Brazilian History

Brazilian History:

Culture, Society, Politics 1500-

2010

By

Roberto Pinheiro Machado

Brazilian History: Culture, Society, Politics 1500-2010

By Roberto Pinheiro Machado

This book first published 2018

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2018 by Roberto Pinheiro Machado

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-0349-6

ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0349-6
To Cláudia Mendonça Scheeren
 CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 9

The Colonial Period (1500–1822)
1.1 From the Discovery to the Colonization
1.2 The French Invasions (1555–1560 and 1594–1615)
1.3 The Dutch Invasions (1624–1625 and 1630–1654)
1.4 The Iberian Union and the Portuguese Territorial Expansion
1.5 The Discovery of Gold and the Minas Gerais
1.6 The Conspiracy of Minas Gerais and Brazilian Neoclassicism
1.7 The Conspiracy of Bahia and the Emergence of the Notion of
Citizenship
1.8 A European Monarchy in the Tropics and the End of Colonial Rule

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 49

The Brazilian Empire (1822–1889)
2.1 The Costly Independence
2.2 The First Empire (1822–1831)
2.3 The Regency (1831–1840)
2.4 The Second Empire (1840–1889)
2.5 Culture and Society in the Brazilian Empire

Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 111

The First Republic (1889–1930)
3.1 The Initial Instability (1889–1894)
3.2 Prudente de Morais (1894–1898)
3.3 Campos Sales (1898–1902)
3.4 Rodrigues Alves (1902–1906)
3.5 Afonso Pena (1906–1909)
3.6 Hermes da Fonseca (1910–1914)
3.7 Venceslau Brás (1914–1918)
3.8 Epitácio Pessoa (1918–1922)
3.9 Artur Bernardes (1922–1926)
3.10 Washington Luís (1926–1930)
3.11 Culture and Society in the First Brazilian Republic
viii Contents

Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 186

Getúlio Vargas and the Estado Novo (1930–1945)
4.1 The Rise of Getúlio Vargas and the 1930 Revolution
4.2 The Provisory Government (1930–1934)
4.3 The Constitutional Period (1934–1937)
4.4 The Estado Novo (1937–1945)
4.5 Culture and Society in the First Vargas Government

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 229

The Liberal Republic (1946–1964)
5.1 Eurico Gaspar Dutra and Economic Liberalism (1946–1951)
5.2 The Second Vargas Government and Nationalism (1951–1954)
5.3 Café Filho and the Return of Liberalism (1954–1955)
5.4 Juscelino Kubitschek and Liberal Development (1956–1961)
5.5 Jânio Quadros and High Populism (January–August 1961)
5.6 João Goulart: Parliamentarism and the Left (1961–1964)
5.7 Culture and Society in the Liberal Republic

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 295

The Military Dictatorship (1964–1985)
6.1 Marshal Castelo Branco and the PAEG (1964–1967)
6.2 Marshal Artur da Costa e Silva and the Hardline (1967–1969)
6.3 General Emílio Garrastazu Médici and the Brasil Potência
(1969–1974)
6.4 General Ernesto Geisel and the Castelista Group (1974–1979)
6.5 General João Figueiredo and the End of Military Rule (1979–1985)
6.6 Culture and Society in the Dictatorial Period

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 365

The New Republic (1985–2010)
7.1 José Sarney and the Cruzado Economic Plan (1985–1990)
7.2 Fernando Collor de Mello and the Impeachment (1990–1992)
7.3 Itamar Franco and the Plano Real (1992–1994)
7.4 Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the New Price Stability
(1995–2002)
7.5 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: Finally the Left (2003–2010)
7.6 Culture and Society in the New Republic
 Brazilian History: Culture, Society, Politics 1500-2010 ix

Conclusion ............................................................................................... 418

Brazil after 2010

Notes........................................................................................................ 429

Index ....................................................................................................... 468

 INTRODUCTION

Brazil is the largest nation in Latin America and the fifth largest in the
world. It occupies 3,265,059 square miles in an area extending from about
120 miles above the Equator to approximately 700 miles below the Tropic
of Capricorn. The country’s northernmost point is found in the city of
Uiramutã, in Roraima State, and the southernmost in that of Chuí, in Rio
Grande do Sul State. Despite the long distance extending between these
points, the country is larger from East to West than it is from North to
South. The precise distances are 2,689 miles East–West and 2,684 miles
North–South. Brazil’s large territory is a legacy from the Portuguese
colonial system. Throughout several centuries of colonial rule, Portuguese
officials controlled the land with a tight grip in order to keep the colonial
revenue flowing into Lisbon. The exploitative nature of the colony worked
to preserve its political unity, creating a strong centralized administration
that was kept in place even after the end of Portuguese rule. Until 1808, it
was primarily a closed territory, with commercial lines limited to those
established by the Portuguese administration. Prior to its independence in
1822, all those living in Brazil were either Portuguese, African, or South
American aboriginal.
This book provides an introduction to Brazilian history. Its approach is
critical and interdisciplinary. Analyses of several aspects of the country’s
development, such as the economy, the arts, foreign policy, and society
appear intermingled in each chapter. The presentation is organized
chronologically around the nation’s political history, following the
successive governments that controlled each of the three major historical
periods: the Colony (1500–1822), the Empire (1822–1889), and the
Republic (1889–present). The political-chronological presentation follows
the most common pattern found in Brazilian books of similar scope,
offering thus a perspective akin to that employed by Brazilians in learning
their own history. The choice of format aims to facilitate the use of this
book as a reference for further research, providing a sequential storyline
from which data can be selected, analyzed, and further developed from a
clear temporal perspective.
The chronological account is divided into seven chapters that emerge
as subdivisions of the three major periods mentioned above. Chapter one
examines the Colonial Period, which extends from the arrival of the
2 Introduction

Portuguese in South America in the year 1500 until the Brazilian

proclamation of independence in 1822. The Colonial Period comprises a
long historical phase in which an exploitation colony was gradually
established in the newly discovered territory as the result of a capitalist
enterprise commanded by the Portuguese Crown. The new land would
experience several transformations throughout these three hundred years
of fierce Portuguese rule. It would face several foreign invasions, which
would alter the territory’s material and cultural landscape; it would suffer
the effects of the various wars between Portugal and Spain in Europe; and
it would finally fall prey to the effects of the Napoleonic Wars, which
would cause the transfer of the Portuguese court from Lisbon to Rio de
Janeiro, thus creating a new aristocratic society in the tropical territory.
This first chapter also discusses how an incipient sentiment of national
belonging gradually emerged in the colony, aiding the Portuguese in
maintaining their control over that vast territory, which from the beginning
was fiercely disputed with other European nations also interested in taking
hold of its profitable, fertile land.
Chapter two describes the period of what is called the Brazilian
Empire. It begins with the events of 1822, when Brazil became independent
from Portugal, and ends in 1889, when a republic was proclaimed. As the
chapter unfolds, we will see that Brazilian independence did not ensue
from an all-encompassing revolutionary rupture with Portugal. Although
clashes between Brazilian and Portuguese troops did occur in specific
areas, the transition to autonomy resulted primarily from an agreement
between the two contending parties. This allowed for the continuation of
several colonial institutions into the newly emerging nation. Such
institutional endurance strengthened the grip on power of the same ruling
class that had controlled the colony under the Portuguese administration:
in spite of becoming free from the direct rule of the Portuguese king, a
Portuguese prince took power.
The rule of Pedro I, the heir apparent to the Braganza dynasty,
established a monarchical continuity that linked Europe and America
politically. This, as the chapter will show, provoked considerable suspicion
from Brazil’s neighbors. While the former Spanish colonies severed their
ties with monarchical Europe more thoroughly, adopting republican
systems almost immediately, Brazil remained connected to the European
monarchies by ties of blood, that is, by those existing between its
Braganza ruler and his European family. The presence of a European
monarch ruling a large portion of South America thus became a source of
fear among Spanish Americans, who suspected that Brazil might serve as a
 Brazilian History: Culture, Society, Politics 1500-2010 3

transatlantic bridge for European imperialism and for the recolonization of

South America immediately after the end of Spanish rule.
Besides the contradictions and disputes between Brazil and its
neighbors, the chapter will also discuss how, during this period, the new
country’s ruling class worked to forge a Brazilian nationality, that is, a
general sense of national belonging and of a distinctive national culture.
Towards the end of the chapter, we will observe the economic and social
factors that led to the Empire’s demise. We will see that the country’s
ruling class, which supported the maintenance of the monarchical system
throughout the period, was comprised of a landed aristocracy based on
slave labor and on a fierce patriarchal mentality. When slave labor
crumbled, so crumbled the monarchy. The way was then open for a new
historical period, the First Republic.
Chapter three narrates the events that marked the first Brazilian
republican experience. From 1889 to 1930, the country adopted a republican
presidential system that was sustained through the offices of ten
presidents. The fall of the monarchy had resulted in part from political and
ideological disputes between those who, on one side, argued for
administrative centralization as the ideal formula for the nation’s governance
and those who, on the other, defended decentralization and provincial
autonomy as a necessity for the maintenance of the nation. The provinces
demanded more political and economic freedom than they had theretofore
been granted under the monarchic system, which tended to centralize
authority in Rio de Janeiro. As the provincial landlords achieved their goal
of greater autonomy, the Republic was established in the American
federalist model, with presidents being elected every four years. As the
chapter will demonstrate, elections, however, were seldom fair, and the
rise of a president was primarily a matter of pre-established political
arrangements between members of the ruling classes, rather than a result
of democratic electoral competition. The republican system was kept on
course through the maintenance of a series of economic and political pacts
between the central government and the provincial administrations, an
arrangement known as the Oligarchical Pact. The arrangement worked
well while the country managed to sustain the handsome revenue
generated from its foremost export product, coffee. The apparent political
stability would come to an end, however, when the world crisis of 1929
prevented coffee returns from satisfying the demands of both the central
government and the provincial landlords. The collapse of the American
economy in 1929 had profound effects on the Brazilian Republic: as the
United States was Brazil’s foremost coffee client, and given the
monolithic nature of the Brazilian economy, U.S. economic retraction
4 Introduction

provoked a severe financial crisis in the Latin American country, giving

rise to a political revolution. The ensuing civil war, as we shall see,
provoked the end of the period known as the First Republic.
Chapter four examines the revolutionary undertaking that caused the
First Republic’s demise and proceeds to discuss the main characteristics of
the dictatorial period that ensued. It covers the years from 1930 to 1945,
with special attention on the rise of nationalism and state-led
developmental policies after 1937. As we shall see, this will be a time
when the contenders for administrative centralization will win the long-
standing struggle for power between the provinces and the central
government. We will note that this struggle had assumed clear regional
contours during the former period, the First Republic, when the oligarchy
ruling the southern province of Rio Grande do Sul became the main
proponent of political centralization, vying against the rulers of São Paulo,
who profited from the economic freedom allowed by the decentralized
federative system. As the chapter will show, the revolution which started
in 1930 represented the victory of the southern landlords, who possessed
superior military power in relation to the northern provinces. The South’s
military clout resulted from the historical militarization of the
southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, which had for centuries been the
theater of fierce territorial disputes between Portugal and Spain. The
chapter will discuss the fact that Brazil’s southern frontiers are the only
ones in the nation to have been settled by means of war, a condition that in
turn reflects the pugnacious character of the southern landowners who, in
1930, assumed control of the nation. The chapter will also discuss how the
political history of Brazil in the twentieth century is in great part the
history of the clash between Rio Grande do Sul’s military power and São
Paulo’s economic might. The chapter will end with a depiction of Rio
Grande do Sul’s dictatorship over the entire nation in the context of anti-
communism, nationalism, and the Second World War.
Chapter five starts at the end of the Second World War, when the fall
of the dictatorship established in 1937 opened the way to a new period: the
Liberal Democracy. The liberal-democratic period extends from 1946 to
1964. It begins with the rise of democracy in 1946 and ends with its fall
less than twenty years later. We will see the emergence of a new era in
Brazilian political and economic history, with presidential elections
resuming after a twenty-year hiatus and with measures for economic
liberalization being adopted according to the rules of the Bretton Woods
Agreement, which was co-signed by Brazil in 1944. During the liberal-
democratic period, Brazilians attempted to do away with the former
nationalism of the previous era, and sought political rapprochement with
 Brazilian History: Culture, Society, Politics 1500-2010 5

both the United States and Western Europe. An attempt to open Brazil to
the world economy was pursued through the adoption of bold political and
economic measures aimed at attracting foreign investments to the country.
This was a golden age of mounting economic prosperity and an increased
belief in the nation’s bright future: the time of the construction of the new
capital, Brasilia; the rise of bossa nova, the new musical style born in the
city of Rio de Janeiro; the building of roads, airports, and the implantation
of a national automobile industry. The general popular expectation at the
time was that Brazil would finally become a modern nation. The
democratic and liberal economic endeavor, however, came to an end with
a military coup d’état that threw the nation into a new period of extreme
authoritarianism, ravaging political persecution, increased social inequality,
mounting foreign debt, and a series of army generals, most of them from
Rio Grande do Sul, succeeding one another in the presidency.
Chapter six narrates this new period of fierce authoritarianism: the
Military Dictatorship (1964–1985). This was probably the darkest period
in Brazilian history. Historians usually compare it, and mostly unfavorably,
to the previous dictatorial experience in the country’s republican history,
the one that lasted from 1937 to 1945. We will see how the new military
rulers managed to remain in power for more than 20 years by forging a
series of tacit agreements with the ruling classes, as well as by imposing
several forms of control over society. The chapter will show how the
fiercely anti-communist dictators used political propaganda to boost
Brazil’s victory in the 1970 Soccer World Cup in Mexico while state
agents committed human rights violations throughout the country in the
name of freedom and social order. The chapter will show how an annual
double-digit GDP growth rate was achieved by means of compressing
salaries and imposing harsh labor conditions on the population; how
attempts to colonize the Amazon forest with impoverished inhabitants
from the Northeast ended in failure; how the international oil crisis of
1973 put an end to state-driven stellar economic growth; and how the
period came to an end in 1985, when the country was on the verge of an
economic collapse. Inflation, poverty, foreign debt, corruption, and violence
were some of the results of this long period of military dictatorship.
Our seventh chapter covers the years from 1985 to 2010, which fall
under what is called the New Republic. Also called the Sixth Republic,
this is an extended period that comes up to the present. It starts with the
end of the military dictatorship and with the rise of another era of popular
high hopes and expectations regarding the country’s future and its capacity
to achieve economic well-being. We will see how such expectations were
soon thwarted when it became clear that the severe financial crisis
6 Introduction

inherited from the military period would not end quickly. Starting in 1986,
inflation became Brazilians’ most feared enemy; and when the Brazilians
gathered in a national popular effort to beat the wave of inflation, it just
turned into hyperinflation. In 1992, a series of failed economic plans,
corruption scandals, and the impeachment of a president made Brazilians
question whether the dictatorship had not, after all, been a better political
system. Disillusionment became the norm in Brazilian society at large. As
the struggle against inflation continued, however, a series of well-planned
economic measures achieved what everyone had already given up hoping
for. In 1994, the rising inflation rates were finally subdued and the
prospects of economic stability opened the way to a new period in which
Brazilian rulers attempted to portray the country as an important member
of the international community of nations. Foreign policy started being
conducted almost directly by the president, and the search for international
prestige became an integral part of state policy. The chapter will show
how the attraction of foreign investment became a sine qua non for the
maintenance of low inflation rates, which were in turn sustained through a
fixed exchange rate directly dependent on a high level of foreign reserves.
In spite of the low inflation, however, the economy failed to grow and the
spread of bankruptcies throughout the country, together with high
unemployment rates, caused significant popular discontent. In the first
years of the twentieth-first century, the low inflation rates were no longer
capable of satisfying popular wishes and expectations. Popular
dissatisfaction opened the way to surprising political developments that
resulted in the electoral victory of the left in the presidential elections of
2002, and the subsequent rise of a new government in 2003. The chapter
will finish by relating the successes and shortcomings of the leftist
government in office from 2003 to 2010.
This book will end with an analysis of some relevant aspects of
Brazilian society after 2010. The aim is to offer a realistic portrayal of
some of the major problems the country still faced after the first 510 years
of its history. Widespread corruption, a deficient educational system,
massive popular protests, general popular dissatisfaction, poverty, hunger,
urban violence, and mounting political unrest form a sinister picture of
Brazil after 2010.
Before we proceed to the story of the first European encounter with the
Brazilian territory during the Age of Discovery, however, we should make
one last remark regarding the structure of this book. Together with the
presentation of Brazil’s political history, the reader will find at the end of
each chapter a subdivision dedicated to an analysis of the literature and art
of the period. Brazil is a country that enjoys a unique cultural heritage, and
 Brazilian History: Culture, Society, Politics 1500-2010 7

the nation’s artistic achievements have been informed by centuries of

ethnic mixture. This mixture paved the way for the emergence of
interesting forms of cultural syncretism and for a general openness to new
ideas, trends, and styles. As Brazilian popular creativity and aesthetic
sensibility went on to reflect the country’s ethnic diversity, it produced
expressions marked by a tendency toward the effacement of the frontiers
between popular and classical art, and also favored the development of
styles and forms that challenge European aesthetic and ideological
dominance. In this sense, Brazilian artists produced works that tend to be
almost naturally post-modern in disposition. Brazilian art’s syncretic
temperament, however, did not prevent it from being embedded with
strong nationalist sentiments. Throughout the country’s history, nationalism
has been an ever-present feature of Brazilian artistic expression. As we
will discuss in detail at the end of chapter three, the Brazilian avant-garde
movement of the early twentieth century, called Modernismo, provides us
with a case in point regarding nationalism in the arts. In contrast with the
great majority of the international avant-garde movements that spread
throughout the world in the first decades of the twentieth century, the
Brazilian avant-garde did not adopt all the basic tenets of new European
styles and programs, among which figure a tendency towards
internationalism and universalism. Brazilian artists of the period attempted
to create novelty in art through the discovery of a true national expression.
Unlike the cases of Spanish-America, Eastern Europe, and Asia, no
consistent Brazilian version of Futurism, Dadaism, or Surrealism is to be
found in the country’s twentieth-century movements of renovation in the
arts. Instead, Brazilian artists promoted a strangely self-centered rupture
with the traditional forms found in the previous Brazilian tradition, which
they found too foreign and Europeanized. They thus went in search of an
anti-European national aesthetic, which became their primary avant-garde
intent in the 1920s. As this book will discuss in considerable detail, this
would produce lasting effects in the country’s artistic output. We will see
that twentieth-century Brazilian music, literature, and cinema became
marked by a strong nationalist aesthetic, which involved a very peculiar and
original expression, but which also tended to come up short in terms of
approaching more universalizing and internationally oriented themes
through art.
Finally, the author would like to state his hope that this book will be
read as a general introduction to Brazilian society and culture. The
narrative presented in the following pages is broad in temporal scope, and
most of the events recounted could not be approached in sufficient depth.
For this reason, the reader should approach the book as an entry into
8 Introduction

subjects and events that might then be considered for further study. The
history of Brazil fully reflects the country’s many complexities,
contradictions, and idiosyncrasies. My hope is that the reader will enjoy
exploring some of them in these pages.
 CHAPTER ONE

THE COLONIAL PERIOD (1500–1822)

From the Discovery to the Colonization

Brazil’s official history begins in the year 1500, when Portuguese
nobleman and navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467–1520) reached a tract
of land in the West Atlantic that he initially thought was an island. The
tract of land was immediately named Ilha de Vera Cruz, or True Cross
Island. Several weeks went by before Cabral understood that what he had
found was in fact not an island, but an entire continent. When he realized
that the place where he had landed was not completely surrounded by
water, Cabral quickly changed its name to Terra de Santa Cruz, or Land of
the Holy Cross.
After disembarking on the luxuriant tropical shore, Cabral’s first task
was to make contact with the locals. Natives of fairly amiable disposition
inhabited the areas surrounding the Portuguese landing. Some of them
were taken onto the Portuguese fleet’s main ship, where Cabral offered
them gifts. These natives were members of the Tupiniquim, a large tribe of
hunter-gatherers of which some 2,500 descendants survive today,
inhabiting a reserved area demarcated by the Brazilian federal government
in the southeast of the country, close to where this first encounter took
place in 1500. This first exchange between the Portuguese and the natives
in the new land forms one of the major symbolic events in Brazilian
history, one that would assume considerable ideological importance in the
future. The encounter is generally construed as the emblematic starting
point of the nation, suggesting the idiosyncratic development of interracial
exceptionality, as well as the intentional building of a multi-ethnic national
identity. This first encounter would thus become a recurrent theme in the
Brazilian imagination. A few centuries later, the word tupiniquim would
enter the popular vocabulary and would start to be employed humorously,
or more precisely self-mockingly, by Brazilians when they attempted to
describe themselves in their most genuine characteristics. This witty use of
the word would traverse several centuries of usage to be popularized by
the early twentieth-century Brazilian avant-garde movement, when artists
10 Chapter One

attempted to define the national identity as the product of a mixture of

indigenous and European elements. The word tupiniquim would then come
to mean anything originally Brazilian, that is, anything genuinely simple,
endearingly naïve, somewhat unrefined, and above all blatantly funny.
Back in 1500, after that first contact was made, Cabral’s next task was
to take care of religious matters. Four days after his arrival on the South
American coast, he ordered his crew to build an altar near the shore and
the first Catholic mass celebrated on Brazilian soil took place on April 26,
1500. This religious service is also of great historical and symbolic
significance. In its inclusiveness, the Mass engaged the indigenous
population in a religious celebration that marked the beginning of a long
process of acculturation conducted by the Catholic Church. The indigenous
population inhabiting the tropics lived in communal semi-nomadic
societies that were naturally integrated within the forested geography of
the continent. In contrast with the Europeans, the natives wore no clothes
and many tribes were characterized by matriarchal societal arrangements.
So the Catholic Church immediately established a process of dressing the
natives, attempting to bring them into the sphere of what the Christians
conceived as “civilization.”
This First Mass thus became the symbolical landmark of the
acculturation process that was enacted throughout the construction of the
Brazilian nation. It established a myth of peaceful integration and mutual
acceptance between the Europeans and the American natives. In doing so,
however, it helped mask the truly genocidal aspects of the European
conquest of the territory. The mass itself, it should be noted, would feature
as a major theme in the future history of Brazilian art and literature. The
very celebratory scene would be immortalized 360 years later by one of
Brazil’s most prestigious nineteenth-century painters, Victor Meirelles
(1832–1903). In the 1860s, during the Imperial Period, Meirelles would be
officially employed by the monarchy to depict the great historical scenes
that forged Brazilian nationality. His The First Mass in Brazil (1860)
would become one of his most celebrated works.1
Together with Meirelles’ painting, the First Mass also figures
prominently in what is considered to be the foundational work of Brazilian
literary history, namely the famous Carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha, an
account written by one of Cabral’s officials, Pero Vaz de Caminha (1450–
1500), to the Portuguese king, Manuel I, reporting the discovery of the
new land—or island, as it was initially believed. The account is dated May
1, 1500, and it describes the land’s beauty in ornamented language. The
elegant quality of Caminha’s writing may justify the classification of his
letter as a literary work of art. His account’s inclusion in the Brazilian
 The Colonial Period (1500–1822) 11

literary canon parallels that of the Crónicas de Conquista in Spanish

America, where the reports and descriptions by the first Spaniards in the
new world have pride of place in the Hispanic-American canon. 2
Caminha’s enthusiastic description of the land’s beauty would serve the
purposes of those who in the future would attempt to build a sense of
national unity and identity in the territory. The work’s rendering of the
new land as a magnificent and mythic island would also produce important
effects in the future nation’s foreign relations. Caminha’s idealization of
the “Brazilian Island” would have remarkable psychological influence on
the Portuguese conquerors, and would thus indirectly boost what we will
see as the unrelenting Portuguese obsession for territorial expansion, an
expansion that would take place in contention with the neighboring
Spanish settlers in the new world. In the centuries following the discovery
of the land, the Portuguese rulers would make a series of attempts to
delineate the colonial territory on the basis of what historians came to call
the “Myth of the Brazilian Island,” that is, the idea that the La Plata River,
which crossed the southern part of the territory, had somewhere a meeting
point with the Amazon River, which ran in the North. The imaginary
meeting of the two rivers, much in accord with Caminha’s initial account,
supported the Portuguese belief that its colonial territory should contain all
the land found encased by the two rivers, much as if the territory were in
fact an island. If this were the case, however, the Portuguese territory
would necessarily include a substantial portion of what is today Argentina.
As we shall see, from the contradictions between the Portuguese myth of
the Brazilian Island and the reality of the Spanish Viceroyalty of the River
Plate, many a war would ensue.3
Cabral and his crew left the newly discovered land at the beginning of
May 1500, a few days after the holding of the First Mass. Some thirty
years would pass before the Portuguese reached a decision on what to do
with their new possession. Around 1530, the Portuguese Crown started
sending exploratory expeditions to America. These soon found a lucrative
economic activity in which to engage in the new territory, namely the
extraction of Brazilwood, a species that was abundant all along the coast
as well as in part of the hinterland. The wood had significant economic
interest in Europe, where it was valued for the red dye it produced and
which was used in the manufacture of luxury textiles. The tree would thus
give the future colony, as well as the future country, its name.
Intense felling and shipping ensued in the decades after the finding of
Brazilwood. The Portuguese attempted to establish a monopoly on the
commerce of the wood throughout the entire territory, which they now
considered their own. The product’s high profitability, however, soon
12 Chapter One

encouraged other nations to enter the market, creating fierce competition.

The first to vie for Brazilian natural resources were the French, whose
fearsome corsairs conducted several attacks on Portuguese ships. the
resulting disputes between the Portuguese and the French over the new
land and its Brazilwood immediately escalated into something close to all-
out war. The French king, Francis I (1494–1547), openly defied the
Portuguese and the Spanish in their attempts to secure dominance over the
South Atlantic region. The two Iberian nations had signed a controversial
treaty in 1494, the famous Treaty of Tordesillas, by which all newly
discovered lands in the new world would be divided between Portugal and
Spain along a meridian that crossed the Cape Verde islands, a Portuguese
territory, and the island of Cuba, which had been discovered by
Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to the region and claimed for
Spain. Learning of the exclusivist treaty between the Iberians, Francis I
uttered the famous phrase: “Show me Adam’s will!”
The Portuguese were thus obliged to arrange a military defense of what
they considered to be their rightfully owned territory. During the first
decades of the sixteenth century, the growing commerce of Brazilwood led
the Portuguese to establish a series of trading posts along the coast. These
included warehouses for the wood that was shipped to Europe, and
functioned as operational bases for the capturing and enslavement of
native inhabitants. The natives were employed directly in the extractive
process, the communal experience of the First Mass having given way to
the enslavement of the indigenous populations under the guise of capitalist
enterprise.
Unlike the Portuguese, however, the French adopted a less violent
strategy in their pursuit of Brazilwood. They established alliances with the
native Brazilians, just as they would do with the native inhabitants of the
northern hemisphere. These alliances strengthened the French conquerors
to a point where, in 1528, the Portuguese chief commander for the region,
Cristóvão Jacques (1480–c.1530), had to report to the Portuguese king the
unfeasibility of defending such a large coast from the subjects of the
French king, Francis I. Cristóvão Jacques then suggested a policy of
colonization.
By the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had already established a
functioning centralized bureaucratic state in Europe. Starting in the year
1385, when a succession dispute resulted in the overthrow of the House of
Burgundy by the House of Aviz, the new ruling dynasty had begun to
form a centralized bureaucracy that would be responsible for conducting
the affairs of the state. Portugal had moved away from the typically
decentralized feudal administrative arrangements of medieval Europe
 The Colonial Period (1500–1822) 13

towards a centralized organization in which the ruling classes were

directly employed under the king’s orders. The nobility thus shared in the
government’s power and authority, transcending the limits of their
individual estates or feuds. This form of political arrangement resulted in
the emergence of an administrative structure known as the patrimonial
state. The concept comes from German sociologist Max Weber (1864–
1920), who described the patrimonial state as the expression of the
amalgamation between the public and private realms in a given political
entity. In the case of Portugal, the analysis of its emerging patrimonial
arrangement, initiated in 1385, comes from Brazilian historian Raymundo
Faoro (1925–2003), who argued that the structure of the Portuguese state
since the Revolution of Aviz allowed the nobility employed in the
governmental bureaucracy to merge its private interests with those of the
kingdom. The merging of the personal and the public spheres allowed for
the self-interested use of the state; soon the administrative structure, or the
state itself, would become the bureaucrat’s patrimony, whence the concept
of patrimonialism.4
This was the administrative structure that would be transferred to the
new American territory when the Portuguese king realized that his
overseas possessions could not be defended without an active colonization
policy. When encouraged by Cristóvão Jacques to start occupation, John
III employed a scheme to maintain the Crown’s ownership over the land
while at the same time engaging private investments in it. The king divided
the territory into fifteen hereditary captaincies, that is, administrative
divisions that were entrusted to the management of men of confidence.
The captaincies were awarded to businessmen by means of two specific
legal instruments, the Carta de doação (Donation Letter) and the Foral
(Register). These documents gave entrepreneurs the right to explore their
allotted captaincy, but the ownership of the land remained with the Crown.
Prospects of the existence of gold and silver in the American territory
made the captaincy system especially attractive to Portuguese entrepreneurs,
who started arriving in Brazil in 1530.5
The Portuguese had already employed the captaincy system in the
colonization of the island of Madeira. Located in the Atlantic Ocean,
around 540 miles southwest of the Portuguese coast, the island had been
under Portuguese rule since 1425. A successful captaincy system had
operated there since 1440. The remoteness and peculiarities of the Brazilian
territory, however, sealed the fate of the captaincy arrangement in the
Americas. Of the fifteen administrative units initially devised, only two,
those of Pernambuco and São Vicente, prospered. Pernambuco, a
captaincy located in the Northeast, thrived from the production of sugar
14 Chapter One

cane and São Vicente, in the Southeast, prospered mostly from dealing in
indigenous slaves. São Vicente would be established as one of the first
urban administrative units, or villages, in 1532, during an expedition led
by nobleman and military commander Martim Afonso de Sousa (1500–
1571). King John III had sent de Souza to Brazil with orders to patrol the
coast, get rid of the French, and found the first colonial settlement on the
new land. São Vicente prospered to become what is today a portion of the
metropolitan area of Santos, a major port city in the state of São Paulo.
In spite of its general failure, the captaincy system lasted for more than
two centuries until it was finally abolished in 1754. The system left a
lasting impression on the Brazilian territorial arrangement, becoming the
basis for the country’s future oligopolistic structure of land tenure and
distribution. The captaincies allowed for the implementation of a policy of
agricultural land partition called sesmaria, which was based on practices
customary in Portugal. The Sesmaria Act of 1375 was promulgated in
Lisbon to counter a food crisis that was plaguing the country at the time.
The Act consisted of several dispositions designed to maintain agricultural
output, such as the expropriation of unproductive land and the
employment of forced labor in sowing and harvesting. When it came to the
colonization of Brazil, however, the sesmaria was turned into a political
instrument whereby the designated administrator of a captaincy transferred
the right to cultivate land to private entrepreneurs. Under this disposition,
land was distributed in the form of gigantic plots to only a few
beneficiaries. In time, this situation gave rise to conflict, as large areas
were left unproductive and subject to unlawful occupation. The system
generated conditions of unfairness and miscommunication in rural areas.
The sesmaria system survived until 1822, when the newly independent
country, self-denominated as the Brazilian Empire, attempted a series of
structural reforms. These notwithstanding, after the official termination of
the system in 1822, the ownership of the traditional estates acquired under
the legal provisions of the sesmaria was recognized by a law of 1850,
meaning that in practice the old sesmaria arrangement would be
sustained.6
In any case, at the time of the establishment of the captaincy system,
the Portuguese king took measures to consolidate the general control of
the colony in the hands of the state. This was done with considerable
haste, following the sudden realization of the lack of economic dynamism
in the captaincies. In 1549, John III sent another nobleman and military
commander, a man called Tomé de Sousa (1503–1579), to Brazil with the
task of establishing a centralized local government that would answer
directly to Lisbon. From then on, the Portuguese bureaucratic state
 The Colonial Period (1500–1822) 15

apparatus would be directly transplanted to the colony. The Governo

Geral (General Government) was established at the entrance of a large
inlet opening to the Atlantic Ocean some 300 miles north of where Pedro
Álvares Cabral had first disembarked on the American continent in 1500.
Called Baía de Todos os Santos (All Saints’ Bay), the inlet’s surrounding
areas offered favorable agricultural conditions, with a hot climate and
fertile soil. Its geography also facilitated territorial defense. The area had
been made into a captaincy entrusted to nobleman Francisco Pereira
Coutinho (d. 1547), from whose descendants the land had to be
expropriated (Pereira died in 1547, eaten by the members of the
Tupinambá tribe, a group of aboriginals who practiced cannibalism against
their enemies). The Governor General was entrusted with the task of
bringing political and judicial order to the colony. The bureaucratic
structure then established comprised three instances of regulation and
control that were run directly by Portuguese officials. These were the
Ouvidor-mor, who managed the affairs of justice; the Provedor-mor, who
conducted the economic affairs of the colony; and the Capitão-mor, who
was in charge of defense. The office of General Governor was entrusted to
Tomé de Sousa. The administrative unit called Estado do Brasil was thus
officially created as a Portuguese colonial institution.
The implementation of a bureaucratic state apparatus in the colony
meant above all the immediate transference of Portuguese political culture
to the new territory. This culture was naturally aristocratic and highly
hierarchical. In the absence of the usual feudal system where the
aristocracy tended primarily to its agricultural estates, the Portuguese
nobility developed distinctive urban habits, which seemed appropriate to
their bureaucratic positions. Over time, they acquired a great distaste for
any form of manual labor, which was generally considered demeaning to
their status. This meant that the appropriate occupation for an aristocrat
was primarily that of giving orders. Coupled with the tradition of a
patrimonial state, where, as mentioned above, bureaucrats tended to
misperceive the public sphere as their own private property, the
aristocratic Portuguese political culture transplanted to the colony
provided for the spread of fierce authoritarianism and individualism in the
local administration. This was enhanced by a logic in which colonial
bureaucrats, as the lawful representatives of a power whose center was
located overseas, could assume a posture of factual ownership of their
offices.
The Portuguese aristocratic bureaucracy would impose severe limitations
on the political participation of the general colonial population in the
administrative affairs of the settlements. As it developed into a number of
16 Chapter One

evolving urban centers that gradually emerged throughout the territory, the
colony’s provincial administration would be carried out in city councils
called Câmaras dos homens bons, or “City Councils of Good Men.” The
“good men” in question were those who by law were eligible to assume
administrative positions in the government, namely Catholic white men
over twenty-five years of age who could prove they owned a significant
portion of land. Any Jewish ancestry was considered a just cause to
prevent individuals to participate in governmental affairs. The first
colonial city council was established in the village of São Vicente in 1532.
From then on, those who did not own land, such as merchants and liberal
professionals, would be prevented from taking part in politics. This would
give rise to a series of civil conflicts, the most remarkable of which broke
out in the state of Pernambuco in the early eighteenth century, when the
traders of the city of Recife took up arms against the landowners of the
village of Olinda in what came to be known as the War of the Mascates
(1710). The war reflected an incipient native sentiment that pitted the
Brazilians against the Portuguese in matters of colonial administration.7
The primary goals of Tomé de Sousa’s first General Government in the
1550s were: 1) subduing rebellious indigenous tribes; 2) enhancing
agricultural output; 3) defending the territory from foreign invasions; and
4) prospecting deposits of gold and silver in the land. The Portuguese
official arrived in the colony with a group of Jesuit missionaries, who
immediately went about converting the natives to Roman Catholicism. The
Jesuit enterprise was enmeshed in the intellectual debate set in motion in
Europe regarding what it meant to be human in a broader international
context. This was a time of intense theoretical discussion among Christian
theorists and theologians regarding the nature of the soul and its
participation in the higher spheres of being. Thinkers such as the Spanish
renaissance philosophers Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), Domingo de
Soto (1494–1560), Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), Bartolomé de las Casas
(1474–1566), and the Dutch humanists Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–
1536) and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) were in the process of developing
the principles of what today forms the historical-theoretical basis of
international and human rights law. Francisco de Vitoria was especially
interested in the moral and legal status of indigenous populations in the
new world. In his De Indis (1532), the Spaniard, actually the leader of the
so-called Salamanca school of philosophy, defended the existence of a
soul in the American natives. Such an acknowledgment automatically
conferred upon the indigenous individuals the status of creatures of God.
The Portuguese rulers accepted Francisco de Vitoria’s ideas and in
1575 the Crown issued an edict prohibiting the enslavement of the
 The Colonial Period (1500–1822) 17

indigenous inhabitants of the colony, except in the case of a ‘just war,’ that
is, one started by the natives against the Portuguese. The Jesuits thus had
legal support in their efforts to pacify hostile indigenous tribes and
integrate them into the emerging colonial society. They would, however,
find great opposition from several, very powerful, groups of entrepreneurs
and explorers, who preferred to keep the natives as slaves. The most
resilient of these groups was that of the Bandeirantes, men who lived off
activities such as gold prospecting and trading in slaves. As we shall see in
more detail in the next chapter, the Bandeirantes played an important role
in advancing the Portuguese territorial expansion in America. Such
advancement, however, took place primarily at the cost of disrupting the
traditional forms of life previously established in the original colonial
territory.
Aided by the Bandeirantes, the General Government established in
1549 would succeed in founding and sustaining Portuguese control over
the vast territory discovered by Cabral in 1500. The administrative system
of the General Government would only be abolished in 1808, when the
Portuguese court was transferred from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro as a result
of the Napoleonic wars. From 1549 to 1808, sixty-one General Governors
assumed the function of controlling the colony. Starting in 1640, after a
period called the Iberian Union, when Portugal came virtually under
Spanish rule, the General Governors would have their status raised to that
of Viceroys, and their power would grow accordingly.
Before moving on to a discussion of the territorial invasions
experienced during the first two centuries of Brazilian colonial history, we
should note that Tomé de Sousa’s first central government became the
starting point for fierce metropolitan domination over the new land. The
General Government itself functioned as a textbook application of
mercantile capitalism, in which all riches found or produced in the colony
were immediately embarked to Lisbon. Local reinvestment would be kept
to a minimum; the new territory existed to be exploited and the General
Government was created with the aim of maintaining the flow of capital to
Portugal at all costs. Soon the fiscal burden would become unbearable for
the local inhabitants, and important fiscal revolts would ensue. Before
those took place, however, and in fact even before the Portuguese General
Government had finally secured its grip on the colonial territory, one
major obstacle had to be cleared away: the French.
18 Chapter One

The French Invasions (1555–1560 and 1594–1615)

In 1555, French commander, Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon (1510–1571)
led an expedition sponsored by the French Crown to start a colonial
enterprise in the tropics. Villegagnon chose one of the best spots on the
South American coast to start his venture. The Guanabara Bay, the site of
present-day Rio de Janeiro, was a stunning area with geographical features
quite favorable for building a settlement. After crossing the Atlantic, the
French fleet reached the calm and dark-blue waters that stretch from the
Sugarloaf Mountain towards the hilly land bordering what today is the
Botafogo beach. Villegagnon had in mind a well-devised plan: with the
help of allies in the tribe of the Tamoios he would lure the Portuguese into
an ambush near a small island just off the coast. The modest Portuguese
defenses would be easy prey for the superior French naval forces.
Much to Villegagnon’s disappointment, however, an unexpected
explosion in one of the Portuguese defense ships, which would soon be
ascribed to divine intervention, scared his men off, and the French fleet
retreated. The initial ambush resulted in failure, but Villegagnon
succeeded in maintaining control over the island where the French had
been hiding to trap the Portuguese. As a result of the commander’s
obstinate intention to stay and fight the Portuguese, his island became the
hub of what was named La France Antarctique, the first French colony in
Brazil.8
This first French invasion of the Portuguese colonial territory echoed
important developments taking place in Europe in the sixteenth century,
most notably the Protestant Reforms. Villegagnon was a distinguished
nobleman and knight of the Catholic Military Order of Malta who, during
a previous secret expedition to the Brazilian coast in 1554, had learned of
the fierce opposition the Portuguese were encountering from two powerful
indigenous tribes, the Tamoios and the Tupinambás. Villegagnon then
decided to employ all his political prestige to convince the Catholic king
Henry II, Francis I’s son, that Brazil would be the right place to build a
French colony to which the Protestants could be invited to emigrate. The
commander’s claim was that, by setting the native inhabitants against the
Portuguese, the French Crown would be able rescue the land from the
Iberians and create a realm of religious freedom under French rule, thus
earning an opportunity to cast aside the Protestants.
Besides this social and religious objective, Villegagnon’s project also
aimed at transforming the Portuguese colony into a powerful naval base
from which the French Crown would control the world’s main commercial
routes to India. This was the heyday of state monopoly capitalism, an
 The Colonial Period (1500–1822) 19

economic model that would not be challenged in the Atlantic until at least
1621, when Flemish Calvinists launched the private Dutch West India
Company, which would be granted the monopoly over the slave trade and
other commerce from the Dutch Crown. Villegagnon thus immediately
started the construction of a fortification in the French controlled Serigipe
Island, which he had occupied on November 10, 1555. Curiously, the
island is known in Brazil today as Ilha de Villegagnon (Villegagnon
Island), a name that is used in place of its original denomination given by
the Portuguese settlers, that is, Ilha de Serigipe. Be that as it may, Fort
Coligny, the French headquarters, soon towered over the area. The Fort
was named in honor of one of Villegagnon’s commanders, the French
Huguenot Gaspard de Coligny (1519–1572). The French enterprise,
however, soon began to fail. General discontent arose among Villegagnon’s
men and a mutiny occurred in 1556, caused by the insubordination of a
few soldiers outraged at their leader’s conservative rules determining that
any man who took an indigenous woman should be obliged marry her.
The Portuguese would only defeat the French in 1560, when the third
succeeding Portuguese General Governor, Mem de Sá (1500–1572),
marched on Fort Coligny, conquering it in the absence of Villegagnon,
who had returned to France. Even after that, however, the French were not
willing to give up their South American colonial ambition. Together with
their allies, the Tamoios, they reorganized their forces and, in 1565,
Estácio de Sá (1520–1567), Mem de Sá’s nephew, was obliged to establish
a local settlement in the area with the aim of blocking the French. The
settlement would become the present-day city of Rio de Janeiro. The
French forces attacked Estácio de Sá’s defense in 1567, provoking a
confrontation known as the Uruçu-mirim battle. During the skirmishes,
Estácio de Sá was wounded in the eye by a Tamoio spear and died a few
days later. The French were finally defeated after this battle and their
colony, the France Antarctique, foundered. Estácio de Sá would go down
in Brazilian history as a national hero. Today various sites in Rio de
Janeiro bear his name: a university, an avenue, and a samba school that
parades every year in the city’s carnival.
But the French were tenacious. Unsuccessful in the South, in 1594 they
came back to the Portuguese colony and now invaded the North. This time
their presence would last a little longer: the France Équinoxiale
(Equinoctial France) was formally established in 1612 on the island of
Upaon-Açu, a large landmass just off the coast of present-day Maranhão
State. The French turned the Upaon-Açu island into a trading post and
renamed it after their king, Louis XIII (1610–1643). The trading post grew
into an urban settlement and its French name remained in place even after
20 Chapter One

the French were defeated. Today the Upaon-Açu island, which harbors the
capital city of the Brazilian state of Maranhão, is called São Luís, the
Portuguese version of the French king’s name.
The French came to control a considerable expanse of territory in the
northern part of the colony during the years immediately following 1612,
but were defeated again by the Portuguese in 1615. At that time, Portugal
was under the rule of Philip III of Spain. The French defeat, however, did
not result in the Portuguese achieving final and complete control over the
land. Before colonial control could be decisively settled for the
Portuguese, one more group of invaders had to be ousted: the Dutch.

The Dutch Invasions (1624–1625 and 1630–1654)

The Low Countries were under the rule of the Spanish Empire until 1581,
when a war of independence broke out. Just one year before, in 1580,
Portugal and Spain had come under a single ruler, the Habsburg Spanish
king, Phillip II (1527–1598). The union of the Portuguese and the Spanish
Crowns under a single king was the result of a dynastic crisis that had
begun in 1578, when the young Portuguese ruler, Sebastian I (1554–1578),
was killed fighting the Moors in the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, in present-
day Morocco. With Portugal and Spain united, the Low Countries, in war
with latter, turned against the former, vying for what were now Spain’s
colonial possessions. Among the Spanish territories in America, the
Brazilian colony was of special interest, for, by then, it had become one of
the world’s largest producers of sugar cane. Cane cultivation had been
brought to the colony together with the captaincy system, thriving, as we
have seen, in the North, especially in the captaincy of Pernambuco.
So, once freed from Spanish rule, the Low Countries, or more properly
the Dutch, began their own colonial enterprises in the Atlantic. The first
Dutch invasion of the Iberian colonial territory occurred in 1624. The city
of Salvador, then the seat of the General Government and the capital of the
State of Brazil, was the chosen target for the Dutch West India Company’s
attack. The Company was a militarized private enterprise run by Dutch
merchants. It had been granted a trade monopoly with the Caribbean, as
well as control over the slave trade in the region, from the recently
founded Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. The occupation of the
city of Salvador lasted almost one year; the city was recaptured in 1625 by
a combination of Portuguese and Spanish forces.
Unwilling to surrender, the Dutch continued their fierce opposition to
the Spanish. In 1628, engaging in a juggling act of piracy and deception,
they seized a Spanish silver convoy, taking possession of the precious