How Cacareco the Rhinoceros Won 100,000 Votes in São Paulo’s 1959 Election

In São Paulo’s 1959 municipal election, no politician attracted more support than a candidate who could not possibly take office: Cacareco, a rhinoceros. Around 100,000 voters wrote her name on their ballot papers, turning a protest joke into one of Brazil’s most curious electoral episodes.

How did a rhinoceros end up in the election?

Cacareco was born in Rio de Janeiro and taken to São Paulo for the opening of the city’s zoo, where she quickly became a popular attraction. During the 1959 city councillor campaign, journalist Itaboraí Martins helped launch the idea of symbolically putting the animal forward as an alternative to the politicians.

At the time, voting was done using paper ballot papers, allowing voters to write in names that did not even appear on the official list of candidates. Political dissatisfaction found an easy, humorous and highly visible route to the ballot box through a rhinoceros already familiar to the public.

How many votes did Cacareco receive?

Once the votes had been counted, the result caused a stir: Cacareco received around 100,000 votes, more than any individual human candidate in that contest. This total would have represented an extraordinary vote count, but the votes clearly could not be treated as valid for electing the animal.

The precise figure differs between historical records because the votes cast for the rhinoceros were annulled. Even so, contemporary sources and later accounts broadly point to a total close to or above 100,000, enough to make the case newsworthy and turn it into a political symbol.

Why did so many people choose to vote for her?

Her success did not mean that São Paulo residents genuinely believed a rhinoceros could serve a term in office. Writing “Cacareco” on the ballot paper was a way to express frustration with both the candidates and the political climate, using humour as a collective form of protest.

Several factors gave the demonstration a scale that an ordinary campaign of complaints would have struggled to achieve:

• Cacareco was already well known and liked by visitors to São Paulo Zoo.
• Paper ballot papers allowed people to freely write the name of a person, or even an animal.
• The idea gave dissatisfied voters a light-hearted way to reject the choices available.
• The huge vote total turned an election joke into a protest that was impossible to overlook.

Watch the video shared by the YouTube channel Canal Não Adormeça, which tells the story of the rhinoceros that received 100,000 votes in the City Council election.

Could she really have become a city councillor?

No. Cacareco was never an official candidate and, naturally, met none of the requirements to stand for or hold public office. Votes cast for her were deemed invalid, so the remarkable total did not secure a seat on the City Council or produce any direct electoral outcome.

That did not, however, lessen the episode’s symbolic impact. The fact that an animal received more votes than registered candidates made the scale of voters’ rejection unmistakable and rapidly took the name Cacareco far beyond the zoo’s boundaries.

How did Cacareco become a symbol of the protest vote?

Decades later, the story is still remembered precisely because it brought together political dissatisfaction, humour and public participation in a single act. Cacareco became one of the best-known examples of a protest vote in Brazil and is mentioned whenever voters show their rejection of the options presented to them.

The 1959 election demonstrates that ballot-box protests can take unexpected forms. When around 100,000 people choose to write the name of a rhinoceros, the joke stops being merely funny and becomes a document of its time. Cacareco is worth remembering because, behind the absurd episode, there was a very clear political message.