of recruits was carried out by police and military detachments.

With origins in Europe, Brazilian forced recruitment had existed since the colonial period. The recruitment was violent, called "human hunting", and the service was in harsh conditions, being considered a punishment. The free poor did their best to escape recruiters, and the flight of workers could damage the economy. The central power, wishing to fill the ranks without harming the economy, lived in a precarious balance with the administrative agents, who needed to fulfill the task without interfering in the patronage networks, and the free population. Recruitment ran up against a large number of exemptions defined by law, such as the national guards, and a network of patronage protection, not reaching workers protected by local elites. For patrons, choosing who would be protected was a powerful instrument of control. Recruitment fell to those who could not find protection, considered the unproductive portion of the population. Popular morality had an ideal of what fair recruitment was, with deserving and undeserving of the impressment.

Forced recruitment was not enough to fill even the small line troops in peacetime. In 1874, the Minister of War estimated that it was necessary to arrest 20,000 individuals to obtain 2,000 recruits. The great demand for troops in the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) overloaded the system and created tension in its social relations. The inefficiency of mobilization was one of the reasons why the war took so long. Both the military officers and reformist parliamentarians wanted to reform recruitment throughout the 19th century, seeking to civilize the "human hunt" and modernize the Armed Forces. The inspiration was European armies, whether built by compulsory military service or by volunteering. The 1874 reform attempt failed because it threatened the way society lived together with conscription, and even the first military lottery in 1916 came eight years after the new law was passed in 1908.

Service model

Conscription
1780 caricature of a press gang
1780 caricature of a press gang
Related concepts
By historical country
By modern country
By geographical area

There was continuity in the recruitment of soldiers between the beginning of the Republic,[1] the Empire of Brazil, the colony and Portugal, although the Portuguese model in the 17th and 18th centuries, typical of the European Old Regime, found different conditions in Portuguese America. The distinction between regular or first-line troops and the milícias and ordenanças was also a Portuguese heritage.[2][3] These were replaced in the Empire of Brazil by the National Guard, whose recruitment (called "enlistment") was complementary and antagonistic, absorbing personnel of a higher social level. National guards were exempt from recruitment into the Army and Navy, and the institution was therefore one of the forms of evasion.[4][5] National guards were considered citizens and qualified, and their service a duty to the country, very different from first-line troops.[6]

Soldiers entered military service voluntarily or by force.[7] In 19th century Brazil, "recruitment" was synonymous with forced recruitment. The authorities were referring to the "seizure" and "arrest" of recruits. There was no neutral term to refer to all recruits (volunteers or obligated). The term "recruited" was sometimes used specifically for the obligated.[8] In the legislation on the subject, the term "forced conscription" appears in the decree of 1835, but not in the ministerial instruction of 1822, which established escorts for conscripts, but without chains, handcuffs or shackles.[9] Even so, there were reports of recruitment literally "with a snare", with conscripts being tied up.[10] The free population saw military service as degrading, and since the 17th century the authorities had noted the repugnance with which it was perceived.[11] The violence and arbitrariness of the recruitment, added to the harsh discipline and low remuneration in the service, gave it the connotation of punishment,[12][13][14] being associated with captivity in the popular imagination.[15] The process was called "human hunting"[16] or "blood tribute".[17]

Few joined voluntarily.[18][19] Volunteers were mainly unemployed or escaped from the authorities, but also some children of soldiers, problem children enlisted by their parents and poor boys in search of social mobility;[7] even among small landowners, many lived in worse conditions than that of the soldiers. Volunteering was a possible escape from "hunger, unemployment, homelessness and, at times, slavery".[20] During the Brazilian War of Independence there was genuine military enthusiasm among the population, but it was the exception to the rule.[21] The 1835 decree granted volunteers a bonus pay, differential treatment, shorter service time and the possibility to serve closer to their family, but the incentives were not enough for the volunteers to leave the minority.[22] In the Navy there was another means of entry, the Schools for Apprentice-Sailors.[23]

Soldiers were professionals, serving until expulsion or end of career. They were not sent into reserve.[24] Length of service varied: in 1808 it was 16 years for conscripts and 8 years for volunteers, dropping to 6 years for both in 1875 and 3 in 1891.[25] The best ones renewed their service for up to 20 years, at which point retirement was guaranteed.[26] In the Empire, with the difficulty of replacing the staff, it was common for the State to illegally prolong the period of service.[27] Non commisioned officers (corporals, sergeants, and warrant officers) came from the ranks of soldiers.[24] During long periods of service, the older soldiers became attached to the chiefs, installed their families near the barracks, and were accompanied by their women on campaign.[26]

Execution of recruitment

The Portuguese Crown and later the Imperial State had a low degree of bureaucratization.[28] The police forces had few means to act, there was a lack of qualified manpower in the administration and it was very difficult to maintain a civil registry and carry out a population census. There was resistance to the census, as in the Ronco da Abelha revolt, and one of the reasons was precisely the fear of recruitment. There was not a sufficient enforcement and monitoring apparatus to directly tax and recruit the population.[29] The solution was to delegate powers to local potentates.[28] The administration and supply of recruits were the responsibility of militia and National Guard officers, police delegates and sub-delegates, local parish priests and justices of the peace, linked to local potentates, involving private interests.[12][30] The Army had a limited role in the process, although it contributed with detachments.[8]

The state was strengthened, but so were the local authorities.[31] Control over who would and would not be recruited was a powerful instrument.[32] Recruitment was considered pernicious for elections,[33] as it was common to recruit political opponents, to the point that an 1846 law prohibited it between 60 days before and 30 days after elections, but its application was limited.[34][35][36] The political elite was part of the class that benefited from patronage, protecting its clients from recruitment.[37]

The activity of recruiting agents was not regular, but episodic and unpredictable. It caused social disorganization and yet it did not meet the needs of the Army.[38] Large escapes occurred when agents arrived,[39] and the population covered the fugitives. The free poor population continually migrated through the immensity of the country, and one of the reasons was the fear of recruitment.[40] The abandonment of towns and cities and the flight of young men harmed the economy:[11] "at their approach the newsboys disappeared and the crops were lost".[41] The Armed Forces competed with landowners, who did not want to lose laborers on their crops.[42] To succeed, recruiters needed secrecy and simultaneity and used numerous ruses, increasing the hostility of the population.[43] Recruitment was a "cat-and-mouse game".[11]

Role in society

Satire by the magazine Cabrião, 23 December 1866. The caption reads: "Block inspector: - If you don't want to go to S. Paulo to join the army, you shall marry my aunt. Recruit: Only if ye give me a month to think.

The main obstacles to recruitment were local privileges, exemptions and safety nets. Not only were the rich immune, but their servants and dependents as well.[41] The exemptions de-universalized the service. Its goal was to protect the helpless (widows, orphans, married people, only children) and not harm the economy.[44] Single men aged 18 to 35 were recruitable. The wealthy could buy exemptions or provide substitutes, and there were numerous exemptions for the economically active population, such as one child from each farmer and a few employees from each shop. The clause "once they carry out their jobs effectively and behave well" gave recruiters room for discretion. Exempt individuals were captured, but provincial presidents, representatives of the Crown, released many of the recruits, reinforcing their legitimacy.[45] Petitions were addressed to provincial presidents, police chiefs and, after 1871, to the courts.[46] Many of the petitions were made by women.[47][48] Recruits and recruiters fought "office wars" to prove or disprove that they fit an exemption.[49] Hasty marriages, forgery, self-mutilation[50] and migrations were also forms of evasion.[40]

The free poor took refuge in local bosses, who could obstruct recruitment or intercede for exemption. Disputes between local lords, each defending their clients, could hamper recruitment, and sometimes there was violent resistance. If recruiters used excessive violence, workers would disappear into the countryside. There was a fragile balance between the central power, wishing to fill the ranks without harming the economy, the administrative agents, who needed to comply with the law without interfering with patronage networks, and the population, which sought protection in these networks. Recruitment was limited, with many releases, and fell on those who could not find protection, such as travellers, itinerant workers and farmers selling their crops far from their lands, but especially on men considered idle and vagrants,[41][45] a portion of the population considered unproductive.[51]

Those recruited were "vagrants, ex-slaves, orphans, criminals, migrants, unskilled workers and the unemployed", contributing to the degrading connotation of military service.[52] The barracks were "the male equivalent of brothels", and the soldiers, seen as "degenerates, criminals, sick, misfits and social irretrievables".[53] Police used recruitment to get rid of troublemakers not convicted by the courts.[54] For the Navy and other institutions, military service with harsh discipline would serve as moral correction for recruits.[55] Mass recruitments were used as punishment after the revolts of the regency period, with recruits being transferred to distant and remote provinces, but under normal conditions the numbers were reduced. The role of military service in maintaining order was paltry, given the very small number of conscripts.[56][57]

Distributive justice was the problem in the choice of recruits, governed not only by the law but also by a "moral economy of unwritten rules" and conceptions of who should receive the burdens.[28] The "honorable poor", small farmers who fulfilled their family and National Guard obligations, saw recruitment and patronage as a natural way of differentiating themselves from socially undesirable individuals.[58] It fulfilled a moral function, distinguishing between the "married and badly married, good and bad children, industrious and idle craftsmen."[38] As arbitrary and confusing as it was, there was a precarious way of living with the blood tribute.[59]

Mobilization capacity

The Empire of Brazil kept the army small, oscillating in peacetime between 15,000 and 20,000 men after 1830.[60] A quarter of these needed to be replaced annually due to illness, death, end of service and defection. Even with the small force, recruitment was not enough to fill the ranks. Soldiers were "difficult to find and make, and easily volatilized." It was not possible to incorporate large numbers.[61] In 1874 the Minister of War calculated that 20,000 people would be needed to make 2,000 recruits. The rest were lost to exemptions, physical defects and escapes.[38]

From 1860 to 1875, the provinces of Alagoas, Amazonas, Espírito Santo, Maranhão, Pará, Pernambuco and Sergipe, in addition to the Court, contributed a number of recruits proportionally greater than their population. The provinces of Bahia, Minas Gerais, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, Santa Catarina and São Paulo had a lower per capita contribution. The representation of the other provinces fluctuated. Minas Gerais, a large and populous province, stood out for its insignificant participation. Line troops had little presence to meet recruit quotas. The provinces of the Imperial North (present-day North and Northeast) as a whole contributed 53% of those recruited during the Paraguayan War.[62]

The Paraguayan War was protracted in part because of the difficulty to mobilize troops.[63] The recruitment system did not withstand the pressure. Even with the appeal to the Fatherland Volunteers, the initial popular enthusiasm waned. It required large-scale forced recruitment, arresting men traditionally free from military service.[63][64] The Army had to interfere with the National Guard, a traditional refuge for recruitment.[65] There was resistance from local elites and free poor.[64]

Reform attempts

Officials had been advocating recruitment reform since the 1840s,[66] desiring better quality labor.[67] In the Legislature, it had been discussed since 1827 and the current model was condemned in rhetoric, but successive projects failed to eliminate it, showing how much it was still convenient for power.[68] In Europe, a reference for the Brazilian elite, the model after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) was that of industrialization, states with greater control over the population and large conscript armies, which, after 1 to 3 years of service, went into a growing reserve, to be mobilized during wartime through rail networks.[69] Forced recruitment was far from the elites' ideal of civilization.[16] After the exhaustion of the model evidenced by the Paraguayan War,[70] in 1874 a law was finally approved for service through sortition, inspired by the French model. The Prussian models of conscription of entire classes and the British models of a purely voluntary force were not accepted.[71][72]

The law was met with opposition from almost all social classes.[73] The military mandate required by the state would become more comprehensive, obliging the aggregates of local chiefs to serve.[74] Although seen by its directors as an institutional advance, it was a threat to the way of living established around recruitment and popular morality. In August 1875, on the day scheduled for the start of the enlistment, crowds of "slash-lists" in ten provinces impeded the work. Resistance continued until it made the law a "dead letter", preserving the status quo. The current system was strengthened. The police could no longer hand over prisoners directly to the army, but instead had them volunteer.[75][76]

The Brazilian Constitution of 1891 abolished forced recruitment on paper,[77] and at the beginning of the Republic all soldiers were, on paper, volunteers. Forced recruitment continued to occur, however.[1] In 1908 another sortition law was passed, but it was not implemented until 1916, replacing forced conscription.[78] With the modernization of Argentina, seen as a possible enemy, in the late 19th century, and the demonstration of total war in World War I, the Brazilian model, without reserves and general mobilization, was obsolete.[79]

References

Citations

  1. ^ a b Ferreira 2014, p. 60.
  2. ^ Mendes 2004, p. 113-116.
  3. ^ Possamai 2004, p. 154.
  4. ^ Saldanha 2015.
  5. ^ Goldoni 2009.
  6. ^ Guarese 2017, p. 37.
  7. ^ a b Peregrino 1955, p. 270.
  8. ^ a b Kraay 1999, p. 114.
  9. ^ Gonzales 2008, p. 101-102.
  10. ^ Cândido 2008, p. 27.
  11. ^ a b c Mendes 2004, p. 125.
  12. ^ a b Santos 2020, p. 447-448.
  13. ^ Saldanha 2015, p. 677.
  14. ^ Gonzales 2008, p. 102.
  15. ^ Guarese 2017, p. 81.
  16. ^ a b Kraay 1999, p. 134.
  17. ^ Mendes 2004, p. 111.
  18. ^ Bandeira 2007, p. 4.
  19. ^ Possamai 2004, p. 158.
  20. ^ Guarese 2017, p. 23.
  21. ^ Rodrigues 2006, p. 58.
  22. ^ Guarese 2017, p. 53-54.
  23. ^ Almeida 2010.
  24. ^ a b Carvalho 2006, p. 76-78.
  25. ^ Guarese 2017, p. 54-55.
  26. ^ a b Peregrino 1955, p. 271.
  27. ^ Rocha 2016, p. 37-38.
  28. ^ a b c Mendes 2004, p. 112.
  29. ^ Mendes 1998, p. 6-9.
  30. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 123.
  31. ^ Ribeiro 2011, p. 254.
  32. ^ Mendes 2004, p. 114.
  33. ^ Mendes 1999, p. 267-268.
  34. ^ Rocha 2016, p. 35-36.
  35. ^ Guarese 2017, p. 22.
  36. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 118.
  37. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 143.
  38. ^ a b c Mendes 1998, p. 12.
  39. ^ Cândido 2008, p. 28.
  40. ^ a b Mendes 1998, p. 13-14.
  41. ^ a b c Mendes 2004, p. 115.
  42. ^ Cândido 2020, p. 28.
  43. ^ Mendes 1998, p. 10-11.
  44. ^ Mendes 2004, p. 122.
  45. ^ a b Kraay 1999, p. 116-130.
  46. ^ Rocha 2016, p. 41.
  47. ^ Rocha 2016, p. 46.
  48. ^ Cândido 2008, p. 42.
  49. ^ Mendes 1998, p. 14.
  50. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 129.
  51. ^ Mendes 1998, p. 11.
  52. ^ Gonzales 2006, p. 103.
  53. ^ Guarese 2017, p. 22-23.
  54. ^ Rocha 2016, p. 35.
  55. ^ Bandeira 2007, p. 3.
  56. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 119-120.
  57. ^ Ribeiro 2011.
  58. ^ Rocha 2016, p. 36.
  59. ^ Mendes 1999, p. 272.
  60. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 117.
  61. ^ Mendes 2004, p. 123-124.
  62. ^ Guarese 2017, p. 37-39.
  63. ^ a b Guarese 2017, p. 24-25.
  64. ^ a b Kraay 1999, p. 130-133.
  65. ^ Rocha 2016, p. 39.
  66. ^ Santos 2020, p. 448.
  67. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 127.
  68. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 115 e 135-136.
  69. ^ Ferreira 2014, p. 52-57.
  70. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 130.
  71. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 135.
  72. ^ Santos 2020, p. 449-450.
  73. ^ Souza 2014, p. 246.
  74. ^ Guarese 2017, p. 86.
  75. ^ Mendes 1999.
  76. ^ Kraay 1999, p. 130 e 140-143.
  77. ^ Encarnação Filho 2007, p. 34.
  78. ^ Gonzales 2008, p. 107.
  79. ^ Carvalho 2006, p. 77-78.

Bibliography

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