“A Healthy Terror”: Police Repression of Capoeiras in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro Open Access

On the night of December 28, 1836, Rio de Janeiro police arrested Graciano, a Mina slave, born in West Africa. He had run afoul of the law before, for disrespect to authority, possession of illegal weapons, and engaging in capoeira. Beyond the gymnastic fighting technique still associated with the term in Brazil today, in the nineteenth century it was used to denote groups or gangs that police authorities in Rio de Janeiro considered a scourge of the city, an activity notorious among young male slaves and the free lower classes. Graciano also had a reputation as a sneak thief, and was in the habit of carrying a blade, with which he had once tried to attack the cashier in his owner’s business. Furthermore, he had brazenly declared at various times that he was bent on taking away the willfulness of the whites.¹

Police brought Graciano before Luís da Costa Franco e Almeida, the justice of the peace in charge of police activity in Sacramento parish, who remanded the slave to the custody of his owner, Jacomo Rombo, resident on Conde Street (now Visconde do Rio Branco) in downtown Rio. Rombo had owned Graciano only six months, but the Mina slave had already tried to escape three times. Rombo decided it was time to teach him a lesson. He had the slave taken to a back room of the residence and bound so tightly that his hands and forearms were deeply injured by the cords, and ordered him whipped.

By the next morning, news of the severity of the beating had reached as far as Diogo Antônio Feijó, regent of the empire who exercised executive authority in the name of the child emperor, Pedro II. As minister of justice a few years before, Feijó had taken several measures to curb the arbitrary power of slave owners, insisting that the state must intervene to regulate disciplinary punishment and to assume jurisdiction over criminal activity by slaves. Regent Feijó summoned Justice of the Peace Almeida and personally ordered him to investigate the circumstances surrounding the brutal beating. Almeida then called in two physicians to conduct an examination to determine if a crime had been committed. On the morning of December 29 the doctors found Graciano in his owner’s house, able to lie only on his side, unable to stand or walk. In addition to severely lacerated hands and forearms, he had intensely painful open wounds on his thighs and buttocks, surrounded by inflamed tissue, numerous bruises, and cuts caused by repeated blows of the whip. They declared that due to the seriousness of the wounds, and the possibility of deterioration of Graciano’s condition, he would require an extended period of convalescence.

Under interrogation, Graciano’s owner pointed out that it would hardly be in his interest to kill or seriously injure his own slave, so the punishment had been for correctional purposes only. Justice of the Peace Almeida decided not to bring formal charges against Rombo. He went no further than to oblige the owner to report any deterioration of the slave’s condition, and not to remove Graciano from the house or otherwise dispose of him for a period of 30 days, after which time another medical examination would be conducted. Despite explicit recognition in the language of the interrogation that Rombo had violated the law, he was not submitted to further legal proceedings, much less punishment. From Graciano, the slave who engaged in capoeira and wanted to relieve the whites of their obstinacy, the police had only the mute but graphic testimony of his physical condition.

Seeking the minister of justice’s approval of his handling of the case, Almeida recalled the slave revolts in Bahia and Minas Gerais in 1835 and the threat of such an uprising in the province of Rio de Janeiro in January 1836.² In this tense atmosphere, he argued against a policy of government intrusion into the domain of private residences, as he was required to conduct in the case of Graciano, and which would serve to limit the free hand of masters to punish slaves at their own discretion. Beyond the general “state of terror” generated by the threat and reality of slave rebellions, there were more specific local incidents that made close vigilance of the slaves essential: “Within the past month we have had in this city the atrocious and inhuman murders of two unfortunate cashiers, sacrificed by the barbarous Africans, who disgracefully continue to increase among us, and whom nothing will contain short of a healthy terror.”³ Reflecting the environment of fear and tension between the races and between slaves and masters, this local official invoked the term “terror” twice in the same paragraph; first referring to the masters’ dread of slave revolt, then to suggest the necessary countermeasures.⁴

The Police Structure and Social Control

The case of Graciano illustrates several features of a system of social control, as well as the relationship among the public authority of the emerging Brazilian state, the private rights of slave owners over their human property, and the rage and resistance seething just below the surface of this slave society. In his study of the 1835 revolt of slaves in the city of Salvador, João José Reis suggests that “the history of the dominated groups comes to the surface through the pen of the police clerk.”⁵ Routine police documents reveal what is on that surface, but the unacceptable behavior of interest to police often provides only tantalizing hints of the more complex reality obscured below. Rather than the general history of slaves and other groups affected, these records more narrowly reveal one theater of operations in the social war fought between agents of the dominant class—the police placed in the front lines—and the classes to be dominated, in the battlefields which the public places of the imperial capital became.⁶

But while police files can open for today’s view a “window” on the past of groups generally without a defined voice in traditional sources, they also present methodological problems. In the first place, the police acted primarily in the public arena—what students of Brazilian society know as the world of “the street.”⁷ The private life of “the house,” whether in the slave quarters of workshops and townhouses or the shacks and tenements of the lower classes, usually escaped police vigilance and is still difficult for us to learn about today. The case of Graciano is unusual in that regard, and the plea of the officiating justice of the peace suggests that his aversion to entering the private residence was based on common assumptions about the separation of the two domains. Secondly, the police concerned themselves with behavior defined in legal codes, municipal ordinances, police regulations, and in the mind of the policeman as unacceptable. It is worth remembering that such activities comprised only a small fraction of all social behavior. Deviating for a moment from the language of academic objectivity, we might say that “good” people had little to fear from the authorities, and police records tell little about them. “Bad” people, on the other hand, could expect the worst. The functional definition of “bad,” as well as the measures to repress such behavior, change in space and time, and in Brazil the police have had a central role in the task of specifying and applying the definition on the street.

With the arrival of the exiled Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro in 1808, a General Intendancy of Police for the capital city replaced the ad hoc use of military units and private armed guards in protecting person and property and maintaining public order.⁸ A royal decree of that year explicitly delegated to the police the power to judge and punish minor transgressions of poorly defined rules of behavior, in the following language: “As there are crimes that require no punishment other than some correction, the intendant may in such cases arrest such persons as deserve correction, keeping them imprisoned for a time judged by the intendant as proportional to the disorder committed, and as seems necessary for correction.”⁹ This policy was based on the same informal tradition under which slave owners and their representatives were expected to “correct slaves for violating rules and to ensure a general level of discipline. Such disciplinary action, including the public whipping of slaves to serve as an example to others, was intended to control the unacceptable behavior of the population, slave and free, rather than to limit and punish what in the modern world are more narrowly and legalistically defined as criminal acts.

During the decade of liberal dominance following political independence in 1822, the Constitution of 1824 formally established the rule of law, and the legal framework became more elaborate and explicit with establishment of the elective justice of the peace in 1827, promulgation of the Criminal Code in December 1830, and approval of the Code of Criminal Procedure in November 1832. These reforms, intended to replace the arbitrary will of the monarch with the even-handed authority of the state, mitigated but did not eliminate earlier practices by which police repressed behavior related to public safety and security, based on municipal ordinances or internal police regulations and on unquestioned tradition.¹⁰

A complex police system was developed in Rio during the 1830s, culminating in the conservative judicial reform of December 3, 1841, which established a centralized hierarchy headed by the chief of police, who was chosen from among sitting judges. By midcentury, with a total population of some 206,000, the city had about 800 men in its police force. At the top were the chief and two delegates, with a staff of 15 clerks and bailiffs in the central police headquarters. The city was divided into eight parishes, each supervised by a police subdelegate. Each of the latter was backed up by six alternates (suplentes), who often filled in for the subdelegate in his absence or joined in police operations. The city was further subdivided into 195 blocks (quarteirões, arbitrarily determined administrative units containing a minimum of 25 residences each), with a resident appointed as block inspector in each. As the “front line” of the civilian police structure, the block inspector was expected to be alert for suspicious, disruptive, or illegal activity in his local jurisdiction, could arrest in flagrante, and was to call for help from other authorities as necessary. The chief, delegates, and subdelegates assumed the police powers the locally elected justices of the peace had exercised from 1827 to 1841, and they had full authority to judge and sentence those accused of minor crime. This “judicial police” hierarchy, all appointed by the central government, was assisted by a force of some 120 uniformed and armed patrolmen (pedestres), who were stationed at conspicuous points around the city or accompanied delegates and subdelegates in the line of duty.

Parallel to this “judicial” police hierarchy comprising some 400 men, a permanent uniformed force to be used for “ostensive and repressive” policing was created under military discipline, quartered in barracks, and commanded by army officers. This military police corps also had 400 men in its ranks by 1850, including a headquarters staff of 10 officers and senior noncommissioned officers, 116 cavalry, and 274 infantry. Armed with two pistols and a sabre, military police soldiers patrolled the streets in small units, especially at night, and assisted civilian authorities as necessary. The military police kept a force in readiness in case of civil disturbance or similar eventuality. Due to Rio de Janeiro’s status as the national capital, the civilian chief of police and the commander of the military police were subordinated directly to the minister of justice of the empire.¹¹

While control of the population was never complete, and authorities often complained of inadequate staffing, this system provided an extensive network of surveillance. At any time of the day or night, anywhere in the public space of Rio de Janeiro, a representative of the state or officer of the law was never very far away or would soon pass on patrol, and a whistle or shout could quickly bring reinforcements. Police in this overlapping set of institutions, the direct predecessor of today’s civil and military police system, engaged in a wide range of activities related to controlling the behavior of the population. Some of that behavior was formally outlawed; some was defined as unacceptable by police operating guidelines and informal consensus among those in authority.

The Challenge of Capoeira

Among the many specific reasons for the repression of Rio’s lower classes, one of the most common and most serious was that of practicing capoeira. Today capoeira is well known in Brazil as a stylized form of martial art of Afro-Brazilian origin, rhythmically performed to the music of percussion and the berimbau, a bow-shaped instrument using a gourd as a resonating chamber to amplify the low tones produced by tapping its single string with a stick. With graceful and powerful movements resembling gymnastic floor exercise, the capoeirista strikes intricate blows (or would-be blows) primarily with the feet and head, which the partner/ opponent parries, evades, and returns. The dance/fight and the accompanying music are the focus of the effort, developed in organized clubs and training schools presided over by master teachers. This activity developed from an earlier form of deadly foot fighting, often assisted by daggers, razors, stones, and clubs, practiced by groups organized into gangs known as maltas or badernas.¹²

Popular tradition records the names of some of the maltas, organized by the church parish that usually gave each district of the city its common name: Cadeira da Senhora (the Lady’s Chair) in Santa Ana, as Saint Anne is usually depicted seated; Três Cachos (Three Bunches) and Flor da Uva (Flower of the Grape) in Santa Rita, referring to the grapes associated with that saint; Franciscanos in São Francisco de Paula; Flor da Gente (Flower of the People) in Glória; Espada (Sword) in Lapa; Lança (Lance) in São Jorge, referring to the weapon used to slay the dragon; Luzianos in Santa Luzia; Ossos (Bones) in Bom Jesus do Calvário; Santo Inácio in the Castelo, where the Jesuit church was located; and Guaiamu in the Cidade Nova district. Notorious individual adepts acquired such nicknames as Quebra-Côco (Skull Buster), Clave de Sol (Treble Clef), Chico Africano (Frankie the African), Zé Maluco (Crazy Joe), Desdentado (Toothless), Trinca-Espinha (Spine Splitter), Carrepeta (Ironwood), Boca-Negra (Black Mouth), Manduca (Chomper), and Corta-Orelha (Ear Cutter).¹³

Capoeira activity emerged some time in the late eighteenth century, and it was recognized in form and name by the early nineteenth century. It remained a police problem in Rio until the 1890s. Since the 1940s, it has reemerged as a major focus of folklore studies, as a system of physical training and Brazil’s contribution to the range of martial arts traditions from various parts of the world, and as public performance.¹⁴ Although this modern form is now known and practiced to some degree in most parts of Brazil, the main historical centers have been Rio de Janeiro and Salvador. In the latter city capoeira is often associated with the religious tradition known as candomblé. While Afro-Brazilian religions were also practiced in Rio de Janeiro, there is little evidence that in the nineteenth century Rio authorities were much concerned about what is now referred to generally as Afro-Brazilian culture, except when its manifestations intruded on what the white elite considered a necessary level of social peace and public calm.¹⁵ That elite created and directed a system of police, however, for which capoeira became a major preoccupation. Thus, tracing the efforts to repress capoeira in Rio during the empire provides an opportunity to glimpse several other aspects of the relations among sections of the urban lower class, both slave and free, and between police and slaves during the period in which state institutions in some measure replaced, but also reinforced, the traditional dominance of the slave owners over their human property.

The primary concern to the police of Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century was not specifically the form of foot fighting, which was then as now a distinguishing characteristic of capoeira, nor the connection between capoeira and other forms of Afro-Brazilian cultural expression. Rather, the problem was the physical assault, bloodshed, disturbance, and general mayhem the maltas engaged in. Brazil’s 1830 Criminal Code, modern for the time and for Latin America, stated that no act was a crime unless so established by prior law, and that only such crimes would be punished. Capoeira was never mentioned in the code nor in the 1838 compilation of Rio’s municipal ordinances or later revisions. Nevertheless, police authorities often took measures aimed at ending or at least reducing the incidence of a phenomenon that they considered dangerous and a constant threat to “public tranquility.” The police saw capoeira as inadmissible conduct to be restricted and punished wherever possible at the level of administrative procedures, that is, dispensing with the formalities of laws, courts, and judges further up the judicial hierarchy of which the police were an integral part.

From another point of view, the recurrent attempts to repress those engaged in capoeira indicate the continuity of the phenomenon, and suggest its importance as a response, on the part of slaves and their allies in the lower strata of urban society, to the system of control the emerging state imposed on them. The gangs, led by those most skilled in capoeira fighting, operated in territories which they defended from both rival groups and police incursions. The activities of the gangs and the specific fighting technique make capoeira the most persistent and perhaps the most successful effort to establish a social “space” on the part of urban Afro-Brazilians—an area of activity which they controlled, used for their advantage largely on their own terms, and from which they could exclude outsiders. The world of the capoeiras was ruled by violence, but the same must be said of the world of the police and of the slave system more generally. In a social hierarchy based fundamentally on the threat and reality of physical harm, capoeira gave those on the bottom the opportunity to meet force with force. It should not be surprising that the internal hierarchy of the gangs and the competition among them should have a similar basis.

An eyewitness account of an incident in the second decade of the nineteenth century confirms that capoeira fighting techniques could be used quite effectively for personal defense. A carriage was parked in the street, the driver and footman idly waiting for their passenger to return. When a passing slave tried to squeeze by, “so good an opportunity of mortifying the poor half naked negro was too good to let slip, and the coachman gave him a very severe cut with his whip over the bare shoulders,” raising a thick welt. The driver hit the slave again as the latter writhed in pain, then the footman grabbed the whip and joined the sport. The English visitor who watched this “gratuitous and unprovoked brutality” was astonished that the slave stood for it. “Blacky [sic] had, however, his reasons for thus appearing passive; he was watching his moment, and having found it, a flash of lightning is not more prompt than were his movements.” Crouching, he butted the driver against a wall, knocking him out. Then turning suddenly to the footman, “the negro gave him with the sole of his foot a kick in the stomach with such force and dexterity that he stretched him lifeless. Leaving both his victims, he then took to his heels with the swiftness of a deer.”¹⁶

This incident involved neither police nor master, but illustrates the racist brutality a slave might suffer on the streets of Rio for the offense of coming within reach of a free coachman’s casually wielded whip. If the recorder of this scene of humiliation and retribution had been a policeman rather than a visiting Englishman, the slave might have expected arrest, three hundred strokes of the lash, and three months in prison—the punishment meted out in March 1820 to Bernardo, a Mina slave, and Estanislao, Brazilian born. “On the first there was found a small bag with a razor and a wooden dagger. He attempted to resist the patrol, calling his companion, and they were then surrounded by capoeiras, who threw many stones” at the police.¹⁷ In this incident, as in many others, the capoeiras were unsuccessful in keeping their colleagues free from the whipping post and slave dungeon. From 1810 to 1821, before the liberal reforms culminating in the Criminal Code, capoeira accounted for 438 of the 4,853 known reasons for arrests in Rio, second only to the 751 arrests of slaves for escape.¹⁸

In November 1821, after a fight involving capoeiras resulted in six deaths and many injuries, an official order criticized the proliferation of capoeiras, claimed that whipping was “the only punishment that intimidates and instills fear,” and ordered the royal guard of the court, predecessor of the military police, to administer corporal punishment “as soon as blacks are arrested for disorder, or with a knife or suspicious instrument.” Such swift action would have the dual advantage of providing a public example and saving owners the cost of jailing their slaves.¹⁹ This order was confirmed in December 1823, and in March 1826 the intendant of police of the court ordered that any slave arrested for capoeira be summarily given one hundred lashes and remanded to the Calabouço, the city’s jail for slaves.²⁰

Soon after these efforts to specify the official response to capoeira activity, an incident took place that entered the folklore of the city. On June 9 and 10, 1828, many of the two thousand German and Irish mercenaries billeted in Rio de Janeiro mutinied against their Brazilian officers. They had been contracted by the increasingly unpopular Emperor Pedro I to fight in his campaign to regain the Cisplatine Province (modern Uruguay) for Brazil, but in Rio the idle foreign troops irritated the native population with their arrogance and drunken sprees. When their officers attempted to impose more rigorous discipline and ordered corporal punishment for some of the more egregious offenders, the mercenaries broke out of the barracks in revolt, running wild in the streets and attacking innocent passersby. During the five days it took to bring the uprising under control, capoeira gangs engaged in running battles with the rioting troops. Participation of capoeiras along with loyal native soldiers, police, and private citizens in the struggle to subdue the mutineers thus became part of a positive popular image of capoeira, vaguely suggesting a common nationalistic effort to protect local people from the marauding bands of foreign mercenaries.²¹ There is little indication that capoeiras coordinated their activities with the “forces of order” in this incident, however, much less that the authorities sought the assistance of slaves who the day before and the week after were subject to one hundred lashes and a term in the Calabouço. An interpretation more consistent with the long-term relationship between capoeiras and the police is that the gangs took advantage of the generally anarchic situation during the mutiny to strike out at a group of white strangers whom no one wanted to protect in any case. It also seems likely that blacks in Rio had suffered considerable racist insults at the hands of the obnoxious northern Europeans, and the mutiny gave the capoeiras an ideal opportunity to avenge such treatment.

Popular tradition further associates capoeira with urban politics in the 1870s and ’80s, when factions in Rio employed gangs of toughs who used capoeira techniques to protect polling places for favorites, disrupt the rallies of rival candidates, and intimidate opposition voters. As a commentator on life in Rio in the 1880s concluded: “Until recently many of those in government rose by the flash of the razor, and the Senate and the Chamber [of Deputies] supported themselves on the swarthy shoulder of the capoeira.”²² Yet it should not be assumed from this that amicable relations with the forces of order or with political bosses characterized the history of the capoeiras in Rio. To suggest that capoeira gangs were merely a violent extension of the will of the powerful belies the autonomy with which they operated. That interpretation also implies that slaves, often interacting in the gangs with members of the free lower classes, could not be expected to develop their own independent mechanisms of solidarity and defense, outside of the patron-client cooptation so common in Brazilian social traditions.

One source of possible confusion, here and elsewhere in the historical study of capoeira, is the relationship between the distinctive fighting technique (which any adept individual can learn) and the activities of organized and autonomous groups. The term is used for both, and by extension a bodyguard or staff of hired enforcers who used capoeira techniques acquired the label. To the extent that such associative terminology increased the intimidating reputation of the bodyguard, its effectiveness might be enhanced. So while some hired thugs employed by corrupt politicians may have fought like capoeiras and been of similar ethnic stock and social origin, the more consistent pattern was for agents of the state to maintain constant vigilance against capoeira gang activity, and for those arrested for it to suffer ruthless repression.

The Evolution of State Responses

During the liberal interlude from the late 1820s through the ’30s, several measures reduced the authority of the police to administer whippings summarily at the time of arrest. In 1827, with the establishment of the office of justice of the peace, the official exercising police functions at the local level had formal judicial power as well, and could order punishment for minor crime on his own authority. Then the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1832, elaborating on the Criminal Code of 1830, provided that no punishment could be administered without a judicial review, perfunctory though it often was. These changes were also specified in a formal order of October 1831 in which Diogo Antônio Feijó, as minister of justice following the abdication of Pedro I, ordered that the whipping of slaves in the Calabouço should not exceed a total of 200 lashes, restricted to a maximum of 50 per day. Feijó also ordered that correctional punishment in the Calabouço at the request of the slave owner was not to exceed 50 lashes, “since more than 50 should be understood as excessive punishment, and thus prohibited by law.”²³ Feijó made a telling statement justifying these limits on disciplinary whippings, and determining that “the authority of the slave owner, restricted to the correction of minor faults, should not be extended to punishment for crimes which are under the jurisdiction of the judicial system. Slaves are men, and the law extends to them.”²⁴

The developing state, with these and related measures, increasingly entered into the area of slave-master relations, imposing the rule of law and attempting to limit arbitrary and excessive physical abuse in order to preserve a system thus considered to be more “humane.” The apparent compassion of Feijó in this passage must be understood in the context of the maintenance of an ideological system and a legal culture that could consider the slave a human being, and at the same time regulate brutal techniques of repression and maintain slavery itself. Being “human” was not inconsistent with being bound, chained, whipped, thrown into dungeons, having irons clamped on neck and leg, and similar treatment. For Feijó and like-minded liberal ideologues, the rule of law, which also meant the authority of the state, should extend into the realm of public behavior of slaves, meeting the authority of the slave owner at the door of his private domain. While punishment was reserved to the state, the master was still allowed and expected to exercise disciplinary control.²⁵ In a situation in which most workers and many members of “public” society were also private property, the ideological pretensions of the nation-state to the universal application of authority were inevitably circumscribed.

To accentuate the contradiction, the economy and society of Brazil depended fundamentally on slavery, and because slaves were unwilling to submit to their condition without coercion, state authorities and the slavocrats found themselves in uneasy collaboration. Justice of the Peace Almeida had been caught in this dilemma when Feijó ordered him to look into the case of Graciano. In restricting his involvement to investigation and supervision of the slave’s recovery from a beating Feijó considered excessive, Almeida took a pragmatic position:

In the environment of resistance and repression central to Brazilian slave society, state authority had to yield to the traditional obligation and responsibility of property owners. Furthermore, this reasoning went, if the state restricted the master’s discretion, the state in turn would suffer the consequences of loosened control.

During the same period that “modern” reforms were being debated at the top of the social and political hierarchy, capoeira activity continued at the bottom. At about seven o’clock on the evening of July 26, 1831, two rival gangs totalling more than two hundred individuals were engaged in a set battle in São José parish, near Rio’s waterfront, when a civilian patrol came on the scene. Before separating into their respective factions and dispersing, the assembled capoeiras wounded the leader of the patrol on the head in a rock-throwing melee. Three slaves, two black and one mulatto, were arrested and delivered to the justice of the peace. Later that night, the gangs regrouped in other parts of the city.²⁷ In November 1832, the intendant warned the commander of the military police that “the black capoeiras and individuals of a similar bent customarily carry daggers and other weapons of that nature hidden in marimbas, pieces of sugar cane, and in the handles of the small black whips made in this country.” He insisted that the patrols practice “the utmost vigilance, and carefully search such individuals, arresting those found with these instruments so that they can be punished under the law.”²⁸

Eusébio de Queiroz, better known as the author of measures ending the contraband slave traffic from Africa to Brazil after 1850 while minister of justice, spent the first years of his administrative and political career as police chief of the city of Rio, from 1833 to 1844. In June 1833, in disagreement with the restrictions imposed by new legal measures, Queiroz asked for instructions from the minister of justice, with the following preface:

In this instance, the representative of the state saw the slave owners as not merely lax or unwilling to extend their authority into the public realm. Their actions went further, Queiroz claimed, by protecting slaves whose delinquent activity, detrimental to public order and beneficial to capoeiras, was thus left unpunished. As police chief directing the operations of anti-capoeira patrols in the streets, Queiroz argued that the police would be able to fill that gap in the network of control, if only they were again given the authority to carry out summary punishment in the act of arrest.

Queiroz continued his campaign, even as capoeira gangs continued with what he called “their usual madness, especially at night.” In 1836, he ordered justices of the peace and their police patrols to “search all blacks on the street and dissolve their gatherings, whether in the streets or in taverns, and to take action against tavern keepers who permit such meetings.”³⁰ In the same year, a justice of the peace requested more military police to reinforce patrols in the same Campo de Santana where “capoeiras have shown themselves . . . armed with knives and committing attacks and disorders.” In response, Queiroz ordered that “from time to time operations should be carried out against such capoeiras, as soon as word arrives that they have gathered.”³¹

In April 1845, a new chief of police took up the demand for harsher treatment of capoeiras, “who in recent days have become most daring,” committing physical attacks on peaceful citizens and generally disturbing the peace. The new policy, which the minister of justice approved, looked much like the old one of the 1820s, before the promulgation of the Criminal Code. Immediately after arrest for capoeira, slaves were to be sent to the House of Correction and summarily given 100 lashes, after which they were to serve one month at hard labor on public works, “to see if with this measure we manage to bring them to order.”³² In August of the same year, however, following complaints from owners deprived of the services of their slaves, these orders were changed to increase the number of lashes to 150 and eliminate the additional sentence of a month at hard labor. The result of this ongoing tension between the state’s demand for order and the slaveowners’ demand for labor was 50 more strokes of the lash for every slave brought in for capoeira. An inspector of the prison system noted in October 1852 that these orders continued in effect, and “presently when a slave is arrested for capoeira, with no further formality whatever he is sent to the House of Correction, where he immediately suffers the 150 lashes.” The inspector, a criminal court judge, considered this punishment excessive.³³

Those arrested for capoeira continued to receive severe punishment, despite the lack of any law prohibiting capoeira activity per se, and local police officials continued to struggle against a problem that at times required special measures. In April 1849 the subdelegate of police in the downtown Sacramento parish requested a special detachment of military police to pursue the several capoeira gangs operating in the area. They had “committed acts of great disrespect” and had seriously injured four persons. “This type of ruffian,” the subdelegate noted, was “one of the scourges peculiar to our fair city,” and he had seen the “rage of these wrongdoers increase” despite the efforts of the block inspectors of his district, police officers, and the one patrolman assigned to him. Denying the request, the commander of the military police offered to increase the number of regular patrols in the district, but said that staffing shortages made it impossible to supply a special detachment for anti-capoeira duty. The problems persisted until the subdelegate prevailed on the chief of police to use his authority to provide a military police detachment. Two months later there were further reports of capoeira activity in Sacramento parish, and the minister of justice, the same Eusébio de Queiroz who as police chief in 1833 had complained about restrictions on immediate punishment of arrested capoeiras, demanded an explanation. The subdelegate reported that thanks to the recently redoubled efforts, aided by the increased force at his disposal, the capoeiras had been chased out of Capim Square, their favorite gathering point, and “if any capoeiras now appear in this parish they are just passing through to other points in the city, as my inspectors have observed.”³⁴

In 1849, police made one of their periodic efforts to rid the city of groups whose crimes against personal security and property were “becoming notable for their frequency if not for their seriousness.” Police Chief Antônio Simões da Silva imputed tactics to midnineteenth-century capoeira gangs that in the 1960s became associated with urban guerrilla groups in Latin America. For the urban guerrilla strategist, militant actions were designed to bring on generalized repression in order to polarize the population against state authority.³⁵ Simões claimed that armed capoeira gangs committed beatings and personal injury “intentionally to provoke the authorities into using extreme measures, which in turn are always criticized and often rebuked.” Given the difficulties of making criminal charges stick in such cases, the police resorted to alternative measures for getting such “vagrant and disorderly elements” off the street. In this campaign, 60 men were obliged to sign promises to behave well and seek honest employment. Unlike vague charges such as engaging in capoeira, breaking the conditions of such a probationary bond was a clear violation of the law, and usually brought a swift jail sentence. In addition, 40 men were conscripted into military service in this sweep. These and related measures against such a large number of men, the chief claimed, “relieved the city of the shadow cast by the clouds of capoeiras and troublemakers that for some time had alarmed the population.”³⁶ As in the case of urban guerrilla activity more than a century later, state authorities relied on a general desire for “public tranquility” to counter the popular appeal of those who opposed the system through violent disruptive tactics.

Capoeira in Police Statistics

Isolated incidents that proliferate over the decades, for all their suggestive and personalizing details, give little sense of the quantitative scale of the phenomenon. Although more detached and standardized, the statistics produced by the police and jail system provide a broader context to assess individual examples of capoeira activity. One such source is the record of all persons brought into the central police station during the year 1850. This broad sample of the functioning of the police system, immediately following the anti-capoeira campaign of 1849, confirms that among slaves capoeira exceeded by far those reasons for arrest related more directly to slave status. Of the 530 slaves arrested in 1850, 290 had the reason for arrest recorded. Of them, 63 men were brought in for capoeira. This compares to 18 slaves arrested for escape and 15 for suspicion of escape in the same period. In addition to the 63 slaves, there were 3 free men, 2 former slaves, and 1 “free” African arrested for capoeira, a total for the year of 69. The arresting officers in 43 of the 69 cases were the uniformed patrolmen (pedestres) directly supervised by civilian police delegates and subdelegates. Ten capoeiras were arrested by civilian police authorities, 7 were brought in by soldiers of the military police, 1 by a guard employed by the city government, and 1 by an army soldier.³⁷

Of 60 capoeira arrestees in 1850 further identified, 18 were Brazilian born, and 42 were born in Africa. Notations in the blotter entries of all but 3 of the 69 capoeira arrestees mention disposal of the case. They show that on the average African-born slaves could expect the most severe treatment, consistent with the general vigilance and repression police authorities directed against slaves not fully acculturated to Brazil from birth. Twenty-four, including 11 creole and 8 African-born slaves, 1 free man, and 1 former slave, were released after an average stay in the lockup of 2.25 days, suffering no formal corporal punishment during that time. Thirty-four, including 6 creole and 23 African-born slaves, and 1 each of the free, former slave, and “free” African categories, were sent to the House of Correction for further punishment, probably including whipping in the Calabouço for the slaves. Two African-born slaves were whipped at the police station and released. And 6, including 1 free man and 5 African-born slaves, were immediately remanded to the city jail.

The dates of arrest reveal that of the 69 capoeiras arrested in 1850, 38 (55 percent) were brought in on a Sunday and 10 (15 percent) on a Monday —most likely in the early morning hours. The remaining 30 percent were fairly evenly spaced over the other days of the week. This is a more pronounced version of the pattern for all arrests during the year, with many more on Sunday than any other day of the week, followed by Monday. More people were arrested on Sunday because it was the only day of relief from work for most of the population. Many leisure activities involved gathering in public squares and taverns for socializing and drinking, accompanied eventually by rowdiness, gambling, fighting, and other acts that violated the authorities’ sense of permissible behavior. Thus, much of what people did for recreation brought them into confrontation with the police, who in turn redoubled efforts to ensure public order.

Twelve years later, more than four times as many people were brought into the jail of the central police station as in 1850. Table I lists all 7,290 detainees in 1862 by numerical ranking of offenses, to provide a context for the 404 arrests for capoeira (5.5 percent of the total) in that year. Table I also illustrates a consistent feature of police activity in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro: the overwhelming proportion of the energy and activity of the police that was directed at violations of public order, rather than at crimes against property or person. Although significant numbers of people were brought in for physical injury to others, usually the result of fighting, those arrests listed in Table I which can readily be assumed to have offended the person or material interests of a victim account for less than 20 percent of the total.³⁸ In contrast, the combined total of the six major public order offenses (curfew violation, “investigation,” disorderly conduct, drunkenness, vagrancy, and capoeira) is 4,268, or nearly 60 percent of all arrests in 1862.

Periodic reports of arrests by the military police provide other samples with which these data from the central police jail may be compared. In the course of 1862, military police made 2,946 arrests, including 138 for capoeira, fifth in importance as a reason for arrest after disorderly conduct (572), drunkenness (268), escaped slaves (260), and petty theft (215).³⁹ While capoeira accounted for 4.7 percent of military police arrests in 1862, the equivalent figure for the six-month period from December 1870 through May 1871 was nearly 13 percent, as shown in Table II.

Military police made 8 of the 22 capoeira arrests shown in Table II on Sunday, including 2 free men and 2 slaves arrested together on December 18, 1870. Another group arrest came on Thursday, December 22, 1870, when 3 blacks “who refused to give their names” were brought in. In all, only 10 of the 22 capoeiras arrested in this sample were slaves, 11 were free Brazilians, and 1, Antônio Luiz da Costa, was a Portuguese national.⁴⁰

Portuguese immigrants comprised by far the most numerous category of the free foreign population in Rio, and they frequently occupied social roles—such as retail merchant, tavern keeper, cashier, and policeman—that brought them into recurrent and sometimes hostile contact with slaves and the free underclass. Thus, they were more often the target of capoeira attacks than participants. Although slaves and free Brazilians were usually punished for capoeira activity without benefit of legal formalities, the few foreign nationals arrested for this offense were more often punished under specific laws. Such was the case of José Croset, a French citizen, arrested for capoeira in the Lapa section of the city on July 2, 1871. After the incident was made public in the Jornal do Comércio, a leading newspaper, Croset was charged with resistance to authority, a violation of Article 116 of the Criminal Code.⁴¹

A different sort of sample comes from an 1852 report on Rio’s notorious Aljube jail, a complex of dank and overcrowded bays carved in the side of Conceição hill. Intermediate between the holding cells at the central police station and the long-term House of Correction for those convicted of major offenses, and distinct in purpose and location from the slave Calabouço, the Aljube was used primarily for people serving short sentences for minor violations, or held awaiting trial for more serious crimes. Of the 111 people in the Aljube in early August 1852, only 12 had been sent there as a result of court action. The other 99 were being held on the orders of the chief of police or his delegates, who after the 1841 judicial reform had legal authority to pass judgment and decree jail terms for most misdemeanor crimes.

Of the total 111 inmates, 11 men were in for capoeira. None were slaves, and the times they spent in jail provide a sample of the punishment nonslave capoeiras might expect. Seven of the 11 had been brought to the jail on Sunday, July 25, 1852. One of these men was sent on to the House of Correction after 11 days in the Aljube, and the other 6 were released together after serving 24 days. The entry of two capoeiras was recorded on Monday, July 26, one of whom was released after 10 days, and the other released on August 18 with the 6 who had come in on July 25. The remaining 2 represent the short and the long for capoeira jail terms; 1 entered on July 30 and was released after serving 6 days, the other entered on May 19, 1852 and was released on August 5, after serving 78 days.⁴²

Rio’s slave jail, the Calabouço, functioned through the early years of the nineteenth century primarily as a place where masters could remand their slaves for disciplinary whipping, paying a fee per stroke of the lash with no questions asked.⁴³ With the legal restrictions of the liberal interlude and the establishment of a more efficient police system in the 1830s, the rate of slave punishments in the Calabouço at the master’s request fell significantly. It is also likely that masters became less prone to order correctional whippings after the middle of the century, when the final abolition of the transatlantic traffic made slaves increasingly scarce and more valuable. Table III classifies all the 329 people imprisoned in the Calabouço in the period from June 1857 through May 1858.⁴⁴

During that year, the most important single reason for imprisonment was capoeira, which brought 81 slaves to the Calabouço, or nearly 25 percent of the total. Another 69 were there to be punished on request —as compared to almost 1,800 in 1826, 31 years earlier. The third highest number were simply “on deposit,” which refers to the function of the Calabouço as a holding place for slaves sold and awaiting delivery, in the estates of deceased owners before distribution of the inheritance, etc. Two of the principal reasons for imprisonment thus reveal more about the functions of the slave jail than about the rates of law breaking among slaves. Slaves sent to the Calabouço for “common” crimes were relatively few in number, but those caught for theft, weapons possession, and similar offenses not directly associated with slave status were often sent to the other jails of the city together with nonslave arrestees. The Calabouço is sometimes also referred to as the jail “for escaped slaves,” but, at least in this one-year period, escapees amounted to less than 10 percent of the total.

As for the 81 slaves in the Calabouço for capoeira, 66 were whipped, at an average of 81 lashes each; 35 received 100 lashes, and 14 received 50 lashes. Two were beaten with the palmatória (a wooden paddle with perforations in the end to reduce wind resistance); one with 48 blows, the other with 36 blows. Of the total 81, there were 58 African born and 27 Brazilian born, including 4 listed as “brown” (pardo).

Among students of Afro-Brazilian culture, of which capoeira is one manifestation, the regional origin of slaves provides a clue to tracing the African roots of culture traits. This is especially relevant in nineteenth-century Brazil because the transatlantic traffic, although illegal after 1831, continued on a large scale until 1850-51.⁴⁵ Data on ethnic origin for those slaves brought into the police jail for capoeira during 1850, and on the detainees in the Calabouço in 1857-58, are brought together in Table IV.

It is important to keep in mind that the data in the table do not provide a profile of those who participated in capoeira, but only those who ended up in these institutions during these periods. Compared to the large numbers police rounded up in periodic eradication campaigns, the hundreds of men arrested for capoeira in other years, or the several hundreds who probably participated in capoeira gangs at any given time or knew something of its fighting techniques, these are small samples. Nor are they in fact strictly comparable. Nevertheless, they prompt several observations. First, the largest single category is native Brazilian, increasing slightly from 30 percent in 1850 to one-third in 1857-58. Second, those from the general region of modern Angola, often considered a likely location of African origin for capoeira, formed the next largest group, but fell from 37 percent at midcentury to 22 percent in the later sample. Finally, these fragmentary data clearly show that slaves from diverse origins practiced capoeira in Rio. Any further assessment of the significance of regional origins, however, would require estimates of the proportional composition of the slave population of the city by ethnic category, and such estimates are necessarily tenuous. In any case, ethnic labels appear in police records primarily for rough identification purposes, to overcome the duplication of common given names. Unacculturated boçal slaves from Africa were generally considered more threatening to public order than the more tractable Brazilian-born crioulos, but if any specific African group was more the target of police vigilance than others it was the Minas from the southern coast of the West African “hump,” rather than those of Angolan origin.⁴⁶

Perceptions and Misperceptions of the Problem

The scale and unpredictability of capoeira attacks was of more concern to authorities than the ethnic origin of the perpetrators. The police sought public tranquility, not ethnographic information, and while they often claimed to be mystified by what they saw as irrational outbursts of violence, the police did little on the official level to penetrate the world of the capoeira gangs. In his annual report to the minister of justice for 1853, the chief of police provided an indication of how poorly the white elite understood the gang warfare and territorial defense and aggression that lay behind much capoeira activity:

As in other assessments over the years, the chief found it noteworthy that capoeira gangs seemed little interested in theft, and that their aggressive behavior could not be explained by the usual assumptions regarding motives for interpersonal crimes, such as response to insult or desire for revenge. These observations do, however, reiterate the fear capoeiras instilled in their social opponents, and the need both sides felt to meet violent force with a similar response.

Incidents in this same period seemed to confirm the frequent comments by the authorities that capoeiras attacked innocent passersby for little apparent reason. Visiting Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1850s, Kidder and Fletcher took note of the following press report: “Night before last, after eight o’clock, an individual named Maurício was attacked by a band of capoeiras, who fell upon him with clubs, striking him upon the forehead, and gashing his thigh.” They further reported that the capoeiras formed “a singular secret society among the negroes, in which the highest rank is assigned to the man who has taken the most lives. . . . [D]uring a festa they will rush out at night and rip up any other black they chance to meet. They rarely attack the whites, knowing, perhaps, that it would cost them too dearly.”⁴⁸

In November 1858, Demiciano, a “free” African who worked as a servant in the city police headquarters, stepped out to buy cigars at a nearby store. It was just at nightfall, about 7 p.m., and as he was returning from the errand two capoeiras accosted him. Demiciano was cut twice, on the chest and arm, but not robbed. He made it back to his place of work, and police immediately gave chase. Although the attackers escaped, police retrieved the hat of one of them, by which they identified him as the slave of Dr. Penna, resident of Violas Street. In reporting the incident, the chief clerk at police headquarters noted that such incidents were on the rise in the vicinity, and vouched that Demiciano was “of very good conduct, incapable of provoking anyone.”⁴⁹ Perhaps Demiciano was assaulted because of his association, even though not of his own will, with the police. It is also possible that he was a mere target of opportunity for toughs looking for some action, who picked the wrong target and nearly ended up in the hands of the police themselves. Other “free” Africans were less well behaved, as in the case of Felizardo, of Cassange ethnic origin. When Felizardo was picked up in the Campo de Santana for capoeira in August 1861, the tax inspector who supervised him at the city market where he was assigned reported that “he is somewhat arrogant, and several times I have had complaints about his behavior. On April 19 of this year he was arrested for possession of a folding knife, and disorderly conduct. ”⁵⁰

Again and again, authorities were hard pressed to explain the rationale behind what appeared to be random attacks on innocent bystanders. When capoeiras did battle with police patrols, the basis for the conflict was clear enough. When gangs fought one another, it was often interpreted as evidence of a running feud, in which each new offense demanded retribution in a continuing cycle. Police recognized that such conflicts often involved territorial rivalries, as intrusion into one group’s “turf” by another was in itself a major offense. Attacks on tavern or shop owners or their cashiers may well have been precipitated by the efforts of such merchants to prevent capoeiras from using their establishments as meeting points, which in turn might bring police surveillance. And it is possible that not only extortion but also racial antagonism and antiforeign sentiment were involved in attacks on businesses, because many proprietors in petty commerce, and even more typically their trusted employees, were Portuguese immigrants. Less easily explained were cases of injury, usually vicious razor attacks that sometimes resulted in the death of the victim, suffered by people with no apparent connection to capoeira and no obvious reason to be targets. Given the deliberate secrecy and autonomy of the gangs, however, one must consider the possibility that such “random” attacks were in reality carefully planned and disguised measures to punish those who violated the internal discipline of the group, to avenge offenses defined as such by capoeiras but unknown to police, or attacks commissioned for personal, economic, or political reasons by people outside the capoeira structure itself.

Against the System from Within

In the early decades of the nineteenth century capoeira was closely identified with slaves, along with some former slaves and a few free people of color, later including such semislaves as the “free” Africans. Although slaves continued to be involved, capoeira became an activity for increasing numbers of free persons as well after the middle of the nineteenth century, as slavery in the city went into relative and then absolute decline.⁵¹ More and more, membership in the maltas connected those on the bottom of society, slave and free, in opposition to the forces of order and state power. Interestingly, however, among the capoeiras were to be found members of the rank and file of such institutions as the army, police, national guard, and fire prevention service. In an 1855 attack on Guarda Velha Street, for example, a member of a capoeira gang, “said to be a fireman of the Carioca station, threw a sharpened round file into the tavern at number 23, where it stuck in the front of the counter. The cashier of the tavern narrowly escaped injury.”⁵²

Some of those arrested during the anti-capoeira campaign of 1849 were members of the national guard, thus exempt from regular military duty, so that the common practice of removing capoeiras from circulation by drafting them into the army was unavailable in their case. The police chief recognized how sensitive this issue could be, given the political importance of the national guard, but he suggested that the guard, “where so many honest and upstanding citizens serve, should not also be a refuge for vagrants and malefactors.” In a similar vein, in 1859 the chief of police requested that Felisberto do Amaral be dismissed from the national guard to be conscripted into the army because “he is very dangerous, and known to be the head of the capoeiras who gather in Santa Rita parish. He is the one who, during the pursuit of a capoeira gang there, threw a brick at patrolman Lúcio Feliciano da Costa, wounding him on the head.”⁵³

But conscription into the army might serve little purpose unless the individual thus chastized was posted far from Rio—as suggested by several incidents in which soldiers were involved in capoeira. Anticipating the commemoration of the feast of Saint Sebastian, patron of the city, in January 1859, the chief of police requested military authorities to restrict to quarters those soldiers not on duty. The basis for the request was that “the capoeiras are accustomed to taking advantage of the celebration to engage in their forays, committing crimes and alarming peaceful citizens, and it is undeniable that among them are a large number of soldiers in civilian dress.”⁵⁴ (With or without the participation of off-duty soldiers, the problem of capoeira activity during the Saint Sebastian celebration remained: in January 1865, the police chief urged on the commander of the military police “all vigilance against the capoeiras, in order to repress their usual forays on such occasions.”⁵⁵) In 1869, the minister of justice went so far as to approve the conscription into the army of four men who, “although members of the national guard, were arrested as members of the capoeira gang which, on the night of August 29, 1869, created a disturbance in Lapa Square.”⁵⁶ In the following year, however, the same ministry denied the police chief’s request to conscript arrested capoeiras found to be exempt from military service by virtue of national guard membership, suggesting that other “means be found to repress them.”⁵⁷

Accusations that the national guard harbored notorious capoeiras must be seen in the context of the size, composition, and function of that paramilitary institution by the middle of the century and after. Established in 1831 as a citizens’ militia, its membership was restricted to free men, excluding former slaves and foreigners. Minimum income or property requirements closed the officer ranks to all but the economic elite, and local examining boards chaired by justices of the peace screened the eligibility of others. The guard is sometimes considered to have been the bastion of the white property-owning classes and their dependents in the free population, particularly in the provincial and rural areas of the country. But in the city of Rio, the rank and file was made up of “citizens who live from their labor,” including artisans, petty merchants, clerks, and others of the lower orders of free society. As of 1849, the guard in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro had a total of 6,544 members, nearly 13 percent of the 51,037 free male Brazilians in the city’s population. Of the total, 624 were cavalry troops and 4,052 were soldiers of the lowest rank, distributed among the eight infantry battalions in the city.⁵⁸

Although some guard units were occasionally called to active duty to assist police patrols in emergency situations, particularly during the institutional transition of the 1830s, by midcentury most guardsmen donned their fancy uniforms only for periodic assemblies and to participate in parades during civic celebrations. Membership had become primarily an honorific mark of respectability, as active repression of slaves and the free rabble was increasingly left to full-time professionals. Thus, evidence that now and then some guard members were caught in an anti-capoeira sweep tells something about how far capoeira activity had penetrated the non-slave population, rather than constituting a blanket assessment of the low levels to which the national guard as an institution had fallen. Nor can these cases be taken as evidence that the state’s policy of repression and the capacity for it had weakened. On the contrary, that policy was consolidated and routinized, as troops of the military police and pedestres took over daily policing under the centralized administrative control of the “judicial” police system established in 1841, and complementary vigilance by civilian block inspectors.

Full-time policemen, for their part, were recruited from the same free lower classes that included the idlers, malefactors, and disturbers of the peace of such concern to authorities. Once in service, military police soldiers were kept under rigid military discipline, including a strict code of behavior to which they were subject even while off duty, and a range of nonjudicial punishments even for minor infractions. This enforced separation of the military police from the surrounding society was intended to increase the corporate identity and efficiency of the institution, but it did not eliminate activity on the other side of the law. In December 1869, for example, the military police arrested four of its own members, who were found in civilian clothes with a group of capoeiras near the imperial palace. Admonishing that such activity is “unworthy of soldiers of the military police, who must always exhibit good conduct and moderation,” the commander ordered them jailed for six days in Lage fort on a tiny island in Rio bay as an example to the other soldiers of the corps. He took the opportunity to further caution officers of the military police to arrest any of their own soldiers “found in the company of musicians, or in groups of civilians on the streets of the city.”⁵⁹

During the Paraguayan war (1865-71) certain of Rio’s military police units were sent with the regular army to the battlefront. To help replace the surveillance capacity thus lost, some national guard units were attached to the military police for the duration of the war. In April 1870, the commander of the national guard in the city wrote to the civilian chief of police that

As a result of these and other irregularities the police subdelegate in Candelaria was replaced on April 4, 1870. That did not resolve the problems, however, and on April 19 the military police commander sent the police chief another long report of irregular conduct, including the case of a national guardsman in civilian clothes who, “razor in hand, engaged in capoeira. There was also present a guard of the city tax collection agency, a friend of the national guardsman in question and perhaps one of the best of the capoeiras, who advised the national guardsman to turn himself in.”⁶⁰

In a later “recruiting” incident, while denying published accusations that policemen looking for conscripts invaded a church on Christmas Eve 1871, the police subdelegate of the Lagoa parish asserted that those arrested to be conscripted were “known to be capoeiras and ruffians.”⁶¹ Forced conscription into military service—a practice that had naturally increased during the Paraguayan war—was used throughout the empire period as a way of cleaning the city streets of undesirable elements, including capoeiras, without bringing formal criminal charges. But such punitive conscription also suggests the extent to which free men participated in capoeira activities, because slaves were not subject to forced military service.

Many free people, for their part, had the protection of the public institutions they were affiliated with. In 1872, the chief of police emphasized the involvement in capoeira of increasing numbers of free men who could not be controlled by applying vagrancy ordinances because they were “national guardsmen, soldiers on pass, retired members of the armed forces, or artisans in the army and navy arsenals, and were thus looked after by their respective commanders” when arrested.⁶² The involvement of government employees was of special concern because of their embarrassing identification with public institutions, and police authorities hoped that their counterparts in other agencies would be able to restrict the behavior of such problematic subordinates. These cases accordingly stand out in interagency correspondence, and they, too, suggest the extent to which capoeira activity eventually spread to the nonslave population. Yet most capoeiras were probably not under the control or protection of any patron, especially as slavery waned in the city.

A pitched battle in April 1870 shows that the traditional basis of confrontation persisted: “In the conflict with the capoeiras in front of the slaughterhouse, the military police patrol in the area was involved, the block inspector assisted, and they fought with the large number of capoeiras gathered there. The patrol going on the midnight to dawn shift also joined in.”⁶³

The Later Stages of Repression

In his annual report for 1872, the chief of police noted (as others had before) the difficulty of dealing with capoeira activity, since it was “not a crime according to the Criminal Code,” and members of the gangs had to be dealt with according to specific offenses, such as physical injury or murder. Like many of his predecessors, the chief claimed that through the “most active vigilance and constant persecution” he had managed to “repress the audacity of the capoeiras, who were the terror of the peaceful population, and they no longer dare to gather openly in the streets and squares as they once did.” He recognized that they form a sort of association, divided by neighborhood, with specific leaders. They not only do battle among themselves, but also injure and murder innocent passersby.” An archetypical example of injury to bystanders came once again on December 7, 1874, when capoeiras running through downtown streets slashed a slave boy named Gervásio in the stomach, then stabbed a black slave named Bernardo nearby. While claiming again that concerted repressive measures had dissolved the organized maltas, the chief of police recognized that “there are still troublemakers who, armed with knives and razors, occasionally fight among themselves, with tragic consequences.

In 1878, reporting on yet another campaign to rid the streets of Rio of what he called “one of the strangest moral diseases of this great and civilized city,” the chief of police again urged that capoeira activity be formally declared a crime. He advocated that foreigners arrested for the offense be deported, and Brazilians sent to rigorous penal colonies, such as the one recently established on isolated Fernando de Noronha Island in the South Atlantic. The chief likened capoeiras to “the bloody sect of those who worship Siva, or the homicidal Druses,” and characterized them as “a regularly organized association, subdivided into gangs with their own special signs and slang terms.” The maltas (supposedly dissolved years before) took advantage of the cover provided by crowds during popular gatherings and public festivals, to fight over their own rivalries, “That is the time that some, the most cruel, disperse themselves among the people, razor in hand, wounding at random those whom they encounter, sometimes committing murder, with no reason for complaint against them, and without even knowing them.” Arrested in the 1878 sweep were 645 capoeiras, including 507 free men and 138 slaves.⁶⁵

After decades of repressive efforts by Rio police, the situation still seemed little changed when, on May 20, 1886, “a group of more than 15 armed capoeiras attacked a tavern on Visconde de Sapucai Street, and beat the owner. Escaping down the street they continued their mischief, clubbing passersby and leaving wounded the Portuguese Francisco Gonçalves Saloca, who later died.”⁶⁶ About this same time, the French visitor Émile Allain wrote that the capoeiras

Allain also provided one of the few early descriptions of capoeira as public performance when, echoing police concerns, he noted that “they are present at all large gatherings. One sees them especially in the front of parades at popular festivities, engaged in a gymnastic performance or special dance, also called capoeira.”⁶⁷ While their presence on such occasions may indicate popular acceptance of capoeiras, the police considered this another example of the gangs’ use of the cover of the crowd to engage in mischief or worse. The observations of an English botanist passing through Rio, apparently intended to convey the picturesque habits of the natives, suggest the deadly nature of the “game” played out during carnival festivities in the 1880s: “Every kind of horse-play is exercised. Numerous mulattos, called Capoeiros [sic], dance about and run ‘amok’ with open razors strapped to their hands, with which they rip people up in a playful manner. The police are always on the look-out for these gentlemen, and rush out on them with drawn swords!”⁶⁸

An occasional policeman continued to be involved on the other side, as well. In 1887 Military Police Lieutenant Argemiro Pereira de Araujo Cortez was arrested as a member “of the well-known and incorrigible gang of capoeiras that . . . caused the disorders in Constitution Square. This case, reported in the Jornal do Comércio, reminded the commander of another incident on Senhor dos Passos Street, in which the same lieutenant “beat up an individual, and roamed through the bars and taverns in the company of capoeiras and troublemakers.” For these infractions of regulations, which gave “the most deplorable example of indiscipline . . . keeping company with individuals of the lowest class, with whom he equalled himself in committing indecorous acts,” Cortez was severely reprimanded in the Order of the Day and imprisoned for 15 days in the internal jail of the military police headquarters.⁶⁹ This case, like earlier evidence that some members of the police, national guard, and army soldiers were involved in capoeira, indicates that at the level of the street the social division between the forces of order and the forces of disruption was more like a permeable membrane than a solid barrier.

Finally, soon after the proclamation of the republic in November 1889, Police Chief João Batista Sampaio Ferraz launched a sustained effort against the capoeira gangs. Given discretionary powers to deal with the problem by Provisional President Deodoro da Fonseca himself, Ferraz summarily deported many of those arrested in several dragnets to the prison colony on Fernando de Noronha Island, effectively breaking the strength of the maltas.⁷⁰ Moreover, the new Penal Code of the republic, decreed in October 1890 to replace the 1830 Criminal Code, for the first time included a provision that specifically prohibited “practicing, in the streets and public squares, the exercise of agility and corporal dexterity known by the term capoeiragem.” Although capoeira criminality in Rio did not end swiftly and completely, it was greatly reduced as a threat to public order by the 1890s, to be subsequently maintained and eventually revived primarily as a form of martial art skill and public performance.⁷¹

Some Final Considerations

To assess the broader significance of capoeira activity in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, and of police efforts to control it, we might first return to the theme of institutional transition and consolidation during the independence era from 1808 through the 1820s, and particularly following the abdication of Emperor Pedro I in 1831. These examples of police operations provide important hints for better understanding the development of Brazil’s institutions and the evolving relationship of the state to society through the nineteenth century.⁷² A fundamental aspect of this process is the penetration of the state not only into the streets and public squares of the city, but also into the relations of master with slave, so basic in the social development of Brazil. Police and their practices in urban areas after independence were the product of the introduction of “modern” institutional forms, as the state assumed some functions of social control formerly left in the hands of the property owners and their private agents.

The liberal reforms of the 1830s, intended to ensure due process and limit arbitrary and excessive punishment, were not always enforced in practice or maintained in police regulations, when authorities decided that more forceful means of repression were necessary. Not legally defined as a crime until 1890, capoeira continued to be dealt with in the nonjudicial realm of “correction” established in the 1808 order, which specified and codified the customary role of the police as disciplinary agent. The liberal restrictions were honored mainly in the breach, the punitive power of the police was later formally restored, and slave owners retained considerable discretion over their human property. Only with the demise of slavery itself did the state assume full authority and responsibility for disciplining those who violated acceptable norms of public behavior. The formal criminalization of capoeira in the 1890 Penal Code marks the culmination of this process of expansion of state authority, whether or not it led to the extermination of capoeira gangs.

This examination of capoeira also suggests the need to reconsider some commonly held notions regarding urban slavery, and slaves as part of the larger society. Despite institutional developments reinforcing the traditional control of the dominators over the dominated, the very persistence of capoeira would suggest that there were aspects of life in Rio de Janeiro that those in charge could not control. Not only was the private world of interpersonal relations inside the residential house beyond the normal purview of police, but there were public places and social networks involving both slave and free people, what we might call social space, that existed outside the exercise of public power. Capoeira activity can be seen as a problem of social control and public security, or as a successful technique of resistance and establishing relative autonomy, depending on one’s point of view. It stands out as common and recurrent among the various methods of resistance used by the slaves of Rio de Janeiro, which ranged from work slowdowns, which should be seen as the most available and direct way of resisting forced labor, to escape and the formation of runaway slave communities on the outskirts of the city, to outright armed rebellion, even if on a small scale and always repressed by security forces.⁷³

Because slavery is universally condemned in the modern world, it is common and understandable for those who study the institution to speak positively of any evidence of defense, counterattack, and rebellion by slaves as justifiable resistance to an intolerable condition. Joining capoeira gangs, defending their territory, attacking members of the free population, and actively engaging in battles with the police are examples of such activity. It is less common for historians to comment approvingly on gang violence and criminal acts committed by free people. If enslavement is an automatic rationale for resistance, nonslave status just as automatically eliminates that particular justification for breaking the rules.

What we can glean from Rio police records on the capoeira phenomenon calls into question the idea of courageous resistance by slaves in contrast to criminal elements of the free population disturbing the peace and attacking law-abiding citizens. The police authorities of Rio de Janeiro had little reason to make such a distinction. For them members of capoeira gangs were dangerous thugs, to be repressed wherever and to the extent possible. In the context of the time, and from the perspective of those who made the rules and enforced them, capoeira activity was not a slave problem, but a public security problem. When the culprit was a slave, as was more often the case in the first half of the nineteenth century, the lash and the dungeon were available as punishment, if not deterrent. For free capoeiras, who became proportionally more numerous after midcentury, impressment into military service or simple imprisonment were alternatives, as was punishment for those acts prohibited in laws and ordinances, from vagrancy to murder. After the 1860s, capoeira continued to be a major concern of the police, but was seldom listed as a specific reason for arrest, in apparent recognition that there was no legal basis for such detentions. It is likely, however, that a good number of those arrested for such public order crimes as illegal weapons possession, vagrancy, curfew violation, disorderly conduct, and unspecified “investigation,” as well as physical injury, might also have been involved in capoeira, even if it was no longer specified as a separate offense.

If today we can think of slave capoeiras as freedom fighters resisting oppression, what are we to make of their companions who were not slaves? Posing the issue in this way leads to the consideration of the urban underclass of nineteenth-century Brazil as a social category that extended across the legal boundary of slave and free, the racial spectrum of black to white, and the ethnic division of African and Brazilian. Recognizing that slavery was a uniquely limiting and marking condition that only those in bondage could know, we might also suggest that in their common experience in the urban environment slaves shared much with their cohorts who could not legally be sold or whipped, but who were considered by the coercive arm of the emerging state to be in a similarly hostile relationship with the dominant class.

Capoeira is present in police and prison records as a problem of control and regulation. That surface revealed by the “pen of the police clerk,” however, gives little more than suggestive indications of how the organization and practice of capoeira—the gangs and their activity—functioned in the larger context. A key to understanding capoeira activity as a social phenomenon is the relationship between the gangs and the society in which they operated, including slaves, the free black and mixed population, and the free poor generally; and here our data are sorely inadequate. It would also be helpful to know more about what capoeiras did when not hanging out on the street. On these matters the fragments of information available come mainly from the enemies of the capoeiras, and from folkloric tradition. The former had every interest in a negative assessment, and the latter often has as much to do with the biases of the present as with historical reality in its ambiguous complexity. As in so many other themes in social history, the very nature of the documentary record hides, filters, or distorts what we would like to know.

Clearly, whatever the capoeiras did should be interpreted broadly as social activity rather than narrowly as criminal behavior. It is less clear where such speculation should lead. Two possible approaches are the romanticization of capoeiras as an urban version of “social bandits, valiant defenders of oppressed people’s desire to “do their own thing rather than constantly submitting to the oppressive will of the masters and their agents, and the more “structural” view that capoeiras represented a pre-ideological form of class-based resistance.⁷⁴ Such interpretive excursions answer a modern urge to make sense of the past, and both of them might be heuristically fruitful, morally satisfying, and even politically useful. It is by no means certain that either of these explanations would have made much sense to the capoeiras of nineteenth-century Rio, to the police authorities for whom the gangs were such a persistent nemesis, or to the general population of the city. Speculation in a different direction might lead us to suppose that law-abiding slaves and free poor people considered the capoeira gangs to be dangerous and intimidating bullies, as willing to prey on the people who nourished and sheltered them as to strike out against the master class, and whose running battles with police brought repression down on slave, free black and brown, and poor white alike, as authorities struck back in frustration.

The brutal beating of the Mina Graciano in 1836, with which this essay began, provides some of the few suggestions regarding motives and habits of individuals accused of capoeira, and even this case requires careful assessment.⁷⁵ On being called to task by Regent Feijó himself, Justice of the Peace Almeida had an interest in justifying his light treatment of Graciano’s owner, Rombo. Thus, to the extent that “capoeira” became an epithet much like ruffian, hooligan, or—for another generic term common in Brazilian police records—malfeitor, it might have been a useful label for Almeida to include in his recounting of Graciano’s transgressions. This does not mean, of course, that the list of transgressions was necessarily inaccurate. At the same time, the remarkable claim that the slave publicly declared his desire to relieve whites of their stubbornness may also have been true. If so, it was added reason for the authorities to let his owner get away with beating Graciano within an inch of his life.

Author notes