The Brazilian federation constituted, already in 1891, an old aspiration of the political elites as a form of accommodating and generating important economic and regional diversities. Consecrated in the first republican Constitution, in accordance with the North-American model, the federation, in practice, implied excessive autonomyy of state governments, which rapidly consolidated themselves as political oligarchies. The dispute for federal resources became, in time, a conflict between states, which did not feel embarrassment in using federal forces, momentarily under their control, to oust enemies in control of other states. However, this arrangement would only be broken when a dissension reached the criteria for the occupation of the Presidency of the Republic. A coalition of state forces unsatisfied with the result of presidential elections was the main agent of the 1930 Revolution, which would suspend for over 15 years states' autonomies.