“The Bandeirantes of Freedom”: The Prestes Column and the Myth of Brazil's Interior, 1924–30

This paper offers a new perspective on one of the most mythologized events in Brazilian history. From 1924 to 1927, a group of junior army officers led by Luiz Carlos Prestes marched nearly 25,000 kilometers across Brazil’s vast interior regions. The Prestes Column did not succeed in bringing down the government, but it captivated national attention and galvanized momentum for what would soon become the Revolution of 1930. While existing scholarship treats the Column’s passage through the interior as a backdrop to the rebellion, I focus on the interior regions themselves, exploring how the country’s so-called ‘backlands’ served as both a place and a concept in the formation of modern Brazil.

An interior perspective is vital because the mythology of the Prestes Column drew directly from a myopic refashioning of the interior: rebel leaders launched political careers based on their actions in the backlands and some of Brazil's greatest writers memorialized the march amongst the rural masses. In this prevailing narrative, the rebels ventured into the interior, discovered poverty at every step, and turned the injustices they witnessed into a rallying cry of their movement. As rebel leader Miguel Costa later described, they had been “the bandeirantesof freedom”—an invocation of the colonial-era slaving excursions into Brazil’s interior.

Yet this mythic status overlooks the fact that the rebels committed many violent acts against the interior populations they claimed to be liberating, and also that their rhetoric during and after the march served to reinforce, rather than reverse, the stigma of a backwards and helpless interior. By studying both how this mythology came to be and also what that process rendered invisible, my history of the Prestes Column offers a new interpretation of the interior’s role in 20^thcentury Brazil.