Penal colony of Clevelândia

The penal colony of Clevelândia, located in the current district of Clevelândia do Norte, Amapá, functioned from 1924 to 1926 in the extreme north of Brazil, bordering French Guiana. It was installed in the "Cleveland Colonial Nucleus", an agricultural colony founded in 1922, and received a total of 946 to 1,630 prisoners. They included enemies of president Artur Bernardes' government (tenentist rebels, militant workers and anarchists) and common prisoners (criminals from the "dregs of society" and the homeless, capoeiras, and minors caught on the streets). They came from Paraná, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Amazonas and Pará. In addition to these, the colony's population was made up of Brazilian Army guards, employees, traders and settlers, the last three totaling 204 inhabitants at the end of 1926. At the beginning of 1927, the Washington Luís administration allowed the prisoners to return.

The original agricultural colony was already losing its inhabitants to neighboring Martinica (present-day Oiapoque) in 1924, when the Bernardes government needed a remote and isolated prison. In response to the tenentist military revolts, the government had imposed a state of emergency and overcrowded prisons. Miguel Calmon, then Minister of Agriculture, offered the location, as it was the most remote agricultural colony in the country. This has precedents in the governments of Floriano Peixoto, who deported prisoners to the Amazon, and Rodrigues Alves, in the period after the Vaccine Revolt, as well as in other penal colonies around the world. The first ship with prisoners arrived at the mouth of the Oyapock River on 26 December 1924.

The sudden expansion of the colony's population overloaded the agricultural center's infrastructure. Testimonies from prisoners recorded precarious accommodation and usually unpaid labor in hot, humid and unhealthy conditions, as well as threat of violence from guards and some common criminals. The prison's workforce carried wooden logs to the sawmill, weeded the fields, built public facilities and worked in the pau-rosa mills. Military personnel who swore loyalty to the government performed technical and bureaucratic functions. In June 1925, soldiers from the Public Force of São Paulo, defeated in the battle of Catanduvas during the Paraná Campaign, brought an epidemic of shigellosis, which killed hundreds of prisoners along with other diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. According to the official report Journey to the Cleveland Colonial Nucleus, out of 946 prisoners, 491 died and 262 escaped.

Press censorship suppressed the matter until the first months of 1927, when the prisoners returned and the penal colony became a front page topic, described as a "green hell" by the opposition and a "very common agricultural colony" by government supporters. Its history was permanently associated with president Artur Bernardes. It was remembered by anarchists and forgotten by historiography, for which it became the subject of its first major study only in 1991. Historians have characterized the penal colony as a forced labor camp or even as a concentration camp.