Bento Aranha and the combat press in Northern Brazil (1866-1911)

Abstract

The article discusses the singular career of Bento de Figueiredo Tenreiro Aranha, one of the main publicists working in the press and in the political scenario in the extreme North of the country during the Second Reign and the early decades of the Republic. Acting in both Pará and Amazonas, he was one of the most active journalists living there, idealizing, and directing several periodicals, in addition to working in other newspapers as a true pollinator of ideas, signing hundreds of articles in defense of great social causes and in favor of subaltern people. Based on a meticulous inventory of his writings in the press, literary works and speeches given at the Provincial Assembly of Amazonas, the analysis of his discourse advances in association with a biographical approach revitalized in the historical analysis, unveiling an intellectual and politician ahead of his time. He was guided by the inclusion of (disguised) slavery of indigenous people in the abolitionist debate in which he took part since 1870. As one of the first Republicans, he saw the dawn of the Republic as the realization of a dream soon converted into a nightmare, but he never abandoned his principles and utopias, remaining in combat against what he had  diagnosed as the regime’s “moral decay”. As an advocate of a revolutionary republic along the lines of the one that came up with the French Revolution in 1789, his radical criticism of the republican project victorious on the 15th of November and the leaders of the Republic he soon became a major expression of Jacobinism in the Amazon. Persecuted and excluded by the regime for which he fought so hard, Bento Aranha was unfairly silenced and forgotten, and today he is practically unknown to Brazilian historiography, which is why it is urgent to revisit his ideas and positions.