'Squatter' families on public lands were also often ignored, giving peasants another means of survival. However, when railways began to be rapidly snake across the nation, the potential for making profits off of the land seismically increased. From 1907-1914 the entrepreneurial capitalist Percival Farquhar began to engage in a massive construction campaign. Huge waves of immigrants to work for the railroad made an influx into formerly homogeneous regions, profoundly destabilizing the lives of residents as well as of these new arrivals. Violent clashes were common between railroad workers and peasants -- although peasants were forced off of their land to work on the railroads as well.

Diacon calls the forces that brought change to Brazil a "deadly triumvirate" of the state government, the Brazil Railway Company, and the landowners looking for a quick profit (Diacon 59). Even many smaller landowners lost tracts to the powerful railroad companies. Regardless, the patron-client relationship was completely severed because now worker labored directly for the railroad companies, with old landowners effectively betraying their old tenants by contracting them out, acting as brokers. The work on the railroad was hard, and provided none of the benefits of tilling the land in terms of feeding the worker's families. Being a pure 'wage slave' was a relatively new concept to the rural people of the region.

Rural Brazilians looked backward in terms of their religious...

The return of the monarchy was "God's chosen form of government" (Diacon 18). Faith healers and charismatics dominated the movement, not exponents of a coherent political ideology. The Contestado did not see themselves as resisting progress; they saw themselves as resisting evil.
But why, given this lack of a political program, did the state react so violently? The motivation to make money and the threat to the railroad was of course in great part to blame -- but so was the ideology that associated the workers with 'backwardness' in a similar way that native peoples had been associated with savageness. "At the time of the war many Brazilians saw it [the Contestado movement] simply as a movement of crazed peasants that attacked all signs of civilization" (Diacaon140). To those outside of the Contestado movement, it was logical to sell crops for money, not tend cattle as subsistence farmers, it was logical to embrace progress and the end of the patronage system, to adopt a traditional working day; to do otherwise was anarchy (Diacon 92). Phrased in such black-and-white terms, a culture clash of values was perhaps inevitable.

Works Cited

Diacon, Todd A. Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.