1904 week of civil disorder in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The Vaccine Revolt () 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 the 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 vaccinatation 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 payment of fines for 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. Given the systematic repression and extinguished 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.
Relying on a large majority in Congress, Rodrigues Alves soon took action to make the sanitation and urban reform works in the city viable. He attributed the task of reforming the port, with discretionary powers and resources, to Lauro Müller, then Minister of Industry, Transport and Public Works. The budget law of 30 December 1902 provided the Ministry of Transport with substantial resources, destined for the restructuring and expansion works of the port, which, in addition to modernizing the existing pier, intended to expand the port facilities of Prainha, passing through Praia de São Cristóvão, to Ponta do Caju. The same law authorized the issuance of bonds aiming at increasing the capital intended for investment. It also released any loan that came to be arranged by the contractors in charge of the works, under any terms and with any credit agencies, and even agreed with the demolitions and construction of works parallel to the pier, surrounding or connected to the port facilities, which ensured storage and free and rapid circulation of exchanged goods.
Despite being the most important in the country and one of the busiest in the Americas at the time, the port of Rio de Janeiro still had an old-fashioned and restricted structure, incompatible with its fundamental role in Brazilian economic activity. The limits of the pier and the shallow depth prevented the docking of large international transatlantic ships, which were anchored offshore, forcing a complicated, time-consuming and costly system of transhipment of goods and passengers to smaller vessels. Once the goods were transported to land, the problems continued. The space on the docks was too small to store items intended for the national and international market. The products had to be taken to the railway junctions, which connected Rio de Janeiro to the rest of the country, in coordination with cabotage navigation. The city streets, however, were still colonial alleys, narrow, tortuous, dark and with very steep slopes. Thus, the improvement of the port of Rio de Janeiro also implied a broad urban reform.
Urban reform.
Engineer Pereira Passos was nominated as mayor of the Federal District to carry out the necessary reforms. Knowing the extent and urgency of the works he had to carry out and prefiguring the resistance and reactions of the population to the demolitions, Passos demanded full freedom of action to accept the position, without being subject to legal, budgetary or material embarrassments. Rodrigues Alves, through the law of 29 December 1902, created a new statute of municipal organization for the Federal District, attributing broad powers to the mayor.
The law foresaw that the judicial, federal or local authorities could not revoke administrative measures and acts of the municipality, nor grant possessory interdicts against acts of the municipal government exercised for imperative reasons; it ended any bureaucratic control or postponement of the reforms and, in cases of demolition, eviction or interdiction, there would be only one notice posted in the place, providing for penalties against disobedience; it also provided for the eviction of residents in the buildings to be demolished, as well as the removal of their furniture and belongings, which would be done by the police.
At the same time that he led the works, Pereira Passos also took a series of measures aimed at prohibiting and changing the forms of work, leisure and sociability considered incompatible with a cosmopolitan and modern capital. He banned stray dogs and dairy cows from the streets; ordered the beggars to be collected in asylums; prohibited the cultivation of vegetable gardens and grasslands, the raising of pigs, the itinerant sale of lottery tickets; he also ordered people not to spit on the streets and inside vehicles, not to urinate outside urinals, and not to fly kites.
The works on the port were contracted in 1903 with the English firm C. H. Walker, which had built the docks in Buenos Aires, and began in March 1904, comprising in its first part the 600-meter stretch that went from the Mangue to the Gamboa pier. Complementary works on Avenida Central, Avenida do Cais (now Avenida Rodrigues Alves) and the Mangue canal were the responsibility of the federal government itself, under the direction of a commission whose chief engineer was Paulo de Frontin. The expropriations for the construction of the new avenue began in December 1903 and the demolitions in February 1904, when work on the Mangue canal also began. At the same time, the city government was in charge of widening some downtown streets.
By November 1904, the date of the uprising, the demolition of houses to open up Avenida Central had ended and 16 of the new buildings were under construction. The avenue's central axis was inaugurated on 7 September, amidst large parties, already with tram service and electric lighting. The demolition of around 640 buildings had torn, through the most inhabited part of the city, a corridor that ran from the beach to the Passeio Público. Part of the rubble still covered the sides of the avenue. On the same date, the streets of Acre (formerly Prainha), São Bento, Visconde de Inhaúma, Assembleia and Sete de Setembro were being widened. Rua do Sacramento was extended to Avenida Marechal Floriano Peixoto, with the new part named Avenida Passos. The demolition of the old buildings, by then almost all converted into boarding houses and tenements, caused a housing crisis that raised rents and pressured the popular classes towards the suburbs and up the hills that surround the city.
Sanitation measures.
In the early 1900s, Rio de Janeiro was an endemic focus for several diseases, including yellow fever, typhoid fever, malaria, smallpox, bubonic plague and tuberculosis. Of these, yellow fever and smallpox caused the greatest number of victims in the capital. The crews and passengers arriving at the port often did not even get off the ships to avoid contracting such diseases. So that the campaign to attract capital, immigrants, technicians and foreign equipment with the improvement of the port could be effectively carried out, it was essential to proceed with the sanitation of the city. Thus, sanitation in Rio de Janeiro maintained an intimate relationship with the improvement of the port and also with urban reform, since the sanitation problem was considered to depend on an architectural remodeling of the city and, consequently, the opening of double access roads and airy communications, replacing the narrow streets, overloaded with intense traffic, without enough ventilation, without trees and flanked by buildings that were considered unhygienic.
Doctor Oswaldo Cruz was in charge of sanitation in the city, assuming the General Directorate of Public Health (DGSP) with the intention of tackling yellow fever, smallpox and the bubonic plague. To this end, he demanded from Rodrigues Alves the most complete freedom of action, in addition to resources for the application of his measures. In 1904, the sanitary services were reformed, suppressing the dual attributions between the municipal and federal governments after the approval of a bill that had already been in process since the previous year. Thus, the DGSP could invade, inspect and demolish houses and buildings, in addition to having a special forum, with a specially appointed judge to resolve issues and overcome resistance.
First, Oswaldo Cruz faced yellow fever, tackling the disease by eliminating mosquitoes and isolating patients in hospitals. He structured his campaign on military bases, using legal instruments of coercion and, to a lesser extent, means of persuasion, such as the "Councils to the People",