The judiciary acted as a link between the elites of Bahia and the then -prince regent, playing a relevant role in the consolidation of, started and realized in Bahia after they ended 202 years ago.
On February 16, 1822, when facing tensions that would result in the first conflicts, Dom Pedro established the Council of Prosecutors of the Provinces of Brazil, with attributions to advise the emperor, examine administrative reform projects and defending the interests of the provinces.
Dom Pedro determined that the decree would be executed for the first time by Judge Antonio José Duarte de Araújo Gondim, trusted magistrate of the Bahian elite who was in the Bahian Recôncavo. The goal was to make Bahia the first province to appoint a prosecutor.
The decision reveals an attempt by Dom Pedro to guarantee the adhesion of the magistrates of the Bahia Court of Appeal and the Crown Attorney and Prosecutor, recognizing the need to include Bahia in his political project to effect
This and other unpublished information is part of the “Technical Note on the Participation of the Public Prosecution Service of the State of Bahia, notably the Crown Attorney and Prosecutor, through the Court of Appeal, in the events and events of the Brazil Independence War in Bahia, July 2”.
The document was prepared by the authors of this article, researchers from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), at the request of the Center for the Defense of Historical, Artistic and Cultural Heritage of the Public Prosecution Service of the State of Bahia, coordinated by prosecutor Alan Cedraz Carneiro Santiago.
New research will be carried out with the objective of mapping, in an unprecedented manner and over a year, the sometimes politically ambiguous legal action of the Crown Attorney and Prosecutor.
Initial research points out that, while preserving interests of the slave Bahian elite, he acted in the guarantee of human dignity. In some cases, it made possible demands for citizenship and rights of the enslaved, liberated, poor, indigenous and female population.
In February 1821, for example, at the conflicting conjuncture of adhesion from Bahia to the Portuguese Constitutional Movement of 1820, Judge Luiz Manoel de Moura Cabral, from the Bahia Court of Appeal, reported the subhuman conditions to which hundreds of political prisoners of the Pernambuco Revolution of 1817, imprisoned in the prison of Aljube, in Salvador.
Moura Cabral personally interfered to end the torture and the distribution of damaged foods, as reported by the prisoners themselves, such as Cipriano Barata and Antonio Carlos da Silva Andrada.
Thus, it prevented more political prisoners to be executed and obtained Dom John 6º to sign the annulment of criminal proceedings and the release of the accused.
It does not seem to have been for another reason that Judge Luiz Manoel de Moura Cabral was chosen to preside over the second governing board of Bahia, installed on January 31, 1822. The first board was deposed for being aligned with the attempt to recolonize Brazil by the Lisbon courts.
Moura Cabral played a key role in joining the Bahian elite to the cause of Brazil’s independence and the radicalization of the war against the Portuguese in Bahia. His political action resulted in a manifesto called “Brazilians”, signed by Dom Pedro on August 1, 1822.
In the document, he summoned “brave miners, intrepid Pernambuco defenders of Brazilian freedom” to Bahia: “It is not the cause of a province; it is the cause of Brazil that defends itself in Cabral’s firstborn.” It was the beginning of Brazil’s independence, implemented on July 2, 1823.
