The penal colony of Clevelândia, located in the current district of Clevelândia do Norte, Amapá, functioned from 1924 to 1926 in the extreme north of Brazil, bordering French Guiana. It was installed in the "Cleveland Colonial Nucleus", an agricultural colony founded in 1922, and received a total of prisoners that ranged from 946 to 1,630 individuals. The prisoners included enemies of president Artur Bernardes' government and common prisoners. They came from Paraná, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Amazonas and Pará. In addition to these, the colony's population was made up of Brazilian Army guards, employees, traders and settlers, the last three totaled 204 inhabitants at the end of 1926. At the beginning of 1927, the Washington Luís administration allowed the prisoners to return.

Anarchism was an influential contributor to the social politics of the First Brazilian Republic. During the epoch of mass migrations of European labourers at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, anarchist ideas started to spread, particularly amongst the country’s labour movement. Along with the labour migrants, many Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German political exiles arrived, many holding anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist ideas. Some did not come as exiles but rather as a type of political entrepreneur, including Giovanni Rossi's anarchist commune, the Cecília Colony, which lasted few years but at one point consisted of 200 individuals.