Heróis indesejáveis: a Guerra do Paraguai e os Voluntários da Pátria nas narrativas da imprensa pernambucana

Abstract

The Paraguayan War, due to its continental scale, required a military contingent beyond the National Guard and the official Brazilian Army. In this context, the “Volunteers of the Homeland” campaign was launched, aiming to enlist civilians. However, many individuals were hesitant to participate in a war on behalf of an Empire with which they did not identify. To encourage voluntary service, incentives were promised, and a sense of patriotic duty was cultivated. For this reason, the present work aims to map recent articles published between 2018 and 2023 on the recruitment of the Volunteers of the Homeland; to identify the strategies used for the recruitment of the Volunteers of the Homeland in Pernambuco; and to investigate how the recruitment of the Volunteers of the Homeland was covered by the newspapers of the time. To this end, we theoretically base our research on the concept of Social Control, discussed by Pedro Oliver Olmo (2005), and on the work "Tributo de Sangue" by Peter Beattie (2009), which analyzes forced recruitment during the war against Paraguay. Methodologically, we conducted a bibliographical research following the procedure of Lakatos and Marconi (2003), in the databases Periódicos CAPES, SciELO Brasil, and Google Scholar, in addition to the analysis of printed sources, as discussed by Tânia de Luca (2008), in the newspapers Diário de Pernambuco and Jornal do Recife, available in the Digital Library of the National Library. The main results of the research indicate that as new contingents of Volunteers were sent to the war, the honors and space dedicated in the newspapers to their participation in the war diminished.