Who was Tiradentes?

A man without a patron

In the 1700s Brazil was a Portuguese colony, and its richest corner was Minas Gerais, the “General Mines,” where gold had turned up in the 1690s. Joaquim José da Silva Xavier was born there in 1746, on a farm near the town of São João del-Rei, and was orphaned young. He had no money and no patron, and in a colony that ran on favors, that mattered.

He tried his luck in the gold fields, without success. So he learned a trade with his hands: pulling rotten teeth and fitting replacements carved from bone. The work gave him the nickname that outlived his real name, Tiradentes, the tooth-puller.

The lowest officer in the regiment

In 1775 he joined the Dragoons of Minas, the captaincy’s cavalry, as an alferes, an ensign. It was the bottom rung of the officer ladder, below lieutenant and captain. He never climbed it. Younger comrades were promoted past him, and years later, under questioning, he said he had acted in despair after being passed over four times.

He was restless rather than idle. In 1787 and 1788 he spent months in Rio de Janeiro, the colonial capital, and gave the viceroy plans to pipe the water of three streams, the Andaraí, the Catete and the Maracanã, into the city. The plans went nowhere.

The man who talked too much

Back in Minas, the gold was running thin and the Crown was threatening the derrama, a forced levy to cover years of unpaid gold tax. Tiradentes told anyone who would listen that the land was rich and its people poor because the wealth was shipped abroad. He carried around a French book, the collected laws of the new American states, printed in 1778, and pestered people to translate it. One acquaintance handed the volumes back and told everyone to keep away from that madman.

Wealthier men were listening. Poets, priests and colonels were planning a republic for Minas, the plot Brazilians call the Inconfidência Mineira, and the ensign became its loudest voice.

Arrest, confession, gallows

An informer gave the plot away in March 1789. Tiradentes was arrested in Rio on May 10, hiding in a house on the Rua dos Latoeiros. He denied everything at three interrogations; at the fourth, in January 1790, he said the whole plan had been his. In April 1792 a royal court sentenced eleven men to hang, but a letter from Queen Maria I of Portugal spared ten. He was the one left out, and he was hanged in Rio on April 21, 1792, at 45.

Why Brazil remembers him

After independence in 1822, Brazil became an empire ruled by Maria I’s grandson and then her great-grandson, and the ensign was best forgotten. The republicans who ended the monarchy in 1889 thought otherwise. In January 1890 they made April 21 a national day in his name, and artists gave him a bearded, long-haired face modeled on Christ, though no one had painted him in life. A 1965 law named him the civic patron of the nation.

Today his face is on the five-centavo coin, a colonial town in Minas bears his name, and April 21 is a public holiday. The hero was built by the Republic. The man was an ensign with no patron who could not keep quiet.