Early History

The Indians fascinated the Portuguese, and many of the first Europeans to visit Brazil sent lengthy reports back home. The most vivid account was penned by a German mercenary, Hans Staden, who spent three nervous years among the cannibal Tupi after being captured in 1552. He tells how they tied his legs together, “… and I was forced to hop through the huts, at which they made merry, saying ‘Here comes our food hopping towards us.’” Understandably, his memoirs were one of the first bestsellers in European history, and contained much accurate description of an Indian culture still largely untouched by the colonists. The work of Staden and the first explorers and missionaries is a brief snapshot of Indian Brazil in the sixteenth century, a blurred photograph of a way of life soon to be horribly transformed.

It was unfortunate that the Portuguese first landed in the only part of Brazil where ritualized cannibalism was practised on a large scale; away from the Tupi areas it was rare. Nowhere was stone used for building. There was no use of metal or the wheel, and no centralized, state-like civilizations on the scale of Spanish America. There are arguments about how large the Indian population was: Carvajal described taking several days to pass through the large towns of the Omagua tribe on the Amazon in 1542 but, away from the abundant food sources on the coast and the banks of large rivers, population densities were much lower. The total number of Indians was probably around five million. Today there are two hundred thousand in Brazil.

Conquest

Portugal, preoccupied with Africa and the lucrative Far East spice trade, neglected this new addition to its empire for the first few decades. Apart from a few lumber camps and scattered stockades, the Portuguese made no attempt at settlement. Consequently, other European countries were not slow to move in, with French and English privateers using the coast as a base to raid the spice ships. Finally, in 1532, João III was provoked into action. He divided up the coastline into sesmarias, captaincies fifty leagues wide and extending indefinitely inland, distributing them to aristocrats and courtiers in return for undertakings to found settlements. It was hardly a roaring success: Pernambuco, where sugar took hold, and São Vicente, gateway to the Jesuit mission station of São Paulo, were the only securely held areas.

Irritated by the lack of progress, King João repossessed the captaincies in 1548 and brought Brazil under direct royal control, sending out the first governor-general, Tomé da Sousa, to the newly designated capital at Salvador in 1549. The first few governors successfully rooted out the European privateers, and – where sugar could grow – wiped out Indian resistance. By the closing decades of the century increasing numbers of Portuguese settlers were flowing in. Slaves began to be imported from the Portuguese outposts on the African coast, as sugar plantations sprang up around Salvador and Olinda. Brazil, no longer seen merely as a possible staging point on the way to the Far East, became an increasingly important piece of the far-flung Portuguese Empire. When Europe’s taste for sugar took off in the early seventeenth century, the Northeast of Brazil quickly became very valuable real estate – and a tempting target for the expanding maritime powers of northern Europe, jealous of the Iberian monopoly in the New World.

War with the Dutch

In 1624 a Dutch fleet appeared off Salvador, taking the governor completely by surprise, and the city by storm. After burning down the Jesuit college and killing as many priests as they could find (like the good Calvinists they were), they were pinned down by enraged settlers for nine months and finally expelled in 1625 by a hastily assembled combined Spanish and Portuguese fleet – the only direct intervention made by either country in the conflict. When a Dutch force was once more repulsed from Salvador in 1627, they shifted their attention further north and found the going much easier: Olinda was taken in 1630, the rich sugar zones of Pernambuco were occupied, and Dutch control extended up to the mouth of the Amazon by 1641. With settlers moving in, a strong military presence and a fleet more powerful than Portugal’s, Dutch control of the Northeast looked like becoming permanent.

Maurice of Nassau was sent out as governor of the new Dutch possessions in Brazil in 1630, as the Dutch founded a new capital in Pernambuco: Mauritzstaadt, now Recife. His enlightened policies of allowing the Portuguese freedom to practise their religion, and including them in the colonial government, would probably have resulted in a Dutch Brazil had it not been for the stupidity of the Dutch West India Company. They insisted on Calvinism and heavy taxes, and when Maurice resigned in disgust and returned to Holland in 1644 the settlers rose. After five years of ambushes, plantation burnings and massacres, the Brazilians pushed the Dutch back into an enclave around Recife. The Dutch poured in reinforcements by sea, but their fate was decided by two climactic battles in 1648 and 1649 at Guararapes, just outside Recife, where the Dutch were routed and their military power broken. Although they held on to Recife until 1654, the dream of a Dutch empire in the Americas was over, and Portuguese control was not to be threatened again until the nineteenth century.

The bandeirantes: Gold and god

The average bandeira would be made up of a mixed crew of people, reflecting the many – and often conflicting – motives underlying the expedition. None travelled without a priest or two (bandeirantes may have been cut-throats, but they were devout Catholic cut-throats), and many bandeiras were backed by the Jesuits and Franciscans in their drive to found missions and baptize the heathen. The majority combined exploration with plundering and could last for years, with occasional stops to plant and harvest crops, before returning to São Paulo – if they ever did: many towns on the Planalto Central or Mato Grosso have their origins in the remnants of a bandeira. The bandeirantes had to fight Indians, occasionally the Spanish, and also themselves: they were riven with tension between native-born Brazilians and Portuguese, which regularly erupted into fighting.

The journeys bandeiras made were often epic in scale, covering immense distances and overcoming natural obstacles as formidable as the many hostile Indian tribes they encountered, who were defeated more by diseases to which they had no resistance, than by force of arms. It was the bandeirantes who pushed the borders of Brazil way inland, practically to the foothills of the Andes, and also supplied the geographical knowledge that now began to fill in the blanks on the maps. They explored the Amazon, Paraná and Uruguai river systems, but the most important way they shaped the future of Brazil was in locating the Holy Grail of the New World: gold.

Gold was first found by bandeirantes in 1695, at the spot that is now Sabará, in Minas Gerais. As towns sprang up around further gold strikes in Minas, gold was also discovered around Cuiabá, in Mato Grosso, in 1719, adding fresh impetus to the opening-up of the interior. The 3500-kilometre journey to Cuiabá, down five separate river systems, took six months at the best of times; from São Paulo it was easier to travel to Europe. Along the way the bandeirantes had to fight off the Paiaguá Indians, who attacked in canoes and swam like fish, and then the Guaicuru, who had taken to the horse with the same enthusiasm the Plains Indians of North America were later to show. They annihilated entire bandeiras; others following left descriptions of “rotting belongings and dead bodies on the riverbanks, and hammocks slung with their owners in them, dead. Not a single person reached Cuiabá that year.”

But the Paulista hunger for riches was equal even to these appalling difficulties. By the mid-eighteenth century, the flow of gold from Brazil was keeping the Portuguese Crown afloat, temporarily halting its long slide down the league table of European powers. In Brazil, the rush of migrants to the gold areas changed the regional balance, as the new interior communities drew population away from the Northeast. The gateways to the interior, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, grew rapidly. The shift was recognized in 1763, when the capital was transferred from Salvador to Rio, and that filthy, disease-ridden port began its transformation into one of the great cities of the world.

The Jesuits

The role the Jesuits played in the conversion of the Indians was ambiguous. Mission Indians were often released by Jesuits to work for settlers, where they died like flies; and the missionaries’ intrepid penetration of remote areas resulted in the spread of diseases that wiped out entire tribes. On the other hand, many Jesuits distinguished themselves in protecting Indians against the settlers, a theological as well as a secular struggle, for many Portuguese argued that the native population had no souls and could therefore be treated like animals.

The most remarkable defender of the Indians was Antônio Vieira, who abandoned his position as chief adviser to the king in Lisbon to become a missionary in Brazil in 1653. Basing himself in São Luís, he struggled to implement the more enlightened Indian laws that his influence over King João IV had secured, to the disgust of settlers clamouring for slaves. Vieira denied them for years, preaching a series of sermons along the way that became famous throughout Europe, as well as Brazil: “An Indian will be your slave for the few days he lives, but your soul will be enslaved for as long as God is God. All of you are in mortal sin, all of you live in a state of condemnation, and all of you are going directly to Hell!” he thundered from the pulpit in 1654, to the fury of settlers in the congregation. So high did feelings run that, in 1661, settlers forced Vieira onto a ship bound for Portugal, standing in the surf and shouting “Out! Out!”

But Vieira returned, with renewed support from the Crown, and Jesuit power in Brazil grew. It reached a peak in the remarkable theocracy of the Guaraní missions, where Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits founded over a dozen missions on the pampas along the Uruguayan border. Left alone for the first fifty years, they effectively became a Jesuit state, until the Treaty of Madrid in 1752 divided up the land between Spain and Portugal; the treaty ordered the missions abandoned, so that settlers could move in. The Guaraní revolted immediately and, while the Jesuit hierarchy made half-hearted efforts to get them to move, most of the priests stayed with their Guaraní flocks. Resistance was heroic but hopeless: the superior fire power of a joint Spanish–Portuguese military expedition decimated both Guaraní and Jesuits in 1756.

Jesuit involvement in the Guaraní war lent added force to the long-standing settler demands to expel them from the colony. This time, they were helped by the rise to power of the Marquis de Pombal, who became the power behind the Portuguese throne for much of the eighteenth century. Seeing the Jesuits as a threat to Crown control, he seized upon the Guaraní wars as an excuse to expel the Order from Brazil in 1760. The Jesuits may have been imperfect protectors, but from this time on the Indians were denied even that.

Independence

In 1807, Napoleon invaded Portugal. With the French army poised to take Lisbon, the British navy hurriedly evacuated King João VI to Rio, which was declared the temporary capital of the Portuguese Empire and seat of the government-in-exile. While Wellington set about driving the French from Portugal, the British were able to force the opening-up of Brazil’s ports to non-Portuguese shipping, and the economic growth that followed reinforced Brazil’s increasing self-confidence. João was entranced by his tropical kingdom, unable to pull himself away even after Napoleon’s defeat. Finally, in 1821, he was faced with a liberal revolt in Portugal that threatened to topple the monarchy, and he was unable to delay his return any longer. In April 1822 he appointed his son, Dom Pedro, as prince regent and governor of Brazil; when he sailed home, his last words to his son were “Get your hands on this kingdom, before some adventurer does.”

Pedro, young and arrogant, grew increasingly irritated by the strident demands of the Côrtes, the Portuguese assembly, that he return home to his father and allow Brazil to be ruled from Portugal once again. On September 7, 1822, Pedro was out riding on the plain of Ypiranga, near São Paulo. Buttoning himself up after an attack of diarrhoea, he was surprised by a messenger with a bundle of letters from Lisbon. Reading the usual demands for him to return, his patience snapped, and he declared Brazil independent with the cry “Independence or death!” With overwhelming popular support for the idea, he had himself crowned Dom Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, on December 1, 1822. The Portuguese, preoccupied by political crises at home and demoralized by Pedro’s defection, put up little resistance. Apart from an ugly massacre of Brazilian patriots in Fortaleza, and some fighting in Bahia, the Portuguese withdrawal was peaceful and by the end of 1823 no Portuguese forces remained.

Early empire: Revolt in the regions

There were common threads in all the rebellions in the provinces: slaves rebelling against masters, Indian and mixed-race resentment of white domination, Brazilians settling scores with Portuguese, and the poor rising against the rich. The first, and most serious, conflagration was the Cabanagem Rebellion in Pará, where a mass revolt of the dispossessed began in 1835. The rebels took Belém, where, in a great moment of retribution, the Indian Domingues Onça killed the governor of Pará. The uprising spread through the Amazon like wildfire and took a decade to put down. A parallel revolt, the Balaiada, began in Maranhão in 1838. Here the rebels took Caxias, the second city of the state, and held out for three years against the army. Similar risings in Pernambuco, Bahia and Rio Grande do Sul punctuated the 1830s and 1840s; the disruption was immense, with large areas ravaged by fighting which threatened to tear the country apart.

The crisis led to Dom Pedro II being declared emperor four years early, in 1840, when he was only fourteen. Precociously talented, he was a sensible, scholarly man, completely unlike his father. His instincts were conservative, but he regularly appointed liberal governments and was respected even by republicans. With government authority restored, the provincial rebellions had by 1850 either blown themselves out or been put down. And with coffee beginning to be planted on a large scale in Rio, São Paulo and Minas, and the flow of European immigrants rising from a trickle to a flood, the economy of southern Brazil began to take off in earnest.

The War of the Triple Alliance

It pitted, in unequal struggle, the landlocked republic of Paraguay, under the dictator Francisco Lopez, against the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Although the Paraguayans started the war, by invading Uruguay and parts of Mato Grosso in 1864, they had been sorely provoked by Brazilian meddling in Uruguay. The generals in Rio, with no more rebels to fight within Brazil, wanted to incorporate Uruguay into the empire; Paraguay saw Brazil blocking its access to the sea and invaded to pre-empt a Brazilian takeover, dragging Argentina reluctantly into the conflict through a mutual defence pact with Brazil.

The Brazilian army and navy were confident of victory as the Paraguayans were heavily outnumbered and outgunned. Yet the Paraguayans, for the first time, demonstrated the military prowess that would mark their history: united under the able leadership of Lopez, the Paraguayan army proved disciplined and fanatically brave, always defeated by numbers but terribly mauling the opposition. It turned into a war of extermination and six terrible years were only ended by the killing of Lopez in 1870, by which time the male adult population of Paraguay is said to have been reduced (by disease and starvation as well as war) to under twenty thousand, from over a million in 1864.

The end of slavery

But it was not until the nineteenth century that slavery was seriously challenged. The initial impetus came from Britain, where the abolitionist movement became influential just when Portugal was most dependent on British capital and British naval protection. Abolition was regarded with horror by the large landowners in Brazil, and a combination of racism and fear of economic dislocation led to a determined rearguard action to preserve slavery. A complicated diplomatic waltz began between Britain and Brazil, as slavery laws were tinkered with para inglês ver – “for the English to see” – a phrase that survives in the language to this day, meaning doing something merely for show. The object was to make the British believe slavery would be abolished, while ensuring that the letter of the law kept it legal.

British abolitionists were not deceived, and from 1832 to 1854 the Royal Navy maintained a squadron off Brazil, intercepting and confiscating slave ships, and occasionally entering Brazilian ports to seize slavers and burn their ships – one of history’s more positive examples of gunboat diplomacy. The slave trade was finally abolished in 1854 but, to the disgust of the abolitionists, slavery itself remained legal. British power had its limits and ultimately it was a passionate campaign within Brazil itself, led by the fiery lawyer Joaquim Nabuco, that finished slavery off. The growing liberal movement, increasingly republican and anti-monarchist, squared off against the landowners, with Dom Pedro hovering indecisively somewhere in between. Slavery became the dominant issue in Brazilian politics for twenty years. By the time full emancipation came, in the “Golden Law” of May 13, 1888, Brazil had achieved the shameful distinction of being the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery.

From empire to republic

Once again, Brazil managed a bloodless transition. The push came from the army, detachments led by Marechal Deodoro da Fonseca meeting no resistance when they occupied Rio on November 15, 1889. They invited the royal family to remain, but Dom Pedro insisted on exile, boarding a ship to France, where he died in penury two years later in a shabby Parisian hotel. Deodoro, meanwhile, began a Brazilian tradition of ham-fisted military autocracy. Ignoring the clamour for a liberal republic, he declared himself dictator in 1891, but was forced to resign three weeks later when even the army refused to support him. His deputy, Marechal Floriano de Peixoto, took over, but proved even more incompetent; Rio was actually shelled in 1893 by rebellious warships, demanding Peixoto’s resignation. Finally, in 1894 popular pressure led to Peixoto stepping down in favour of the first elected civilian president, Prudente de Morais.

Coffee with milk – and sugar

The boom was led by coffee and rubber, which – at opposite ends of the country – had entirely different labour forces. Millions of nordestinos moved into the Amazon to tap rubber, but the coffee workers swarming into São Paulo in their hundreds of thousands came chiefly from Italy. Between 1890 and 1930 over four million migrants arrived from Europe and another two hundred thousand from Japan. Most went to work on the coffee estates of southern Brazil, but enough remained to turn São Paulo into the fastest-growing city in the Americas. Urban industrialization appeared in Brazil for the first time, taking root in São Paulo to supply the voracious markets of the young cities springing up in the Paulista interior. By 1930, São Paulo had displaced Rio as the leading industrial centre.

More improbable was the transformation of Manaus into the largest city of the Amazon. Rubber turned Manaus from a muddy village into a rich trading city within a couple of decades. The peak of the rubber boom, from the 1870s to the outbreak of World War I, financed its metamorphosis into a tropical belle époque outpost, complete with opera house. Rubber exports were second only to coffee, but proved much more vulnerable to competition. Seeds smuggled out of Amazônia by Victorian adventurer Henry Wickham in 1876 ended up in Ceylon and Malaya, where – by 1914 – plantation rubber pushed wild Amazon rubber out of the world markets. The region returned to an isolation it maintained until the late 1950s.

Economic growth was not accompanied by political development. Although not all the early presidents were incompetent – Rodrigues Alves (1902–6), for example, rebuilt Rio complete with a public health system, finally eradicating the epidemics that had stunted its growth – the majority were corrupt political bosses, relying on a network of patron–client relationships, whose main ambition seemed to be to bleed the public coffers dry. Power was concentrated in the two most populous states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, which struck a convenient deal to alternate the presidency between them.

This way of ensuring that both sets of snouts could slurp away in the trough uninterrupted was called “café com leite” by its opponents: coffee from São Paulo and milk from the mineiro dairy herds. In fact, it was coffee with milk and sugar: the developing national habit of the sweet cafezinho in the burgeoning cities of the south provided a new domestic market for sugar, which ensured support from the plantation oligarchs of the Northeast. In a pattern that would repeat itself in more modern times, the economy forged ahead while politics went backwards. The saying “Brazil grows in the dark, while politicians sleep” made its first appearance.

The revolution of 1930

It was the working class, combined with disillusion in the junior ranks of the military, that swept Vargas to power. Younger officers, accustomed to seeing the armed forces as the guardian of the national conscience, were disgusted by the corruption of the military hierarchy. When the Great Depression hit, the government spent millions protecting coffee growers by buying crops at a guaranteed price; the coffee was then burnt, as the export market had collapsed. Workers in the cities and countryside were appalled, seeing themselves frozen out while vast sums were spent on landowners, and as the economic outlook worsened the pressure started building up from other states to end the São Paulo and Minas grip on power. This time, the transition was violent.

In 1926, Washington Luis was made president without an election, as the elite contrived an unopposed nomination. When Luis appeared set to do the same thing in 1930, an unstoppable mass revolution developed, first in Vargas’s home state of Rio Grande do Sul, then in Rio, then in the Northeast. There was some resistance in São Paulo, but the worst fighting was in the Northeast, where street battles left scores dead. The shock troops of the revolution were the young army officers who led their units against the ancien régime in Minas and Rio, and the gaúcho cavalry who accompanied Vargas on his triumphant procession to Rio. Although São Paulo rose briefly against Vargas in 1932, the revolt was swiftly crushed, and Getúlio, as Brazilians affectionately knew him, embarked on the longest and most spectacular political career in modern Brazilian history.

Vargas and the Estado Novo

Reforms this fundamental could not be carried out under the old constitutional framework. Vargas simplified things by declaring himself dictator in 1937 and imprisoning political opponents – most of whom were in the trade union movement, the Communist Party or the Integralistas, the Brazilian Fascists. He called his regime the “New State”, the Estado Novo, and certainly its reforming energy was something new. Although he cracked down hard on dissent, Vargas was never a totalitarian dictator. He was massively popular and his great political talents enabled him to outflank most opponents.

The result was both political and economic success. The ruinous coffee subsidy was abolished, industry encouraged and agriculture diversified: by 1945 São Paulo had become the largest industrial centre in South America. With the federal government increasing its powers at the expense of state rights, regional government power was wrested out of the hands of the oligarchs for the first time.

It took World War II to bring Vargas down. At first Brazil stayed neutral, reaping the benefits of increased exports, but when the United States offered massive aid in return for bases and Brazilian entry into the war, Vargas joined the Allies. Outraged by German submarine attacks on Brazilian shipping, Brazil was the only country in South America to play an active part in the war. A Brazilian Expeditionary Force, 5000-strong, fought in Italy from 1944 until the end of the war; when they returned, the military High Command was able to exploit the renewed prestige of the army, forcing Vargas to stand down. They argued that the armed forces could hardly fight for democracy abroad and return home to a dictatorship, and, in any case, after fifteen years a leadership change was overdue. In the election that followed in 1945, Vargas grudgingly endorsed the army general Eurico Dutra, who duly won – but Getúlio, brooding on his ranch, was not yet finished with the presidency.

The death of Vargas

Vargas’s supporters reacted angrily and argument turned into crisis in 1954, when shots were fired at Lacerda, missing their target but killing an air force officer guarding him. The attempt was traced to one of Vargas’s bodyguards, but Vargas himself was not implicated. Even so, the press campaign rose to a crescendo, and finally, on August 25, 1954, the military High Command demanded his resignation. Vargas received the news calmly, went into his bedroom in the Palácio de Catete in Rio and shot himself through the heart.

He left an emotional suicide note to the Brazilian people: “I choose this means to be with you always … I gave you my life; now I offer my death. Nothing remains. Serenely I take the first step on the road to eternity, as I leave life and enter history.” The initial popular reaction of stunned shock gave way to fury, as Vargas’s supporters turned on the forces that had hounded him to death, stoning the newspaper offices and forcing Lacerda to flee the country. Eighteen months of tension followed, as an interim government marked time until the next election.

JK and Brasília

“Fifty years in five!” was his election slogan, and his economic programme lived up to its ambitious billing. His term saw a spurt in growth rates that was the platform for the “economic miracle” of the next decade; the economic boom led to wider prosperity and renewed national confidence. Kubitschek drew on both in the flight of inspired imagination that led to the building of Brasília.

It could so easily have been an expensive disaster, a purpose-built capital miles from anywhere, the personal brainchild of a president anxious to make his mark. But Kubitschek implanted the idea in the national imagination by portraying it as a renewed statement of faith in the interior, a symbol of national integration and a better future for all Brazilians, not just those in the South. He brought it off with great panache, bringing in the extravagantly talented Oscar Niemeyer, whose brief was to come up with a revolutionary city layout and the architecture to go with it. Kubitschek spent almost every weekend on the huge building site that became the city, consulted on the smallest details and had the satisfaction of handing over to his successor, Jânio Quadros, in the newly inaugurated capital.

1964: The road to military rule

The coup of 1964 was years in the brewing. It had two root causes: a constitutional crisis and the deepening divides in Brazilian society. In the developed South, relations between trade unions and employers went from bad to worse, as workers struggled to protect their wages against rising inflation. But it was in the Northeast that tension was greatest, as a result of the Peasant Leagues movement. Despite industrial modernization, the rural Northeast was still stuck in a time-warped land tenure system, moulded in the colonial period and in many ways unchanged since then. Peasants, under the charismatic leadership of Francisco Julião and the governor of Pernambuco, Miguel Arrães, began forming co-operatives and occupying estates to press their claim for agrarian reform; the estate owners cried communism and openly agitated for a military coup.

The crisis might still have been avoided by a more skilful president, but Kubitschek’s immediate successors were not of his calibre. Quadros resigned after only six months, in August 1961, on the anniversary of Vargas’s suicide. He apparently wanted popular reaction to sweep him back into office, but shrunk from suicide and ended up shooting himself in the foot rather than the heart. The masses stayed home, and the vice-president, João Goulart, took over.

Goulart’s accession was viewed with horror by the right. He had a reputation as a leftist firebrand, having been a minister of labour under Vargas, and his position was weakened by the fact that he had not succeeded by direct popular vote. As political infighting began to get out of control, with the country polarizing between left and right, Goulart decided to throw himself behind the trade unions and the Peasant Leagues; his nationalist rhetoric rang alarm bells in Washington, and the army began to plot his downfall, with tacit American backing.

The coup, in the tradition of Brazilian coups, was swift and bloodless. On March 31, 1964, troops from Minas Gerais moved on Rio; when the military commanders there refused to oppose them, the game was up for Goulart. After futile efforts to rally resistance in Rio Grande do Sul, he fled into exile in Uruguay, and the first in a long line of generals, Humberto Castelo Branco, became president.

Military rule

The political climate worsened steadily during the 1960s. An urban guerrilla campaign took off in the cities – its most spectacular success was the kidnapping of the American ambassador in 1969, released unharmed in return for over a hundred political detainees – but it only served as an excuse for the hardliners to crack down even further. General Emílio Garrastazú Médici, leader of the hardliners, took over the presidency in 1969 and the worst period of military rule began. Torture became routine, censorship was strict and thousands were driven into exile: this dark chapter in Brazilian history lasted for five agonizing years, until he gave way to Ernesto Geisel in 1974. The scars Médici left behind him, literally and metaphorically, have still not completely healed.

Opening up the Amazon

For the military, the Amazon was empty space, overdue for filling, and a national resource to be developed. They set up an elaborate network of tax breaks and incentives to encourage Brazilian and multinational firms to invest in the region, who also saw it as empty space and proceeded either to speculate with land or cut down forest to graze cattle. The one group that didn’t perceive the Amazon as empty space was, naturally enough, the millions of people who already lived there. The immediate result was a spiralling land conflict, as ranchers, rubber tappers, Brazil-nut harvesters, gold-miners, smallholders, Indians, multinationals and Brazilian companies all tried to press their claims. The result was – and remains today – chaos.

By the late 1980s the situation in the Amazon was becoming an international controversy, with heated claims about the uncontrolled destruction of forest in huge annual burnings, and the invasion of Indian lands. Less internationally known was the land crisis, although a hundred people or more were dying in land conflicts in Amazônia every year. It took the assassination in 1988 of Chico Mendes, leader of the rubber tappers’ union and eloquent defender of the forest, to bring it home. Media attention, as usual, has shed as much heat as light, but there are grounds for hope. Deforestation follows highways and there’s unlikely to be a comparable highway building programme in the future, so the worst may well be about to come to an end. And for all the destruction, Amazônia is very large – there is still time for more sensible development to protect what remains.

The abertura

The São Paulo strikes began in the car industry and soon spread throughout the industrial belt of São Paulo, in a movement bearing many parallels with Solidarity in Poland. Led by unions that were still illegal, and the charismatic young factory worker Lula (Luís Inácio da Silva), there was a tense stand-off between army and strikers, until the military realized that having São Paulo on strike would be worse for the economy than conceding the right to free trade unions. This dramatic re-emergence of organized labour was a sign that the military could not control the situation for much longer.

Reforms in the early 1980s lifted censorship, brought the exiles home and allowed normal political life to resume. But the military came up with an ingenious attempt to control the succession: their control of Congress allowed them to pass a resolution that the president due to take office in 1985 would be elected not by direct vote, but by an electoral college, made up of congressmen and senators, where the military party had the advantage.

The democratic opposition responded with a counter-amendment proposing a direct election. It needed a two-thirds majority in Congress to be passed, and a campaign began for diretas-já, “elections now”. Even the opposition was surprised by the response, as the Brazilian people, thoroughly sick of the generals, took to the streets in their millions. The campaign culminated in huge rallies of over a million people in Rio and São Paulo, and opinion polls showed over ninety percent in favour; but when the vote came in March 1984 the amendment just failed. The military still nominated a third of Senate seats, and this proved decisive.

It looked like defeat; in fact it turned into victory. The moment found the man in Tancredo Neves, ex-minister of justice under Vargas, ex-prime minister, and a wise old mineiro fox respected across the political spectrum, who put himself forward as opposition candidate in the electoral college. By now it was clear what the public wanted, and Tancredo’s unrivalled political skills enabled him to stitch together an alliance that included dissidents from the military’s own party. In January 1985 he romped home in the electoral college, to great national rejoicing, and military rule came to an end. Tancredo proclaimed the civilian Nova República – the “New Republic”.

The New Republic: Crisis and corruption

His administration was disastrous, though not all of it was his own fault: he was saddled with a ministerial team he had not chosen, and a newly powerful Congress which would have given any president a rough ride. But Sarney made matters worse by a lack of decisiveness, and wasn’t helped by the sleaze that hung like a fog around his government, with corruption institutionalized on a massive scale. No progress was made on the economic front either. By 1990 inflation accelerated into hyperinflation proper, and, despite spending almost $40 billion repaying interest on the foreign debt, the principal had swollen to $120 billion. Popular disgust was so great that on every occasion Sarney found himself near a crowd of real people, he was greeted with a shower of bricks and curses. The high hopes of 1985 had evaporated: Sarney had brought the whole notion of civilian politics into disrepute, and achieved the near-impossible of making the military look good.

Brazil in the 1990s

The campaign had passed the torch to a new generation of Brazilians, as the young Collor, playboy scion of one of Brazil’s oldest and richest families, had squared off against Lula, who had come a long way since the São Paulo strikes. Now a respected – and feared – national politician, head of the Workers’ Party that the strike movement had evolved into, Lula took most of the cities, but Collor’s conservative rural support was enough to secure a narrow victory.

Collor’s presidency began promisingly enough, as he pushed for a long-overdue opening-up of the economy and implemented the most draconian currency stabilization plan yet, the infamous Plano Collor, hated by the middle classes because it temporarily froze their bank accounts. The economy resisted all attempts at surgery, and inflation began to climb again. Collor seemed to become more unstable than the economy; he was increasingly erratic in public, and rumours grew about dark goings-on behind the scenes. Thanks to fine journalism and a denunciation by Collor’s own brother, apparently angry that Fernando had made a pass at his wife, it became clear that a web of corrupt dealings masterminded by Collor’s campaign treasurer, P. C. Farias, had set up what was effectively a parallel government. Billions of dollars had been skimmed from the government’s coffers, in a scam breathtaking even by Brazilian standards.

Impeachment proceedings were begun in Congress, but few politicians expected them to get anywhere. Demonstrations began to take place in the big cities, led initially by students, but soon spreading to the rest of the population and numbering hundreds of thousands of angry but peaceful citizens. It rapidly became clear that if Congress did not vote impeachment through, there would be hell to pay. In September 1992, Collor was duly impeached and replaced by his vice-president, Itamar Franco. Farias was jailed, later to die in mysterious circumstances: he was allegedly murdered by a girlfriend who then committed suicide, but it is likely the full story of his death will never be known. His master, Collor, who may know more than most about the murder, lives in gilded self-exile in Miami, to the fury of most Brazilians. Specimen corruption charges failed, and his continued liberty is testimony to the weakness of the Brazilian legal system.

Franco, like Sarney before him, proved an incompetent buffoon left minding the shop. The real power in his government was the finance minister, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who staked his claim to the succession by implementing the Plano Real in 1994. This finally tamed inflation and stabilized the economy, for the first time in twenty years. A grateful public duly gave him an overwhelming first-round victory in the presidential election later that year, when he trounced Lula in every state bar Brasília and the Distrito Federal.

Cardoso: Stability and reform

Cardoso entered office with a clear vision of Brazil’s economic and political problems, and how to cure them. On the economic front, he has built on the Plano Real by pushing through a privatization programme in the teeth of fierce nationalist opposition, cutting tariff barriers, opening up the economy to competition and making Brazil the dominant member of Mercosul, a regional trade organization which also includes Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, with Bolivia and Chile in the queue to join. During his first term the result was healthy growth, falling unemployment and low inflation, an achievement without precedent in modern Brazilian history.

Politically, he steered a skilful middle course between dinosaurs of right and left, corrupt caudilhos and their patron–client politics on the one hand, and time-warped nationalists still clinging to protectionism and suspicious of the outside world on the other. In a steady, if unspectacular process, a series of constitutional amendments were passed reducing the role of the state and reforming the political system.

The stabilization of the economy that Cardoso achieved through the Plano Real was not forgotten by the poor, who were the most affected by hyperinflation; Cardoso was re-elected in 1998, providing a much needed period of political stability at the top. His second term proved more difficult, however. The Asian financial collapse of 1998 brought down much of Latin America with it, including Brazil; there was a sharp recession for a year, although the economy proved much more resilient than most expected and resumed its upward trend in 1999. Most importantly, despite the substantial devaluation of the real in early 1999, inflation remained low, an important break with the economic patterns of the 1980s and 1990s, and a sign that some at least of Cardoso’s reforms were working.

Cardoso’s legacy is not all positive, however. Corruption and social inequality still plague Brazil, although there are signs that public impatience is being reflected in a newly aggressive and powerful federal prosecutors system which is starting to take on powerful vested interests. Cardoso’s reliance on a broad centrist coalition has limited his ability to deal with rural inequalities or really get to grips with environmental issues, and the public finances are perennially in deficit because of a bloated public sector pensions system which is extraordinarily resistant to reform, not least because among those who benefit from it most directly are members of congress and the judiciary. The judicial system itself is a joke, which is much more of a problem than it seems: it underlies the frightening level of violence in Brazilian society, since those using it know they will almost certainly not be brought to book, and it also encourages corruption, for the same reason.

In the countryside, the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST – the landless movement), which emerged in the south of the country in the early 1990s, has become increasingly radicalized in recent years. Land invasions have become bolder and the government’s response less tolerant than in the past, with many parts of the country becoming potential tinderboxes.

Nevertheless, Brazil enters the new millennium in better shape than seemed possible a decade ago. The bad press it often – and usually deservedly – gets abroad can obscure the positive side of the coin: an increasingly deep-rooted democracy, where people and the media were able to bring down a corrupt president, and now, finally, a relatively stable, growing economy. Cardoso is clever enough to realize that his place in history depends on reducing inequality, as well as encouraging growth. If – a big if – Brazil’s politicians build on Cardoso’s achievements rather than concentrate on lining their wallets, Brazilians, justly famous for their optimism, can extend it to fields other than a football pitch.