One of the biggest problems that the regionNorth EastofBrazil had to face since the most remote times was thedry. The long periods of drought that ravaged the northeastern region of Brazil caused the ruin of various agricultural crops and animal husbandry, as well as claiming the lives of thousands of people. Some historians, such as Marco Antonio Villa, point out that the records of damage caused by water scarcity in the Northeast date back to the first decades of the colonization, specifically the year 1552.
At the time of the SecondEmpire, in 1877, registered one of the greatest devastations caused by drought in the northeastern hinterland. With the advent of Republic and the beginning of the political model of oligarchsregional, some projects to reduce the impact of the drought on the backland population were put forward. In 1909 it was created the Federal Inspectorate of Works against Droughts (IFOS), whose mission was to build dams and weirs for water storage. However, the actions of the IFOS were not enough to retain the impact of one of the longest drought periods ever seen in the Northeast, that is, that of the year
1915. In both the 1877 and 1915 droughts, one of the most affected states was Ceará. On both occasions, thousands of backlanders migrated to the surroundings of urban centers, such as the capital, Fortaleza. This fact also occurred in the 1932 drought.The mass of migrants from Ceará was configured as a diaspora, dispersing over several regions of the country. The Amazon region, for example, due to economic development around rubber trees, accommodated thousands of people from the Northeast. However, a large part of this mass became legions of “flagellates”, as they were called. One of the solutions that the government of Ceará found for the situation of those affected was the constructioninfieldsinconcentration. As the journalist Mauri König points out:
“Ceará had 800 thousand inhabitants, of which 120 thousand emigrated to the Amazon and 68 thousand went to other states. Another great drought hit the region in 1915. To prevent another invasion of Fortaleza, the state and federal governments created concentration camps on the outskirts of large cities to collect the flagellates. [1]
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The first of these fields was that of marshy, near Fortaleza, which was even the setting for the novel “O Quinze” (published in 1930) byRachel de Queiroz. This field came to hold about 8 thousand people, who called him “government corral”. The construction of the fields followed an orientation hygienist and, in many cases, eugenicist*, as was typical in several regions at the time. The country's own capital, Rio de Janeiro, underwent a process of urban reform that produced thousands of homeless people by removing tenements and shacks from the center of the city.
In the Alagadiço field, it is reported that around 150 people died daily. In the droughts that came in later years, more fields were built near Fortaleza, but also in other cities in Ceará. Added to this was the problem of the neglect of the regional political oligarchies of the Northeast in relation to the situation of the population affected by the drought. A phenomenon known as "industrygivesdry” exemplifies this: for many decades, the federal budget allocated to the construction of wells and public dams for the cooling of the effects of the drought was used in the construction of wells and private dams in large estates of families from oligarchs.
The effects of the drought in the Northeast and the political negligence produced several reactions on the part of the population. Some examples are the messianism of Antônio Conselheiro, in Bahia, and the consequent Straw War derived from it, as well as the yokeand the appearance of figures like the Lamp.
NOTE:
[1]: KÖNIG, Mauri. Diaspora from drought redraws Brazil.
* Eugenics (From the Greek: Me = "good, beautiful", more genius: “birth”/ “genesis”): type of ideology that believed in a biological improvement of the human species, having as parameter the supposedly superior “races”, such as the “white” or Aryan race.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
FERNANDES, Claudio. "Drought in the Northeast"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiab/secas-nordeste.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
