Ruy Barbosa

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Ruy Barbosa de Oliveira
Ruy Barbosa
Born	November 5, 1849 Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
Died	March 1, 1923 Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Occupation	Writer, jurist, politician, diplomat

Ruy Barbosa, born Ruy Barbosa de Oliveira in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, on 5th November 1849, and died in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 1st March 1923. A famous writer, jurist, and politician, he was a federal representative, senator, minister of finances and taxation, and diplomat. For his distinguished participation in the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907), "peace conference" of the Hague (1907), he earned the nickname "Eagle of the Hague". He ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Brazil in 1910 and again in 1919.

Ruy Barbosa gave his first public speech for the abolition of slavery when he was 19. For the rest of his life he remained an uncompromising defender of civil liberties. Slavery in Brazil was finally abolished by the Lei Áurea ("Golden Law") in 1888. Part of Barbosa's legacy to history is that he authorised, as minister of finance in 1890, the destruction of most government records relating to slavery.^[1]

Barbosa's liberal ideas were influential in drafting the first republican constitution (1891). He was a supporter of fiat money, as opposed to a gold standard in Brazil. During his term as minister of finances, he implemented far-reaching reforms of Brazil's financial regime, instituting a vigorously expansionist monetary policy. The result was chaos and instability: the so-called fiat experiment was a dismal failure. An orthodox backlash followed under the Murtinho program later in the decade.

[edit] Notes

^ Population, Citizenship and Human Rights in Brazil: Elements for a System of Indicators, paper at International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) conference 2005 accessed at [1] March 29, 2007

[edit] Further reading

Turner, C. W. (1945). Ruy Barbosa: Brazilian crusader for the essential freedoms. New York, Abingdon-Cokesbury Press. - reissue (2005) Kessinger Publishing, ISBN 1419104241