The Vaccine Revolt (Portuguese: Revolta da Vacina) was a popular riot that took place between 10 and 16 November 1904 in the city of Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil. Its immediate pretext was a law that made vaccination against smallpox compulsory, but it is also associated with deeper causes, such as the urban reforms being carried out by mayor Pereira Passos and the sanitation campaigns led by physician Oswaldo Cruz. At the beginning of the 20th century, the urban planning of the city of Rio de Janeiro, inherited from a colonial period and the Brazilian Empire, no longer matched its status as a capital and center of economic activities. In addition, the city suffered from serious public health problems. Diseases such as smallpox, bubonic plague and yellow fever ravaged the population and worried the authorities. In order to modernize the city and control such epidemics, president Rodrigues Alves initiated a series of urban and sanitary reforms that changed the city's geography and the daily life of its population. The architectural changes in the city were the responsibility of engineer Pereira Passos, appointed mayor of the then Federal District. Streets were widened, tenements were destroyed and the poor were removed from their former homes. Doctor Oswaldo Cruz, who took over the General Directorate of Public Health in 1903, was responsible for the sanitation campaign in the city, which aimed to eradicate epidemics. To this end, in June 1904, the government proposed a law that made vaccination mandatory. The law generated heated debates between legislators and the population, and, despite a strong opposition campaign, was approved on 31 October. The trigger for the revolt was the publication of a bill to regulate the application of the mandatory vaccine in the newspaper A Notícia, on 9 November 1904. The bill would create a requirement of proof of vaccination for enrollment in schools, obtaining jobs, traveling, getting accommodations, and weddings. It also provided for the imposition of fines on those who resisted vaccination. When the proposal leaked to the press, the indignant and upset people started a series of conflicts and demonstrations that lasted for about a week. Although mandatory vaccination triggered the revolt, protests soon began to target public services in general and government representatives, in particular against repressive forces. A group of florianist and positivist soldiers, with the support of some civil sectors, tried to take advantage of popular discontent to carry out a coup d'état in the early hours of 14 to 15 November, which, however, was defeated. On 16 November, a state of emergency was decreed and mandatory vaccination was suspended. With systematic repression and extinguishment of the triggering cause, the movement ebbed. In the repression that ensued, police forces arrested a number of suspects and individuals considered to be troublemakers, regardless of whether they were involved in the revolt or not. The total balance was 945 people arrested on Ilha das Cobras, 30 dead, 110 injured, and 461 deported to the remote state of Acre.
Background
At the turn of the 19th century, at the same time as the abolitionist movements that put an end to slavery and the monarchy took place, in addition to the revolts that convulsed the first years of the First Brazilian Republic, large contingents of European immigrants and former slaves from the decaying coffee producing zones flocked to Rio de Janeiro, then capital of Brazil. The city underwent a process of industrialization and population growth, rising from 522,651 to 811,444 inhabitants between 1890 and 1906. The pressure for housing led the owners of the large imperial and colonial buildings, which occupied the central region of the city, to divide them internally into several cubicles, transforming them into boarding houses and tenements (cortiços) and renting them out to entire families. The precarious sanitary conditions favored the proliferation of diseases such as the bubonic plague, smallpox and yellow fever, endemic in Rio de Janeiro, especially in the poorest regions. Epidemics gave Rio de Janeiro the reputation of being a plague-ridden and deadly city, driving away foreigners, fearful of contracting diseases, and the urban planning inherited from the colonial period and the Brazilian Empire no longer matched its condition as the capital and center of economic activities in Brazil of that period. In this context, Rodrigues Alves was inaugurated president of Brazil in November 1902. In his first message to Congress, Alves declared that problems in the capital affected and disturbed national development as a whole, and adopted sanitation and improvement of the port of Rio de Janeiro as priorities for his government. Rodrigues Alves had inherited a temporarily stabilized economy from Campos Sales after the Encilhamento crisis, thanks to the recovery of coffee prices on the international market and Sales' austere and unpopular financial policy. Without significantly changing the financial policy of his predecessor, Rodrigues Alves embarked on an intensive program of public works, financed by external resources, which managed to start the economic recovery.
Causes of the revolt
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