Brazil

BRAZIL

Slavery

I’m going to turn my focus on my adopted home: Brazil. I came to Brazil in 2003 and I’ve been here on and off ever since, some seventeen years. Now, Brazil is a really, really interesting country with some fascinating history and in a little series of episodes, I’m going to tease out six things that have had a massive impact on Brazil and some of them at least, a massive impact on the world: slavery, the fact that the emperor came to live in his colony, military dictatorship, a new currency, a purpose-built capital and Pele.

Now I can tell you with absolute accuracy and total sincerity where I fell in love with Brazil. It was in a bar-restaurant in Sao Paulo, a regular haunt of mine and friends for a good few years, that played samba. I used to call it “happiness in a bubble” but it wasn’t really a bubble because that happiness is carried around by Brazilians everywhere they go and every day of their lives or just about. And samba comes from Africa, and came to Brazil via the slave trade.

Though the first slave ship arrived in Brazil in 1538, the slave trade really came later to South America than it did to the north American colonies as for most of the sixteenth century, labour was provided by the native Indians of the continent. But when it came, it did so in huge numbers: 3.5 – 4 million in the three centuries in which the trade lasted, six to seven times the number transported to America. And, as we know, the voyage itself was horrific, with overcrowding, inadequate food and water, and disease. Limits were placed on the number of slaves allowed per tonnage of the ship (but we can imagine that this was easily side-stepped with a bribe or two) and captains of ships were given an incentive to improve conditions on board with cash rewards if the death toll was kept below 3 per cent.

And so, they came. By the late 18th century, Rio de Janeiro had become the ‘City of Africa’, inhabited mostly by slaves. Nowhere else in the world have there been so many slaves since the end of the Roman Empire. They ran the city in the sense that they ensured it functioned. The economy was built on slaves, hired out by slave owners for the day, trained in special functions such as gem cutting or cobbling, or just as manual labour. What this meant for the unskilled working white population was dire poverty as work for them dwindled to next to nothing.

In the account books of slave traffickers and plantation owners these human beings were marked up as pieces or items. They were branded by their owners, a policy temporarily banned, but renewed when disputes over ownership led to trouble. And the life of the slave in Brazil was similar to that in north America: whether on plantations (sugar cane, cotton and coffee), in the mines and in domestic servitude, sometimes treated reasonably well if in domestic servitude (though they could be reminded of their true status at any moment) but otherwise in desperately poor housing, badly fed and badly clothed, brutally overworked, their welfare of little concern to their owners. They could also be badly beaten by their owners, and the women were too-often sexually exploited. They would often be particularly badly treated in their early days, seen as a ‘breaking in’ period by their owners.

Public flogging was banned and so the pelourinhos, whipping posts, that were a feature of the main town square throughout Brazil, became obsolete. Though it was banned as much because of the fear it might incite uprisings as for any moral reasons.

So hard were they forced to work that they would repay their purchase cost in just a year, after that they were pure profit to the plantation owner and so would be worked to death, literally, and replaced by another victim. Little wonder, then, that having been captured in Africa, having barely survived the trans-Atlantic crossing and now subjected to the brutality of being ‘broken in’, for some, suicide seemed the better option, ‘runaways who have reached the spirit land’ as one contemporary described them.

Such were their numbers though, heading towards 50,000 in the north-east of Brazil by the middle of the nineteenth century, that fears of revolts were always on the minds of the plantation owners. They mixed different tribes, with different traditions, beliefs, and most important of all, different languages, as much as they could. But still, slaves were able to organise themselves.

Runaway slaves in rural Brazil set up communities known as quilombos (a Bantu word meaning something close to war camp). There were many of them all over the country. Such is the size of Brazil that, they could lose themselves in the vast interior and amazingly there are still as many as 6,000 of them today and there are 1.3 million quilombolas, the people who live in them. We know this because they were identified as a distinct group in the 2022 census. Though many still struggle to attain their legal right to land and for such things as proper education and health care provision. Bolsonaro was fined 50,000 reais (around $10,000) in 2017 for insulting quilombo residents, saying that “they do nothing” and are “not even good for procreating”, though the ruling was overturned on appeal.

In the days of slavery, these quilombos were usually little more than a village, replicating life in Africa, though many were nothing more than a group of runaway slaves sticking together for safety but living and sleeping rough. Others though were quite sophisticated and even formed local trading links. To hunt down runaway slaves in the seventeenth century was usually more costly than it was worth, it was cheaper to replace them. But some were a nuisance, encouraging more slaves to run away, even rebellion. The most famous of the quilombos was set up in the seventeenth century in Pernambuco in the northeast of Brazil, called the Republic of Palmares, and something had to be done about this one.

As the name suggests, the Republic of Palmares, was something very different. It covered thousands of square kilometres, hilly but with good farmland in the valleys, and was a series of fortified towns and villages with a total population of some 20,000, conducting raids to free more slaves in nearby plantations, and raising free children.

There was a capital, Macaco, with a population of around 6,000. It was led by Ganga Zumba, the self-declared king or great lord, his sons and his son-in-law, Zumbi. The runaway slaves grew crops, raised pigs and fished. Learning from their time in the plantations as well as from the local Indians, they had carpentry shops, potteries and even foundries. And, acting like a state within a state, it defied the Brazilian state for decades. Consequently, it was seen as a threat to the state.

So, they set out to destroy it, but repeatedly failed. In 1677, the governor of Pernambuco attempted to negotiate a settlement and Ganga Zumba tried himself a year later, only to be overthrown by Zumbi. There were then more attempts to destroy the republic, every year between 1679 and 1684. And it was then that a bandeirante called Domingos Jorge Velho came to Pernambuco. Bandeirante literally means a flag bearer, but think of them as pioneers. They penetrated the interior of Brazil in search of gold and captured local Indians for slavery in the process (which is what Domingos Jorge Velho did for the first two years he was in Pernambuco, and very successfully). But in 1687 he agreed to deal with the Republic of Palmares though even he wasn’t able to begin the final siege of Macaco until six years later, the end of 1693. Hundreds of quilombolas died, two hundred threw themselves off cliffs rather than be captured, 500 were indeed captured and sold back into slavery, the rest, including Zumbi, escaped. But Zumbi was captured two years later. He was executed and his head was put on display in the central square of Recife, the capital of Pernambuco.

But the slave revolts only increased, throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. Slaves now included those born in Brazil, spoke Portuguese and saw no reason why Brazilian laws shouldn’t apply to them. By the nineteenth century, the Portuguese in Brazil were also under intense pressure from Britain to end the trade (Britain had abolished it in 1807) and Brazil did so in 1831 with a treaty signed in 1828, officially at least. Officially, because slaves continued to be shipped to Brazil, some half a million between 1830 and 1850 when the trade was finally ended. And though the trade had been banned, slavery itself continued: in the sugar cane and cotton plantations of the north and north-east, and in the coffee plantations around Sao Paulo. Their owners saw no viable alternative to free labour. Though the truth was that it was their plantations that were least efficient and running into financial trouble.

There was a push from liberals in the urban centres of the likes of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to have it abolished and from some more progressive plantation owners. The Anti-Slavery Society was established in 1880 and other abolitionist clubs, liberal newspapers also took up the cause. It was a classic case, so often seen in history, of liberals in cities clashing with conservatives in the countryside.

For abolitionists, apart from moral arguments, there was the economic argument that free labour both produced more and, of course, as they were paid, consumed more. Besides, the abolitionists saw it as an embarrassment internationally and as a step Brazil needed to make if it was to modernise. Then, in 1866, with Brazil fighting a war with Paraguay, those slaves that joined the army were granted their freedom. In 1871, the Law of the Free Womb freed the children of slaves, though not without causing as much harm as righting a wrong, as the children were required to stay with their parents until they were twenty-one and so wouldn’t be free until then, and even on reaching twenty-one, it meant families were divided as parents were still kept as slaves whilst their children became free. In 1885, slaves over the age of sixty-five were freed, though there would be problems surrounding determining their age. But these measures were seen by abolitionists as nothing but delaying tactics. Whilst the last measure would take away from the slaveowners the responsibility, and cost, of looking after slaves too old to work. Anyway, from 1885, the system of slavery began to collapse as slaves simply left the plantations and neither the police nor the army would do anything to prevent them, they certainly wouldn’t try to catch them. Some plantation owners, however, set out to catch their runaways and there was some violence in cities such as Recife and Fortaleza in the north-east. In Santos, however, the port for Sao Paolo, runaway slaves were allowed to live in the hills above the city and were able to gain employment in the city. Until finally, in 1888 slavery was ended with the so-called ‘Golden Law’. Brazil was the last country in the western world to end slavery and it did so only because the revolts of slaves had become too many and too large to contain.

Now I was actually finishing off writing this episode, and the next which will look at the status of the Afro-Brazilian today, on November 20^th which is Dia da Consciência Negra, Black Consciousness Day, here in Brazil. In about half the states it is a public holiday. May 13^th, the day slavery was abolished in 1888, and the last of the slaves, some 750,000, were freed, was the date set in the 1960s but under pressure from the Afro-Brazilian community itself in the 1970s the date was changed. They preferred to commemorate the day in which Zumbi, the leader of the Republic of Palmares, the most famous quilombo, was killed.

The Afro-Brazilian today

I’m continuing my look at Brazil and my look at the Afro-Brazilian, moving on from the end of slavery to today.

You will remember 1888 was the year of the Golden Law, the end of slavery in Brazil. In 1889 Brazil became a republic and for the white elites, this helped draw a line between its slave-owning past and its future. But for the former slaves, life remained very hard. For many, freedom meant nothing more than being without work and so, dire poverty. Even for those with work, life seemed hardly better than when they had been slaves. Some went back to the plantations looking for paid work only to find a hostile reception or that their jobs had been taken by European immigrants. For most former slaves, the republic was looked on with suspicion if not fear (fear for their future), especially when their calls for land reform fell on deaf ears; the end of the monarchy was seen as something to regret.

Yet there are two significant differences between the experience of slaves and ex-slaves in America and those in Brazil. The first is that inter-racial relations, cohabitation and even marriage, was much more common in Brazil than was the case in America. This was a result of the fact that the Portuguese immigrants to Brazil were overwhelmingly male and so, on their own, and that the Catholic Church actively encouraged marriage when children resulted from these relationships. The second difference is that when freed, although they weren’t given any help, they were not held down by the Jim Crow laws that prevailed in America’s South.

And with slaves now free, in the decades that followed, Brazil underwent a policy known as “whitening” (blanqueamento). Brazil encouraged inter-racial breeding thereby making all Brazil white. Again, the experience of the Afro-Brazilian was very different to that of the Afro-American. Coupled with “whitening”, however, it was also seen as important to suppress African culture and the police were involved in violently suppressing African religions.

This has resulted in a society that is as racially mixed as can be. The mulatto or as they call them in Brazil, pardo (the term used on Brazilian censuses since 1872), half black-half white, and which is not an offensive word or description in Brazil, is the largest racial group in the country. Brazil’s Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) established five official racial categories in 1940 and according to the 2022 census, the pardo (brown) population constitute 45.3% of Brazil’s total population, the branco (white) population account for 42.8%, the prêto (black) population account for 10.6%, the indígena (indigenous) account for 0.8% and the amarelo (yellow – Asians of whom nearly all are Japanese), account for 0.5%. But behind these figures lies an awkward modern truth: most marriages are made within the same class, and the Brazilian middle class is almost entirely branco, and so, inter-racial marriages today are between prêtos and pardos, brancos overwhelmingly marry brancos. Miscegenation, as Brazilians celebrate it, is in truth a thing of the past.

Yet that is not to say there isn’t racism in Brazil, both at a personal and an institutional level. For example, in 1988, a hundred years after slavery had been abolished, it was reported that whilst only 0.5 out of every ten Brazilians were black, out of every ten poor Brazilians, six were black. And Brazil has had to work its way through anti-discriminatory wage structures, opening up entry into a range of jobs, both public and private, and dealing with police discrimination, though there has not been the outright racist legislation like the Jim Crow laws in America’s South or Apartheid in South Africa.

And many pardos have experienced something of a racial no-man’s land: are they branco or preto? Too white to take the kind of bottom-end unskilled jobs that were regarded as “black jobs”? But not white enough to make real social advancements. And if they navigated a path through that, do they cross the colour line and become white, dropping their black culture in the process? Brazilians have a saying: “money whitens”. A pardo, say, is seen as “more white” the wealthier or successful he or she is; “more preto”, the poorer or less successful he or she is. But it is incredibly complex in Brazil. A scientific study some years ago using DNA estimated that around 85% of the population – including tens of millions of Brazilians who regard themselves as white – have a more than 10% African contribution to their genome.

If you want to read a novel that deals with this, read Jorge Amado’s Tent of Miracles. I love his novels, they have the most wonderful characters that leave you with the suspicion that they couldn’t be made up – Brazil oozes out of very page! But the man whose work did more than anything else to change the way Brazilians would view their racially mixed heritage was Gilberto Freyre. In 1933 his study of the sugar growing regions in the colonial period, The Masters and the Slaves, though the Brazilain title, Casa-grande & Senzala, perhaps gives a more evocative description of it, enabled Brazilians black and white, branco and preto, to see that they had produced something unique, something that, despite its ugly side (slavery), they could actually be proud of. And they had literally produced it by the sexual relations between masters and slaves that produced the mulatto or pardo.  

He emphasised the positive contribution of Afro-Brazilians to Brazilian life, dismissing any negative traits to the impact of slavery. For Brazilians who had read the same Social Darwinist arguments that Hitler and others had, this was something they were happy to latch onto. For white Brazilians had felt that their country was doomed to be forever second best to white Europe because they had produced a race of mulattos. As Hitler would look at it, they had weakened their own blood. The republic’s motto, that you will see on its flag, Order and Progress, betrays this fear. Of course, Freyre’s was an idealistic vision (and in any case Freyre was actually saying that it was the white Portuguese ability to absorb other cultures that really made Brazil special). Nevertheless, it is from Freyre that the notion that Brazil was actually developing a ‘racial democracy’ really took off. Brazil is the land where races mixed in true harmony.

Well, if they ever did, the days were over. Freyre was looking back and the world he was looking at had already changed by the time his book was published. Between 1880, the decade in which slavery was finally abolished, and 1939, the decade in which Freyre had written his book, some four million new immigrants had arrived in Brazil, mostly European – Italian, Spanish German as well as more Portuguese, but also from the Middle East (there’s a big Lebanese population in Brazil) and from Japan, and this would carry on up to the First World War. At the same time, in 1890, immigration from Africa and elsewhere in Asia was banned. There was a debate about encouraging immigration from China. On the one hand the Chinese were seen as cheap, hard-working labour and because they were unlikely to assimilate, would not pollute the developing Brazilian race; but others feared they would do just that, that they would degrade the race. Both sides of the immigration policy, then, can be seen as another part of the “whitening process”. In the 1950s another 600,000 immigrants arrived. Racial democracy, always a misleading notion, was taken by the political elite and used to justify their dominance. For if Brazil was a land of equal opportunities where was the wrong in white Brazilians seizing their opportunities. If others didn’t, it couldn’t be their fault.

But the truth was, and is, that every type of racism exists in Brazil: internalised, the way individuals see others, for example in stereotyping; interpersonal, for example in the way others are prejudged and so treated differently (including discriminatingly) and the way someone might see themself as superior; institutional, seen in the policies and practices of institutions ranging from schools to businesses, for example in recruitment policies, and even churches; and structural, the whole web of racism, from culture, the way our history is taught, to laws enacted to institutions to interpersonal relations: the whole caboose. It just manifests itself differently than say, in America, which is more “in your face”.

That racial discrimination exists can be plotted on maps. The majority of Afro-Brazilians live in northern of Brazil, still stuck where the original sugar cane plantations where, while the majority of white-European Brazilians live in the industrial and considerably wealthier southern region. So, the poor have remained poor, and, of course, less educated. OK. You can argue that white Brazilians in the south of the country have worked hard to get where they are. And no doubt many have. But also, in the south there are favelas (slums) found on the edge of major cities and small towns alike, often lacking electricity or running water, and here you will find Afro-Brazilians, who exist to serve the white population: pumping petrol into their cars, cleaning their apartments or maybe selling water and snacks from the roadside as they sit in traffic jams in the over-congested roads. Many jobs undertaken by Afro-Brazilians are undertaken in the “black economy”, cash-in-hand with no taxes paid but no health insurance, no sickness or holiday entitlement and nothing paid into pension funds, and when they reach retirement age, they will qualify for only the very minimal pension, set at the level of the minimum wage.

What about some statistics:

• According to the 2010 Census (such details haven’t been released from

    the 2022 Census yet), The illiteracy rate among whites aged 5 and over

    was 5.9%. 14.4% of prêtos and 13% of pardos.

• In the age group, 15 to 24, 31.1% of brancos attend college whereas the

    percentages for pardos and prêtos are 13.4% and 12.8% respectively.

• According to the 2007 Brazilian National Data, the average monthly

    income of branco workers was almost double that of pretos and pardos.

• Brancosearn more than 50 percent more than prêtos for the same

    occupation.

• Of Brazil’s richest 1% of the population, only 12% are prêto and pardo

    while brancos make up 86.3% of the group.

• Among the poorest 10%, 73.9% were prêto and pardo, and 25.5% were

    branco.

• While 15.5% of brancos live below the poverty line, 33% of prêto and pardo

• The vast majority of Brazilians in leadership positions in government, politics, the judiciary, the military, education and the media are branco, for example 83% of the Brazilian Senate (with 14% self-identifying as pardo and only 4% as preto); and 75% of the Chamber of Deputies (with 20% self-identifying as pardo and again, only 4% as preto); while only 5% of CEOs in Brazil’s 500 largest companies self-identify as preto)

• But pretos and pardos constitute 75% of murder victims and 75% of those killed by the police.

The former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, admitted that “in general terms, to be black was to be poor in Brazil”. As president, he introduced affirmative action programmes, for example encouraging quotas for university applicants from both state schools and for black undergraduates. Those for black students are the object of fierce controversy and have hit problems you couldn’t imagine such has been the miscegenation, the mixing of races in Brazil. Twins applied to the University of Brazilia only for one to be accepted under the black quota system but for the other to be rejected as not being black. Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president for two terms from 2003 until 2011 (and president again, today), made racial equality a priority in his own government and in the wider administration. He appointed four Afro-Brazilians to his cabinet, appointed the first Afro-Brazilian judge to Brazil’s supreme court, and established a government office for promotion of racial equality. He also introduced the Bolsa Familia, which aimed to encourage children in poor families to stay in education and improve their health care too. It also empowered women in the family as the payments were made directly to them. Whether the policy has been successful or not is debated, though it will take time for its benefits to work through the generations, but at least it recognised the problem and tried to address it.

And so you can see that the Afro-Brazilian, be they preto or pardo, of mixed race or Black, have been consistently disadvantaged compared to the white population of Brazil throughout Brazil’s history. Brazil’s claim to racial democracy doesn’t stand up too well. But does any country? As always, I really do thank you for listening and as always, I remind you that you can check out my scripts on HistorymadeEasier if you so wish. Take good care. Cheers.

The Emperor comes to us

In this episode I’m going to look at something that I think is unique, or if it isn’t then it is very, very unusual. For Brazil was a colony that came to be home for its emperor.

Brazil as a colony had always, essentially, been self-governed. The Portuguese simply didn’t have the wherewithal to govern the colony, and to be fair, Brazil was always a bit like the cuckoo in the nest of a small bird: Brazil is 92 times bigger than Portugal and today its population is 20 times greater. Brazil’s first census in 1872 showed a population of 8 million free people, the majority of whom incidentally were already non-white, plus 1.5 million slaves and it is estimated (they weren’t included on the census) 400,000 indigenous people. Portugal’s population today is only 10.5 million of whom only a little over 9 million are Portuguese (some 200,000 are in fact Brazilians). So, you see my point.

It was a combination of threats from Napoleon and the British that forced the royal family to pack up and move. Napoleon demanded that Portugal cease trading with Britain whilst Britain threatened that, if they did, then the British navy would cut off Portugal’s ties with Brazil, at the same time promising to escort the Portuguese royal family to Brazil if they so wished. They did so wish, leaving Lisbon at the end of November, 1807, having waited anxiously for the winds to change, and at the very moment Napoleon’s troops entered the capital. It wasn’t just the royal family though; they took with them their court of some 10,000 people. And so many were crowded onto the ships that most had to sleep on deck with nothing but the clothes they had fled in. It must have been an awful voyage as they didn’t arrive in Salvador, in Bahia in the north-east of Brazil until late January 1808.

And had the Portuguese royals not arrived on Brazil’s shores, it is likely that Brazil would have fragmented into different states. Instead, the royal family, for all its faults, created enough of a sense of unity to hold Brazil together. And in the process, Rio de Janeiro, which had replaced Salvador as the country’s capital in 1763 (and the Court moved there as soon as it could), was not only Brazil’s capital but it was also the capital of the Portuguese empire. The old colonial relationship had been turned on its head. How crazy is that! But it got crazier, because with Napoleon defeated in 1815, King Joao decided to stay in Rio, making Brazil a kingdom on equal status with Portugal.

But before I move onto what happened to the royal family on landing in Brazil, let me just add something about that voyage that was of immense importance to the future of Brazil. For crowded as the ships were, they also carried coffee bush saplings. And just as a Brit, one Henry Wickham, would nearer the end of the century, smuggle thousands of rubber-tree seeds out of Brazil, delivering them to the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, which bred trees that were ultimately used in Malaysia to break the Brazilian rubber monopoly; so would those coffee bush samplings grow to make Brazil the world’s biggest exporter of coffee. One money-making bush was already in the process of replacing a money-making tree in the Brazilian economy, even though it was British and American firms (including Maxwell), who benefited most from the trade.

Anyway, back to the Portuguese royals. Brazil was actually governed first by Dom Joao, Queen Maria I’s son, as regent as his mother was mentally ill. And when she died, Dom Joao became king. But the relationship between Brazil and Portugal had to be sorted out and a revolution in Portugal that brought to power a liberal government eager to bring about a constitutional monarchy for a United Kingdom of Portugal and Brazil seemed to present an opportunity. Dom Joao reluctantly returned to Portugal to sort the matter out, becoming Joao VI of Portugal in the process, and leaving his son, Crown Prince Pedro, who was now in his twenties, in Rio as regent.

The Portuguese attempted to reassert their leading role in the relationship, however, treating Brazil as less than an equal partner, I suppose I should say less than an equal kingdom. The different Brazilian provinces or states were ordered to report to Lisbon directly and Crown Prince Pedro was first downgraded to governor of Rio and was then ordered back to Portugal. However, the Brazilian elite now seized their opportunity to assert themselves and persuaded Pedro to take up the Brazilian throne and become Pedro I, King of Brazil, and he duly did. It is said that on September 7^th 1822, he drew his sword on the banks of the Ipiranga Brook, a river in Sao Paulo state (and today a big chain of petrol stations), and declared, “Independence or Death. We have separated from Portugal.” A bit dramatic but as I’ve said in a different series, every nation needs its myths and he would become known as “the Liberator”. Certainly, the painting, the Cry of Ipiranga, painted 66 years after the event in 1888, did its bit. Pedro’s entourage were actually on mules, not the thoroughbred horses in the painting, and the uniforms in the painting were not adopted by the Brazilian army until a hundred years later (maybe they were inspired to do so by the painting).

Anyway, back to the great event. Pedro was in Sao Paulo to secure the state’s loyalty (Sao Paulo is a state as well as a city) and it was on the banks of the Ipiranga brook that he received news that Lisbon had ordered an end to what was going on and ordered him to return to Portugal. Instead, after the drama on the Ipiranga, on October 12^th 1822 he was declared Constitutional Emperor and Perpetual Defender of Brazil. However, in reality, he was only emperor of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo states, the rest of Brazil had to be won (and at this point I could add that this included Uruguay too which was briefly a Brazilian province. And when I say Brazil had still to be won, I mean won from both army units loyal to Portugal and Brazilian provinces loyal to themselves more than to the idea of a united Brazil. And it took until 1824 before this was achieved. What then unfolded in the 60+ years life of the Brazilian Empire serves to show how history could have been so different if personalities had been different, if wars had had different results, IF – the biggest word in history as it is in sport, as it is in life.

A constituent assembly met, comprised of those naturally most interested in writing constitutions: lawyers and judges. It envisaged a parliamentary democracy with the emperor’s powers very much restricted. Brazil would be governed by Brazilians, or at least wealthy Brazilians. But they quickly got bogged down in personal power struggles. Pedro intervened in no uncertain manner, surrounding the assembly with troops, dismissing it and sending its leading radical into exile. Pedro and his closest advisers then organised themselves as a Council of State and wrote a constitution to their own satisfaction: the Constitution of 1824. It would last until the end of the empire.

The constitution gave Brazil a bi-cameral (that’s a two-House) parliament: the lower house, the chamber of deputies, indirectly elected for four-year terms, the upper house, the senate, appointed by the emperor but from three-person lists from the states. The vote as well as the right to stand for parliament was based on property. The emperor had veto powers over legislation and could dismiss the government as well as the parliament. A council of state would assist the emperor. Regional control was assured by the emperor’s appointment of provincial presidents. It wasn’t quite absolutism but it certainly wasn’t a parliamentary monarchy. And it wasn’t entirely popular which meant Brazil had to be won all over again. There was a full-scale rebellion in the north-east where states joined together to form the Republic of the Confederation of the Equator. It took six months of bitter fighting before it was quelled (see how history could have been so different). Pedro then created a Brazilian nobility to help consolidate his position.

America had been the first nation to recognise Brazil, Britain soon recognised it too, Britain’s price being a trade treaty and the ending of the slave trade (even if it still went on). Britain then put pressure on Portugal to recognise their cuckoo.

On the death of his father in 1826, Pedro became King of Portugal but renounced the Portuguese throne in favour of his daughter who eventually became Queen Maria II. But Pedro’s reign would end ignominiously. There were two reasons. He took the wife of an army officer as a mistress and elevated her first to viscountess and then to marchioness and he recognised her daughter as his own. None of this endeared him to Brazilians. And he also tried to impose his personal rule, replacing his council of state with one more to his liking (meaning one more acquiescent). He had lost the support of the elite and, always of upmost importance, the army when a war with Argentina over, amongst other things, the Uruguayan province, though ending in something of a draw still led to the loss of the province as a result of British pressure. In 1831 he dramatically abdicated in favour of his son, also called Pedro, and headed back to Europe where he died of TB while securing his daughter’s claim to the Portuguese throne after his brother had tried to claim it from her (families eh!).

As a footnote to our brief look at Pedro I, on the 200^th anniversary of Brazil’s independence in 2022, Pedro’s heart, embalmed and preserved in a glass urn filled with formaldehyde, was flown to Brasilia as part of the bi-centennial celebrations. It must have been charged excess baggage too – with the urn it weighs 22lbs or 10 kilos! Pedro had asked on his death bed for his heart to be removed from his body and taken to the city of Porto, where it is kept in an altar in the church of Our Lady of Lapa. The heart was received in Brazil like a head of state, “It will be treated as if Dom Pedro I was still living amongst us,” Brazil’s foreign ministry’s chief of protocol Alan Coelho de Séllos said. And indeed, it was: there was a cannon salute, a guard of honour and full military honours. The national anthem was played and the independence anthem (which was actually composed by Dom Pedro I). Pedro’s body had already been transferred to Brazil in 1972 to mark the 150th anniversary of independence and has been kept in a crypt in São Paulo. It really is a crazy world, and I can tell you it doesn’t get crazier than here in Brazil. It’s why I belong here!

Pedro II

This episode continues our little soap opera looking at the royals of Brazil by looking at the reign of the much-loved (at least in this part of the world) Pedro II.

Now, Pedro II was only five when his father abdicated, and so a three-man regency was established, actually it was provided for in the Constitution of 1824, though an amendment to that constitution led to a single regent who would be elected for a four-year term. Hardly surprisingly, then, politics in Brazil went through a very uncertain period. The country was huge and communications were not very good, making it more difficult for the centre to control the states or for the states to influence the centre. Pedro Is abdication hadn’t been expected and Brazil’s elite was small in number and split into factions rather than organised parties. There was a faction that wanted the restoration of Pedro I (his death in 1834 put an end to that option though), there were those who wanted the monarchy to survive but under his son when he turned eighteen, and there were those who leaned towards a republic. What unfolded, however, was that power devolved to the states. Two things signified this more than anything else: the creation of a national guard in each sate and under the separate control of each state, and state legislatures (another amendment to the constitution adopted at the same time as the regency amendment). Brazil, if it held together, would be a federal state, whether as an empire or as a republic.

That it would hold together, however, was by no means certain. It had already lost territory (Uruguay), though this had been Spanish territory and it had only been held by Brazil for a little more than six years so it was not a major loss even if it was the end of the dream of controlling the Rio de la Plata. But what had always been Portuguese-Brazilian territory (give or take the odd Dutch incursion) might slip away from the young empire. There were revolts at either end of the country.

In the north, the revolts were more to do with local issues, revolts against the local elites, but they still threatened the integrity of Brazil. In the south though the unrest developed into a war of independence, with Argentina and the newly created Uruguay doing what they could to help the rebels. Incidentally, the legend of Italian independence, Guiseppe Garibaldi, in self-exile in Brazil at the time, got involved. The regency clearly wasn’t working and the political elite in Rio was divided over whether to centralise power before Pedro II came of age to rule or else to install him as emperor now in order to bring about unity. It was the latter group that forced the issue and Pedro II took the oath of office in 1840 when still only fourteen, and was ceremonially installed as emperor the following year.

For the first ten years of his reign, different factions of the elite ran things but Pedro would grow into the job and, by the end of his reign, he had changed his cabinet no less than thirty-six times, dismissing the governing party eleven times. Yet he wasn’t autocratic. He generally kept his temper but clearly, he knew what he wanted, or what he didn’t want, and he did what he could to direct Brazil in the direction he thought it should develop. To some extent, he weaved a deliberate path alternating between liberal and conservative governments so that Brazil would benefit from both their viewpoints. Though both parties were mostly made up of landowners and so both they, along with the emperor, were somewhat blind to the needs of industry and commerce.

As for politics as we understand it, there had now developed a conservative party that favoured central control, and a liberal party that favoured devolved power and this was an even bigger issue than it would have been anyway as, with Pedro alternating his governments, every change at the centre necessitated changes at state level too. So that, the states seemed to be at the mercy of what was going on in Rio. Also, the fact that states like Sao Paulo, that were driving the economy, had less representation in the federal legislature than states that may have once been important but were no longer so, caused resentment. Modernisation was a key issue but the issue that caused most division was slavery, to be precise that it was soon going to abolished, no matter how much those against its abolition tried to delay it (and remember, it was the issue that led to civil war in America). And it was the divisions over the seeming imbalance of power between the centre and the states, and the delay over the abolition of slavery (seen by the abolitionists as necessary if Brazil was to modernise) that led to the growth of a republican party in the 1870s. And the whole issue of a monarchy was also brought into question as a result of the early deaths of Pedro’s sons. But what brought the monarch down was war.

I’ve mentioned Uruguay in this tale a few times. No sooner had they gained their own independence, both Brazil and Argentina had their eyes on the Rio de la Plata, and Paraguay was sucked into the territorial greed of their much bigger neighbours too. And without going into detail this led to war between Paraguay and Brazil, lasting six years from 1864 to 1870 and a very bloody, very nasty war it was too. Brazil expected to crush Paraguay but it fought to the bitter end, and even then, its president continued to fight a guerrilla war. It cost Brazil over $300 million, a staggering sum and left Brazil in debt. And tens of thousands of men died or else were wounded. So, it had a profound effect on Brazil. Pedro refused to countenance anything but total victory and it became his war rather than Brazil’s. But in late 1889 the Crown paid the ultimate price. With the Republican Party banned from contesting the 1889 election, they pushed the army to act which they duly did, toppling the monarchy.

Pedro II had been emperor, as a boy and as a man, for fifty-eight years. And when told he had been deposed, supposedly said: “I guess this is retirement. That’s okay, I’m tired anyway.” He packed up and moved to Europe with his family, where he died just two years later in 1891. He had shown a strong sense of duty and devotion toward his country and his people, yet he was increasingly tired of his role. It wasn’t just the war that led to the coup that overthrew him, though the manner the war had been fought, annoyed the army, so that when it was pushed by republicans to initiate a coup, it did. He had annoyed both sides of the slavery debate with the stance he took, his gradualist approach annoyed the abolitionists and his ultimate goal, of course, annoyed the die-hard slave owners. The new generation hadn’t experienced the uncertainty in Brazil that his reign had done so much to dispel and so were more disposed to make the leap towards making Brazil a republic. But in truth he, himself, was unsure about the whole notion of monarchy and without male heirs, and much as he loved his daughter, he didn’t think a woman should rule, he felt the days of the empire were numbered.

His remains were returned to Brazil in 1921 with celebrations across the country. Many Brazilian historians have regarded him in an overwhelmingly positive light and several have ranked him as the greatest Brazilian of all time. He certainly had a deep impact on the country’s history. And ultimately, the order he had helped bring to Brazil gave republicanism the space it needed to grow. It was the new generation that was the empires downfall: given the union of Brazil and its consolidated status as a nation-state they no longer feared the collapse of political order. Pedro almost certainly approved.

Towards military dictatorship

In this episode I’m going to look at Brazil post-empire. Tracing the country’s path to dictatorship.

War with Paraguay had helped create a new kind of nationalism amongst the soldiers, fuelled by the fact that they had risked their lives for their country and, too, by the manner in which their country, especially its politicians, didn’t seem overly grateful for their victory. This was seen most amongst the officer corps whose numbers had swelled to some 10,000 during the war. They would come to form a significant part of a tiny middle class in Brazil, significant because they were republican and were both disciplined and organised; significant because they favoured a state controlled at the centre; and significant because their status was based more on merit than family connections. They envisaged a future based on order, the creation of a modern Brazil, an economy based on science and technology, and a society in which virtue and merit would be rewarded. But the key to progress would be order. And ominously, for the emperor and ultimately for Brazil, that the army was prepared to enter the political arena was made clear in 1887 (so just two years before Pedro II was forced out) when the officers formed a political club: the Clube Militar. Its first president, Marshal da Fonseca, would become the first president of the new republic.

A new constitution was written in 1891, though not entirely new. It dropped property qualifications though literacy would still be a requirement to vote, and women remained excluded. This gave the middle class a little more power. Federalism was strengthened as states would now elect their own governors and their own state legislatures. They were also able to establish their own militias and even negotiate their own foreign loans. Even so, with the federal legislature and the first president at constant loggerheads, the president dissolved the congress and ruled by decree (and remember he was a military man) until he resigned and his vice president, Marshal Floriano Peixoto (yes, another general), took over, avoiding calls for a new election. It had almost come to a civil war but the army just about held back.

Yet still, Brazil tottered on the brink. Marshal Peixoto tried to impose a governor of his own choosing on the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul but, insisting on their constitutional right to choose their own governor, they prepared to fight for that right. At the same time, elements in the navy mutinied. They joined with federalists in calling for a referendum to reinstate a monarchy. In stepped Sao Paulo state, the driving force of the economy. They insisted that elections for a new president be called. And, of course, they had their candidate ready. To back their demand, a state militia was organised, strong in number and in arms. Peixoto could see the writing on the wall and agreed and in the election, Sao Paulo’s man, Prudente de Morais, who was a bridge between the defunct empire and the republic – he had been president of the constituent assembly that drafted the new constitution and had run for president against the military candidates. It meant Brazil was free of military control but it did mean that the elite in the different states were back in control, leaving the urban middle class feeling the true spirit of the republic had still been betrayed.

Federalism asserted itself once again. What developed under the next president, Brazil’s fourth but only its second civilian president, was what came to be called the “Politics of the Governors” whereby the president dealt directly with governors and promised to leave state affairs to them, while they accepted that matters like foreign relations, defence, border issues and external tariffs. Congress fell into the new political reality, not acting like a national legislature but more like an assembly of states, arbitrating when there were disputes between them. A serious down side to this new way of doing politics was that politics tended to be personalised and with that, getting rid of an individual seemed to be the most effective way to settle political differences. As a result, political assassinations became a far-too common feature of political life in Brazil.

There were also military revolts, in protest to the way the armed forces had been treated and in protest to government policy, and the tiny middle class supported them. They were minor in nature and, in the immediate term at least, in significance too, but they were emblematic of the unease caused by the way the government was being controlled by small state elites. And in the 1920s a quasi-political group, the tenetes, was formed by lieutenants that identified problems that included widespread corruption, vote fixing, constitutional abuse in dealing with state autonomy and intimidation of the press.

To put all this in context for you, we are talking about the early twentieth century: WW1, the Russian Revolutions, the Treaty of Versailles is what most history books focus on (and by the way, Brazil was the only country in South America to fight against the Central Powers and so was represented at the peace conference, in fact its president led the Brazilian delegation). Meanwhile, in Brazil it was a time of modernisation, electrification, developing industries, the time when Rio de Janeiro began to take on the look it is famous for today, and it was a Brazil at least united by the airwaves as the radio began to have its influence. Yet it was also a Brazil in which its north-east states were still in what could be described as colonial isolation. There were railways but these mostly linked Brazil’s agricultural areas to the coast. The roads from Sao Paolo and Rio to the north east were mostly dirt roads. Journeys were still mostly taken by sea, or else by air.

But the influence Brazil was opening itself up to also led to the formation of the Brazilian Communist Party in 1922. Whilst the political elites, and they could be counted only in hundreds in each of the states, around 300 in Sao Paolo tied by kinship and marriage, continued to run things, with the economic powerhouse of Sao Paolo, along with Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais which borders the other two, and in the south, Rio Grande do Sul dominating the other states, no matter their constitutional rights to their own autonomy. A state hierarchy had developed based on resources and so economic strength, and leading to a political hierarchy. Coffee was at the heart of it.

Brazil had a population of some 35 million, most of whom lived near the coast. But there were also the ‘backlands’ in the interior, areas were poor individuals and families scratched out a living on land that they had cultivated from virgin scrub or bush (but had no land title deeds) and saw any attempts by the states to impose taxes or laws of any nature as an invasion of their independence. In some ways you can see them as similar to the quilombolas of the runaway slaves as they were attempts to scratch a living in a world that didn’t otherwise give them much of a chance to do so; so, they tried to remove themselves from that world.

Since the first two military presidents, the republic had elected eight presidents from Sao Paolo and three from its neighbouring state Minas Gerais, in what had become an arrangement between the two states. The Brazilians called it the café com leite deal (coffee with milk – the coffee coming from Sao Paolo and the milk from Minas Gerais). But three things came together to bring about the collapse of not only the café com leite deal but the end of rule by the state elites: the Great Depression that began with the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the candidacy of Julio Prestes for president in the 1930 election and one of those political assassinations I told you about, this one also in 1930.

The depression immediately unsettled the middle class, while army officers still railed against the selfishness of states and craved for a truly unified country. And at this critical juncture, the existing president, a Sao Paulo nominee, ignored the café com leite deal and nominated another Sao Paolo man, Julio Prestes, for the 1930 election. The Minas Gerais elite were furious – milk would not be added to the coffee! They established a Liberal Alliance (there was always something of a misnomer in that name) with Rio Grande do Sul and another state, Paraiba from up in the north-east, as well as the urban middle class and the tenentes, and put up their own candidate: Getulio Vargas, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul with one Joao Pessoa, the governor of Paraiba, as vice president.

Vargas knew he wouldn’t win and didn’t but was taken aback when the victors refused to allow some of their opponents to take their seats in congress. And then came the murder of Joao Pessoa. Now this is an insight into an ugly side to Brazilian politics that raises itself from time to time. The assassin had been the victim of violence at the hands of Pessoa’s henchmen, and his assassination was an act of revenge, but revenge worked both ways and the assassin’s entire family were murdered by Pessoa’s men. Despite the circumstance of the assassination, the Liberal Alliance painted it as a political assassination and the Brazilian people generally saw it that way too: a Paolista plot to rid it of any opposition that dare raise its head. Forces from Rio Grande do Sul threatened Sao Paolo, others from Minas Gerais threatened Rio, individual tenentes acted in the north east, the army joined in too and a military coup was a real possibility but Vargas’s popularity made them hold back. And so, Julio Prestes, the man elected to be president, and who would most likely have made a good president, stepped down and Vargas it was who became Brazil’s 15^th president. It was a right old mess. The army’s response, not for the first time, was ominous. They were disappointed, they were angry, they thought the republican ideal had been betrayed by the different state elites. Again, they set up political clubs: the October Third Club and the October Legion. Both advocated a dictatorship to cleanse Brazilian politics from its self-serving politicians.

Now you will see just why the Liberal Alliance was such a misnomer because Vargas issued in what amounted to a dictatorship. He dissolved the congress and governed by issuing decrees, He removed all sate governors except in Minas Gerais, appointing his own acting governors in their place, and all constitutional guarantees were suspended. He then set about revising the constitution. And having forced out officers who hadn’t supported him, he had the army’s full support.

The states of Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais organised against Vargas but when the army surrounded the city of Sao Paulo the revolt quickly fizzled out, leaving Vargas in an even stronger position. The end of the elites’ control of Brazil, always an agricultural elite, was in fact welcomed by most Brazilians.

The electorate was enlarged (only two million had voted in 1930) with a new electoral code that became law in 1932: the voting age was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen (only done in Britain in 1969 and in America in 1971 – the Vietnam War being the driving factor in America), women were given the vote too. But literacy was still a requirement. This new code elected a Constituent Assembly and a new constitution was put in place in 1934 which increased power at the centre. Again, to help put what was happening in Brazil in historical context, this was the 1930s and fascism, in the hands of Mussolini and Hitler, was on the march in Europe. The constitution also guaranteed fifty seats in the assembly for key corporate interest groups: workers, industry, the professions and the civil service (something Mussolini had done in Italy, though strictly under fascist control, of course). They would join the 250 traditionally elected delegates. A fascist party, the Integralist Party, emerged in the 1930s and as we had the black shirts in Italy and the brown shirts in Germany, in Brazil, we had the green shirts. They shared a lot with the European fascists but for two things: racism was not a factor and nor was an expansionist policy. There were violent clashes with communists and the communists did attempt a coup in 1935 but its was easily quashed and gave Vargas the excuse to suspend civil rights and the constitution. And two years later, with presidential elections, for which Vargas could not stand, due the following year, Vargas initiated his own coup. He had the army evict congress and announced the Estado Novo, the New State, borrowing the name, and much else, from the Portuguese dictator, Anntonio Oliveira Salazar. Vargas would rule Brazil as a fascist yet he banned the fascist Integralist Party. But this was Brazilian fascism and much as he admired the Nazi propaganda machine, Brazil did things differently. Vargas controlled the Rio Carnaval parade by offering a substantial government prize for the winning Samba school, but the floats were required to adopt historical themes or else national figures.

The Estado Novo

I’m continuing my look at Brazil and in this episode I’m looking at Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo or New State.

The Estado Novo was founded on three pillars: the bureaucracy, urban workers and the army and, of course, he ensured that all three had a vested interest in maintaining his regime. This meant government-sponsored unions, social welfare provision for the workers, an important role in the administration for bureaucrats, and more money for the army as well as recognition of their unifying role. In any case, Vargas was in tune with the army’s thinking: a distrust of party politics, national unity, and a modern, independent Brazil that would be respected internationally. Vargas was also in tune with the paternal style of authority in which many peasants viewed their relationship with their landowner, and workers with their employers. In this way Vargas was portrayed as the father of the people, O Pai do Povo, and his wife, Darcy, as the nation’s mother. Like Hitler, and like Roosevelt, he made full use of the radio, the new medium for mass communication. The Hora do Brasil, Brazilian Hour, became a part of people’s lives helped by placing loudspeakers in important public spaces so that the message would get across to the maximum number of people (again, something the Nazis did too).

The states were all-but emancipated, under the president’s control. Though it has to be said that the Vargas regime was popular, certainly at first, nevertheless the National Security Law of 1935 turned Brazil into a virtual police state and political opponents could expect harsh treatment. All, again, if not as ruthless, it was still like Nazi Germany.

As for WW2, I think its interesting for us to know that Vargas at first tried to play both sides. There are a lot of Germans and even more Italians in Brazil and both Berlin and Rome used powerful transmitters to broadcast to Brazil a mixture of songs and other entertainment from home with outright propaganda. But after Pearl Harbour, Vargas sided with the Allies. Ultimately, the American economy mattered more to Brazil whilst the British navy could blockade Brazil.

After the war, Vargas new his dictatorship was over; elections had to be called and he wouldn’t be eligible to stand for re-election. There was a Queremistas movement (We Want Vargas) but it backfired and did him more damage than good. The army called for him to resign and he did. And such was the pre-eminence of the army in Brazil’s political future that it was two generals that stood for election: General Eurico Dutra, who had been Vargas’s war minister, and Major General Eduardo Gomes, head of the air force, who had participated in an army revolt in the 1920s and had helped quash the communist revolt in 1935. Dutra won and the motorway linking Sao Paolo and Rio is named after him. And with the electorate enlarged in 1932, six million people voted. Still, a small number for such a large country (Brazil’s population in 1945 was around 46 million). There was, of course, yet another constitution. This one, the Constitution of 1946, went back to the pre-Estado Novo days and decentralised power. States would be allowed to run their own affairs again. But behind everything was the army and it was determined to keep a careful eye on democracy. The armed forces were made responsible for guaranteeing the constitution and ultimately for maintaining law and order.

Again, to give a wider historical perspective to what was going on politically, these post-war years saw the rise of the favelas in Brazil’s cities: Rio and Sao Paolo, of course, but in cities up and down Brazil. The poor were sucked into the cities in search of a better life only they didn’t find it. What they got was self-made shacks, without water or sanitation, forging their own economy collecting what had been thrown away in order to recycle it for their own use, getting cash-in-hand jobs without any security, if they could, otherwise left to scavenge or rob. They became a sub-class, uneducated and unskilled, living on the very margins of society; and they are there today, only in much greater numbers.

But back to politics: Vargas came back, winning the 1950 election! But now he had to govern within the terms of a constitution and it didn’t work out very well. He wanted to modernise Brazil but was thwarted by a congress that he couldn’t control while the military watched on in deep suspicion. Then it turned tragic. Vargas was being criticised on different radio shows but the host of one targeted him with a viscousness that was personal – he was out to destroy him. Without Vargas’s knowledge, his personal body guard, incensed by the attacks on his boss (and his president), put out a contract to murder the journalist. It failed, but the journalist’s volunteer bodyguard, an air force general, was killed in the bungled assassination attempt. An enquiry led back to Vargas, innocent though he was. The military demanded his resignation but Vargas did more than that: he put a bullet through his own heart. The nation, understandably, was shocked. And the shock turned to horror when his suicide note was published throughout Brazil and read on the radio over and over again: “I cannot give you more than my blood”, he wrote, going on to say, “I choose this means to be with you always…. Now I offer my death…. I leave life to enter history.”

Vargas’s successor, in more ways than one, was Juscelino Kubitschek who did his best to drive Brazil’s modernisation forward but emptied the coffers in the process, whilst basic problems such as communications remained. Two initiatives that have an effect on Brazil today are that he built a new capital, Brasilia, and he made the decision to invest in roads rather than railways. The future would be the car not the train, and boy are Brazil’s roads clogged, in the cities at least. But with inflation a constant drag, he didn’t deliver a secure lifestyle for the middle classes and the army was left increasingly worried about the state of the economy and the level of corruption. Kubitschek’s successor, Janio Quadros, was quite simply a disaster, out of his depth and quickly out of office (within a year), and though his successor, his vice-president, Joao Goulart, was not much better, though to be fair, inflation was now out of control (100% by 1964) and the army made it very difficult for him to govern the way he might have wanted to, trying to turn his presidency into little more than a symbolic role with power going to congress and a prime minister. A referendum, however, rejected that idea. When, in desperation, attempting to find a power base somewhere, Goulart moved to the Left, the army, after securing America approval (President Johnson was prepared to assist if it proved necessary), made their move. Order would be imposed and communism, if it was indeed ever a threat, would be squashed. On March 31^st-April 1^st 1964 the tanks came onto the streets of Rio, Sao Paolo and all major cities, Brasilia was cut off from the rest of the country. In the way all coups work, if they are going to be successful, government buildings, tv and radio stations, all potential opposition –politicians, including Kubitscheck (Goulart fled to Uruguay), union leaders, radical leaders of any sort, were rounded up. An expected response from the Brazilian people never materialised.

The military in power

So, with America at war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement making some headway (I wouldn’t exaggerate how much), with hippies flocking to San Franciso, and British culture taken over by the Beatles, the Stones, the Who and co; Brazil was taken over by the military.

Throughout the years of the republic, the military had had a presence in Brazilian cabinets and now, ten days after the military coup, a three-man junta formed from just such cabinet members issued the first of a number of Institutional Acts, extra-legal decrees that the military regime used to impose their will. This first one declared the coup to be justified and that the new government would exercise its power “in the exclusive interests of the Nation.” General Humberto de Alencas Castelo Branco was made president (another to have a major motorway leading out of Sao Paulo named after him). Meanwhile the congress was purged of the more troublesome opposition.

Castelo Branco had two immediate aims: stop the spread of communism (not as great a threat as the army feared but nevertheless a real threat given the degree of poverty in Brazil, the huge gap between the wealthiest and the poorest and the vast number of landless peasants), and get the economy back on track. Now, I’m not going to explore what the military governments did over the next twenty-one years, what they achieved and where they failed, I’m more interested in the nature of miliary rule in Brazil and so that’s where my focus will lie.

In the state elections in 1965, the year after the coup, all but two states elected governors who were hostile to the military regime and this led directly to a second Institutional Act which banned political parties, except for a government party and an “opposition” party (a farcical attempt at appearing to be democratic) and instigated indirect elections (only the purged congress voting) for the president and vice-president and a third Institutional Act in 1966 instigated indirect elections for governors who, in turn, would choose the mayors for their state capital. The military government was also given the power to intervene in state affairs. Five new pro-government judges were appointed to the Supreme Court though in any case the scope of its powers were restricted, military courts would try so-called subversives and the government was given the right to waver the rights of any individual. The centre hadn’t held so much political power since the early days of the empire. So, only local municipal government, and then only outside of the state capitals, remained free from central control.

When Castelo Branco retired from the presidency, his successor eased back on central control only for demonstrations on the streets against the restrictions to political life and freedom in general, and for congress to attempt to assert itself. All of which brought a no-nonsense response from hard-lime military officers (the linha dura) and another Institutional Act. The president disbanded congress and closed state legislatures too, imposed censorship, declared dictatorial powers, suspended more political rights and the arrests of suspected opponents was made easier with the suspension of habeas corpus for political offences and crimes against national security (and, of course, the military regime would define what constituted such crimes). Brazil now entered the period known as the Dirty War. Journalists were arrested, foreign journalists were required to submit their dispatches for approval, even former president Kubitscheck was taken into custody.

The Dirty War began with moves against opposition wherever it might be found, be it the land reform movement, students, artists or, believe it or not, the Mothers’ Union (I couldn’t find out why, I just know they were included, but why shouldn’t mothers be radical?). The National Intelligence Service, a secret police force, military intelligence and paid informers were all put to work, opening mail, tapping phones, sitting in on meetings and university classes, and, of course, making arrests. Students had organised demonstrations but when a protest march in Rio, the so-called March of the 100,000, was held in 1968, which drew in priests, workers and professionals, as well as students, it brought a ban on all public demonstrations from the regime.

Music became one of the very few avenues left for peaceful protest with the Tropicalia movement (they dressed up in tropical costumes but there was much, much more to the movement than that). It mixed protest with humour and as well as great music, blending different genres, Brazilian, African and international (the Beatles were just one influence), it also included poetry, theatre, film and art, indeed it was a poet who coined the name, and it really got the regime’s backs up, even though it also annoyed the Left because it wasn’t “Brazilian” enough. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, two guys whose music, if you don’t already know it, you should check out, were the leaders of the movement. Both Veloso and Gilberto Gil were arrested at the end of 1968 and spent two months in jail followed by four months of house arrest before they were allowed to go into exile. They both moved to London where they stayed until 1972. Caetano Veloso would go on to win two Grammy awards. Gilberto Gil would not only go on to win three Grammy awards but in 2003 would become Minister of Culture in Lula da Silva’s first government. The only thing I would add is that their protests in 1968 were no small thing. They were brave acts and they had an effect. Brazilian heroes as well as Brazilian legends, I think.

Opposition aimed at making it difficult for the regime to govern was, of course, forced underground. Guerrilla groups were formed by students. They funded themselves through bank robberies, they hid out in favelas and they chose kidnapping as the best means to get their voice heard. It started with the kidnapping of the American ambassador in 1969. The price for his release was newspaper, radio and television coverage of their manifesto as well as the freeing of fifteen political prisoners who were flown to Mexico. Swiss, German and Japanese diplomats were also kidnapped. But in truth, their greatest effect was to justify the military regime and its clampdown on democracy and liberties, after all its purpose was to ensure order and prevent extremism. Well, here was living proof of the need for the regime. And the regime responded with ruthless force: torture was used to get names, assassinations were conducted, and people “disappeared”. Almost 500 people were disappeared or killed, and many, many more detained and tortured.

Amongst the victims, and they were mostly young middle-class people, between the age of eighteen and thirty, were many who were innocent. Whilst accountability for what was happening was always very vague: vague directives from the top left local agents free to make their own decisions as to who to arrest and what to do with them. It meant that the more sadistic elements amongst the security forces (and they’re always there) were free to do their worst. One of the infamous torture methods consisted of leaving prisoners hanging upside down from a pole for hours, heels and wrists tied together in a position known as the “parrot’s perch”. Many prisoners were also subjected to electrical shocks and some faced mock executions.

Getting back to civilian government

In this episode I’ll look at how the Brazilian military got itself out of the hole it had dug, and got itself out of its political role.

Military rule hade left the Church in a dilemma. As they were opposed to atheist communism, they supported the military regime. But at the same time, a Vatican initiative was begun in 1962 for the Church to do more to help the poor. This meant not just spiritual help but material help, and calls for greater social and political justice too. Rather awkward when there’s a military regime in place viciously clamping down on political opposition that represents the poor. It led some 2,000 priests (15% of all Brazilian priests) to leave the clergy in order to devote their lives working directly with the poor. This, in turn, led to increasing calls from communities to do something, be it land reform or cooperatives or better schools and better health care. The military chose to label those ex-priests now working in poor communities as either outright communists or else communist dupes. The Catholic Church at one and the same time, found itself at odds with conservatives and radicals, with the military regime and, in the last resort, at odds with itself.

Now, military dictatorships can be instigated for the good of the country, the military reluctantly steps in to lend a hand at times when politicians seem to have failed the country and have no answers to the problems they face. A big problem, however, is how to bring it to an end. By the 1970s the military in Brazil faced just that problem. Many officers were worried that the dirty war had driven a wedge between the army and the people, that they were now seen as the enemies of the people rather than their allies. Amazing really that they should be surprised by that given the violent means by which they had suppressed opposition; the culture of fear they had developed.

In 1973 the arrest, torture and death of a student activist, Alexandre Vannuchi Leme, led to protests that lasted a month, some 3,000 denied the military regime and attended his memorial service, and these protests helped bring the issue of how to get Brazil back onto a democratic path to a head. Censorship was eased and contacts were made between the military and the Catholic Church, business groups and unions discussing the path forward. In 1975, the arrest, torture and death of a journalist, Vladimir Herzog, reignited things again, and a majority in the military were now determined to end the dictatorship. It would take another ten years but at least Herzog’s death ended the use of torture.

A watershed had been reached by the mid-1970s. The official opposition party had inflicted heavy defeats on the government party in the congressional elections of 1974 and would do so again in the municipal elections of 1976. The voices of civil society, for example the Church, business groups, the legal profession and unions began to be heard voicing their opinions again. The one thing the military were adamant on, however, was that there would be no repercussions for those involved in the Dirty War once democratic norms had been restored.

A series of decrees in the Spring of 1977 put a return to democracy, in the words of President General Ernesto Geisal, on a “slow, gradual and certain” path. In 1979, Geisal’s successor, President Joao Batista de Oliveira Figueiredo, announced an amnesty for both political prisoners and those in exile, but also for those responsible for abuses during the Dirty War, though the secret service still kept a careful eye on those who had been arrested for at least a decade after the amnesty. In 1980, Congress passed a law reintroducing the direct election of governors. And in 1982, opposition candidates won the country’s most important governorships as well as a majority in Congress. But the military regime only finally ended with the presidential election of 1985. The military failed to put forward a candidate and Tancredo Neves, governor of Minas Gerais, was elected (though note this was still an indirect election – the people didn’t have a say). Neves had made clear that the military would be treated with respect, that there would not be a major investigation into the Dirty War, and he even promised to increase the military budget. So, the “slow, gradual and certain” path was completed. Not that Brazil was through with drama. Come on, this is Brazil!

Neves was not to have his big day. He died the day before his inauguration, I should add that he died of natural causes. So it was that the first civilian president since 1964 was Jose Sarney, elevated from vice-president literally at the last minute. However, the first popularly elected president, under yet another new constitution, was Fernando Collar de Mello, elected in 1989. That would end in tears though when he became two years into office, the first president to be impeached. So, starting a tradition in Brazilian politics.

And there would be more drama. In 1992, the Brazilians were asked to decide in a referendum, first whether they wanted to remain a republic or re-institute a monarchy. The overwhelming vote, almost 87%, was to remain a republic. Still, that meant around 6.5 million Brazilians did, in fact, want the monarchy to return. And they were also asked to vote on whether they wanted to retain a presidential system or introduce a parliamentary system, and here the vote was a little closer: 69% to 31% in favour of retaining the presidential system. Interestingly though, turnout was low – ony 73% – and this in a country where voting is compulsory, while 13% of the votes were invalidated (you couldn’t vote for a monarchy and for presidentialism) and 10% of people returned blank slips. Why would anyone want a return of the monarchy? You might well ask. The argument wrested on the fact that the republic was proclaimed in 1889 after a military coup; the people had had no say in it. Now, given that a period of military dictatorship had ended, maybe now was the time to give the people a say. There was also the argument that the reign of Pedro II had been a period of stability, but then it was a long time ago and a very different world.

Then, in 2014, twenty-six years after the end of the military dictatorship, the Brazilian government, under the presidency of Dilma Rousseff who was herself a victim of torture during the Dirty War, set up a National Truth Commission to shed light on human rights violations. It worked for a little over two and a half years, even setting up partnerships with other countries in order to investigate the international networks set up by dictatorships in their efforts to squash political opposition. This was Operation Condor that, as well as Brazil, included Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia. The commission found four important violations of human rights: (1) unlawful and arbitrary detentions; (2) systematic torture using physical and psychological methods as well as rape and sexual assault (and with an estimated total of over 20,000 victims); (3) summary, arbitrary and extrajudicial executions or other forms of state murder; (4) enforced disappearance and concealment of the victims’ bodies. As well as the harrowing evidence it revealed, it identified 377 state agents, of whom almost 200 were still alive, who had been responsible for cases of torture, killings or “disappearances”. Amongst those implicated were past generals and past presidents, in this case, all deceased. What is more, despite the Amnesty Law of 1979, it recommended prosecutions.

However, the Brazilian Supreme Court had already ruled in 2010 that the Amnesty Law of 1979 still applied and no prosecutions resulted from the report. It certainly stirred up emotions though, from the victims of torture, President Dilma amongst them, and from the military who thought that accountability for those years were behind them. And in the name of balance, I am obliged to add that there were criticisms that no investigations were made into the bank robberies and kidnappings and murders carried out by opponents of the dictatorship.

Then, in 2018, forensic experts were able to identify the remains of Aluisio Palhano Pedreira Ferrera, the trade unionist who had been disappeared in 1971. He was only one of five people they were able to identify from more than 1,000 bags of human remains discovered more than thirty years before. But also in 2018, Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro as president and he was, of course a former army captain. As a congressman, he had opposed the creation of the Truth Commission and with reference to the motto at the centre of the Brazilian flag, he defined the period of the military regime as “20 years of order and progress.” What is more, he also described Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who was in charge of one of the torture centres and was charged with the kidnapping of Palhano, only for the courts to rule that the Amnesty Law protected him, as a “national hero.” Nuff said.

Something good, something not good, something beautiful

To end this little series looking at Brazil, something good, something not good, and something beautiful.

Brazil is one of the few countries in the world to have a purpose-built capital: Brasilia, deep in Brazil’s north-central interior. And, completed in just four years, it stands as a symbol of just what Brazil can achieve when it puts its mind to doing so, as well as being the show piece of the work of one of the great architects, Oscar Niemeyar (who is also notable for living until the grand old age of 107 – he died in 2012). As I mentioned in a previous episode, it was President Juscelino Kubitschek who set the ball rolling, or the bulldozers bulldozing, in 1956. It not only replaced Rio de Janeiro, which in turn had replaced Salvador, as Brazil’s capital, but is now Brazil’s third biggest city if its satellite towns are included, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a source of great pride for Brazilians.

The notion of a purpose-built capital had been around for a long time. It was first mooted in colonial Brazil back in 1789, the year of the French Revolution, by a man known to all Brazilians: Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes (Joaquim was amongst other things an amateur dentist, Tiradentes being the Portuguese for dentist). Anyway, he led a revolt to free Brazil from Portuguese rule. The revolt failed and Tiradentes was hung, and his body cut up (but he did give us another public holiday). Anyway, the idea of a purpose-built capital in Brazil’s interior was also included in Brazil’s first constitution as a republic in 1891 constitution.

But it was President Kubitschek who made it happen, though we have seen the heavy price Brazil paid: he borrowed money and he printed money and with inflation running amok, the military stepped in. Kubitschek’s campaign slogan in the 1955 presidential election was “Fifty Years of Progress in Five”. He attempted to initiate a positive era for Brazil and to give Brazilians confidence in themselves and their country. And this is where Niemeyar came in – his buildings would project strength and confidence, and it would do so in a futuristic mould. The target was to complete the project and open the capital for business on April 21^st 1960, Tiradentes Day. Amazingly, he met his target, though, of course, Brasilia wasn’t quite finished. But when you consider the jokes that abounded about incomplete projects linked to Brazil hosting the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, getting anywhere near meeting that target was quite something.

One of the amazing things about Brasilia is that it was planned to be viewed from the air. Lucio Costa was the man in charge of the city’s plan and he designed it to look like a Cross, however many think it looks more like a jet airliner flying across Brazil’s interior or else a soaring bird, both symbolic of what Brazil likes to stand for, on the one hand modernity, on the other, its affinity with nature and its indigenous people (not in Bolsonaro’s time though). And to complete the team, Roberto Burle Marx was responsible for the landscape designs. But it is Niemeyar’s architectural triumphs that steel the show and for which Brasilia is justifiably most famous for. All I can say is that, unlike much of modern architecture, they really do seem to have passed the test of time. They are as amazing, futuristic and beautiful today as they were back in 1960.

And if I can just squeeze in a complementary phenomenon to this positive new beginning for Brazil, even though it was brief and didn’t work out (don’t forget Brazil would soon fall under a military dictatorship), a musical phenomenon came out of the old capital, Rio de Janeiro, a music that so suits the great city and the life style of the carioca: Bossa Nova with the likes of Vinicius de Moraes and Antonio Carlos (Tom) Jobim to the fore. ‘Garota de Ipanema’, better known as ‘the Girl from Ipanema’ must be one of the most played songs ever written, and one of the best.

So, if that was something good, I’m afraid I’m now going to turn to something bad; something that has scarred a generation of Brazilians: hyperinflation and national bankruptcy. The 1980s are still referred to as the ‘lost decade’ even though Brazilians were now free of military rule. Because such was the sorry state of Brazil’s economy in the early 1990s that people would make a dash for the supermarket as soon as they received their wages and spend their cash before the currency lost purchase power. And the supermarkets they were making a dash for might raise their prices as much as three times a day. It was not unusual to see families shop for a month or more. I should add that unemployment was also a growing problem. And lest you think I’m exaggerating, bear in mind that in 1993 the annual inflation rate was almost 2,500% and had averaged at around 1,500% since 1990. However, this was but the climax of Brazil’s economic struggles that had been going on for four decades (so, including those under military rule). Indeed, on and off since independence in 1822.

Brazil had many currencies in its history. From 1500 to 1822 the Portuguese real, inherited as the name suggests from Portugal, was the currency. After independence, in 1822, the currency changed to the Brazilian real, and changed again in 1833 when the mil-réis was introduced. The mil-réis survived until 1942 when the Vargas’ dictatorship introduced the cruzeiro.  Inflation led to the cruzeiro novo in 1966 (novo means new), and again in 1970 when the second cruzeiro was introduced. The second cruzeiro lasted until 1986 when inflation required another devaluation and another new currency: the cruzado. Dizzy yet. You soon will be! There was another revaluation in 1989 and the cruzado novo was introduced. And again in 1990 when the cruzeiro made yet another comeback with its third manifestation only for it to be revalued again in 1993. Which brings us to 1994 and the real. Staggering isn’t it, and evidence of Brazil’s economic struggles ever since its independence in 1822. I think it links to the history of the Third World and the journey Brazil has made to being a founder-member of the BRICS group.

A number of plans had taken place before the early 1990s, but the two most important were the Cruzado Plan in 1986, which with the introduction of the new currency, consisted basically in freezing all retail prices, and, most traumatic of all the Collar Plan of 1991 which froze all bank accounts over $1,000.

The Real was launched in the middle of 1994. An important factor in the new plan – the Real Plan – was its transparency. The details of the plan were announced months before they were implemented, thus the markets were prepared for what was coming. First, it created a virtual currency which was roughly set at a par to the American dollar. Prices, loans and all business as well as government contracts were converted to it over a period of four months until the new currency, the Real, was launched. But structural reforms and fiscal discipline – government spending and taxation – were also needed and these were duly provided for with new laws where necessary, ensuring stability and the chance for economic growth.

It was a desperately needed success: by 1995 inflation was down to 22% (and I know that seems high). Brazilian companies could now operate in a more certain market, as could foreign investment which flooded in. Brazilians could now plan for the future and what is more, poverty began to be reduced. There was a down-side though: high interest rates and increased public debt. And by the end of the 1990s the real was struggling though this has to be seen in the context of the international economic crisis.

And so, to something beautiful, the greatest footballer ever: Edson Arantes do Nascimento, otherwise known as Pele. I watched his funeral last year on television here in Brazil. It was very Brazilian: chaotic but wonderful, a celebration. I also remember watching Pele in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, the leading force in the greatest team ever put together. What a tournament that was, Brazil vs England, an absolutely fantastic game and Brazil, the winners of the trophy for the third time; Pele the winner of the trophy for the third time. History was made. And more history was made: this was the first World Cup to have substitutes, and the first World Cup to have yellow and red cards, not that they were used much; this was also the first World Cup not to have a single player sent off since 1950, and it hasn’t happened since. And another incredible record for you: Brazil not only won every game in Mexico but they won every game in qualifying. You can check out all their goals in the tournament on YouTube there are a couple of ordinary goals but the rest, well if it’s not an amazing strike of the ball, it’s an amazing defence splitting pass or a deft touch before the ball rockets into the net. And in the final, in which Brazil beat Italy 4-1, the final goal is just a thing of beauty. Possibly the greatest goal you will ever see.

It wasn’t just Pele, of course, that got Brazilians dancing in the streets, though he was the pivot of the team. There was Jairzinho, Brazil’s top goal scorer in the tournament with seven, scoring in every game, Rivelino, Tostao and captain, Carlos Alberto, and indeed, all of them that made up the Selecao. And much was owed to their manager, Mario Zagallo who had played in both the 58 and 62 World Cups. Together, for my generation at least, they became the gold standard against which football has since been measured.

It was Joao Saldanha who managed Brazil and steered them toward the finals. With Brazil still under the heel of a military regime, Saldanha was the last person you would have thought would be put in charge: he was a card-carrying communist who claimed to have met Mao Zedong while working as a foreign correspondent in China. And it was an even more awkward pick for the president, General Emílio Garrastazu Médici, who was a fanatical football fan himself, and he clashed with Saldanha before the World Cup when the general-president wanted his favourite player picked. Saldanha’s response? “I don’t pick his cabinet and he doesn’t pick the team.” He was sacked after the World Cup, but not for any disagreement with the president. He was something of a loose cannon.

Saldanha wouldn’t last much longer though, the military regime stepped in and sacked him, but not as a result of his risky response to his dispute with the president over selections, though selections were an issue: he had stubbornly refused to play his best players, including Pele and Tostao, at least not in the same team. But the truth was that Saldanha really was a loose cannon. Just before he was sacked, he had taken a gun to the Flamengo training ground to threaten their coach. A few days later, he claimed Pelé had a life-threatening disease and dropped him from a friendly against Argentina. It was all too much and Zagallo took over. Saldanha took it on the chin, saying that the real question was not why he was sacked, but why he had been given the job in the first place.

And yet incredibly, despite winning all their qualifying games, Brazil had looked like anything but world-beaters when Zagallo took over. Only three months before winning the 1970 World Cup, Brazil’s national team played a friendly match against Bangu, a very small club from Rio. The national team was booed off the pitch. Incidentally, Bangu was formed in 1904 after some Brits who worked in the local factory, introduced football to the Brazilian workers. Indeed, the first football match ever played in Brazil was at Bangu. Another historical claim to fame for Bangu to be proud of is that they were the first club in Brazil to play Afro-Brazilian players. Today, however, Bangu plays in Serie D, Brazil’s fourth division.

But Zagallo managed to get Brazil’s best, and most exciting, players into the same team by changing the formation of the team and what he expected them to do. And the rest is history as they say. It’s not an exaggeration to say he invented modern football: attacking as one unit and defending in the same way. And since writing this, I’ve come back to the piece to add that sadly Zagallo has died, though at 92 he reached a good age.

With the World Cup won, Brazilians in the Estadio Azteca went wild, invading the pitch and ripping the shirt off Rivellino’s back. Rivellino feinted. And the celebrations only got bigger when the team returned to Brazil with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets. That they did in such numbers takes on an historical significance as the military regime had banned public gatherings at the end of 1968 following the March of the 100,000 in protest to what the regime was doing. But now, the regime tied itself to the victory and every member of the squad received a second medal, cash, cars and 10,000 shares in a state electricity company.

Bolsonaro and his cronies tried to claim the famous Brazilian shirt as their own in the 2022 election against Lula. So that wearing Brazilian shirt has become a questionable act, associated with the far-right. So much so that in a recent poll carried out by a São Paulo university, more than one in five football fans said they would not wear the yellow jersey for political reasons.

But what of Pele? In total, he would score 1,283 goals in 1,367 professional matches, including 77 goals for Brazil. He was the top scorer in the Brazilian league 11 times and he won ten championships with Santos. He went on to popularise football in America, playing for New York Cosmos and winning the North American Championship with them. The league went out of business after the 1984 season but at the grass-roots level, and in schools and colleges, football took off. And America is about to host its second World Cup, we’re no longer surprised to see an American team in the finals, while its women’s team have won the World Cup three times. Pele was just seventeen when he scored six goals in the 1958 World Cup, including a hat trick in the semifinal against France and two in the final against Sweden. But he would take heavy criticism for retiring from the national team and refusing to play in the 1974 World Cup, in West Germany.

As a human being, he was not perfect and he was not without criticism in Brazil. The day he scored his 1,000th goal, in 1969 at the Maracanã stadium in Rio in front of more than 200,000 fans, Pelé was mobbed by reporters on the field and used their microphones to dedicate the goal to “the children.” Crying, he made an impromptu speech about the difficulties Brazil’s children faced and the need to give them better educational opportunities. Many journalists interpreted the gesture as grandstanding, but for decades, as if to correct the record, he cited that speech and repeated the sentiment. And by the way, research for his 2006 biography found that it was actually his 1,002^nd goal!

Bad business deals would also plague him throughout his life. In 2001, Pelé Sports and Marketing, was accused of taking enormous loans to stage a charity game for Unicef and then not repaying the money when the game didn’t take place. Pelé shut down the company and Unicef said there had been no wrongdoing on his part but mud sticks. He was married three times and after his first divorce he often appeared in the gossip pages, partying with film stars, musicians and models. It also emerged that he had two daughters from different affairs, one of whom he refused to acknowledge.

On a more positive note, Pelé became Brazil’s minister for sport in 1995 and he began a professionalisation of Brazilian teams which were still run largely as gentlemen’s clubs. In 1998, what quickly came to be called Pelé’s Law required clubs to be run as corporations, publish their accounts and with their profits taxable. It required that players had to be 20 before signing a professional contract and gave them the right of free agency after two years (instead of after the  age of 32). Many of the provisions were later weakened, and corruption continued, but at least Pelé tried to improve things and the free agency clause survived.

Pelé also had something of a musical career. His whole life, he was never far from a guitar, and he carried a miniature tape recorder to record tunes or lyrics. He composed dozens of songs that were recorded by Brazilian pop stars, usually without his taking credit.

But let’s go back to my “something beautiful” theme. Because Pele, along with others, helped create and promote what he, himself, later called “o jogo bonito” — the beautiful game — played with flair and with joy. Pelé not only played it better than anyone else; he went onto champion it around the world. And let me end with a quote from what I’m sure you’ll find to be an unexpected source: Andy Warhol once said, “Pelé is one of the few who contradicted my theory. Instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries.”