Brazil History
Brazil has a far reaching and fascinating history. Unlike the Inca and Maya civilizations, the Brazilian Indians never established a central empire. The pre-Columbian indigenous Indian population in Brazil was widely scattered and probably numbered no more than 1 million when Pedro Cabral, the Portuguese explorer, reached the coast of Brazil on April 22, 1500. Today there are fewer than 200,000, most of them in the hidden jungles of the Brazilian interior.
The first permanent Portuguese settlement was founded at Sao Vicente, in the state of Sao Paulo (1532). Initially, development was slow, based upon a feudal system in which favored individuals received title to large blocks of land called capitanias. Owing to the great demand for sugar in Europe, the first major economic cycle in Brazil was based upon sugarcane grown in plantations along the northeast coast.
Slave laborers – primarily indigenous Indians - were used to work the fields under the supervision of the Bandeirantes who were the pioneers of the state of Sao Paulo. When the Indians proved insufficient in numbers, or unable to withstand the hard labor, depending upon the story, the importation of millions of slaves from African began.
In the 1690s, gold was discovered in Minas Gerais and the rush was on. Brazilians and Portuguese flooded into the territory and countless slaves were brought from Africa to dig and die in the mines.
In 1807-08, during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, King John VI of Portugal took refuge in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil, now the seat of government for its mother country, witnessed tremendous economic growth. Life was so pleasant in Rio that after Napoleon had been defeated, the Royal family stayed on until a threatened revolt in Portugal forced John VI to return to Lisbon. In 1822 the Prince Regent’s son – Pedro - who remained in Rio to rule the colony when his father returned to Portugal, pulled out his sword and yelled the battle cry ‘Independência ou morte!’ - Independence or Death. Portugal was too weak to fight its favorite son, so Brazil became an independent empire without spilling a drop of blood.
During the 19th century, coffee replaced sugar as Brazil's major export. At first the coffee plantations used slave labor, but with the abolition of slavery in 1888 thousands of European immigrants – most of them Italian - poured in to work on the coffee estates called fazendas. In 1889 a military coup supported by the powerful coffee aristocracy toppled the Brazilian Empire and for the next 40 years Brazil was governed by a series of military and civilian presidents, supervised in effect by the armed forces.
At the end of the 19th century the rubber cycle started which produced enormous profits for the country. The invention of vulcanization turned rubber into an important industrial material. Rubber trees are native to the Amazon basin, but as every Brazilian child is taught, an Englishman stole a rubber plant and stole away to Malaysia where Asian Rubber production began. The Brazilian rubber boom soon collapsed, unable to complete with the cheaper fabricated rubber from Asia.
The next major cycle that took off in Brazil was that of the coffee bean, and for more than 50 years politics, like the economy, was governed by the crop with coffee growers establishing themselves all the way from Sao Paulo to the cattle ranchers towards Minas Gerais. In 1929, the global economic crisis weakened the coffee planters’ hold on the government and an opposition Liberal Alliance was formed with the support of nationalist military officers. When the Liberal Alliance lost the election in 1930, the military seized power on their behalf and installed the Liberal leader, Getúlio Vargas, as president. Vargas, whose regime was inspired by Mussolini’s and Salazar’s fascist states, dominated the political scene for the next 24 years until he was forced out of office in 1954.
His replacement was called Juscelino Kubitschek and was the first of Brazil’s big spenders; he built the new capital Brasília which was supposed to catalyze the development of the interior. By the early 1960s the economy was battered by inflation, partly because of the expense of building the new capital, and fears of encroaching communism were fueled by Castro’s victory in Cuba. Again, Brazil’s fragile democracy was squashed by a military coup in 1964. The military rulers then set about creating large-scale projects that benefited a wealthy few, at the expense of the rest of the population.
In the mid-1980s, Brazil's economic miracle - supported largely by loans from international banks - petered out and the military handed power back to a civilian government. In November 1988 Brazil got a new constitution and in October 1989, Brazilians had their first opportunity to elect a president by popular vote in almost 30 years. They elected Fernando Collor de Mello, an ex-karate champion, over his socialist competitor by a narrow but secure majority. Collor gained office promising to fight corruption and reduce inflation, but people soon found that Collor was highly corrupt and for the first time in Brazilian history a president was impeached.
Vice President Itamar Franco became president in December 1992 with Collor’s resignation. A new currency called the Real was introduced and this stabilized the economy. In November 1994, Fernando Cardoso, architect of the Plano Real (Real Plan) was elected president. Through the mid-1990s Cardoso presided over a Brazil with a growing economy, stable currency, and record foreign investment. These achievements were offset by the legacy of longstanding problems including the loss of two million jobs between 1989 and 1996, and ongoing problems with agrarian reform. A United Nations report in 1996 showed that Brazil had the world’s most unequal distribution of wealth. Over 50 million Brazilians remain truly poor while corruption in Brazil remains a way of life - despite the increasing emergence of attempts to tackle it.
In 2002 the socialist president Luiz da Silva, Lula, won the elections. For the first time in Brazilian history the country is governed by a socialist government. In 2006, Lula won re-election and continues to lead Brazil along leftist lines in what is becoming an increasingly liberal led continent.
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