The Port of Torres

How the imperial project of the Port of Torres was dismantled by the nascent Republic and diverted by the oligarchies.

How the imperial project for the Port of Torres was dismantled by the new Republic and diverted by the oligarchies.

> "Origin [Ursprung] is an entirely historical category, which has nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin does not designate the coming-into-being of what has sprung forth, but rather what emerges out of becoming and decline. Origin is a qualitative time in which present, past and future meet and form a constellation."

> Walter Benjamin

1.0 Introduction

A history of Brazil told through great events and heroic figures conceals the anatomy of power and its disorders. That anatomy shows itself in the details — in the projects that were conceived, and above all in those that were aborted or turned from their purpose. The Port of Torres, in Rio Grande do Sul, is one such case. Far from a footnote in the history of national infrastructure, the Torres project, conceived under the Empire, is a powerful emblem of a strategic vision for Brazil that the new Republic dismantled and perverted. Pedro II, a monarch with a long view of development and national integration, saw in Torres, by its geography, a pillar of a balanced and prosperous country. The passage from Empire to Republic was not only a change of political regime; it was a deep change in the logic by which the State and its resources were managed. The Port of Torres does not merely illustrate that change. In its trajectory of abandonment and diversion, it shows how the early Republic turned strategic projects of national development into mechanisms of corruption and of oligarchic concentration — paving the way for the regional and social inequalities that persist to this day.

1.1 The imperial dream — Torres as national strategy

Dom Pedro II's vision for Brazil went well beyond maintaining the status quo. An enthusiast of scientific and technological progress, the Emperor understood what infrastructure meant for the integration of a country of continental size. Asked once why the country was called an Empire, he pointed to its geographical extent. His project for the Port of Torres was no regional whim; it was a key piece in a national strategy of balanced development, meant to keep both the South and the North connected and prosperous.

Torres was crucial for several geographical and economic reasons. On the northern coast of Rio Grande do Sul, it offered direct access to the Atlantic, bypassing the complex and often impassable Lagoa dos Patos, which hindered navigation and the outflow of the state's production. That direct access would not only ease internal trade; it would open a strategic door to the markets of the River Plate — Argentina and Uruguay — strengthening Brazil's position in the region and diversifying its commercial routes.

The conception of Torres contrasts sharply with the development of other ports of the period. Santos was important, but from its origin it served narrower, regional interests: the outflow of São Paulo coffee. Torres represented a project of State, with a vision of integration and development that would benefit a vast region — including the interior of Rio Grande do Sul and potentially parts of Santa Catarina, linking them to the federal capital. It was a modern project, made for the future, seeking to break with the colonial logic of the port as a mere entrepôt and to create an autonomous pole of development. The documentation of the time, in 1888, shows the project already at an advanced stage of study. Its interruption with the Proclamation of the Republic was not a pause but a fundamental diversion, one that would permanently alter the economic and political geography of Brazil. And at the same time it reveals the disorders of the new regime: the country's development narrowed to the regionalism of those who governed it.

1.2 Deodoro, and the betrayal of a national project

The Marshal is a complex figure and, ironically, a personal friend of Dom Pedro II. Deodoro, a career soldier, had served the Empire loyally for decades. His part in the fall of the monarchy is usually attributed to a series of factors: pressure from military and republican sectors, discontent with imperial policy, and, to some degree, personal ambition and personal grievance. His rise to power marked not only the end of a regime but a deep personal betrayal — of Pedro II, and of the projects of national integration. Under Deodoro, the Port of Torres, which represented an investment in the future of the country as a whole, was turned into political currency.

1.3 Deodoro's allies and the distribution of privileges

Deodoro, ailing, recalls the inert heart of the baroque prince suffering from acedia. The frailty of the Marshal in power let him be dominated by the corrupt men of the Empire, whose ambition now reached into the new Republic. Those groups, hungry for power and wealth, came quickly to the new government, seeking concessions and favours that would guarantee them exorbitant profits at public expense. The case of the Port of Torres is the original example of that distribution of privileges — and original here refers to Benjamin's category of Origin. In 1891, Deodoro's government granted the construction and operation of the Port of Torres, together with a railway that would connect it to the interior, to a private consortium. That concession, made at derisory prices and with guarantees of heavy government financing, was in practice a plundering of the public treasury.

The mechanism was simple and perverse: the State would finance the work and assume the risks and the initial costs, while future profits would be privatised and pocketed by the concessionaires. There was no genuine interest in developing national infrastructure — only in appropriating public resources for private enrichment. This original practice would become part of the DNA of the Republic, showing the absence of a project of State and the prevalence of particular interests over the common good. The Torres concession, in that context, was not an isolated act but part of a series of measures meant to consolidate the power of an ambitious elite that saw the State as an inexhaustible source of resources to be exploited.

1.4 Corruption and the coup of 3 November 1891

The unchecked distribution of privileges and the general corruption under Deodoro's government did not pass unnoticed. The National Congress, incipient and with frailties of its own, tried to react. Seeking greater transparency and accountability, parliamentarians began to move toward a Law of Responsibility. It was meant to punish the President of the Republic for financial and administrative crimes, establishing mechanisms of control over the Executive and curbing abuses that were becoming ever more evident.

Deodoro's answer to that attempt at accountability was brutal and authoritarian. On 3 November 1891 he dissolved the National Congress and decreed a state of siege, in a plain coup d'état. That act of force revealed the darkest face of the young Republic: intolerance of criticism, and a readiness to use violence to hold power and protect the interests of a corrupt elite. Deodoro's authoritarianism was not merely a trait of his character; it was a direct answer to the threat that his acts, and those of his allies, might be investigated and punished.

And yet the corruption he tried to bury with the coup was, ironically, among the chief causes of his fall. The unpopularity of his measures and the resistance of sectors of the Navy and the Army, which would not accept the closing of Congress, forced his resignation on 23 November 1891 — twenty days after the coup. The Republic was thus born marked by corruption and by authoritarianism: a legacy that would prove durable.

1.5 The transfer of monarchical privilege to the paulistas

Deodoro's fall opened the way for his vice-president, Floriano Peixoto, to take the office. Floriano, known as the Iron Marshal, took an ambiguous stance toward the contracts and concessions signed by his predecessor. He revoked some of Deodoro's most unpopular measures, but the logic of favouring particular groups and of concentrating economic power persisted — it only changed hands, and changed its geography.

It is in that context that a decisive displacement can be observed: the Port of Torres project, already compromised by the corrupt concession of 1891, is definitively passed over in favour of the Port of Santos. The coffee planters, aggrieved by an abolition that came without indemnity, saw in the Republic a chance to recover their privileges and their influence. Santos already had a project under way, but it received an unprecedented impulse under the new republican administration, which had passed into paulista hands. Its inauguration on 2 February 1892, only months after Deodoro's fall, symbolised the country's new direction. With two hundred and sixty metres of masonry quay, Santos stood for modernity and efficiency — and, above all, for the consolidation of paulista hegemony.

The crucial question is why Santos won and Torres lost. The answer lies in politics. Santos was the port of coffee, the product that sustained the paulista economy and, with it, the power of the coffee oligarchy then rising to control of the Republic. Investment in Santos was not a national project but a regional one, made national by the political and economic weight of São Paulo. Torres, by contrast, represented a broader integration, benefiting Rio Grande do Sul and other regions, and was not aligned with the immediate interests of the new dominant elite. To prioritise Santos over Torres was therefore a deliberate political choice, one that sealed the fate of both regions and redrew the economic map of Brazil.

1.6 Torres and Santos, compared

The comparison between the fates of the two ports is essential to understanding the predatory logic of the First Republic. The Torres project, as conceived under the Empire, aimed at a development that would benefit the country nationally, joining the South to the centre, to Atlantic commerce and to the markets of the River Plate. It was a vision of balance, and of strengthening the several regions of the federation.

By contrast, the accelerated development of Santos under the Republic, alongside the port of Rio de Janeiro, was a project that benefited almost exclusively São Paulo and the coffee oligarchy that controlled the State. Santos became the principal outlet for coffee, concentrating the investment and infrastructure that consolidated paulista economic and political hegemony.

The Republic's political choice was clear: instead of promoting a distributed and equitable development, it concentrated resources and power in a single region. Paulista profit had to be maximised, and carrying the coffee to the neighbouring port of Rio de Janeiro would have meant a reduction they found unacceptable.

That decision had a devastating economic impact on Rio Grande do Sul, which found itself marginalised, its port and commercial potential severely compromised. The economic hollowing-out of the state, the setting aside of its strategic projects, and the perception that central power served specific regional interests were maintained even — and especially — after the Pacification of the Federalist Revolution by Prudente de Morais. As we shall see, the idea of a federation stayed on paper: an ornament for political speeches with no national project behind them.

1.7 The legacy — Torres as an emblem of republican sectarianism

The Port of Torres remained an unkept promise, a silent witness to a strategic vision sacrificed on the altar of oligarchic interest. Rio Grande do Sul was left virtually outside the federation in terms of investment and federal attention, handed over to a positivist dictatorship for nearly thirty years, while the centre of power and of resources moved inexorably toward São Paulo.

The concentration of infrastructure and investment in São Paulo was no accident but a deliberate strategy of the paulista group — monarchist and slaveholding — which, ironically, came to dominate the First Republic. That pattern of allocation, in which federal projects disproportionately benefit particular oligarchies, is original in Benjamin's sense. The modernity the Republic promised was in fact a selective modernity, a progress that flowered only where the interests of dominant power could be maximised.

Torres, in this sense, is an emblem of republican sectarianism, of the way the State was captured by elites who put private profit and regional power first. The whole of financial policy was shaped to benefit the new owners of power, from currency manipulation to the Encilhamento. And this must be said precisely, because the loose version is easy to knock down: the indemnity to slave-owners for the abolition of 1888 was proposed and defeated, and in 1890 Rui Barbosa ordered the slavery registers burned, precisely so that no such claim could ever be brought. What happened came afterwards, and was another thing with the same effect: from 1890, an enormous expansion of credit and of currency issue, available to those who already owned property, and an inflation that settled debts contracted earlier in money that no longer bought what it had bought. It was not compensation at the moment of the loss — it was the means by which those who had lost recovered themselves. The indemnity was denied by name and granted by mechanism, and the bill was left with those who had nothing to issue. The legacy is clear: rather than unifying and developing the country evenly, the Republic deepened its inequalities and consolidated a model in which public resources are exploited for the benefit of a few.

1.8 The connection with the perspective of these Cadernos

The history of the Port of Torres is a microcosm, revealing the web of relations that drew the First Republic into its historical form. Its trajectory is bound directly to the essay on coffee and power, showing how paulista hegemony, economic and political, was able to divert federal investment to its own interests at the expense of projects of national reach. Torres set aside in favour of Santos is the materialisation of the rise of coffee power, maximised by the central government, and of its capacity to shape the country's infrastructure in an excluding way.

The marginalisation of Rio Grande do Sul, visible in the abandonment of Torres, is consolidated in the Federalist Revolution. The economic hollowing-out of the state was intensified by a war financed by central power against Rio Grande, in favour of the tyranny of one group among the many republican groups.

The republic of diplomas, discussed further on, also finds its echo here. Who were the engineers and bureaucrats deciding on the viability of Torres or of Santos? They were, in large part, members of the credentialled elite, attached to the centres of power, whose technical decisions frequently masked political and economic choices. Expertise as legitimation shows itself in the technical language used to justify the priority of Santos and the abandonment of Torres. The rhetoric of efficiency and technical progress served to legitimate decisions that were, at bottom, purely political, aimed at centralising power and concentrating wealth in particular hands — disguising the appropriation of public resources under the mantle of technical rationality.

1.9 Torres as a microcosm of the Republic

The saga of the Port of Torres is, in essence, the history of the Brazilian First Republic in miniature. It encapsulates, dramatically and revealingly, all the mechanisms of power and all the disorders that characterised the period.

First, it exposes the endemic financial corruption, from the concessions of 1891 — which turned a development project into a plundering of the treasury — to the Encilhamento, which benefited speculators and above all the paulistas weakened by the loss of slave labour: the indemnity the law refused, delivered by monetary means.

Second, it shows regional exclusion as a policy of State, where benefit to São Paulo meant loss and marginalisation not only for Rio Grande do Sul but for the other Brazilian states, creating imbalances that would perpetuate themselves. Antônio Coelho Rodrigues is an author who records with precision the deleterious effects of an absolute paulista sovereignty, excluding and harming every other region of Brazil.

Third, the history of Torres underlines the authoritarianism inherent in the Republic, evidenced by Deodoro's coup of 1891 — a violent answer to Congress's attempt at accountability. Fourth, it reveals the concentration of power in the hands of regional oligarchies that turned the State to their own interests.

Finally, Torres is a clear example of imperial projects appropriated for oligarchic ends, exposing the contradiction of a regime that presented itself as being for all. Pedro II's strategic vision of an integrated and developed Brazil was perverted, and his projects abandoned to serve an agenda of enrichment and power for the governing group. The Port of Torres, therefore, is not only a port that never was: it is a beacon lighting the shadows at the foundation of the Republic — a blunt reminder of how the dream of a nation can be turned from its purpose by greed and political short-sightedness, presented in the finest of clothing.

1.10 The port that is coming now

A century and a half later, the port is being built — but not at Torres, and not by Brazil.

It is called Porto Meridional, and it is rising on the beach of Arroio Seco, in the municipality of Arroio do Sal, next to Torres — on the same stretch of coast the Empire had studied. It is a terminal of private use, with Chinese investment.

It is worth grasping the scale of that. For some time now China has understood the importance of maritime commerce, and has been building and administering ports across the world: more than a hundred ports in sixty countries, besides operating in Shanghai, the busiest on the planet. Two companies concentrate that presence, COSCO and China Merchants Port Holdings. Alone or in partnership they administer four large ports in Brazil and fifteen more around the Atlantic, from Argentina to the Caribbean and the Panama Canal — and also in Germany, Belgium, Spain, Cameroon and Nigeria. In the Pacific: in Peru, in Mexico, which has ports on both oceans, in Canada and in Australia, besides the national ports of the Pacific basin.

This is not a matter of denunciation, nor of praise: it is a matter of reading the form. The project of a port on the northern coast of Rio Grande do Sul, which the Empire studied and the Republic approved and then hollowed out, was not inviable. It was viable, and it remains so — so much so that it is being built. What changed is who is building it, and with whose money.

And here the post-history returns the question to the beginning. If the port was possible, then what prevented it for a hundred and thirty years was not technique, geography or economics: it was the political decision that it should not be made, taken by those who preferred Santos. What was called inviability was an arrangement. A century and a half later the same work appears — and appears as foreign investment, because those who held the State in their hands, and hold it still, never had any interest in it.