Brazilian nationalist businessman born on the Boa Vista farm, municipality of Ipu, Ceará, pioneer in the introduction of social benefits for the workers, known as the king of the sertão in Northeast Brazil, for his wealth, philanthropy and courage to challenge the economic power of the British in the Northeast. Of humble origins, he was the illegitimate son of a farmer and cattle dealer, Delmiro Porfírio de Farias, who had died in the Paraguayan War, and of Leonilda Flora da Cruz Gouveia. From a poor family, he had to work early to support himself and help his mother, and at the age of 19, he moved with her to the city of Goiana, in Pernambuco, and then to Recife. He was a ticket agent at the Olinda station of the urban train called maxambomba, also working at the Apipucos station, in Recife, and also worked as a barge dispatcher. Interested in the purchase and sale of leather and goat and sheep skins, he went to the interior of Pernambuco, where he married (1883) Anunciada Cândida de Melo Falcão, in the city of Pesqueira.
He initially worked as an intermediary between producers of goat, sheep and ox hides spread throughout the northeastern hinterland and foreign traders based in Recife. He later worked for Keen Sutterly & Co., Philadelphia, and became branch manager (1892). The following year, when the head office went bankrupt, he bought his offices in Recife and founded Casa Delmiro Gouveia & Cia (1896). Connected to firm L. H. Rossbch, the Brothers of New York and, with their financial support and buying outlets spread across the Northeast, grew rich and became known as the Fur King. He moved on to other projects and urbanized the Derby neighborhood in Recife, where there were only mangroves, opening streets, building houses and a large model market with no similar in Brazil, the Coelho Cintra Market (1899), burned down (1900), renovated (1924) and today headquarters of the Pernambuco Military Police headquarters, and built a sugar refinery that became the largest in the Americas of the South.
Authoritarian and hard-tempered, as he grew rich he created more enemies, especially among the Pernambuco politicians, which led him to separate from his wife (1901) and to take refuge for a year in the Europe. Back in Brazil, the following year he ran away with a teenager, Carmela Eulina do Amaral Gusmão, settling in Vila da Pedra, a location about 280 km from Maceió, today Delmiro Gouveia, near the São Francisco river, in the hinterland of Alagoas (1904), and returned to trade of furs. It was a village made up of half a dozen shacks around a terminus of the railway that linked Piranhas to Petrolândia, through which one train circulated a week. With financial support from the Rossbach brothers, he joined two Italian partners, Lionelo Iona and Guido Ferrário, founding the firm Iona e Cia., headquartered in Maceió. To Pedra, skins and hides were taken from the states of Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Bahia and Sergipe, where they were treated and baled. They followed by train to Piranhas, descended the São Francisco to Penedo and by sea went to Maceió, from where they were exported to the United States.
In a short time he recovered financially and traveled several times to Europe and the United States, where he experienced the new industrial revolution brought about by the use of electricity. When he got to know the Paulo Afonso waterfall, he had the idea of carrying out a large project there and brought a group of engineers and investors (1909-1910), for the design and construction of a large hydroelectric plant, which would generate enough energy to light and supply the Recife is a large agro-industrial enterprise on the land around the waterfall, in areas of Bahia, Alagoas and Pernambuco to be acquired for the company. But the governor of Pernambuco, Dantas Barreto, suspected the enormity of the project and he was forced to reduce the dimensions of the project. With the support of the Rossbach brothers, he organized the Cia. Agro-Fabril Mercantil and with German and Swiss turbines and generators, installed in one of the falls of the waterfall of Paulo Afonso, the one in Angiquinho, on the Alagoas side of the river, a hydroelectric plant that generated 1,500 HP, with a voltage of 3 KV. Personally, he chose, in England, machines from the Dobson & Barlow industry, for a factory, Cia Agro-Fabril, which started (1914) the production of sewing threads, for lace and embroidery, threads and cords of raw cotton in skeins, waxed threads and gummed ribbons for packages. This industry had revolutionary characteristics, in the social field, with a workers' village, medical assistance, school and cinema.
This undertaking, however, started to harm the British monopoly in the sector, because with the beginning of the First World War, their products became scarce in the market and the production of Pedra, the Estrela brand, soon became known for its quality and resistance and gained acceptance immediate. Producing more than 20 thousand spools per day, Estrela lines won Brazil and entered the markets of Argentina, Chile, Peru and other Andean countries. English Machine Cotton, producer of Current Lines, reacted by registering (1916) in Chile and Argentina the Estrela brand, forcing the Brazilian product to be repackaged with its labels changed, and then tried to buy the industrial park of Stone. Pressured and irreducible, he resisted the proposals to buy the factory and ended up being mysteriously murdered in Vila de Pedra (1917), municipality that today bears his name, at the age of 54, on the terrace of his house, a crime that has never been enlightened.
After his death, Machine Cotton engaged in criminal dumping by selling its lines at half the production price, under the passive eyes of the Brazilian government, for a sufficient time to be liquidated the factories installed in the parents. Under the complacency of the Washington Luis government, the Stone factory complex was eventually sold (1929) in Paislay, Scotland, at Machine Cotton headquarters, for 27,000 pounds, followed by their destruction with sledgehammers by a team of specially hired breakers (1930) and the wreckage of machinery English women installed there, transported in carts pulled by yoke of oxen and thrown over a cliff below the San Francisco, about 20 km away from Stone. THIS YES! IT'S A SHAME IN BRAZIL'S HISTORY! PORTRAIT OF THE ETERNAL SUBSERVICE THAT WE WILL BE SUBMITTED! (See more in Delmiro Gouveia - A Factory in the Sertão: http://eiderdoo.sites.uol.com.br/delmiro.htm).
Figure copied from the JOAQUIM NABUCO FOUNDATION page:
http://www.fundaj.gov.br/docs/delmiro/deljovem.jpg
Source: Biographies - Academic Unit of Civil Engineering / UFCG
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