José Mentor Guilherme de Mello

Who was José Mentor Guilherme de Mello?

José Mentor Guilherme de Mello was a colonel of the Brazil´s National Guard, an entrepreneur in the waterway transport business and an exporter. Son of Laureano Guilherme de Mello and Isabel Gomes de Oliveira Mello, with roots in traditional families of Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte, particularly of Mossoró, he worked in the boom of the Amazonia rubber extraction business, and later became a prominent exportation entrepreneur of plant leaves, of carnauba wax and of babassu and cotton seeds, and simultaneously an waterway transport businessman, in the Brazilian states of Piauí and Maranhão.

He was respected, not for the money he had, but for his generosity to the poor. With his entrepreneur spirit, he greatly contributed to the development of the economics of the states of Maranhão and Piauí, in the 1910s.