Brazil pedia
Is Brazil a rich or poor?
Brazil is the 83rd country in the world in GDP per capita, with a value of US$7,741.15 per inhabitant in 2021. The country is rich in natural resources. From 2000 to 2012, Brazil was one of the fastest-growing major economies in the world, with an average annual GDP growth rate of over 5%.
Brazil
Brazil, officially Federative Republic of Brazil, Portuguese República Federativa do Brasil, country of South America that occupies half the continent’s landmass. It is the fifth largest country in the world, exceeded in size only by Russia, Canada, China, and the United States, though its area is greater than that of the 48 conterminous U.S. states. Brazil faces the Atlantic Ocean along 4,600 miles (7,400 km) of coastline and shares more than 9,750 miles (15,700 km) of inland borders with every South American country except Chile and Ecuador—specifically, Uruguay to the south; Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia to the southwest; Peru to the west; Colombia to the northwest; and Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana to the north. Brazil stretches roughly 2,700 miles (4,350 km) from north to south and from east to west to form a vast irregular triangle that encompasses a wide range of tropical and subtropical landscapes, including wetlands, savannas, plateaus, and low mountains. Brazil contains most of the Amazon River basin, which has the world’s largest river system and the world’s most-extensive virgin rainforest. The country contains no desert, high-mountain, or arctic environments.
Brazil is the fifth most-populous country on Earth and accounts for one-third of Latin America’s population. Most of the inhabitants of Brazil are concentrated along the eastern seaboard, although its capital, Brasília, is located far inland and increasing numbers of migrants are moving to the interior. Rio de Janeiro, in the eyes of many of the world, continues to be the preeminent icon of Brazil. The nation’s burgeoning cities, huge hydroelectric and industrial complexes, mines, and fertile farmlands make it one of the world’s major economies. However, Brazil struggles with extreme social inequalities, environmental degradation, intermittent financial crises, and a sometimes deadlocked political system.
Brazil is unique in the Americas because, following independence from Portugal, it did not fragment into separate countries as did British and Spanish possessions in the region; rather, it retained its identity through the intervening centuries and a variety of forms of government. Because of that hegemony, the Portuguese language is universal except among Brazil’s native Indians, especially those in the more-remote reaches of the Amazon basin. At the turn of the 21st century, Brazilians marked the 500th anniversary of Portuguese contact with a mixture of public celebration and deprecation.
The land
The Brazilian landscape is immense and complex, with interspersed rivers, wetlands, mountains, and plateaus adjoining other major features and traversing the boundaries of states and regions.
Geographic regions
The Brazilian government has grouped the country’s states into five large geographic and statistical units called the Major Regions (Grandes Regiões): North (Norte), Northeast (Nordeste), Central-West (Centro-Oeste), Southeast (Sudeste), and South (Sul). The tropical North—comprising the states of Acre, Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, Tocantins, Roraima, and Amapá—covers more than two-fifths of Brazilian territory and includes the largest portion of Amazon rainforest and parts of the Guiana and Brazilian highlands; however, the region accounts for a limited proportion of the nation’s population and economic output.
The Northeast, which experiences some of the nation’s driest and hottest conditions, has nearly one-fifth of Brazil’s land area and more than one-fourth of the population. It contains the states of Maranhão, Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Alagoas, Sergipe, Bahia, and Pernambuco, the latter including the island of Fernando de Noronha, some 225 miles (360 km) off the Atlantic coast. The region’s oldest cities date from the 16th century, when the Portuguese first established sugarcane plantations there. The Northeast accounts for one-fifth of the nation’s agricultural production, but the industrial and service sectors lag far behind those of the Southeast and South, and the unemployment rate remains high.
The Southeast covers only one-tenth of Brazil’s territory but has two-fifths of its population and the greatest concentration of industrial and agricultural production in the nation. The region includes São Paulo state, which is the nation’s economic and demographic heartland, landlocked Minas Gerais, whose very name (meaning “Extensive Mines”) testifies to great mineral wealth, and the populous coastal states of Espírito Santo and Rio de Janeiro. The city of Rio de Janeiro, the national capital from 1763 to 1960, remains Brazil’s main cultural and tourist centre.
The South, which stretches below the Tropic of Capricorn, includes the states of Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. It occupies an area nearly as large as the isle of Britain but is the smallest of Brazil’s regions. Its diversified economy includes strong manufacturing, agriculture, and service sectors. The South has about one-seventh of the nation’s population, including many people of European ancestry, particularly from Germany and Italy. The South’s tourist trade partly depends on the spectacular Iguaçu Falls, at the Argentine border.
The Central-West consists of the states of Goiás, Mato Grosso, and Mato Grosso do Sul, as well as the Federal District, in which Brasília is located. The region covers roughly one-fourth of Brazil, including forested valleys, semiarid highlands, and vast wetlands. A small proportion of the nation’s population lives there, but an increasing number of settlers have been moving into the region and extending its agricultural frontiers.
Relief
Brazil is a predominantly tropical country famous for its extensive Amazon lowlands; however, highlands cover most of the national territory. Brazil’s physical features can be grouped into five main physiographic divisions: the Guiana Highlands in the North, the Amazon lowlands, the Pantanal in the Central-West, the Brazilian Highlands (including the extensive coastal ranges), and the coastal lowlands.
Guiana Highlands
Brazil shares the rugged Guiana Highlands with Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. Forested mesas and mountain ranges, scenic waterfalls, and white-water rivers characterize the area. The highest point in Brazil is Neblina Peak, which reaches 9,888 feet (3,014 metres) along the Venezuelan border in the Serra do Imeri. The Serra da Pacaraima, farther east, rises to 9,094 feet (2,772 metres) at Mount Roraima, where the borders of Venezuela, Guyana, and Brazil meet. The less rugged Acaraí and Tumuc-Humac (Tumucumaque) ranges border on the Guianas.
Amazon lowlands
The Amazon lowlands are widest along the eastern base of the Andes. They narrow toward the east until, downstream of Manaus, only a narrow ribbon of annually flooded plains (várzeas) separates the Guiana Highlands to the north from the Brazilian Highlands to the south. The várzeas fan out again as the watercourse approaches the Atlantic, but no delta extends into the ocean. The basin’s most widespread topographical features are gently undulating hills called terra firme (“solid ground”), composed of layers of alluvial soil that were deposited as much as 2.5 million years ago and subsequently uplifted to positions above flood level. Shallow oxbow lakes and wetlands are found throughout the region.
Pantanal
The immense Pantanal, an extension of the Gran Chaco plain, is a region of swamps and marshes in northwestern Mato Grosso do Sul and southern Mato Grosso states and, to a lesser extent, in northern Paraguay and eastern Bolivia; it is one of the largest freshwater wetlands in the world, covering some 54,000 square miles (140,000 square km). The Pantanal is dissected by the effluents of the upper Paraguay River, which overflows its banks during the rainy season, inundating all but the tops of scattered levees and low hills. (See also Drainage.)
Brazilian Highlands
The Brazilian Highlands make up more than half of the country’s landmass and are the main source of the nation’s abundant mineral wealth. In Brazil the highlands are often called the Planalto Central (Central Highlands, or Central Plateau), but that term may be limited to the part of the highlands around Brasília and Goiás. The rugged highlands include steep cliffs, flat-topped plateaus, ravines, rolling hills, and rock outcrops; however, the region’s maximum elevations are below 10,000 feet (3,000 metres). Its highest elevations are in two areas: the first along a series of ridges less than 300 miles (500 km) from the eastern coast, and the second in the environs of Brasília and the border dividing Bahia state from Tocantins and Goiás. The highlands to the north and west of Goiás extend for some 600 miles (1,000 km) until they descend into the Amazon lowlands. A massive escarpment marks the eastern edge of the Brazilian Highlands, extending along the coast for some 1,600 miles (2,600 km) and forming mountain ranges that average approximately 2,600 feet (800 metres) in elevation, with many individual peaks rising above 7,000 feet (about 2,100 metres).
The major ranges of the northeastern highlands include the Serra Grande, which skirts the Piauí-Ceará border; the Araripe Upland (Chapado Araripe) in Pernambuco state; and the Diamantina Upland (Chapada Diamantina) in Bahia. The Serra do Espinhaço extends from central Minas Gerais into southern Bahia, where Almas Peak reaches 6,070 feet (1,850 metres). The Serra Geral de Goiás separates the states of Goiás and Tocantins to the west from Bahia to the east. Goiás state also includes some of the more elevated parts of the Planalto Central, the Serra dos Pirineus, and the Serra Dourada. The ranges and plateaus farther north and west, which are neither as elevated nor as deeply dissected as their eastern counterparts, include the mineral-rich Serra dos Carajás in eastern Pará state, the Serra do Cachimbo, mainly in southwestern Pará, and the Parecis Upland (Chapada dos Parecis), which stretches between Rondônia and Mato Grosso. Other highland regions of Mato Grosso state are sometimes collectively designated the Mato Grosso Plateau.
The Serra do Mar, averaging some 3,000 feet (1,000 metres) above sea level, is the largest segment of the escarpment along the Atlantic coast. The range extends from southeastern Minas Gerais to eastern Paraná; in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro, where the range is also known as the Serra dos Orgãos, it presents an almost sheer face to the sea and creates the outcrops of Sugar Loaf (Pão de Açúcar) and Gávea and a string of small islands. The Serra da Mantiqueira, located just north of the Serra do Mar but still somewhat near the coast, marches southward from the Serra do Espinhaço; in southern Minas Gerais the Mantiqueira range reaches 9,143 feet (2,787 metres) at Agulhas Negras Peak on the Rio de Janeiro state border and 9,482 feet (2,890 metres) at Bandeira Peak, near the Serra dos Aimorés, which extends along the Minas Gerais–Espírito Santo border. A series of ridges southwest of the Serra do Mar is known as the Serra de Botucatu in São Paulo state and the Serra Geral from Paraná southward. The Iguaçu River in southwestern Paraná tumbles over a steep rim of diabase rock to form the spectacular Iguaçu Falls. Guaíra Falls on the Paraná River were a similar attraction until 1982, when the huge hydroelectric dam at Itaipú was completed and they were submerged.
Coastal lowlands
The Atlantic lowlands, which comprise only a tiny part of Brazil’s territory, range up to 125 miles (200 km) wide in the North but become narrower in the Northeast and disappear in parts of the Southeast. Nevertheless, their features are widely varied, including level floodplains, swamps, lagoons, sand dunes, and long stretches of white sandy beaches that are protected in some areas by coral reefs and barrier islands. Various deep harbours exist where the rocky slopes of the coastal ranges plunge directly into the ocean, such as at Guanabara Bay, where Rio de Janeiro and Niterói are located, and All Saints Bay, the site of Salvador; cities in these locations occupy small valleys or considerably narrow strips of land, but many poorer neighbourhoods occupy perilously steep ridges on the periphery. The coastal plain widens again in the South at the site of Patos Lagoon, one of the continent’s largest lagoons, and Mirím Lagoon, along the Uruguayan border.
Drainage of Brazil
Brazil is drained by the Amazon River, which is the centrepiece of the most extensive river system in the world, and by other systems that are notable in their own right—the Tocantins-Araguaia in the north, the Paraguay-Paraná-Plata in the south, and the São Francisco in the east and northeast. Numerous smaller rivers and streams drain directly eastward to the Atlantic from the Brazilian interior, but most are short, have steep gradients, and are not impounded for hydroelectric developments or suitable for waterborne traffic. The more navigable rivers of this group are the Paranaíba, between the states of Piauí and Maranhão, and the Jacuí in Rio Grande do Sul.
The Amazon River rises from a point in the Peruvian Andes within 100 miles (160 km) of the Pacific Ocean, whence its course meanders some 4,000 miles (6,400 km) to the Atlantic. There it contributes as much as one-fifth of all of the Earth’s surface runoff from the continents to the sea. The river’s great tributaries include the Juruá, Purus, Madeira, Tapajós, and Xingu rivers on the southern side and the Negro River on the northern side (see ). Six tributaries exceed 1,000 miles (1,600 km) in length, and some carry more water individually than does North America’s Mississippi River, so that the Amazon’s annual discharge to the Atlantic is more than 10 times that of the Mississippi. Ships of considerable size navigate upstream to Manaus, and smaller vessels can reach Iquitos in eastern Peru, some 2,300 miles (3,700 km) from the sea. However, shipping is limited on the Amazonian tributaries, all of which are interrupted by falls and rapids where they descend from the highlands; none of the main effluents have been harnessed to produce hydroelectric power.
The Paraguay-Paraná-Plata is the second of the great river systems of Brazil; it also drains large parts of Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay. In Brazil the system rises in the highlands of Mato Grosso, Goiás, and Minas Gerais states and flows southward in two sections—the Paraguay and Paraná (or Alto Paraná, as it is sometimes called before the two rivers join). The upper reaches of the Paraguay flow through the Pantanal and form part of the border between Brazil and Paraguay. The Alto Paraná collects numerous tributaries from southeastern Brazil, including the Paranaíba (not to be confused with the Paranaíba of the Northeast), Grande, Tietê, and Paranapanema. The Alto Paraná and Paraguay rivers unite southwest of Brazil, on the Argentina-Paraguay border, to form the Paraná proper, which eventually reaches the sea through the Río de la Plata estuary. Brazil’s two southernmost states are drained through the Uruguay River, which also flows into the Río de la Plata. In Brazil these rivers were navigable only for short stretches until they were dredged in the 1990s. Brazilians have built hydroelectric complexes and reservoirs on many tributaries of the system, including the Iguaçu, Paranapanema, Tietê, and Grande.
The Tocantins-Araguaia river system rises in the highlands of Goiás and Mato Grosso states and discharges into the Pará River just south of the Amazon delta. The Tocantins, though popularly regarded as a tributary of the Amazon, is technically a separate system draining some 314,200 square miles (813,700 square km)—nearly one-tenth of Brazil’s national territory. The middle course of the Araguaia River, in a marshland some 220 miles (350 km) northwest of Brasília, temporarily divides into western and eastern branches to form the vast Bananal Island. The Araguaia joins the Tocantins after flowing northward another 600 miles (1,000 km). In the mid-1980s the Tucuruí Dam was built on the lower Tocantins, some 120 miles (200 km) southwest of Belém, in order to generate hydroelectric power for much of Pará and Maranhão as well as for the nearby Carajás mining complex.
The São Francisco River basin covers more than 249,000 square miles (645,000 square km) in eastern Brazil. The river rises in the highlands of western Minas Gerais and southern Goiás and flows more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) northward before it turns eastward to the Atlantic. Shallow-draft riverboats ply the waters between Pirapora in Minas Gerais and Juàzeiro in Bahia, at the eastern end of the Sobradinho Reservoir. Hydroelectric installations harness the river’s energy near Paulo Afonso Falls. and at Juàzeiro. Only the watercourse below the falls is navigable for oceangoing ships.
Climate of Brazil
Brazil has a humid tropical and subtropical climate except for a drier area in the Northeast, sometimes called the drought quadrilateral or drought polygon, that extends from northern Bahia to the coast between Natal and São Luís; that zone receives about 15–30 inches (375–750 mm) of precipitation a year. Much of Brazil receives 40–70 inches (1,000–1,800 mm) annually, but precipitation often is much heavier in parts of the Amazon basin and the sea-facing rim of the Serra do Mar.
The central parts of the Brazilian Highlands receive most of their precipitation during the summer months (November to April), often in the form of torrential downpours. Storms and floods may strike the Northeast at that time, depending on weather patterns, but the region may also experience prolonged drought. These shifting conditions make life difficult in the sertão, the backlands of the Northeast, and are a major cause for migration out of the region. Summer temperatures are largely uniform. In January most of the lowlands average roughly 79 °F (26 °C), and the highlands are a few degrees cooler, depending on elevation. The coast of Rio Grande do Sul is also somewhat cooler, averaging around 73 °F (23 °C), whereas the Northeast backland’s drought quadrilateral, the hottest region of the country, averages some 84 °F (29 °C), with daytime temperatures exceeding 100 °F (38 °C). However, the Northeast’s low humidity makes the heat less oppressive than in Rio de Janeiro.
In the winter (May to October) the Brazilian Highlands are generally dry, and snow falls in only a few of the southernmost states. Regular frosts accompany winter air patterns from the south, and near-freezing temperatures can reach as far north as São Paulo. Cool, rainy weather may extend along the coast as far north as Recife and, in the west, to the Pantanal. Cool air occasionally spills over from the Paraguay lowlands into the western Amazon basin and may travel as far north as the Guyana border. Winter temperatures in the Amazon lowlands remain virtually unchanged from those of the summer months, but temperatures in the drought quadrilateral drop to about 79 °F (26 °C). Temperatures in the Brazilian Highlands average about 68 °F (20 °C) in the central and northern regions and are cooler toward the south: Curitiba, at an elevation of some 3,000 feet (900 metres), averages 57 °F (14 °C) in June and July. During those months the mean temperature at Porto Alegre is the same, but Rio de Janeiro is much hotter, averaging 73 °F (23 °C), partly because of the warm currents that bathe the entire Brazilian coast.
Soils
Brazil’s soils form a vast and intermixed pattern. A large band of nutrient-rich, deep reddish purple soil (terra roxa) lies in the Southeast and South between central Rio Grande do Sul and southern Minas Gerais, including large areas of Paraná and São Paulo states. That region contains Brazil’s most heavily farmed lands; however, terra roxa is not necessarily more productive than soils in other regions of the country. Soils in the Northeast also contain many nutrients, but agriculture is limited there because few fields are irrigated. Heavy rainfall has intensely leached many soils, leaving them with few nutrients but with an overabundance of insoluble iron and aluminum silicates. Laterites (soils dominated by iron oxides) and other infertile soils are especially prevalent in the Brazilian Highlands, where they can reach depths of as much as 90 feet (27 metres).
Amazonian soils are also leached but not as deeply. In the terra firme of the rainforest, dead organic matter quickly decays and is recycled. However, once the overlying forest canopy is destroyed—e.g., by clear-cutting or burning—that regenerative cycle is interrupted, and many nutrients and organic matter are lost. More fertile Amazonian soils, interspersed between the zones of leached soil, include várzea alluvial deposits and terra preta dos indios (“black earth of the Indians”), which has developed throughout Amazonia on the sites of prehistoric settlements.
Plant and animal life
Highlands, coastal regions, and the Pantanal
Most of the original ecosystems of the eastern highlands have been destroyed, including the once luxuriant hardwood forests that dominated the eastern seaboard and the formerly magnificent Paraná pine (Araucaria) forests that covered the southern plateaus. Monkeys, parrots, and other formerly common wildlife are now found only in zoos, private menageries, or small patches of forest that still support the original flora. Saltworks, marinas, and condominiums have replaced the former coastal waterways and swamps that once teemed with waterfowl and alligators.
The Brazilian savannas in the semiarid Northeast have no massive herds of wild animals like their African counterparts. Jaguars and ocelots once inhabited the forest edges, but they have been extensively hunted by ranchers and are now endangered. The plant life varies considerably from coarse bunchgrasses to thorny, gnarled woods known as caatinga, the name derived from an Indian term meaning “white forest”; most caatinga are stunted, widely spaced, and intermingled with cacti. Woodlands known as agreste are found in slightly more humid areas. Most areas of agreste are located near the São Francisco River and on elevated slopes, where some remaining moisture in the air is wrung from the trade winds. Thorny trees in those regions may attain heights of up to 30 feet (9 metres) and form barriers with their interlocking branches that even leather-clad vaqueiros (“cowboys”) cannot penetrate. Artificial pastures and grain fields have largely replaced the native grasslands of Rio Grande do Sul.
The Pantanal’s vast sloughs and watercourses support an abundance of flora and fauna, including the giant pirarucu, a fish that is herded into enclosures like underwater cattle pens until needed for food. Aquatic birds include ibis, herons, ducks, and migratory geese. There are numerous lizards and snakes, including deadly fer-de-lance (jararacas) and rattlesnakes. Among the larger mammals are armadillos and anteaters, which prey on ants and termites, whose nests may stand more than 6 feet (2 metres) high. Rheas (the South American relative of the ostrich), roadrunners (siriemas), and a variety of game birds, notably quail and partridge, are ubiquitous to the Pantanal’s higher ground and to the savannas of central Brazil.
Amazonia
The Amazon basin has the greatest variety of plant species on Earth and an abundance of animal life, in contrast to the scrublands that border it to the south and east. The Amazonian region includes vast areas of rainforest, widely dispersed grasslands, and mangrove swamps in the tidal flats of the delta. Individual plants of most species tend to be widely dispersed, so that blights and other natural threats cause them only limited damage. A typical acre (0.4 hectare) of Amazonian forest may contain 250 or more tree species (in contrast, an acre of woods in the northeastern United States might have only a dozen species).
The crowns of giant Amazonian trees form a virtually closed canopy above several lower canopy layers, all of which combine to allow no more than 10 percent of the sun’s rays to reach the ground below. As a result, more plant and animal life is found in the canopy layers than on the ground. The tallest trees may rise to 150–200 feet (45–60 metres) and are festooned with a wide variety of epiphytes, bromeliads, and lianas, while their branches teem with animal life, including insects, snakes, tree frogs, numerous types of monkeys, and a bewildering variety of birds. Several hundred bird species nest in the immediate vicinity of the main Amazon channel, and alligators, anacondas, boa constrictors, capybaras, and several smaller reptiles and mammals are found along the riverbanks. In the waters are manatees, freshwater dolphins, and some 1,500 identified species of fish, including many types of piranhas (not all of them flesh-eating), electric eels, and some 450 species of catfish. There may also be hundreds of unidentified species.
The Amazon is also home to the world’s largest freshwater turtle, the yellow-headed sideneck (Podocnemis), which weighs an average of 150 pounds (70 kg) and is extinct everywhere else except on the island of Madagascar. The turtles, once a mainstay of local Indians’ diets, are now endangered, but they continue to be hunted illegally for their meat.
Conservation and ecology
Dozens of parks, biological reserves, and other protected areas have been established in Brazil’s vast wildernesses, many of which remain pristine; however, state and federal governments have not adequately maintained many parklands, and some have been modified to allow for new highways or other construction projects. In addition, pollution has degraded Brazil’s rivers, threatening the water supplies of most of the population, and ecological disasters are common: in 2000 alone there were major oil spills in Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay and in the Iguaçu River. The Brazilian government’s environmental agencies regularly fine manufacturers and mining companies for failing to provide adequate environmental safeguards, but the fines are often small and oversight lax. São Paulo and some other cities have dangerous levels of smog, mainly because of motor vehicle emissions; in response, the government has promoted the use of fuels containing ethanol and pollution-control policies to improve air quality. In the late 20th century Curitiba, one of Brazil’s larger cities, rapidly decreased local air pollution and traffic congestion by developing an innovative busing system and other programs.
Brazil’s first conservation law, issued in 1797, prohibited the burning or destruction of forests. The country’s first national parks were created in the late 1930s. From the mid-20th century, Brazilian and international environmental organizations have pressured the national government to curb damage to the Amazon rainforest, the Pantanal, and other ecosystems in Brazil. The government has become increasingly willing to address environmental issues, although widespread destruction has continued. The chief Brazilian environmental agency (Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis, or IBAMA) was created in 1989 in an attempt to reform Brazil’s conservation system. IBAMA, which operates under the Ministry of the Environment, oversees the use of renewable resources, enforces federal environmental laws, and coordinates the efforts of various agencies. However, IBAMA has had limited funding and personnel: in the late 20th century it employed only one staff member for every 110 square miles (290 square km) of federally protected land. In 1992 Rio de Janeiro hosted the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (the Earth Summit), and a few years afterward Brazil and the major developed countries of the world issued a joint plan for the protection of the rainforest. (See also Amazon River: Ecological concerns.)
Many state and national parks are located near urban centres, but most of the newer national parks lie in remote areas, particularly at the headwaters of Amazon tributaries and adjacent to biological reserves or Indian reservations; they are not intended for any great number of visitors. Among the more popular national parks are Itatiaia, Iguaçu, and Serra dos Órgãos, all of which were created in the 1930s. The larger national parks, which range in size from roughly 2,170 to 8,770 square miles (5,620 to 22,700 square km), include Neblina Peak (1979), Jaú (1980), Amazônia (Tapajós; 1974), Serra do Divisor (1989), Pacaás Novos (1979), and Cape Orange (1980), all in the North, and Xingu (1961) and Araguaia (on Bananal Island; 1959), both in the Central-West. In the mid-1980s the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated Iguaçu Falls a World Heritage site, followed by Serra da Capivara National Park in 1991 and two coastal regions in 1999, including the Serra do Mar in the Southeast and the Discovery Coast of Bahia state.
Settlement patterns
Frontier settlement and domestic migration have been features of Brazilian society since prehistoric times. The settlement of what is now Brazil began many thousands of years ago with the arrival of hunters and gatherers. At the time of European contact (in 1500), skilled farmers and fishers occupied the best lands of the Amazon and Paraguay river systems and most of the coastal plains, making up the bulk of the region’s two to six million native inhabitants.
The Northeast coast
The first European occupants of Brazil settled in the early 16th century among the coastal Indian villages or at the trading posts that they established at Salvador and at Cabo Frio (now in Rio de Janeiro state). They exchanged hardware and trinkets with the Indians for brazilwood, which was used for making a valuable, fire-coloured dye (brasa is Portuguese for “live coals”). Sugarcane began to dominate the colonial economy in the second half of the 16th century, giving rise to a scattering of urban centres, among which Olinda and Salvador were the most important. By that time the coastal Indian populations had been decimated, and slaves from Africa were being imported to work on the rapidly expanding plantations, which flourished particularly during the early and mid-17th century.
The Southeast: mining and coffee
During the first two centuries of Brazilian colonization, little attention was paid to the nearly inaccessible and seemingly unproductive highlands, although parties of explorers, known as bandeirantes, traversed them from time to time, capturing Indians for slaves and searching for precious metals and stones. Some of the bandeirantes settled in the interior and introduced small groups of cattle that eventually expanded into large herds; cattle raising came to dominate Brazil’s economy from the caatinga to the Pantanal. The first gold strike occurred in what is now Minas Gerais in 1695, and during the 18th century Brazil furnished a large portion of the world’s gold reserves. Diamonds were found in the same region in 1729, and visions of instant wealth attracted many plantation owners, with their slaves, from the Northeast. They spent money lavishly on the construction of fine towns, such as Ouro Prêto and Diamantina, and also invested in small industries to supply the mines and farms, which were soon producing a surplus for export. Brazil’s economic and political centre shifted from the Northeast to the Southeast after settlers built roads over the Serra do Mar to the coast, and the royal government transferred the colonial capital from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. During the 19th century, great coffee plantations brought additional wealth into the region. The plantations developed chiefly in the Paraíba do Sul valley, which runs from eastern São Paulo to eastern Rio de Janeiro states. By the 1860s thousands of European immigrants, chiefly Italians, were flowing into the region, and two decades later their influx increased to some 40,000 per year.
Rio de Janeiro’s population had passed 500,000 by the time the slaves were fully emancipated in 1888, whereas the city of São Paulo, the entrepôt for all of Brazil south and west of Minas Gerais, was still a modest town of 65,000. That situation changed as the flood of European immigrants began to arrive. Some of the newcomers worked as tenants on the coffee plantations that were expanding across São Paulo and northern Paraná states, while others established themselves on small freeholds along the southern coast and in the forests. The southernmost group remained physically and culturally isolated until after World War II, but the immigrants in São Paulo played a key role in building railroads and industries that gave the city and the state their preeminence in the Brazilian economy.
The backlands and Amazonia
During the same period, the Northeast’s large population struggled to advance economically in the face of drought, high rates of unemployment, and an archaic landholding system that concentrated all of the best coastal lands in the hands of a few powerful landowners. The Northeast remained economically depressed throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and economic booms elsewhere drew people out of the region. Among the first groups to migrate outward were large numbers of farmers who had settled in the sertão, or backlands, of the Northeast; they abandoned their lands in the 1870s and ’80s because of severe drought but found employment by resettling in the Amazon region to the north and west, where they tapped rubber trees. Northeasterners took part in another mass migration in the mid-20th century, primarily to the central interior of the country to help construct Brasília. Others began moving to the sparsely populated forests in the northern part of the Brazilian Highlands and to the frontier Amazonian zones of Rondônia and Acre. There they were joined by migrants from southern Brazil who had lost their livelihoods to the spread of mechanized agriculture.
The entire Amazon region had an estimated population of merely 40,000 in the mid-19th century, but the population exploded after Northeasterners and other Brazilians poured into the area during the rubber boom, which reached its apex between 1879 and 1912. As a result, Belém and Manaus grew from somnolent villages into modest cities, and by the end of World War I the region’s population rose to some 1.4 million. In the late 1950s Japanese settlers began raising jute and black pepper along the lower Amazon, and in the process they created a temporary economic boom. Brazilians also developed manganese deposits in Amapá from the mid-20th century, and a pioneer zone appeared along a newly constructed highway between Belém and Brasília. Forestry, cattle raising, and gold mining spread deeper into the region at the expense of the rainforest; nevertheless, the Amazon region remained the most underpopulated part of Brazil, and government attempts to lure more settlers there had limited success.
Ongoing domestic migration
Low rural incomes, limited landownership, and variable climatic conditions have continued to drive migration in Brazil; in addition, large-scale commercial agriculture in the South and Southeast has limited the number of jobs available to unskilled rural labourers, causing whole families of poor sertanejos (people from the sertão) to flee to frontier areas or cities. The North and Central-West regions have the highest net influx of population, especially in the Federal District and Rondônia. Parts of the Southeast and South have also received large numbers of migrants, particularly São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro states, which have also benefited from foreign immigration. Some rural families from the southeastern state of Minas Gerais and the southernmost states of Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná have moved to an agricultural frontier arching from Rondônia and northern Mato Grosso to western Bahia. Many other migrants to the frontier have come from the Northeast, particularly from the state of Piauí, in the heart of the drought region. Families in Maranhão have been leaving its eastern half, which is also in the drought quadrilateral, and moving into its western half, which is a zone of rainforests.
Urbanization
Brazil’s rural settlement patterns were largely defined by the mid-20th century, after which the nation began a headlong drive toward industrialization: this transformed Brazil from essentially rural to urban, led by the cities of the Southeast and South. By the turn of the 21st century, government statistics described more than four-fifths of the population as urban and less than one-fifth as rural; however, according to an alternative set of definitions, about three-fifths of the population could be described as urban, nearly one-third as rural, and about one-tenth as partly urban and partly rural. In 1940 less than one-third of a total population of 42 million lived in urban areas; by the end of the 20th century about 18 million lived in the São Paulo metropolitan area alone, which ranked as one of the world’s most populous cities. In addition, by that time the highly urbanized state of São Paulo had about one-third of Brazilian industry, a gross domestic product greater than that of many nations, and a population rivaling that of Argentina.
Rio de Janeiro has Brazil’s second largest metropolitan population. Other major urban areas include Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Porto Alegre, Fortaleza, Curitiba, and Recife—each with millions of residents. Slightly smaller are Brasília, Belém, Manaus, Goiânia, and Campinas. Rapid urban growth has produced a series of physical and social problems, while the demand for housing has raised urban land values to staggering heights. As a result, members of the middle class have been increasingly forced to live in minuscule apartments in densely packed high-rises, while the poor are confined in nearby favelas (“shantytowns”) or in residential areas that may be several hours away from their workplaces. Brasília and Curitiba, unlike most Brazilian cities, have benefited from large-scale urban planning.
Preston E. JamesRichard P. MomsenRonald Milton SchneiderThe people
The following section discusses ethnicity, languages, religions, and demography in Brazil. For treatment of the lifestyles and artistic achievements of the Brazilian people, see Cultural life.
Ethnic groups
Brazil has long been a melting pot for a wide range of cultures. From colonial times Portuguese Brazilians have favoured assimilation and tolerance for other peoples, and intermarriage was more acceptable in Brazil than in most other European colonies; however, Brazilian society has never been completely free of ethnic strife and exploitation, and some groups have chosen to remain separate from mainstream social life. Brazilians of mainly European descent account for nearly one-half the population, although people of mixed ethnic backgrounds form an increasingly larger segment; more than two-fifths of the total are mulattoes (mulatos; people of mixed African and European ancestry) and mestizos (mestiços, or caboclos; people of mixed European and Indian ancestry). A small proportion are of entirely African or Afro-Indian ancestry, and peoples of Asian descent account for an even smaller division of the total. Indians are, by far, the smallest of the major ethnic groups; however, as many as one-third of all Brazilians have some Indian ancestors.
Brazilians of African descent (referred to by outside scholars as Afro-Brazilians) can be further characterized as pardos (of mixed ethnicities) or pretos (entirely African); the latter term is usually used to refer to those with the darkest skin colour. Although skin colour is the main basis of the distinction between pardo and preto, this distinction is often subjective and self-attributed. Many Brazilians of colour consider it more advantageous to identify themselves as pardos and therefore do so.
Skin colour and ethnic background influence social interactions in Brazil. Brazilians with darker skin colour account for a disproportionately large number of the country’s poor; nevertheless, racially motivated violence and intolerance are less common in Brazil than in the United States and some parts of Europe. Blatant discrimination is illegal but pervasive, especially in predominantly white middle- and upper-class areas, and racism often takes subtle forms. Interracial marriage does occur; however, the majority of marriages in Brazil are between two people of the same race or colour partly because Brazilians tend to interact primarily with people of their own social class and geographic region—two factors that are closely tied to race in Brazil. Still, although the country may not be a “racial democracy” as some observers have claimed, its social barriers are somewhat flexible and even permeable. Members of the light-skinned majority seldom discriminate against Afro-Brazilians who have achieved high levels of education or socioeconomic status. As a consequence, most Afro-Brazilians pursue social advancement through individual rather than collective actions, such as civil rights movements.
Indians
The tropical forest peoples of Brazil adapted superbly to their environment prior to European contact, although they did not develop empires such as those of the Andes and Mesoamerica. They built dugout canoes and sailing rafts called jangadas (still used along the northeastern coast), slept in hammocks (which many people in Amazonia now use instead of beds), produced pottery and works of art, and cultivated tropical crops, corn (maize), and cassava. The indigenous peoples and the first Portuguese settlers generally benefited from trade and peaceful relations, but Europeans unwittingly introduced influenza, measles, smallpox, and other diseases that drastically reduced the Indian population. In addition, the colonizers began to enslave Indians and force them to live on plantations. Many Indians fled the coastal areas and took refuge in the most distant and inaccessible areas—in the forested regions of the Tocantins and Amazon basins or in the savannas of Mato Grosso. However, they were not completely sheltered in the interior: from the 16th to the 18th century, the Portuguese launched devastating, Indian-hunting bandeiras (slave raids or expeditions) from São Paulo and some northeastern towns. Over subsequent generations many Indian populations on the coast blended with their European or African counterparts, whereas native peoples in the interior carried on a protracted struggle against further encroachments.
Although Brazil’s Indians constitute a statistically marginal part of the national population, they form some 230 different cultural groups. Indians reside in each of the country’s five principal regions, but their numbers are greatest in the North, and roughly half now live in urban areas. The principal Indian peoples include the Yanomami in Roraima state, near the border with Venezuela, the Mundurukú in Pará and Amazonas, the Kayapó and Kayabí (Kaiabi) in Mato Grosso, the Guajajára and Fulnio in the Northeast, and the Kaingáng in the South and Southeast. All but the most isolated Amazonian groups have some regular contact with other Brazilians, such as personnel from the government’s National Indian Foundation.
More than 350 scattered Indian reservations have been demarcated since the promulgation of the 1988 constitution, which entitles Indian communities to territory that they historically occupied. Some of the reservations cover thousands of square miles, and their combined area is nearly as large as Bolivia—that is, more than one-tenth of Brazil’s land area. However, other Brazilians do not always respect the reservation boundaries: garimpeiros (transient miners) have trespassed in several locations, including the lands of the Yanomami, where particularly violent confrontations occurred in the 1980s and ’90s. The government subsequently issued new guidelines for demarcating Indian lands.
Africans
There are more people of mainly African descent in Brazil than in any other nation outside of Africa, and African music, dance, food, and religious practices have become an integral part of Brazilian culture. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, the slave trade brought to Brazil some four million Africans, mainly peoples from West Africa and Angola. Most were taken to the sugarcane plantations of the Northeast during the 16th and 17th centuries. From the 18th century onward, when the mining of gold and diamonds began, more slaves were sent to Minas Gerais. The majority worked as labourers and domestic servants, but some escaped and fled into the interior, where they established independent farming communities or mixed with Indian groups. After the abolition of slavery in 1888, a large proportion of Africans left the areas where they had been held captive and settled in other agricultural regions or in towns; however, the Northeast retained the heaviest concentration of Africans and mulattoes. From the 1860s to the 1920s, Brazilian manufacturers hired millions of European immigrants but largely avoided employing the descendants of slaves, who remained at the margin of Brazil’s economy. By the turn of the 21st century, an increasing number of individuals used education to attain upward mobility.
Europeans and other immigrants
People of European ancestry constitute the largest segment of the Brazilian population, owing to a steady influx of Portuguese immigrants as well as some four million other Europeans (mainly Italians) who migrated there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; their arrivals during that relatively short period were equal to the total population of African slaves brought to Brazil during the previous three centuries.
Until the late 1800s, Lusitanian (i.e., Portuguese) immigrants were practically the only Europeans to enter Brazil. They were found in all classes of society and were anxious to obtain wealth quickly as plantation owners or as merchants. Immigrants of diverse origins joined the Portuguese only following the proclamation of independence in 1822. Italians, the most numerous of the non-Portuguese European groups, settled primarily in São Paulo and northern Rio Grande do Sul states. The Italians were culturally similar to the Portuguese and were easily assimilated. Less numerous Mediterranean immigrant groups, including those from Spain and Middle Eastern countries such as Syria and Lebanon, mainly arrived during the first quarter of the 20th century. Like the Italians, they adapted rapidly to their new homeland and began to contribute to Brazilian industry, finance, politics, and the arts.
German immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries and Japanese shortly before World War I further diversified the ethnic mix; however, those two groups remained culturally distinct for much longer than had earlier immigrants. This occurred largely for two reasons: first, the Germans and Japanese settled mainly in isolated rural areas and, second, they received teachers, textbooks in their native languages, and other assistance from their home governments. However, after World War II they were largely integrated into mainstream society. As a whole, Brazilians of Japanese descent now have a markedly higher level of education than the norm. Other immigrant groups have included Slavic peoples from eastern Europe and small but vital Jewish communities concentrated in major urban centres. Immigration had dwindled by the late 20th century, and less than 1 percent of Brazil’s population was foreign-born.
Language of Brazil
Portuguese is the first language of the vast majority of Brazilians, but numerous foreign words have expanded the national lexicon. The Portuguese language has undergone many transformations, both in the mother country and in its former colony, since it was first introduced into Brazil in the 16th century. The two countries have largely standardized their spellings, but pronunciations, vocabularies, and the meanings of words have diverged so widely that it now may be easier for some Brazilians to understand Spanish-language films from other Latin American countries than films from Portugal. Italians, Germans, Japanese, and Spanish-speaking immigrants have introduced new words and expressions in Brazilian Portuguese, such as the ubiquitous expression tchau (“farewell”), which was adopted from the Italian ciao. Foreign products and technologies have introduced additional terms.
Brazil’s indigenous peoples speak dozens of discrete languages, and some authorities suggest that the greatest divergence of the Brazilian language from the Portuguese can be traced to initial contact with the Indians. The Tupian, or Tupí-Guaraní, language group has especially influenced Brazilian place-names and added perhaps thousands of words and expressions to Brazilian Portuguese. Tupian was the principal language of Brazil’s native peoples before European contact, and it became the lingua franca between Indians and Portuguese traders, missionaries, adventurers, and administrators; it was widely used in the Amazon region and western Brazil until the 19th century. The Tupian influence also caused Brazilians to enunciate more clearly and to use more nasal speech patterns than their Iberian counterparts.
Religion
About two-thirds of the Brazilian people adhere to Roman Catholicism, which ceased to be the official religion after the proclamation of the republic in 1889. After independence, which loosed the formerly close links between church and state, the predominance of Catholics among the immigrants of the 19th and 20th centuries contributed to the lasting presence of that religion. Much of the rest of the population is Protestant, including fundamentalist and Pentecostal groups. (Evangelical groups gathered rapid support from the 1990s by taking some members from the Catholic ranks; in response, Catholic groups initiated a series of charismatic masses and rallies.)
Brazil has increasing numbers of adherents to Eastern Orthodoxy, Buddhism, Shintō, Islam, and other religions, all of which together are about numerically equal to those practicing a form of spiritualism, or spiritism, that is based on the 19th-century teachings of the French medium Allan Kardec. Many Brazilians also practice syncretic religions, such as Macumba, Candomblé, Xangô, and Umbanda, that blend Christian beliefs with rites imported from Africa or with spiritualistic practices. Candomblé predominates in Bahia. The Nagô Candomblé sect, derived from the religion of Yoruba slaves, is particularly widespread and influences the rites of other sects. Macumba and Umbanda have many adherents in Rio de Janeiro state, whereas Xangô is most influential in Pernambuco. Practitioners generally identify their deities with Roman Catholic saints and believe that these deities intercede for them with a supreme being. Priests and priestesses are mostly of African ancestry, but adherents are drawn from every ethnic group and social class, especially in urban centres. Perhaps tens of millions of Brazilian Catholics occasionally participate in syncretic or spiritualist feasts and ceremonies.
Demography
Like most developing countries, Brazil has a young population, but the median age has been increasing since the mid-20th century. By the 1980s the proportion of people under 20 had declined to less than half of the total, and the trend continued into the early 21st century, when between one-fourth and one-fifth of Brazilians were recorded as being under age 15. During that time the proportion of people in the older age groups increased, so that nearly three-tenths of the population was age 45 and over.
As Brazilian society has modernized and become more affluent, life expectancy has increased and the rate of population growth has declined. The birth rate has also generally declined but varies according to region. In 1960 the national average was just over 6 births per female of childbearing age, with a high of 8 to 8.5 in the most rural states and much lower rates in Rio de Janeiro. By the early 21st century the national average dropped to roughly 2 births per childbearing woman, partly because of the populace’s gradual acceptance of family planning measures. Infant mortality rates are still a serious concern but vary widely according to region and socioeconomic status: in the affluent urban districts the rate is quite low, but in the favelas and other poor communities, particularly in the Northeast, it is much higher.
The economy of Brazil
Brazil is one of the world giants of mining, agriculture, and manufacturing, and it has a strong and rapidly growing service sector. It is a leading producer of a host of minerals, including iron ore, tin, bauxite (the ore of aluminum), manganese, gold, quartz, and diamonds and other gems, and it exports vast quantities of steel, automobiles, electronics, and consumer goods. Brazil is the world’s primary source of coffee, oranges, and cassava (manioc) and a major producer of sugar, soy, and beef; however, the relative importance of Brazilian agriculture has been declining since the mid-20th century when the country began to rapidly urbanize and exploit its mineral, industrial, and hydroelectric potential. The city of São Paulo, in particular, has become one of the world’s major industrial and commercial centres.
Brazil’s economic history can be largely characterized as a cycle of booms and busts. From the 16th to the mid-20th century, the country was heavily dependent on one or two major agricultural products, whose prices fluctuated widely on international markets. The cyclical aspect of the economy began with the export of brazilwood in early colonial times and continued with a sugar boom, a mineral boom in the 18th century (paced especially by gold and diamond mining), a coffee boom from the mid-19th century, and a rubber boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Brazilian government in the 20th century attempted to diversify the country’s production and reduce its dependency on agricultural exports by strongly encouraging manufacturing.
The government, hoping to ensure domestic control of key industries, spearheaded a host of nationalistic policies following the Great Depression of the 1930s. It took ownership of some of the country’s largest companies, usually in partnership with one or more local or foreign corporations, and subsequently sold stock to private investors. The government’s growing involvement in the industrial sector was criticized for promoting political and social objectives rather than economic ones and for its cumbersome and inefficient bureaucracy; however, some industries attributed their successes to government measures, which included direct investments, tax and other incentives, protective tariffs, and import restrictions. The government initiated several key industries, including a modern shipbuilding program, a petrochemical sector led by the huge Petrobrás company (created in 1953), a burgeoning microelectronics and personal computer industry, and aircraft manufacturing by the Embraer corporation, including commercial jetliners, aviation and surveillance equipment, and aircraft for the Brazilian air force. It established a motor vehicle industry in the 1950s to replace U.S. and German imports and assembly plants. For a period during the late 20th century, manufacturing accounted for the largest segment of the gross domestic product (GDP) before it was overtaken by the service sector.
Almost continuously high rates of inflation in the late 20th century affected every aspect of Brazil’s economic life. Inflation came in part from the government’s policies of deficit spending, heavily financing industrial expansion, and subsidizing business loans, as well as the practice among individual Brazilians of obtaining loans from foreign banks when domestic credit was restricted. In the latter part of the 20th century, Brazil indexed nearly all transactions for inflation, according to the constantly corrected value of the government’s bonds. This practice virtually institutionalized inflation and led to public acceptance of its inevitability. As a result, Brazil’s anti-inflation programs were only fleetingly successful until the mid-1990s, when the government initiated the Real Plan (Plano Real), a program that strictly limited government spending, introduced a new currency, and made other fiscal reforms.
The government privatized dozens of financial institutions, manufacturers, and mining companies in the 1990s, including several major steel producers and the Rio Doce Valley Company (Companhia Vale do Rio Dôce; CVRD). The CVRD, Brazil’s giant mining and shipping conglomerate, was apportioned into separate (but still economically formidable) mining and shipping units. The government also sold a minority of its Petrobrás shares to private investors and partially opened the petroleum industry to competition. Additional public offerings of Petrobrás shares followed—in 2010, notably, the company raised about $70 billion in the world’s largest share offering to date—but the government retained its majority ownership.
At the beginning of the 21st century, serious problems marked the Brazilian economy, aggravated by political uncertainties. Inflation, financial instability, and unemployment (or underemployment) remained constant threats, and political and financial scandals periodically erupted throughout the country. However, by mid-2004 the inflation rate had decreased, and for the first time Brazil issued bonds in its own currency, the real, instead of the dollar. Brazil still has one of the world’s most lopsided distributions of wealth: 10 percent of the people received nearly half of the country’s income, whereas the poorest 40 percent of the population brought in less than one-tenth of the total. In addition, patterns of landownership continued to be grossly uneven, as they were in colonial times, and social movements agitated for reforms.
Resources
Brazil has some of the world’s most abundant renewable and nonrenewable resources. Most of the country’s proved mineral reserves, agriculturally productive land, and other sources of wealth have been exploited in the Southeast and South, the country’s economic heartland; however, other regions have been growing in prominence. Improved transportation has made more of these resources accessible either for export or for use by Brazil’s burgeoning industries and growing population.
Minerals of Brazil
Brazil contains extremely rich mineral reserves that are only partly exploited, including iron ore, tin, copper, pyrochlore (from which ferroniobium is derived), and bauxite. There are also significant amounts of granite, manganese, asbestos, gold, gemstones, quartz, tantalum, and kaolin (china clay). Most industrial minerals are concentrated in Minas Gerais and Pará, including iron ore, bauxite, and gold. Mato Grosso and Amapá have most of the known manganese ore deposits. The vast majority of kaolin is found in the Amazon basin. Low-quality coal reserves are located in Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. Brazil also has deposits of several other metallic and nonmetallic minerals, some of which are major exports. Brazil has huge offshore reserves of petroleum and natural gas, notably in the Southeast.
Biological resources
Forests cover about three-fifths of Brazil’s land area, representing between one-sixth and one-seventh of the world’s forest coverage. Hardwoods predominate in the Amazon and Atlantic coastal zone. Only a small portion of Brazil’s annual timber harvest comes from the Amazon basin, but loggers are increasingly exploiting the region’s forests as additional roads are built and settlements grow. With its long coastline and numerous well-stocked rivers, Brazil has access to substantial fishing grounds, but the fishing industry is underdeveloped and productivity is low.
Hydroelectric resources
Brazil, with its extensive river systems and plentiful rainfall, has one of the largest hydroelectric potentials in the world. Most of its hydroelectric dams are concentrated in the Southeast and the South, the areas that consume the vast majority of power in Brazil; among the rivers harnessed in that area are the Iguaçu, Tietê, Paranapanema, Paranaíba, Grande, and upper reaches of the São Francisco. The Tocantins River (in the North) and the lower São Francisco (in the Northeast) are also dammed. Several other rivers hold enormous hydroelectric potential but are distant from major industrial and urban complexes.
Agriculture, fishing, and forestry
Farming and stock raising account for about one-fifth of the labour force and roughly one-twelfth of the GDP; although fishing and forestry are important, they are much smaller parts of the overall economy.
Agriculture of Brazil
The country is essentially self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs and is a leading exporter of a wide range of crops, including oranges, soybeans, coffee, and cassava, which are grown mainly in the South and Southeast. Brazil, unlike most Latin American countries, has increased agricultural production by greatly enlarging its cultivated area since World War II, but this expansion has come at grave environmental cost in frontier areas.
Brazil is the world’s leading producer of coffee; it was the country’s most important single export in the early and mid-20th century. Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo are the principal coffee-producing states, followed by São Paulo and Paraná. In the 1990s soybeans and their derivative products, particularly animal feeds, became a more valuable source of revenue than coffee. Most of the country’s soybeans are grown in Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul; Mato Grosso do Sul state has also become a leading producer, because farmers there have increasingly used machinery and fertilizers to work the savanna soils.
About one-third of the world’s oranges are grown in Brazil—more than twice the amount produced in the United States, which is the world’s second major supplier. Brazil is also the world’s main producer of cassava and a leading grower of beans, corn (maize), cacao, bananas, and rice. Although the bulk of these products are consumed domestically, some are exported, including jute and black pepper from the Amazon region; palm oils from the Northeast coast; garlic from Minas Gerais; peanuts (groundnuts), oranges, and tea from São Paulo; and tobacco from Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. Brazil nuts are economically important only in limited areas of the North.
Brazil has one of the world’s largest livestock populations (at more than 200 million) and slaughters more cattle annually than does the United States. The most extensive grazing lands are concentrated in the South and Southeast, with a smaller but increasing share in northern states and frontier zones, such as Amazonia. The meatpacking industry’s principal operations are in Rio Grande do Sul, the state closest to the beef-producing plains of Uruguay and Argentina. Brazil also produces great quantities of poultry; both poultry and meat are important exports.
Mechanized farming is still somewhat rare in Brazil. Tractors and other large machinery are employed mostly in the South and Southeast as well as on the western frontier (Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Acre, and Rondônia). Few tractors are available in the Northeast, where even the sugar plantations rely on manual labour. That region contains about half of Brazil’s farms but most cover only some 12 acres (5 hectares) or less. The government has built costly, large-scale irrigation projects in the Northeast, but they have helped few family farms. Many poor families barely subsist on small, overworked patches of land, whereas some of the largest rural landholdings lie fallow or largely unused. To promote land reform, tens of thousands of impoverished Brazilians have participated in the Landless Movement (Movimento dos Sem Terra), which has organized protests and property invasions, sometimes risking violent confrontations. The government began to redistribute land on an unprecedented scale in the 1990s, although budgetary constraints and administrative backlogs hampered the program.
Brazilian technological advances and scientific efforts have benefited the agricultural sector, including the discovery in mid-2000 of the genetic sequence of Xylella fastidiosa, a bacterium that infects orange trees. A government initiative in the 1970s began to replace costly, imported gasoline as a motor fuel with ethanol (ethyl alcohol) produced mainly from sugarcane, as well as rice and wood shavings. Brazil’s gasoline-substitution program became the most successful effort of its kind in the world: the area under sugarcane cultivation rapidly expanded in São Paulo state and on the Northeast coast, modern distilleries were built, and, for a few years, virtually all new automobiles in Brazil were engineered to run on the fuel. Many Brazilian engines now burn fuel that is one-fifth to one-fourth ethanol, and some use a larger proportion of ethanol than gasoline. Brazil is one of the leading producers of ethanol.
Fishing
Brazil catches significantly less fish than does Argentina or Mexico, although most of Brazil’s population lives on or near the country’s extensive Atlantic coastline. Brazil’s commercial fishing fleets account for roughly two-thirds of the saltwater catch. They sail mainly from Southern and Southeastern ports, partly because of their proximity to markets but also because the coastal waters are warmed by the southward-flowing Brazil Current, which supports fewer fish than do the colder waters farther south. Most ocean fishing in the Northeast focuses on lobsters and shrimps, which are caught primarily for export.
Roughly one-fourth of Brazil’s total catch is freshwater fish, of which a major portion comes from the Amazon River system. The Northeast accounts for another large segment, much of it from reservoirs that the government has stocked with tilapia, a fast-growing fish introduced from Africa. In Fortaleza manufacturers use the skins of tilapia and cambulu, a saltwater fish, to make fashionable shoes, clothing, and accessories—products formerly made from the hides of alligators, which are now endangered.
Forestry of Brazil
The South and Southeast account for the majority of Brazil’s timber production, about half of it from plantations of eucalyptus trees introduced from Australia; Honduras pine and several other exotic species are also harvested. The timber from plantations is used mainly to manufacture cellulose and paper products. Each year, Brazilians burn vast tracts of rainforest and wooded parts of the highlands to make room for pastures, crops, and settlements; however, few of the trees destroyed in that process are used for fuel, and almost none are used for wood products. Most of the small timber yield of the Northeast is used as fuelwood. The forests of eastern Minas Gerais produce the largest share of Brazil’s charcoal, followed by those of western Maranhão, southern Bahia, and Tocantins.
Industry
Whereas other Latin American countries export the vast majority of their mineral and petroleum production, Brazil’s powerful manufacturing sector is a ready market for primary materials.
Mining and quarrying
Brazil’s industries absorb most of its mineral production, including iron ore from Minas Gerais and Pará (though ore from the Carajás region is largely exported); chrome, magnesium, and quartz from Bahia; copper and lead from Bahia and Rio Grande do Sul; bauxite from Pará; asbestos from Goiás; manganese from Amapá, Mato Grosso do Sul, and Bahia; zinc and graphite from Minas Gerais; nickel from Goiás and Minas Gerais; and limestone from various states. Brazil is self-sufficient in cassiterite (tin ore), found along a belt south of the Amazon. Mines in Rio Grande do Norte meet nearly all of the country’s tungsten requirements, and Bahia and Paraná provide most of Brazil’s silver. Coal production, which is centred in Santa Catarina, supplies more than half of the country’s needs.
Brazil is a major gold and diamond producer, but quantities fluctuate widely from year to year and place to place as deposits are located and exhausted. Most gold and diamonds are mined in Minas Gerais, and smaller amounts are produced in Pará, particularly in the vicinity of Serra Pelada, where tens of thousands of garimpeiros swarmed during gold rushes in the 1980s and ’90s. Minas Gerais, Bahia, and Espírito Santo are the major sources of Brazil’s enormous range of gems—topazes, amethysts, opals, aquamarines, tourmalines, emeralds, and others—that make Brazil a world leader in precious and semiprecious stones.
Petroleum and natural gas
Brazil produces the majority of its petroleum and some natural gas, mainly from offshore fields along the continental shelf. Drilling was confined to the Northeast, in the Bahia basin just north of Salvador, from 1940 to the 1960s, after which the area of exploration expanded to include wells on the mainland and offshore from Fortaleza in the north to Santos (in São Paulo state) in the south. Brazil extracts more than two-thirds of its petroleum from the Campos basin on the continental shelf off Rio de Janeiro state. There Petrobrás has developed some of the most advanced deepwater drilling technology in the world, including a well more than 1.5 miles (2.4 km) below the surface. In the early 21st century Petrobrás confirmed that the Tupi offshore oil field, located about 4.3 miles (6.9 km) underwater, contained about five to eight million barrels of oil and natural gas, which boosted Brazil’s supply of oil reserves substantially. Most of the country’s natural gas comes from Bahia and Sergipe states, and there are petroleum and natural gas reserves throughout the Amazon basin, but oil refineries near Manaus have a limited capacity.
Power
Brazil’s total power capacity has expanded rapidly since 1950, mainly through hydroelectricity, which now accounts for nine-tenths of the country’s electric power. The government has given lower priority to thermal power generation because of the poor quality of Brazilian coal. The opening of a gas pipeline from Bolivia in 1999 has led to a program for construction of gas-fired thermoelectric generating plants, chiefly in the Southeast. The opening of a Bolivia-Brazil natural gas pipeline in 1999 has encouraged the construction of numerous gas-fired thermoelectric plants, chiefly in the Southeast.
Brazil’s first nuclear reactor, Angra I, opened in 1982 near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s second nuclear reactor, Angra II, began operating in 2000. In 1984 the Itaipú hydroelectric complex, the world’s largest power station at its completion, began operating on the Alto Paraná River between Brazil and Paraguay. Dozens of smaller generating stations function on the Paraná and Uruguay rivers and their tributaries. Among other major complexes are Tucuruí, which began operating on the Tocantins River in the mid-1980s, and Sobradinho and the Paulo Afonso series of stations, all on the lower São Francisco River. Major hydroelectric projects for the Amazon region have been held in abeyance owing to ecological concerns.
Manufacturing of Brazil
Manufacturing accounts for about one-fifth of the GDP and more than one-tenth of the labour force. With few exceptions, the Southeast contains the largest, most varied, and most efficient establishments in every sector of industry. It also employs three-fifths of the country’s industrial workers, who earn most of Brazil’s wages and produce the largest value of its goods. The South employs more than one-fifth of the country’s industrial workers, but the Northeast employs roughly half that number, and at lower wages than in the Southeast and South. Within the Southern and Southeastern states, the manufacturing sectors of Paraná, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, and Espírito Santo are increasingly offsetting the industrial strength of São Paulo, which alone produces nearly two-fifths of Brazil’s manufactured goods. Generally speaking, Brazil’s factories are not large; only a few employ a hundred or more workers. As might be expected, the largest firms are in the Southeast, followed by the South.
Since the mid-20th century Brazil has been a major world supplier of automobiles, producing nearly two million vehicles per year. Other major manufactures include electrical machinery, paints, soaps, medicines, chemicals, aircraft, steel, food products, and paper. Brazil has been a major producer of textiles, clothing, and footwear since the early 19th century. The textile industry began in Bahia in 1814, using local supplies of raw cotton; it is now centred in São Paulo and Fortaleza. The footwear industry, centred in Rio Grande do Sul, began in the 1820s with small leather works supplied by surplus hides from the meatpacking industry.
Services
The rapidly expanding service sector is Brazil’s largest employer, accounting for more than half of the labour force. It is composed of private and government services, including national and local bureaucracies, public utilities, and a host of special agencies. In the private sector the largest number of workers are employed in hospitality industries (hotels, restaurants, and bars) and repair shops of various kinds. Retail sales and personal services each account for most of the rest of the private-sector workers. Employment is growing most rapidly in the field of information technology.
Finance
The National Monetary Council, under the direction of the minister of finance, is Brazil’s chief financial policy-making body. It oversees the Central Bank of Brazil, which issues currency (the real) and controls the money supply, credit, foreign capital, and other top-level financial matters. The federal government also uses other public financial institutions to implement its policies, the most important of which is the Bank of Brazil. The largest bank in the country, it has numerous agencies at home and abroad and is the main source of long-term loans for farmers and exporters of manufactured goods. The National Economic and Social Development Bank channels government and international loans into large-scale development projects, including loans to state governments for projects that they cannot finance themselves, such as the São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro subways. The National Housing Bank provides home-building loans, and the Federal Savings Bank (Caixa Econômica Federal) makes short-term loans to individuals.
Many states have their own government banks, among which the Bank of São Paulo is the most important. A lesser share of Brazil’s commercial banking is in the hands of private banks, which also provide short-term loans and savings accounts. In the 1990s federal and state governments privatized or closed several formerly state-owned banks and allowed foreign investors to control more financial institutions. The main stock market is that of São Paulo (1890); Rio de Janeiro has a smaller market (1845), and the cities of Pôrto Alegre, Vitória, Recife, Santos, and São Paulo have commodity exchanges. The securities system, which historically has been underregulated and volatile, underwent reforms at the beginning of the 21st century.
Trade
Foreign trade has been critical to the Brazilian economy throughout the country’s existence; however, exports historically accounted for only a small part of the national income, and Brazil had difficulty maintaining a favourable trade balance, partly because of its huge foreign debt payments. The situation began to change with several years of trade surpluses in the 1980s and ’90s. By the beginning of the 21st century, as the country’s foreign debt fell, exports flourished (spurred by government financing as well as efforts to negotiate increased access to foreign markets), and Brazil enjoyed a significant positive balance of trade. Another important contributor to the growth of exports was the country’s expanding ethanol industry.
China and the United States are Brazil’s principal trading partners. However, regional trade has been increasing, notably with Argentina, since the Southern Common Market (Mercosur, or Mercosul) was established in 1991. Other major trading partners include Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, and Italy.
Tourism of Brazil
Tourism is a growing industry in Brazil, which receives some three million foreign visitors a year. However, Brazilians visiting abroad spend significantly more money than do foreigners visiting Brazil; among Brazilians’ preferred destinations are Uruguay, Argentina, and the United States. Most tourists in Brazil travel to Rio de Janeiro and other easily accessible sites that are in or around urban centres with well-established hospitality industries. Salvador and other parts of Bahia are major tourist attractions, and increasing numbers of vacationers are visiting other coastal areas of the Northeast. Eco-tourism is moderately popular in the Amazon region, while in the South the beaches of Santa Catarina draw large crowds of Argentine tourists. The spectacular Iguaçu Falls, which are now connected to major urban centres by highways and air routes, annually attract more than one million foreign and domestic tourists. Pristine beaches in the Northeast, national parks in the interior, and historic sites throughout Brazil are garnering increasing interest. In the 1980s the cities Ouro Prêto, Olinda, Salvador, and Brasília were designated World Heritage sites, as were portions of the Northeast coast in 1999.
The larger Brazilian cities have a wide range of accommodations, but most luxury hotels are in Rio de Janeiro, and there are some large spas, hotels, and resorts in the Minas Gerais highlands and at Iguaçu Falls. Hotel construction has boomed in the cities of the Northeast and South. A growing number of Brazilians travel throughout the country by automobile and aircraft during vacations.
Transportation
Developing an efficient means of transportation has been a matter of critical importance for a country as large as Brazil. Throughout much of its history the country’s coastal regions were connected via shipping and a few short roads, whereas the interior remained an isolated frontier. Railroads were built in the 19th century to link Brazil’s mineral-producing regions to ocean ports; however, they facilitated only limited settlement of the interior, unlike in other Latin American countries, and the rail network could not be integrated quickly because different rail companies used incompatible gauges. Brazil’s transportation infrastructure changed dramatically after World War II, first with the growth of air transport and, subsequently, with the extension of a modern road network. By the 1970s Brazil had the world’s third largest commercial air fleet, and its roads were developing rapidly. In the 1990s the country’s road system was the third-longest in the world (after the United States and India), and Brazil was among the top 10 countries in automobile registrations.
Roads
Roads account for the vast majority of passenger traffic and roughly two-thirds of freight tonnage hauled. The country had few good paved roads at the time Brasília was constructed in the late 1950s. A four-lane highway linked Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, but there were no paved roads from those cities to Pôrto Alegre, Curitiba, the Northeast, or west of Belo Horizonte. During the rainy season some roads could be flooded or blocked for a week or more at a time, stranding motorists in areas with limited housing and food supplies.
The construction of Brasília, for which many bulky materials had to be airlifted in during the rainy season, alerted the country to the poor state of its roads, and when the military assumed power in 1964 it made the upgrading of the road system a primary objective. As a result, a comprehensive system of paved highways now connects all of the major points in Brazil, including several cities in the Amazon region; paved roads account for about one-tenth of the Brazilian road system. Among the more prominent arteries are the Trans-Amazonian Highway and the Trans-Brasiliana project. Given Brazil’s vast extent, these and other highways are extremely long and difficult to maintain, especially in the Amazon region.
Railways
Railroads are of little importance to Brazil’s transportation network except for certain bulk ore carriers and the commuter lines to the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasília. In contrast to Brazil’s dynamic highway construction program, few new railways of any significance have been built in the country since World War II, when Rio de Janeiro was linked by rail to Salvador because of attacks by German submarines on coastal shipping. The modest construction since that time has included a branch line from Minas Gerais to Brasília, the ore-carrying line (opened in 1985) between the Carajás mining project and Pôrto do Itaqui (near São Luis), and the Ferronorte line, which carries bulk agricultural products between Alto Taquari and the Alto Paraná River in the Central-West. Brasília’s metropolitan rail system, linking the capital with its suburbs, inaugurated its first section in 1994 and expanded rapidly thereafter. The federal government sold off its controlling shares of railways in 1997, but many states and cities retain control of local lines.
Shipping of Brazil
Brazilian coastal shipping was, for many years, in no better condition than its railways. After the federal government launched a shipbuilding program in the 1960s, however, cargo tonnage increased markedly, and, more significantly, ships began to carry a larger percentage of high-value goods as the frequency and reliability of services improved. Three-fourths of Brazil’s ships are involved in coastal trade, with the largest proportion of oceangoing vessels owned by Petrobrás.
Brazil has also upgraded its specialized bulk terminals, including one on Sepetiba Bay, west of Rio de Janeiro, and the Itaqui ore terminal, just south of São Luís, as well as the iron-ore terminal at Tubarão, near Vitória, and the oil terminal at São Sebastião, on the São Paulo coast. Traffic through São Sebastião accounts for about half of the export value of São Paulo state, and much of the rest is handled through the port of Santos, which is the country’s busiest port. Other significant ports include Rio de Janeiro, Paranaguá, Salvador, and Recife. Brazil’s major port facilities, historically known for their high costs and low efficiency, were significantly improved in the late 1990s, mainly through privatization.
The extensive Brazilian river system has a total navigability of some 31,000 miles (50,000 km). Navigable waterways are the principal means of transportation in the North, where the principal ports are Belém, at the mouth of the Pará River (an effluent of the Tocantins), and the Amazon port of Manaus, some 1,000 miles (1,600 km) inland. Smaller boats ply the Amazon River system as far west as Pôrto Velho, on the Madeira River in Rondônia state, and the Peruvian port of Iquitos. The Paraguay-Paraná-Plata river system is little suited for long-distance navigation, although certain stretches were used for local transport in the early days of settlement. Barge traffic is increasing, however, and shallow-draft vessels can use the system to access the Atlantic through the Río de la Plata estuary. In the late 1990s the government began to improve navigation on the Tocantins, Araguaia, and Tietê rivers.
The São Francisco River is navigable in two separate sections: for 1,000 miles (1,600 km) northward from Pirapora to the hydroelectric dam at Petrolina and Juàzeiro, and for about 170 miles (270 km) eastward from the Paulo Afonso Falls to the sea. Few of the shorter rivers flowing to the Atlantic are navigable; only the Paranaíba in the far north and the Jacuí in Rio Grande do Sul carry significant shallow-draft and barge traffic.
Aerospace
Brazilians were among the pioneers in flying, and they have long claimed that their countryman Alberto Santos-Dumont, not the Wright brothers, flew the first successful airplane. Numerous airlines flourished in Brazil at one time or another, but they have been consolidated into three major companies that compete nationwide: VARIG, which since the late 1920s has been a largely employee-owned airline; the now privately owned São Paulo State Airline (VASP), which handles mainly domestic flights; and Transbrasil.
Every capital and major city in Brazil has an airport, and some 1,500 smaller cities and towns have airstrips. São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, and Brasília are all linked by air shuttle services, although the overall frequency of flights and the size of terminals are much smaller than those of comparable centres in western Europe and North America. This is due to the relatively high cost of air fares and competition from inexpensive intercity bus services. Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, which each have two international airports, handle most international air traffic.
Brazil is second only to French Guiana as a Latin American leader in space exploration. It began testing rockets in the 1960s and created the first wholly Brazilian-made satellite in the early 1990s. Satellites are launched from a base at Alcântara, on the Maranhão coast just south of the Equator, because rockets launched into orbit from equatorial regions require significantly less fuel than do those launched from higher latitudes. The Brazilian space industry, long under military control, was placed under civilian leadership in 1994. Several Brazilian companies cooperate to design and build launch vehicles and satellites.
Administration and social conditions
Government
Constitutional framework
Brazil is a federal republic divided into 26 states and the Federal District (Distrito Federal), the latter including the capital city, Brasília. Since 1934 the nation has had universal suffrage. In 1988 Brazil promulgated a new constitution—the eighth since the country’s independence in 1822—that abolished many traces of the military regime (1964–85), defined civil rights, and outlined the functions of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. It restricted the president’s power to legislate, proscribed government censorship of the arts, condemned the use of torture, prohibited extradition for political crimes, set the minimum voting age at 16 years, and allowed the federal government to intervene in state and local affairs. The constitution has been amended several times since its promulgation, but some of the changes have been temporary, with specifically designated timespans.
The legislature of Brazil
Legislative power is exercised by the bicameral National Congress (Congresso Nacional), comprising the Chamber of Deputies (Câmara dos Deputados) and the Federal Senate (Senado Federal). Congress meets every year in two sessions of four and a half months each. The constitution gives Congress the power to rule in matters involving the federal government, particularly those related to fiscal policies and to the administration of the union. Congress also ratifies international treaties negotiated by the executive, authorizes the president to declare war, and decides whether or not the federal government may intervene in the affairs of the states. If the president vetoes a congressional bill or any of its provisions, Congress has 30 days to overrule the veto by an absolute majority vote.
The Chamber of Deputies consists of representatives of the states elected every four years by direct universal suffrage. The number of deputies is in rough proportion to the population of each state, but no state can be represented in the chamber by more than 70 or by fewer than eight deputies. This system grants a disproportionate share of political power to the states of the Northeast and North and severely underrepresents the heavily populated state of São Paulo.
The 81-seat Federal Senate is composed of three representatives from each state and the Federal District who serve eight-year terms. Senatorial elections are held every four years, alternating between one-third (27) and the remaining two-thirds (54) of the seats. Senators are directly elected by the residents of each state.
The executive
Executive power is exercised by the president, who is head of state and government, is directly elected to a four-year term (and is eligible for one reelection), and appoints a cabinet of various ministers of state and several other heads of ministerial-level departments. The executive has wide powers, particularly in economic and foreign policy, finances, and internal security. The president can submit bills to Congress and request legislative approval within 30 days; if Congress does not comply within this period, the bill is considered approved. The president can partly or totally veto any bill submitted by Congress in addition to issuing provisional measures that remain in effect for 30-day periods. The president is also commander in chief of the armed forces; in practice, however, civil-military relations in Brazil have never been taken for granted (see Armed forces and security).
Justice
The Brazilian judicial system is divided into two branches: the ordinary branch, made up of state and federal courts, and the special branch, made up of labour, electoral, and military courts.
The Supreme Federal Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal) is Brazil’s highest court. It is composed of 11 members nominated by the president with the approval of the Federal Senate. The court provides final rulings on constitutional issues and hears cases involving the president, the vice president, Congress, the judiciary, the attorney general, government ministers, diplomats, foreign countries, and the political or administrative divisions of the union.
The Higher Court of Justice (Superior Tribunal de Justiça) consists of 33 judges appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate. It is the highest court in the land regarding nonconstitutional matters and also hears cases involving governors of the states and the Federal District. The ordinary branch also includes federal courts of appeal known as Regional Federal Courts. Each state has state and federal courts that exercise first-instance jurisdiction.
Of the special branch courts, electoral courts are responsible for the registration of political parties and the control of their finances. They also select the date of elections and hear cases involving electoral crimes. Labour courts mediate in conflicts between management and workers, and military courts have jurisdiction in cases involving members of the armed forces.
Although the Brazilian judicial system has long been criticized for inefficiency, incidents of political favouritism, and widespread corruption, efforts have been made to reform it, including, most notably, the adoption in 2004 of Constitutional Amendment 45. That amendment established the principle of stare decisis, under which high courts’ decisions were to be considered binding precedents, with the intention of increasing the efficiency of lower courts. The amendment also created the National Council of Justice, an external institution to oversee compliance with judicial rules and to consider complaints against judges. Within the country’s prisons, harsh and overcrowded conditions have often incited mass escape attempts and riots, during which many prisoners have been killed.
Regional, state, and local administration
The federal government does not provide for separate regional administrations, although it promotes economic growth in the poorer regions through agencies known as the superintendencies for the development of the Northeast, or SUDENE (founded 1959), and of the Amazon region, SUDAM (1966). SUDENE and SUDAM grant federal funds to development projects and oversee tax incentives that are intended to stimulate local and regional investment; however, the policies of the agencies have varied significantly under different federal administrations, and agency functions frequently overlap, especially at the local level.
The states are semi-autonomous with their own constitutions, justice systems, and directly elected governors and legislative assemblies. The Federal District has been administered by a directly elected governor since the 1990s; previously, the president had appointed a mayor (prefeito) to oversee the district.
Brazil is also subdivided into more than 5,000 municipalities (municípios) that are created by the states according to federal guidelines. The municipalities, which are similar to counties and may cover urban or rural zones, have their own fiscal resources and autonomous governments, including directly elected mayors and municipal councillors. Major cities are generally state capitals, and relations between governors and mayors are often pervaded by bureaucratic rivalries.
Political parties
The current political party system began to emerge in the 1940s under President Getúlio Dorneles Vargas, who established the Social Democratic Party and the Brazilian Labour Party to buffer his weakening administration. A number of other parties were organized and entered elections through the 1950s and early ’60s, but few of them gained much influence. In 1965 the military government, which had taken power the previous year, abolished all political parties and replaced them with a single government party, the National Renewal Alliance, and a lone opposition party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement. The government abolished these two organizations in 1979 and allowed more parties to participate but still under restrictive regulations. After civilian government was restored in 1985, Brazil again legalized all political parties, and a highly fragmented multiparty system emerged, anchored by the Liberal Front Party, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, and the Workers’ Party.
Luciano MartinsRonald Milton SchneiderArmed forces and security
Brazil has the largest army, air force, and navy in South America, accounting for more than 300,000 soldiers—roughly one-third of the region’s total military personnel. Much of its weaponry is made in Brazil, including diesel-powered submarines, jet fighters, air transports, and firearms. In the latter part of the 20th century, Brazil became a leading arms exporter; however, its sales declined in the late 1980s when the Iran-Iraq War ceased and the Soviet bloc began to collapse, and by the mid-1990s Brazil was a net importer of weaponry.
Although the Brazilian president is commander in chief, the nation does not have a long-standing tradition of civil control over the military. Many senior officers, whose careers were rooted in the 1964–85 period of military rule, still consider their institution to be the nation’s ultimate political moderator and the most dedicated guardian of national interests; however, younger officers appear more willing to accept constitutional limitations. Since 1985 Brazil’s democratically elected governments have presided over relatively stable and peaceful conditions and have gradually limited the military’s political influence. In addition, long-standing concerns over the defense of Brazil’s southern borders have largely dissipated as Brazil and Argentina have strengthened their economic ties.
Historically, Brazil’s national defense strategy focused mainly on the compact, developed southern border with Argentina and Uruguay; however, in the 1990s the perceived Argentine threat dissappeared as Brazil and Argentina developed stronger economic ties.The military has partly refocused its efforts on the sparsely populated northern and western borders, which have been threatened by Colombian guerrillas and international drug traffickers (notably those smuggling cocaine from Bolivia and Peru to Colombia). Since 1994 Brazil has invested heavily in monitoring and controlling air traffic and other movement in the Amazon region, particularly in a wide band along the northern border, by coordinating a system of satellites, land-based and airborne radar, weather sensors, and other devices that have both civilian and military value. Increasing numbers of airstrips, garrisons, river patrols, and outposts have also been established or reinforced; however, given the enormous expanses in the region, the military presence there remains largely token.
Most of Brazil’s law enforcement officers are members of the Military Police, whose units are commanded at the state level; the Military Police have operated independently of the armed forces since 1988. Brazil’s plainclothes Civil Police handle investigative work, whereas only a few thousand Federal Police attempt to patrol the nation’s vast sea, air, and land frontiers—a task for which they have long relied on military assistance. Violence and corruption among police are serious concerns in Brazil, exacerbated by low wages and educational attainment. Each year police in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are implicated in hundreds of extrajudicial killings as well as in drug trafficking, kidnapping, theft, and other crimes. Attempts at reform have been frustrated by the sheer number of such incidents and by frequent conflicts between police agencies.
Education
Education is a means to economic success in Brazil: unschooled labourers earn roughly one-fourth the wages of secondary-school graduates, who in turn attain only half the salary of those with university degrees; in addition, unemployment among the college educated is only one-fourth the national average. However, many poor Brazilians must seek work at an early age and thus regard education as a luxury, whereas the nation’s wealthier, well-connected families generally ensure that their children attain higher degrees and better jobs. The government estimates that roughly one-sixth of the adult population (15 years and older) is illiterate, but the actu
Primary and secondary school
School is free and compulsory for students at the primary (ages 7–14) and secondary (ages 15–17) levels, but roughly three-fifths of Brazilians have only four years of schooling or less. Approximately nine-tenths of children aged 7–14 are enrolled in school (in contrast to 1960, when only half of the children of that age group attended school). The primary schools of the Northeast, North, and Central-West are smaller and more dispersed and are run by teachers less qualified than those in the South and Southeast. Furthermore, the northern and western schools tend to be financed out of meagre municipal budgets, whereas southern schools are predominantly state-supported. Several states markedly increased educational spending in the mid-1990s, notably Minas Gerais and São Paulo, and overall an increasing number of primary students in Brazil have been continuing on to the secondary level.
Less than three-fifths of students aged 15–17 attend school, and, of those who do, some are still finishing a delayed and interrupted primary education; about half the total number of students are in the Southeast and South. However, secondary-school enrollments increased dramatically in the late 20th century, and the number of annual graduations in the mid-1990s was twice that of the previous decade. Secondary schools have low overall enrollment rates in part because many students are compelled to earn wages at an early age (the federal census records child labourers as young as 10). Other students complete only a short-term vocational program rather than a full three- to four-year curriculum. In addition, most secondary schools are located in large towns, particularly in the Northeast, and rural households with children in city schools incur a considerable financial burden paying for room and board. Many people pursue a high-school equivalency diploma through evening courses after they enter the workforce.
Higher education
University attendance rose dramatically in the 21st century in Brazil, but it remained limited compared with that in most developed countries. Although the number is growing, only a small portion of Brazilians aged 18–24 attended universities. Traditionally, higher education had been largely the prerogative of the wealthy and of the more ambitious members of the middle class, with places in the country’s prestigious free public universities limited to only the highest achievers. As demand for places increased, however, the role of private institutions grew, and by the second decade of the 21st century about three-fourths of undergraduates in Brazil attended private higher educational institutions, though in many cases meeting the cost of their education was a great challenge for these students. Beginning in the 1990s, schools began offering a greater number of weekend and extension courses to accommodate the needs of the upwardly aspiring working class and the lower strata of the middle class, and the number of students enrolled in distance learning also increased significantly.
By a large margin most institutions of higher education are located in the south and southeast; however, the Federal District and each of the states has at least one university. The University of São Paulo is the largest and most important state university. The largest private university is Paulista University, also located in São Paulo.
Welfare and health
The social gap between Brazil’s small privileged upper class and the masses at the bottom of the earnings scale is vast. Sandwiched between them is a substantial and diverse middle class. Because of inflation, salaries are expressed as multiples of the official minimum wage. Nearly two-thirds of the working population earns two minimum salaries or less. About half of the Northeastern workforce earns less than the minimum; in contrast, nearly four-fifths of those in the South and Southeast earn more than five minimum salaries.
Many of Brazil’s health problems stem from widespread undernourishment and endemic diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, dengue, amoebic dysentery, tuberculosis, schistosomiasis, and the dread Chagas disease, which is transmitted by the bite of an insect that infests the walls of wattle-and-daub houses. Most of those diseases are common in lowland areas but rare at higher elevations and in the subtropical climate zones. The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, located in Rio de Janeiro, is Brazil’s major research institute for tropical diseases.
Although most endemic tropical diseases have been eradicated in the major cities, migrants from infected areas have reintroduced some maladies as far south as São Paulo. Poor sanitary and housing conditions exacerbate health risks, particularly among Brazil’s millions of shantytown dwellers, or afavelados, who are concentrated in and around São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and other large cities. In those areas new systems of potable water and sewage have greatly reduced the spread of disease. Government programs and privately supported clinics have been established in many to improve health conditions, particularly prenatal and infant health care.
The majority of workers are covered by various benefits: health and unemployment insurance, retirement and severance pay, obligatory savings plans, and holiday pay. These are paid by the employer to the National Social Security Institute on the workers’ behalf. Brazil customarily spends a greater percentage of its gross national product on social services than it does on its military budget. There are, however, widespread complaints about the administration of the public health system, including the level and quality of benefits provided. The government changed the structure of the system in the 1990s after several officials were implicated in scandals.
Roughly four-fifths of the hospitals in Brazil are public institutions. The ratio of doctors to population is lowest in the North and Northeast but rises progressively through the South and Central-West and is the highest in the Southeast. The largest share of the country’s doctors and hospitals are concentrated in the urban areas. The quality and promptness of services provided also varies greatly; public hospitals, which mainly serve poorer Brazilians, have been criticized for responding slowly to emergencies and otherwise delaying treatments. Numerous state and national agencies operate a variety of health-care services, although often with limited programs.
Cultural life
The cultures of the indigenous Indians, Africans, and Portuguese have together formed the modern Brazilian way of life. The Portuguese culture is by far the dominant of these influences; from it Brazilians acquired their language, their main religion, and most of their customs. The Indian population is now statistically small, but Tupí-Guaraní, the language of many Brazilian Indians, continues to strongly influence the Brazilian Portuguese language; other Indian contributions to Brazilian culture are most apparent in the Amazon basin. African influences on the Brazilian way of life are strongest along the coast between the Northeast and Rio de Janeiro; they include traditional foods, religions, and popular music and dance, especially the samba. Commercial and cultural imports from Europe and North America have often competed with—and influenced—Brazilians’ own cultural output, and critics have argued that the nation’s cultural identity is suffering as a result. Despite numerous social and economic challenges, Brazilians continue to be exuberant and creative in their celebrations and art forms.
Cultural institutions
The Brazilian Academy of Letters, with its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, is generally regarded as the most prestigious of the country’s numerous learned societies. The National Library, also in Rio, was founded in 1810 with 60,000 volumes from the Portuguese royal library; it now holds millions of books and documents. Most of Brazil’s other libraries have limited holdings. Among the major history museums are the Museum of the Republic (1960; housed in the former governmental palace) and the National Historical Museum (1922), both in Rio, the São Paulo University Museum (1895), and the Imperial Museum (1940) in Petropólis. The São Paulo Art Museum (1947) and Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art (1948) are internationally renowned. Both Rio and São Paulo have major museums of anthropology and numerous theatres. A notable institution for the performing arts is the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra (1953; revitalized 1972), housed since 1999 in the Sala São Paulo, a renovated early 20th-century railroad station. Few of the country’s major cultural institutions are based in Brasília.
The arts
Literature
Brazil has had many world-renowned literary figures whose cumulative writings are regarded by many to be richer than those of Portugal because of their variety of ethnic and regional themes. Joaquim Machado de Assis, the son of a freed slave, was a leading voice of the 19th century with his romantic novels. In the 20th century the Northeast produced a particularly wide range of superb writing, including that of Gilberto Freyre on the subject of life under slavery, Graciliano Ramos’s tragedies about the drought quadrilateral, João Guimaraês Rosa’s tales of survival and violence in the interior, and Jorge Amado’s lighthearted stories set in the cacao-growing zone of Bahia. Érico Veríssimo’s tales of southern Brazil have also been translated into many languages.
Visual arts
The landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx has made urban Brazilians especially aware of the splendours of their natural environment by replacing the traditional, formal European-style gardens containing imported plants with a profusion of native species in approximation to their natural settings. Some of Marx’s landscapes have been used to set off the imaginative structures of Brazil’s world-renowned architect Oscar Niemeyer. Among his works, Niemeyer designed a striking array of public buildings in Brasília, in collaboration with Lúcio Costa, the creator of the capital’s original layout. Brazil also cherishes numerous splendid structures from its colonial and imperial past, from the tiled houses and ornate churches of Salvador to the palaces and public buildings of Rio de Janeiro. Among the most revered of these are the 18th-century churches in Minas Gerais that were adorned by facades, biblical scenes, and statues carved in soapstone by Antônio Francisco Lisboa, better known as Aleijadinho (“Little Cripple”).
Western styles of painting began developing in Brazil in the 18th century. In the 19th century, particularly during the reign of Emperor Pedro II, the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro drove the development of Brazilian painting, which was largely influenced by Neoclassical and Romantic styles. The academy organized art collections, held exhibitions and competitions, and trained a number of Brazilian artists who specialized in the painting of landscapes and historical subjects. Among the most prominent 19th-century Brazilian painters were Victor Meirelles, Pedro Américo, José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, and Rodolfo Amoedo. In the late 19th century Belmiro de Almeida painted scenes of Brazilian daily life, influencing a trend toward realism. In the 20th century the painter Cândido Portinari was a major proponent of a uniquely Brazilian style, which blended abstract European techniques with realistic portrayals of the people and landscapes of his native land; the painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, a contemporary of Portinari, gained equal international renown. In 1922, seeking to break with the conservative past, Di Cavalcanti helped to organize Modern Art Week in São Paulo, which promoted a Modernist spirit in Brazilian art. Later in the 20th century, celebrated photographic collections, such as the works of Sebastião Salgado, interpreted Brazil’s social and natural settings. The country’s most prestigious art exhibition is the International Biennial of São Paulo (established 1951), which regularly attracts participants from more than 50 countries.
Performing arts
The classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was a powerful force in breaking with tradition to create distinctively Brazilian compositions by weaving folk themes and rhythms of Portuguese, Indian, and African origins into his music. In contemporary music, João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim introduced the world to bossa nova rhythms (including the classic song “The Girl from Ipanema”) by blending samba rhythms with cool jazz. Francisco Buarque de Hollanda composed a wide range of popular music including ballads and socially relevant light opera. The poet-songwriter Vinicius de Moraes caught the urban Brazilian spirit in his memorable lyrics, and the pop singer Roberto Carlos Braga built up a considerable following throughout Latin America in the latter part of the 20th century. Other popular musical styles include sertanejo, especially in the South and Central-West, axé, which is a blend of samba and reggae often heard in the Northeast, and pagôde, an energetic samba style that developed in urban areas. Musical influences from Brazil, North America, and Europe have been blended to create the tropicália style. The larger Brazilian cities periodically host contemporary musical extravaganzas, and free outdoor concerts of classical music attract multitudes of listeners in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, and elsewhere. Brazil also has a long tradition of folk music, such as the Northeast’s cantoria (sung poetry) contests, in which musicians improvise to win “duels.”
Theatrical productions are widespread and well attended, from the bawdy regional comedies in neighbourhood theatres to lavish classical productions in Rio de Janeiro’s opera house. Brazilian theatre has reached international audiences through playwrights such as Alfredo Dias Gomes, author of Roque Santeiro (Roque, the Saint Maker). Motion pictures are enormously popular in Brazil, with offerings for popular and sophisticated audiences. Brazil’s film industry has produced several contenders for international prizes; actors such as Fernanda Montenegro and her daughter Fernanda Torres have won worldwide acclaim, as have many directors, including Fábio Barreto and Bruno Barreto. However, imported North American and European films are the most popular movie fare in Brazil.
Daily life
The rapid large-scale urbanization of Brazil following World War II radically altered the lifestyle of the majority of the country’s inhabitants. In most ways, large Brazilian cities differ little from others in the Western world, but their greater degree of crowding and large volume of pedestrian traffic may in some cases compare more closely to the cities of China than of North America.
Brazilians’ family ties, both immediate and extended, generally remain stronger than in western Europe and North America; family members customarily live in relatively close proximity to one another, holding frequent reunions or gathering at a family farm or ranch on weekends and holidays. However, this traditional system of kinship ties depends on a certain degree of wealth and stability for its preservation, and it is no longer as strong as it once was, given the increased mobility and urbanization of the Brazilian people. In the favelas, various members of an extended family may occupy the same dwelling because of economic pressures or family tradition. Automobiles have become a household fixture for most middle-class families, to the extent that Brazilians are said to have a love affair with cars; however, families with lesser means must rely on bus trips as the only practical way to commute to work or, on the weekend, to the beach or countryside.
The traditional national dish of Brazil is the feijoada completa, a mixture of up to 20 different dried, salted, or smoked meats simmered in a stew of black beans (feijoadas) and often served with rice, vegetables, and other foods. There are many dishes of African origin in Bahia, such as vatapá, which is made of rice flour, coconut oil, fish, shrimps, red peppers, and assorted condiments. Rio de Janeiro contains acclaimed Portuguese restaurants, whereas Italian cuisine is better represented in São Paulo. Steak houses (churrascarias) abound throughout the country. North American fast-food chains are rapidly expanding in the large and medium-sized cities.
Carnival
The four-day pre-Lenten Carnival is the most famous and exuberant Brazilian holiday. Carnival in Brazil is the traditional combination of a Roman Catholic festival with the lively celebrations of people of African ancestry. It evolved principally in urban coastal areas, notably in the former plantation zones along the coast between Recife and Rio de Janeiro.
Millions of Brazilians from the working and middle classes find a social outlet in Carnival preparations. During a considerable part of the year, they spend their leisure time preparing for the annual activities and competitions of Carnival in so-called samba schools (escolas de samba), which function as community clubs and neighbourhood centres. Both children’s and adults’ groups make up the several thousand dancers and musicians of each samba school, and many more people are involved in constructing floats and making elaborate costumes. The samba schools in Rio de Janeiro carry on the most extravagant expression of the festival, focused mainly along Copacabana beach. Most of the schools also attend competitions at the 85,000-seat Sambadrome (Samba Dome; 1984), which was designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Some Brazilians celebrate Carnival in nightclubs, where dancing and elaborate look-alike contests have grown in popularity. Nearly all the neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro and other cities are festooned with streamers and lights, and live samba music is ubiquitous. Salvador’s Carnival is less highly commercialized and has a stronger African component.
Sports and recreation
Football (soccer) is the nation’s most popular sport, and Brazilians are highly enthusiastic fans. It is played virtually everywhere by young and old and amateur and professional, and international matches in the major cities draw huge crowds, notably to Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro, which has a capacity of 155,000. Brazilian teams are consistently among the top contenders for the World Cup, and from Brazil came the world-renowned Pelé, widely considered the greatest player of all time. Many other Brazilian players, such as the strikers Ronaldo and Rivaldo, have also led top football teams throughout Europe and Latin America. Women’s football has gathered an increasing share of interest in Brazil. The country’s string of successes in volleyball since the mid-20th century have made it Brazil’s second most popular sport. Municipal governments often provide volleyball courts and other recreational equipment for the country’s beaches, including Rio de Janeiro’s famous Copacabana and Ipanema. Brazil’s beaches are gathering places for young people, the more athletic of which play football and various racket games. Brazilian championships of beach football and volleyball draw thousands of spectators and television coverage.
Brazilians have also achieved international fame in a variety of other sports. There were surges in interest in tennis in the 1960s, when Maria Bueno won Wimbledon and U.S. championships, and when Gustavo Kuertan won the 1997 and 2000 French Opens. Auto racing has been popular since the late 20th century, when Brazilians won several Formula One championships and U.S. Grand Prix races. Brazilians often are top contenders in international equestrian competitions, such as polo and show jumping. Brazil has competed in every Olympic Games since 1920, except the 1928 Summer Games in Amsterdam. It has been successful in many events, including track-and-field, swimming, yachting, and such team sports as football, volleyball, and basketball. In 2009 the International Olympic Committee selected Rio de Janeiro as the site of the 2016 Summer Games. It was the first city in South America to be chosen to host the Olympics.
Families use the beaches and numerous public parks, both within the cities and at nearby scenic areas, for picnics and other casual recreation. For the young, the urban nightlife includes music, dance clubs, and restaurants. Brazilians have increasingly congregated in shopping malls, which, like their North American counterparts, include food courts, movie theatres, play areas, video arcades, and a variety of retail stores.
In addition to Carnival, there are various official and church holidays during the year, including Independence Day, on September 7, and St. John’s Night (Noite de São João) in June. The latter is celebrated with bonfires, fireworks, and the launching of small paper hot-air balloons. Along the coast on New Year’s Day (a national holiday), fishers pay homage to the African deity Iemanjá, goddess of the oceans (also St. Barbara, patron of artillerymen), by sailing out to sea with offerings that are thought to determine the success or failure of the coming year’s catch.
Press and telecommunications
Brazil publishes more daily newspapers than does Germany, Mexico, or Russia; however, the circulation per capita is limited. Among the nation’s principal newspapers are O Estado de São Paulo and Folha de São Paulo, both in that city, and O Globo, Jornal do Brasil, and O Dia in Rio de Janeiro. There are also several weekly publications, including the newsmagazines Veja, Época, and Isto É and the glossy pictorial Manchete. Popular monthly publications include the health magazine Saúde and such widely circulated fashion reviews as Claudia and Manequim.
Large private companies in Brazil control both press and broadcasting networks, including television’s TV Globo network, which, with Rádio Globo, is by far the largest and most influential of the country’s broadcasting systems. Among the country’s several other broadcasters are the TVSBT network, TV Bandeirantes (affiliated with Rádio Bandeirantes), TV Record, Rede TV!, Rádio Mulher, Rádio Nacional, and Rádio Jornal do Brasil. There are also several regional and local stations. A publicly funded educational network broadcasts to a limited number of major cities. In the late 1990s cable services began to expand rapidly in the larger urban areas.
About nine-tenths of Brazilian households have TV sets. Common television fare includes the tremendously popular prime-time novelas (soap operas), sporting events, news, special reports, foreign movies dubbed into Portuguese, and children’s programs. In many ways television, in conjunction with massive urban migration, has helped to homogenize Brazilian culture by modifying regional differences; in the 1990s, for example, the Brazilian novela Pantanal helped to revitalize the sertanejo musical style and spread its influence.
The former Brazilian Telecommunications Company (1965), provider of long-distance and international telephone service, was divided into four parts and privatized in 1998, and some state and regional companies were subsequently sold off. The resulting influx of private investment led to a rapid increase in the number of Brazilian phones in the late 1990s, and the country now has roughly 160 telephones per 1,000 persons—a higher proportion than in most Latin American nations but substantially lower than in more developed countries. Cellular phones are increasingly popular because of the high cost of wire-transmitted telephone service.
At the turn of the 21st century, Brazil’s middle and upper classes were increasingly joining the computerized, online world. Households and businesses purchased ever greater numbers of personal computers, and there was a concomitant increase in the number of Brazilians connected to the Internet. The number and type of Internet service providers proliferated, and Brazil became an important and growing market for e-commerce.
Richard P. MomsenRonald Milton SchneiderHistory of Brazil
The following discussion focuses on Brazilian history from the time of European settlement. For a treatment of the country in its regional context, see Latin America, history of.
Archaeological sites near the Amazonian towns of Santarém and Monte Alegre and elsewhere in Brazil show that the region has been inhabited since at least 9000 BC. Mixed communities of farmers, fishers, and hunters and gatherers developed in the Amazon lowlands, whereas hunters and gatherers predominated in the drier savannas and highlands. Between two million and six million indigenous Indians lived in the region at the time of European contact in 1500.
Tupian-speaking Indians inhabited the coastal areas and were among the more significant of the tropical forest groups. Portuguese explorers of the region first encountered Tupians and principally dealt with them for many years. Indeed, Tupians may have been the most important Indian influence in Brazil’s early colonial period and in the culture that subsequently developed; however, European diseases decimated the indigenous population, and many surviving Indians endured harsh treatment under Portuguese domination.
Early period
Exploration and initial settlement
Europeans explored the Brazilian coastline only after mapping parts of the Caribbean Sea and the northeastern coast of South America; moreover, intensive exploration of Brazil resulted indirectly from Portugal’s efforts to expand its colonies in Africa and Asia. In 1498 the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama discovered an all-water route to the Indies and the Spice Islands via Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese king, hoping to capitalize on this discovery, dispatched an imposing armada to India under Pedro Álvares Cabral, whose sailing directions had been drawn up by da Gama himself. To avoid the calms off the Gulf of Guinea, Cabral bore so far to the west that on April 22, 1500, he sighted the mainland of South America. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) between Spain and Portugal had established a line at about longitude 46° 30′ W that divided Spanish (west) and Portuguese (east) claims in the New World. The region sighted by Cabral lay well within the Portuguese zone, and the crown promptly claimed it. Portugal’s new possession was initially called Vera Cruz (“True Cross”), but it was soon renamed Brazil because of the copious amounts of brazilwood (pau-brasil) found there that yielded a valuable red dye.
The tidings of Cabral’s landing aroused great enthusiasm among the Portuguese, and the crown began to sponsor major transatlantic explorations, including that of the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, whose small fleet sailed along the coast of Brazil and for the first time estimated the extent of the land. Vespucci, calendar in hand, baptized different points on the coast with the names of the saints on whose days they were discovered.
Interest in Brazil waned over the subsequent two decades. The Portuguese began a desultory trade with the Indians for brazilwood, but they failed to discover precious metals in Brazil and thus focused their attention on the lucrative trade with Asia. Brazil became a sort of no-man’s-land over which the Portuguese crown wielded only a shadowy control, and European rivals quickly took advantage of that neglect. The French, in particular, trespassed on Portuguese claims in South America and shipped the dyewood to Europe. Portugal’s apathy ended, however, during the reign (1521–57) of John III, who gradually shifted the focus in colonial affairs from Asia to America.
The Portuguese crown made the first systematic effort to establish a government in Brazil in 1533. It divided the colony into 15 hereditary captaincies, or fiefs, each extending 50 leagues—i.e., about 160 miles (260 km)—along the coast and an indefinite distance inland. These grants were distributed to favoured persons, chiefly courtiers, who became known as donatários (“donees”) and wielded extensive rights and privileges; however, only two of the captaincies were ultimately successful: São Vicente (in present São Paulo state) and Pernambuco. The former included the town of São Vicente, the growing port of Santos, and the village of São Paulo on the Serra do Mar’s fertile Piratininga Plateau, all of which had a combined population of about 5,000 by the mid-16th century. The captaincy of Pernambuco developed in northeastern Brazil, centred on the town of Olinda. Its donatário, Duarte Coelho Pereira, converted Pernambuco into a great sugar-producing region, offering the first example of a profitable agrarian export from the New World to Europe.
Royal governors, Jesuits, and slaves
King John III resolved to strengthen his authority in Brazil by unifying the inefficient donatários under a central administration. He appointed as governor-general Tomé de Sousa, a Portuguese noble with impressive experience in Africa and India. Sousa landed in Brazil in 1549 and founded Salvador (Bahia), a capital from which Brazil was governed for 214 years. Sousa also placed local officials over the captaincies and fortified strategic points along the coast. In the cities, he established municipal organizations similar to those in Portugal. Brazil then began to attract settlers in increasing numbers. By 1600 Bahia and Pernambuco each had a population of roughly 2,000 Europeans and more than twice as many African slaves and Indians.
Jesuit brethren provided labour and expertise that were central to the progress of the colony. At the request of John III, Manuel da Nóbrega and several other Jesuits had accompanied Tomé de Sousa to Salvador and became the first of a long line of missionaries devoted to protecting and converting the Indians and raising the moral level of the colonists. As soon as they converted Indians to Christianity, the Jesuits settled them in aldeias (“villages”) that were akin to the missions in Spanish America. Most other Portuguese colonists owned Indian slaves, however, and resented the Jesuits’ control over such a valuable labour supply. A conflict arose between the two groups and reverberated throughout the colony, and both parties appealed to the crown. The Jesuits won a partial victory in a royal decree of 1574 that granted them full control over the Indians in the aldeias while permitting the colonists to enslave Indians captured in “legitimate warfare.” In the Amazon River basin, Father António Vieira became the centre of a somewhat similar conflict in the 17th century, when he established a chain of missions there. Though the missions helped protect Indians from slavery, they greatly contributed to the spread of deadly European diseases. Brazilian colonists, facing a compounding labour shortage in the mid-16th century, imported increasing numbers of African slaves.
Dutch and French incursions
Brazil had hardly been brought under royal Portuguese authority before the French made a determined effort to establish a permanent colony there. In 1555 French troops took possession of the beautiful harbour of Rio de Janeiro, which, inexplicably, the Portuguese had neglected to occupy. A large Portuguese force under Mem de Sá, the governor-general, blockaded the entrance to the harbour, eventually forced the French garrison to surrender, and founded (in 1567) the city of Rio Portugal was united with Spain from 1580 to 1640, and Brazil was consequently exposed to attacks by Spain’s enemies, including the newly independent Netherlands. The Dutch seized and briefly held Salvador in 1624–25, and in 1630 the Dutch West India Company dispatched a fleet that captured Pernambuco, which remained under Dutch control for a quarter-century. The company chose as governor of its new possession John Maurice, count of Nassau-Siegen, a prince of the house of Orange and perhaps the ablest administrator in the Netherlands. The Dutch also invited distinguished artists and scientists to make known to Europe the resources and beauties of Brazil; however, the profit-driven directors of the company refused to support John Maurice’s enlightened social policies, and he resigned in 1644. João Fernandes Vieira, a wealthy plantation owner, subsequently launched a rebellion that steadily gained ground against John Maurice’s incompetent successors. The Brazilians, acting without Portuguese aid, defeated and expelled the Dutch in 1654, an achievement that helped spark Brazilian nationalistic sentiments.
Expansion and unification
Brazil’s westward expansion was one of the most significant events of the colonial period. The Treaty of Tordesillas forbade the Portuguese from crossing 46° 30′ W, but Brazilian colonists soon expanded far beyond that line in three groups: missionaries, cattlemen, and bandeirantes (explorers and slave hunters). Missionaries continued to extend their reach along the Amazon and in the South and Southeast. In the Northeast, cattlemen searching for new pastures pushed inland from the sugar-producing zones of Pernambuco and Bahia to the present states of Piauí, Maranhão, and Goiás. Paulistas, as settlers from São Paulo were called, were the most active in the movement westward, organizing major expeditions into the interior, known as bandeiras, in order to capture Indian slaves and search for gold and precious stones. Some of the more adventuresome bandeirantes reached as far west as the silver-mining region of Alto Peru (now Bolivia) and as far northwest as Bogotá in Colombia. In the 17th century they explored the wildernesses of Mato Grosso and attacked the reducciones (Indian missions in Spanish-held areas) in the Paraná and Uruguay river basins. Indians and Jesuits resisted most of bandeirante encroachments, and near the Río de la Plata, in what is now Uruguay, Spanish settlers defeated the invading Paulistas. The bandeirantes’ efforts, though often violent and cruel, contributed significantly to the unification of the huge subcontinent of Brazil.
Shared cultural traits and economic factors also helped integrate the region. The Portuguese language formed a common bond between plantation residents, cattlemen, miners, slaves (both Indian and African), slave hunters, and city dwellers and distinguished them from their Spanish-speaking counterparts elsewhere in South America. Brazilians almost uniformly derived from Portugal an expanded, patriarchal family structure, and the heads of a few powerful families controlled nearly all of the land, slaves, cattle, and, later, mines that produced the wealth of the colony. Only four important cities developed in Brazil during the colonial period: Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, and Ouro Prêto. Moreover, Portugal maintained contact with all parts of Brazil—albeit intermittently—and little trade or other regular contact existed between Brazil and neighbouring Spanish colonies. These common factors held Brazil together in spite of strong regional variations.
Agriculture and prospecting
Brazil’s society and economy were based on agriculture and mining, especially the export-oriented production of sugar and gold. The sugar industry, confined primarily to the Northeast, was the principal source of Brazilian wealth from the 16th to the 18th century, and it provided the crown with most of its revenue through the time of independence. Sugar production called for major investments in land, labour (i.e., slaves), and machinery; consequently, a relatively small number of wealthy, plantation-owning families controlled the industry. Small landholders produced cotton and coffee, which became major exports in the 18th century. Independent freemen living near the sugar plantations raised tobacco and cattle, products that also became prominent by the end of the colonial period.
Colonists vainly sought gold in Brazil from the period of first settlement until 1695, when prospectors discovered large deposits in what is now the state of Minas Gerais. The subsequent gold rush rapidly changed the course of Brazilian settlement. Towns sprang up as if by magic in the hitherto unbroken wilderness while large sections of the coast were virtually depopulated. Slaves from Brazil’s sugar plantations and Africa’s gold-working regions, who were quickly brought into the region, introduced several mining techniques there. The gold mines had a huge impact on the Brazilian economy and brought such vast sums of money into the Southeast that the Portuguese government transferred the colonial capital from Salvador (in the Northeast) to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. The search for gold led also to the discovery of diamonds in the early 18th century in Minas Gerais, Bahia, and Mato Grosso. The mining boom tapered off as the original deposits were depleted, although smaller quantities of gold and diamonds continued to be mined.
Colonial reforms
The treaties of Madrid (1750), Pardo (1761), and Ildefonso (1777) with Spain recognized many Portuguese claims, including the conquests of the bandeiras. Meanwhile, King Joseph’s prime minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, marquês de Pombal, introduced into Brazil a number of reforms that profoundly affected the social, administrative, and religious life of the colony. He abolished the donatário system, granted legal rights to the Indians, encouraged immigration from the Azores and Madeira, created two privileged companies to oversee Brazilian trade, and established a monopoly over the diamond fields. Pombal expelled the Jesuits from Brazil and Portugal in 1759; many Brazilian elites endorsed the expulsion because the Jesuits had seemingly profited at their expense by resisting the enslavement of Indians and engaging in commercial ventures. Pombal progressively centralized the Brazilian government during the final decades of Portuguese rule.
Independence of Brazil
Brazil entered nationhood with considerably less strife and bloodshed than did the Spanish-speaking nations of the New World; however, the transition was not entirely peaceful. José Joaquim da Silva Xavier, popularly known as Tiradentes (“Tooth Puller”), instigated in 1789 the first rebellion against the Portuguese, who defeated his forces, executed him, and unwittingly made him a national hero in his martyrdom.
The French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars deeply affected Brazil, although the main events of those conflicts unfolded across the Atlantic. In 1807 Napoleon I invaded Portugal, a British ally, largely to tighten the European blockade of Great Britain. The Portuguese prince regent Dom João (later King John VI [João VI]) decided to take refuge in Brazil, making it the only colony to serve as the seat of government for its mother country. The prince, the royal family, and a horde of nobles and functionaries left Portugal on November 29, 1807, under the protection of the British fleet. After several delays, they arrived at Rio de Janeiro on March 7, 1808.
The colonists, convinced that a new era had dawned for Brazil, warmly welcomed Dom João, who promptly decreed a number of reforms. He abolished the Portuguese commercial monopoly on Brazilian trade, opened all harbours to the commerce of friendly nations (mainly Great Britain), and repealed laws that had prohibited Brazilian manufacturing.
Dom João installed in Rio de Janeiro his ministry and Council of State, Supreme Court, exchequer and royal treasury, Royal Mint, royal printing office, and the Bank of Brazil. He also founded a royal library, a military academy, and medical and law schools. His decree of December 16, 1815, designated the Portuguese dominions the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves, thus making Brazil coequal with Portugal. Dom João’s mother died in 1816, whereupon he ascended to the throne.
Most Portuguese desired John VI’s return after the French withdrawal, but he remained away as Iberian troubles mounted. The king finally became preoccupied with the situation when radical revolts erupted in Lisbon and Oporto in 1820. On April 22, 1821, he appointed his son Dom Pedro regent and two days later sailed for Lisbon.
Dom Pedro faced a difficult political situation: antagonism was growing between the Portuguese and Brazilians, republican propagandists were gaining greater influence, and the Cortes (parliament) of Lisbon instituted a series of shortsighted policies. The majority in the Cortes favoured restoring Brazil to its formerly dependent colonial status, and the parliament began repealing most of the reforms introduced by John VI. The Cortes then ordered Dom Pedro to return to Europe, fearing that he might head an independence movement.
These acts aroused great indignation in Brazil. Dom Pedro responded by defying the Cortes with a speech known as the “Fico” (“I Am Staying”), and most Brazilians supported his decision. In January 1822 he formed a ministry headed by José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, a distinguished Paulista scholar later known as the Patriarch of Independence because he proved a tower of strength to the young regent during the first uncertain months of independence. On June 3 Dom Pedro convoked a legislative and constituent assembly, and on September 7, on the plain of Ipiranga, near the city of São Paulo, he proclaimed the independence of Brazil; he was crowned emperor on December 1. The United States officially recognized the new nation in 1824, and the Portuguese acknowledged Brazilian independence the following year, whereupon other European monarchies established diplomatic relations. (See also Latin America, history of: Brazil.)
The Brazilian Empire
Pedro I and the regency
The first decades of independence were difficult though not as chaotic as in Latin America’s Spanish-speaking republics. Brazil underwent a series of regional revolts, some of which resulted in thousands of deaths, but the national economy remained strong and the central government largely intact. The emperor was impulsive, however, and made generally despotic and arbitrary decisions. In 1823 he dissolved the constituent assembly, which he regarded as unruly and radical, and sent Andrada e Silva and his two brothers into exile. However, the emperor and his Council of State subsequently wrote a constitution that was liberal and advanced for its time, although it strengthened the hand of emperor. The municipal councils debated and approved the document; Pedro promulgated it in 1824, and it proved versatile enough to last throughout the imperial period. The constitution helped centralize the government by granting the emperor power to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, select members of the Senate, and appoint and dismiss ministers of state. Pedro I’s popularity declined thereafter because he lost Brazil’s Cisplatine province (now the republic of Uruguay) following a costly war with Argentina (1825–28), appointed few mazombos (Brazilian Creoles) to high office, overly preoccupied himself with Portuguese affairs, failed to get along with the legislature, and signed treaties with Great Britain that kept import duties low and exacted a promise to abolish the slave trade. As a result, Pedro formally abdicated on April 7, 1831, in favour of his five-year-old son, Dom Pedro de Alcântara (later Pedro II).
The next decade proved to be the most agitated period in Brazilian history. From 1831 to 1835 a triple regency tried in vain to end civil warfare in the provinces and to control lawless and insubordinate soldiers. In 1834 it amended the constitution to provide for the election of a sole regent to a four-year term; the document also partly decentralized the government by creating provincial assemblies with considerable local power. The priest Diogo Antônio Feijó, who was chosen as regent in 1835, struggled for two years to hold the nation together, but he was forced to resign. Pedro de Araújo Lima succeeded him. Many Brazilians were impatient with the regency and believed that the entire nation would rally behind the young ruler once he was crowned. On July 23, 1840, both houses of parliament agreed that he had attained his majority, though he was only 14.
Pedro II
The reign of Pedro II lasted nearly half a century and constituted perhaps the most varied and fruitful epoch in Brazilian history. The prestige and progress of the nation were due largely to the enlightened statesmanship of its ruler, who was always simple, modest, and democratic, though not without personal distinction. He possessed an insatiable intellectual curiosity and was never happier than when conversing with scholars. He was generous and magnanimous to a fault. One of his favourite occupations was inspecting schools, and he professed a desire to have been a schoolteacher. Yet this kindly, genial, and scholarly ruler regarded his sovereign prerogatives and duties with great seriousness, and he was the final arbiter in all principal matters. A kind of parliamentary government functioned under the watchful eye of the emperor, who maintained power with the aid of Luis Alves de Lima e Silva (subsequently the duke of Caxias), Brazil’s most outstanding military figure. Lima e Silva, the son of General Francisco de Lima e Silva (who headed the first regency following Pedro I’s abdication), led several army units, quelled sundry regional revolts in the 1840s, and, the following decade, became minister of war and twice president of the Council of Ministers.
Pedro II’s government took a keen interest in the affairs of its southern neighbours, especially of Uruguay, which it sought to control through indirect measures. Brazil helped overthrow the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852. In 1864 Brazil invaded Uruguay to help decide the outcome of a civil war there; believing that Brazil was dangerously expanding its power in the region, the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López declared war, first on Brazil and subsequently on Argentina. The resultant costly and bloody conflict became known as the War of the Triple Alliance, or Paraguayan War (1864–70). Brazil, allied with Argentina and Uruguay, eventually destroyed the Paraguayan army and navy and overthrew López. The war was the bloodiest in South American history; it devastated the Paraguayan population and also had profound consequences in Brazil. It provided an opportunity to free a significant number of Brazilian slaves, led to the army’s unwillingness to hunt down runaway slaves, and greatly weakened each state’s ability to recapture them. The war also caused young officers to question Brazil’s economic backwardness and to consider whether a drastic change of regime might be needed—a change that could be instigated by a military rebellion. The empire’s relations with the United States and with Europe were generally cordial, and Pedro II personally visited Europe in 1871, 1876, and 1888 and the United States in 1876.
The empire’s major social and economic problems during the period sprang from slave-based plantation agriculture. That system mainly produced sugar, which was the nation’s leading export, although cotton and coffee were becoming increasingly important. Real political power remained with large rural landholders, who controlled sugar production, formed the Brazilian elite class, and stood unrivaled economically because gold mining had declined; they were also largely insulated from the global antislavery sentiment of the times. Although manumission was common, and the number of freedmen and their descendants far surpassed the number of slaves in Brazil, the slave owners as a group resisted pressures for the complete abolition of the institution. The Brazilian emperor had agreed in 1831 to phase out the slave trade, but that promise was made under pressure from Great Britain, and transatlantic slave traffic did not completely cease for another 20 years. Antislavery agitation began in the 1860s. Pedro II was opposed to slavery, but he did not want to risk antagonizing slave owners; accordingly, he felt that the nation should abolish it by degrees. In 1871 Brazil enacted the Law of the Free Womb, which granted freedom to all children born to slaves and effectively condemned slavery to eventual extinction. However, this concession did not satisfy abolitionists for long, and the young lawyer and writer Joaquim Nabuco de Araújo led them in demanding immediate and complete abolition. Nabuco’s book O Abolicionismo (1883; Abolitionism) argued that slavery was poisoning the very life of the nation. The movement succeeded: in 1884 the governments of Ceará and Amazonas freed slaves in those regions, and the following year the national government liberated all slaves over 60 years of age. Finally, the princess regent (in the absence of the emperor) decreed complete emancipation without compensation to the owners on May 13, 1888. About 700,000 slaves were freed.
The collapse of the empire
Brazil had progressed considerably under Pedro II’s wise guidance. Its population grew from 4,000,000 to 14,000,000, its public revenues increased 14-fold, the value of its exports rose 10-fold, and the nation’s newly constructed railroads extended more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km). Immigration also increased, with more than 100,000 entering Brazil in 1889 alone. Yet people were generally dissatisfied.
Many historians have ascribed the fall of the monarchy to a restive military, a brooding landed aristocracy, and a resentful clergy. Indeed, those three powerful groups were increasingly critical of the emperor. Perhaps more pertinent, however, was the stress placed on the traditional social structure in the late 19th century, owing to a widening gulf between the elites in the neo-feudal countryside and the more progressive urban residents and coffee planters. Members of the urban middle class, the military, and the coffee planters believed that the monarchy represented the past and was too closely tied to the landed elite. They reasoned that a republic better suited the goals of Brazil’s emerging capitalist system, which increasingly was based on coffee and industrial production. A civil-military conspiracy formed, and military officers carried out a coup on November 15, 1889. Pedro II abdicated and went into exile in Europe. The abolition of slavery in 1888 and the overthrow of the monarchy in 1889 terminated the two major institutions that had shaped Brazil’s past; in so doing they initiated a period of social, economic, and political change that accelerated modernization. Accordingly, the period between 1888 and 1922 has been described as the emergence of a “new Brazil.”
The republic to 1960
Transition to civilian rule
Manuel Deodoro da Fonseca, who had led the coup, became provisional president of the military-led government with the support of the nascent middle class and the prosperous coffee planters. He established a republic, separated the powers of church and state, and on February 24, 1891, promulgated a new constitution that combined elements of presidential, federal, democratic, and republican forms of government. The new states of the republic exercised more power than had the empire’s provinces.
Congress elected Fonseca president later that year, but he proved unable to govern under the new constitution. When he attempted to dissolve the dissenting Congress and rule by decree, the public raised such an outcry that he was forced to resign. Floriano Peixoto, the equally militaristic vice president, ascended to office on November 23, defeated several monarchist and military revolts, and restored a measure of tranquillity and order to the nation.
The “coffee presidents”
In 1894, amid peaceful conditions in all but the extreme South, Peixoto reluctantly turned over the presidency to the first civilian president, Prudente de Morais, who had served as the first republican governor of coffee-rich São Paulo. Brazil’s successive “coffee presidents,” who were primarily from the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, helped ensure peace, reform financial institutions, and increase coffee exports. However, they gave Brazil little real democracy, because only a select landowning minority was allowed to vote, fraudulent elections were widespread, and regional political bosses had virtual impunity as long as they supported the president in power.
The economic and political centres of the nation shifted even farther during the 18th and 19th centuries from the old sugar regions of the Northeast to the new coffee regions of the Southeast. Coffee dominated the economy, accounting for more than half of export earnings by the turn of the 20th century. However, Brazilian farmers soon produced an overabundance of coffee, and the slumping value of that product’s exports threatened the nation’s prosperity. In response, representatives of the three major coffee-producing states—São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro—inaugurated a federally supported scheme in 1906 by which the government would purchase excess coffee and remove it from the international market in order to maintain a stable price.
Brazil received increasing numbers of immigrants, and its rate of urbanization accelerated. The rubber boom in the Amazon River basin changed isolated Manaus into a cosmopolitan city with electricity, streetcars, cinemas, and a grandiose opera house. Meanwhile, the prefect Francisco Pereira Passos helped change Rio de Janeiro into one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and the distinguished physician and scientist Oswaldo Cruz made it a more healthful place by virtually eradicating yellow fever there. The prosperous coffee economy attracted huge numbers of immigrants to São Paulo, the nation’s bustling commercial centre, whose population jumped from 35,000 in 1883 to 350,000 in 1907; nearby Santos became one of the world’s busiest ports, sending vast quantities of coffee to the cities of Europe and North America.
Brazil also underwent a literary renaissance during this period, as intellectuals such as Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto took penetrating looks into the traditions, turmoil, and changing nature of Brazilian society. Euclides da Cunha, in his masterful historical narrative, Os Sertões (1902; Rebellion in the Backlands), described a bloody struggle between government forces and a group of messianic separatists in the untamed interior of Bahia state; against this tragic backdrop, Cunha reflected on the shortcomings of Brazilian society, including the pervasive divide between rural and urban traditions: the conflict between the “two Brazils.”
The policy of territorial expansion reached its fruition under the brilliant leadership of the Baron of Rio Branco, José Maria da Silva Paranhos, a diplomat who served most notably as foreign minister (1902–12). On his recommendation, the Brazilian military closed off thousands of miles of inland borders and assumed control of vast disputed territories; consequently, other South American nations yielded to Brazil some 342,000 square miles (886,000 square km) of land—an area larger than France. Except for his land grab, Rio Branco avoided international misunderstandings, disputes, and other potential causes for war. In addition, he emphasized diplomatic relations with the United States over the United Kingdom, partly in deference to the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Brazil, which was generally sympathetic to the Allied cause in World War I, declared war on Germany on October 26, 1917, and it subsequently held a temporary seat on the council of the League of Nations.
Rebellion against the coffee elite
Members of the growing urban middle class resented the government’s political and economic assistance to coffee planters, and some junior military officers shared their feelings. An urban and military coalition challenged the coffee elite in the 1922 presidential election, but, amid charges of fraud, the government declared victory. In response, a handful of disgruntled officers staged a poorly planned and unsuccessful coup in Rio de Janeiro in July. Their revolt initiated an eight-year period of unrest aimed at toppling the old republic.
Groups of junior officers, known as tenentes (“lieutenants”), staged more threatening uprisings in the mid-1920s. The survivors of a 1924 rebellion marched thousands of miles through the interior in an attempt to stir up revolt; however, local landowners retained control over the rural workers and effectively resisted the insurrection. Brazil’s urban areas, in contrast, nourished growing demands for social and political progress. Public gatherings and civic events, such as the Modern Art Week in São Paulo in 1922, promoted nationalistic sentiments. Nationalists increasingly criticized the politics of the “coffee governments,” including their selfish tendencies to monopolize power along regional lines, manipulate elections, and resist economic diversification.
By 1926 the movement of the tenentes adopted a somewhat imprecise nationalistic ideology that championed political and economic development. The tenentes fervently believed that the military could alter the habits of the country and propel it into the modern age. Their primary concern was not democracy but reform and development, which included plans to oust entrenched politicians, expand the base of government, and modernize the economy. They hoped to eradicate regionalism by favouring a strong, centralized government. The tenentes also revealed social democratic tendencies by proposing that the government recognize trade unions and cooperatives, carry out agrarian reform, nationalize natural resources, and establish a minimum wage, maximum working hours, child labour laws, and new educational opportunities. After carrying out reforms, they would consent to return the nation to constitutional rule. Much of the program advocated by the tenentes favoured the goals of the urban middle class, but the two groups failed to coordinate their actions, and the military rebellions did not gain effective urban support. Two related events finally ended the political monopoly of the coffee elites. First, coffee prices declined precipitously because of the international financial crisis of 1929–30, and, second, the elite politicians attempted to install yet another national president.
The Vargas era
Getúlio Vargas, the losing candidate in the 1930 presidential election, led a revolt that placed him in power. Vargas, formerly the governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, remained central to Brazilian national life for the next 24 years, holding office as chief executive on two occasions, 1930–45 and 1951–54.
The Great Depression of the 1930s, which occurred during Vargas’s first presidency, caused considerable economic difficulties for Brazil. In addition, the states vied with the national government for political control, and the people of São Paulo staged a bloody, though unsuccessful, revolt. In 1934 a new constitution granted the central government greater authority and provided for universal suffrage. Three years later, following another uprising, President Vargas seized virtually absolute powers and set up still another constitution, under which he continued as president. The new administration, known as the Estado Nôvo (“New State”), so heightened Vargas’s control that he was able to suppress all manifestations of popular will and strip Brazil of most of the trappings through which it might eventually hope to become a democracy. Vargas increasingly shifted the states’ political, economic, and social functions to the aegis of the national government. However, he also diversified the agricultural sector, enacted social legislation that benefited the working class, and urged further industrialization through import-substitution (using protective tariffs and other policies to limit imports while encouraging domestic manufacturing).
After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Vargas government supported the U.S. policy of inter-American solidarity, and on August 22, 1942, it declared war against Germany and Italy. Brazil’s air force helped defend the South Atlantic by flying antisubmarine patrols, and the United States used some Brazilian naval and air bases, including a major air field at Natal that provided the closest link between the Americas and Africa. Brazil sent an expeditionary force to Italy in July 1944 that distinguished itself in several battles. The Brazilian armed forces significantly upgraded their equipment through the U.S. lend-lease program, and the two governments agreed to increase Brazil’s exports of raw materials. As the war drew to a close, some military officers believed that President Vargas might attempt to retain power, and on October 29, 1945, they staged a coup that forced him to resign. Brazil then experimented with democracy.
The democratic interlude
General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, Vargas’s own choice, won the presidential election in December 1945; Vargas himself was elected to the Senate. The following year Brazil promulgated a new constitution—the nation’s fifth and the fourth of the republican era—which included safeguards intended to prevent the rise of another overpowering president or dictator. It limited the presidential term to five years, separated the three branches of government, and restricted federal intervention in the affairs of the states.
The general elections of 1950 returned Vargas to power by a substantial margin. Although he failed to win a clear majority in the four-way race, he secured 1,500,000 more votes than the runner-up and nearly as many as the combined total for the three rival candidates. Accordingly, he was again installed in the presidency on January 31, 1951, in spite of the serious apprehensions of the military leaders who had deposed him in 1945. Vargas, however, was unable to dominate the political forces of the country or to exploit social and economic trends to his advantage, and, because he endeavoured to abide by the constitution of 1946, some Brazilians criticized him for weak leadership. Lacking a firm majority in the Congress, he could neither enact his own programs nor resist the contradictory pressures of his supporters and opponents. Brazil faced grave economic problems, including inflation and a growing national debt, as government expenditures consistently outran revenues. To counter these trends, Brazilians desired more rapid industrial development and measures to limit inflation and government spending. Vargas maintained a precarious balance between those advocating greater state intervention in the economy (including government ownership of industries and natural resources) and those insisting instead on domestic and foreign private investment. In 1953 the government intervened directly by creating a national petroleum corporation, Petrobrás.
For three years Vargas’s popularity largely protected him from attack by political adversaries, who directed their criticism against members of his administration. João Goulart, Vargas’s young protégé and vice president of the Brazilian Labour Party (Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro; PTB), was accused of using his office to transform organized labour into a political machine loyal to Vargas. He was dismissed as labour minister in 1954 because of his role (with the president’s acquiescence) in radically doubling the minimum wage, an action that contributed greatly to the inflationary spiral. A series of crises followed, reaching a climax on August 5, 1954, when assassins murdered an air force officer and attempted to kill Carlos Lacerda, the editor of an opposition newspaper. Subsequent investigations revealed that the president’s personal guard had hired the assassins and that corruption was widespread within the administration. The former dictator was engulfed in a wave of antipathy. In response, a group of army officers demanded Vargas’s resignation, and on August 24, 1954, he committed suicide in an apparent attempt to engender sympathy for his policies and his followers.
Kubitschek’s administration
Vice President João Café Filho served out most of the remainder of Vargas’s term and carried out preparations for the presidential election of October 1955. The major political parties did not unite behind a single candidate; rather, three strong contenders emerged: former Minas Gerais state governor Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, popularly regarded as Vargas’s political heir; former São Paulo state governor Ademar de Barros, who had broad backing from financial and commercial groups; and Marshal Juárez Távora, considered to be the representative of conservative military and civilian groups. Kubitschek won the election with slightly more than one-third of the total vote. Brazilians widely interpreted the elections as a popular vindication of the Vargas position. However, civil unrest loomed on the horizon: the conservative press regarded Kubitschek as a dangerous radical, and the illegal but active Communist Party, which had thrown its unsolicited support to Kubitschek, claimed to have provided his margin of victory. In addition, following a heart attack that incapacitated Café Filho, rumours circulated of a coup that would prevent Kubitschek’s inauguration. However, Teixeira Lott, the war minister, and Marshal Odílio Denys, who commanded army troops in Rio de Janeiro, staged a “countercoup” on November 11, 1955, in order to guarantee the president elect’s inauguration, and Kubitschek took office as scheduled on January 31, 1956.
Kubitschek encouraged a widespread nationalistic spirit by appealing to the popular demand for economic development and to the belief that Brazil was destined to become a great power among the nations of the world. Kubitschek felt that the national government should play a vital role in economic areas that seemed unattractive to private investment; thus, his administration undertook ambitious programs to construct highways and hydroelectric power projects, expand iron, steel, petroleum, and coal production, and assist privately owned industries. His role in planning, initially constructing, and dedicating (April 21, 1960) Brasília, a new federal capital 580 miles (930 km) northwest of Rio de Janeiro, was perhaps his most outstanding and controversial accomplishment. Kubitschek wanted Brasília to focus attention on the interior of the country, hasten settlement of the region, and develop its untapped resources. Residents of Rio de Janeiro denounced the project, but most Brazilians in other regions regarded the nascent city as a symbol of the nation’s future greatness. In inter-American relations, the Kubitschek administration proposed adopting Operation Pan America, an economic development program for Latin America that foreshadowed the Alliance for Progress.
Brazil achieved great material progress during the Kubitschek period but at a high price: the cost of living and the volume of currency in circulation tripled between 1956 and 1961, while Brazil’s large foreign debt nearly doubled. The gross national product rose to unprecedented levels, but living standards mainly remained unchanged or declined. At the same time, evidence emerged of large-scale graft and favouritism among those holding public office.
Brazil since 1990
Collor, corruption, and inflation
Brazil’s old-regime elites and military continued to inhibit reform of the political system in the early 1990s, while the country’s voters became disaffected and cynical, and the political parties remained superficial, depending on personality cults rather than platforms that addressed specific problems. In the final round of the 1989 elections, Fernando Collor de Mello of the small National Reconstruction Party faced Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known by his nickname Lula, of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores; PT), which presented an uncommonly well-articulated platform and a clearly socialist ideology. Collor nevertheless gained the support of most of the parties of the Sarney government and campaigned for economic growth, modernization, and eliminating government corruption and inefficiency. Although roughly one-fifth of the votes cast were abstentions or were nullified, Collor was declared the clear winner, and he took office in March 1990.
Collor’s government failed to improve the economy and was consumed by a corruption scandal in mid-1992. Millions of dollars from influence peddling had flowed into the president’s secret bank accounts. On September 29 the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to suspend and impeach Collor, and on December 29, minutes after the Senate opened the impeachment trial, he resigned. Vice President Itamar Franco assumed the presidency, marking the first time that the republic resolved a major political crisis without military intervention or arbitration. Investigations subsequently gained momentum and revealed further corruption at the state and federal level, including influence peddling, electoral fraud, and irregular banking procedures.
Franco had taken office with the support of both civil and military leaders, but he represented a political party whose ideology was markedly different from that of Collor and thus failed to inspire great confidence in the Brazilian people. Industrial production and the incomes of the overwhelming majority of Brazilians continued to decline, while the annual inflation rate accelerated drastically to nearly 2,700 percent; meanwhile, the country paid massive amounts of interest to service its foreign debt. Some proposed reorganizing Brazil’s political system as a way to emerge from the crisis, but a special plebiscite in April 1993 decisively rejected either a parliamentary or monarchical system; however, the following year Brazil adopted six constitutional amendments, including one that reduced the presidential term from five to four years in anticipation of permitting reelections (a question that was left to future legislative action).
The Real Plan and Cardoso presidency
Franco appointed as finance minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who put forth the Real Plan, a financial program partly inspired by a successful Argentine plan. The program stopped the government from periodically raising prices (a practice known as indexing inflation), introduced a new currency (the real) and an exchange rate that was partially linked to that of the U.S. dollar, and called for curbs on government spending. The Real Plan succeeded without severely limiting economic growth, and Cardoso’s resulting popularity encouraged him to run for president; many regarded him as a dynamic, modernizing leader in the mold of Kubitschek or Vargas who would guide the country through shifts in the global economy while simultaneously resolving domestic crises. Cardoso won the election by a wide margin over Lula, the perennial leftist candidate. Policies enacted during his first term (1995–99) permitted strong economic growth while lowering the annual inflation rate even more dramatically—from nearly 1,000 percent in 1994 to less than 20 percent within a year and nearly zero by 1998. The political parties backing Cardoso’s policies won a majority of the 1996 municipal elections.
Cardoso pushed through a law in 1997 that permitted presidents and governors to be reelected. His Brazilian Social Democratic Party formed a coalition with the Liberal Front Party, the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, the Progressive Renewal Party, and several smaller entities to enact major fiscal and administrative reforms, notably the decision to privatize such government-owned enterprises as the Rio Doce Valley Company. Brazil’s economy slowed as a result of financial crises in Asia and Russia in 1998, but Cardoso retained his popularity, won reelection to the presidency (again over Lula), and saw his coalition retain a decisive congressional majority.
The government subsequently attained support from the International Monetary Fund, carried out additional fiscal and administrative reforms, and devalued Brazil’s currency by allowing its exchange rate to float rather than continue its near parity with the U.S. dollar. Inflation remained under control, in spite of fears to the contrary, and the military seemed unlikely to intervene in civil affairs in the near future. Cardoso appointed a civilian-led minister of defense, whose duties replaced those of the separate military service ministers. The governing coalition fragmented, however, as parties and politicians maneuvered for advantage in the October 2000 municipal elections. Still, a record harvest and robust economic growth allowed Cardoso to move forward with his programs.
E. Bradford BurnsRonald Milton SchneiderLula’s leftist political agenda
Cardoso constitutionally was barred from standing for reelection in 2002. Lula emerged once again as the leading opposition candidate against government-backed José Serra of Cardoso’s Brazilian Social Democratic Party. On October 27 Lula easily defeated Serra, garnering 61 percent of the vote, and on January 1, 2003, Cardoso oversaw the first transition from a democratically elected president to a democratically elected successor in Brazil in more than 40 years. Lula’s win swung the country’s political agenda to the left as he became the country’s first president from a labour-oriented party. He moderated the rhetoric of the leftist platform he had presented in past elections, and soon after taking office he instituted austerity measures aimed at keeping inflation in check. Under his leadership, Brazil issued bonds in its own currency, instead of the dollar, for the first time. Employment and real wages rose. Major priorities of his administration included reforming social security, pension, and tax policy, combatting hunger and poverty, and enhancing educational opportunities, particularly for poor children. Lula’s presidency was plagued by scandals, however, which included party members soliciting bribes for public works projects and the use of undeclared loans to repay campaign debt. Many Workers’ Party officials were forced to resign.
In 2006 Lula won a second term as president in a runoff election against Geraldo Alckmin of the centrist Brazilian Social Democratic Party. Though Lula’s party was still scarred by scandal, the Brazilian economy continued to grow under his administration. He enacted reforms to increase public investment and control spending. Agricultural and mining operations persistently expanded, and foreign investors and major trading partners showed renewed interest in the country. However, many problems persisted. The country’s cities were ill-prepared to serve the needs of their growing populations, and, in spite of increased regional growth, Brazil’s economic opportunities and population remained heavily concentrated in two regions, the Southeast and the South. Brazil also remained embroiled in domestic and international controversies regarding threats to the Amazon rainforest and to forest-dwelling Indian groups such as the Yanomami. Moreover, landless groups continued to clamour for agrarian reform.
E. Bradford BurnsRonald Milton SchneiderIn June 2009 President Lula signed a bill legalizing the landholdings of nearly one million residents of state-owned land in the Amazon basin. The bill was an effort to control the decades-long land-grabbing situation in the rainforest, wherein settlers and speculators had occupied and exploited a vast area of public land without legal permission. Under the new law, farmers, loggers, and other settlers who occupied small areas received the title to their land for free; occupiers of larger parcels of land were required to purchase them. Environmentalists complained that the law would encourage extensive use of the land and lead to deforestation.
The Petrobras scandal, impeachment of Rousseff, and Temer interregnum
Unable to run for a third consecutive term, Lula endorsed his former chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, as the Workers’ Party candidate in the 2010 presidential election. Her challengers in the October poll were José Serra, Lula’s Social Democratic rival in the 2002 election, and Marina Silva of the Green Party. Rousseff won nearly half of the vote, but, because she fell short of a majority, she and the runner-up, Serra, met in a runoff in October, which Rousseff won convincingly (56 percent to 44 percent) to be elected Brazil’s first woman president.
Shortly after taking office at the beginning of January 2011, Rousseff was confronted with one of Brazil’s worst natural disasters in decades: torrential rain created flash floods and mudslides that left thousands homeless and killed more than 500 in several mountainside communities just north of Rio de Janeiro. Hardest hit were the cities of Petrópolis, Teresópolis, and Nova Friburgo.
Following a sustained period of robust expansion, the Brazilian economy began to cool down in 2011 in response to the deteriorating global economy and a contraction in the Brazilian industrial sector. The country’s GDP growth declined from about 7.5 percent in 2010 to about 1.0 percent in 2012, though unemployment remained low. Throughout 2011 the Rousseff administration faced accusations of corruption, with allegations of influence peddling and other malfeasance leading to the resignations of five cabinet ministers by the end of the year.
As Brazil ramped up for its role as host of the 2014 football (soccer) World Cup and for Rio de Janeiro’s hosting of the 2016 Olympic Games, there was growing discontent among many Brazilians with the government’s expenditures on infrastructure for those events while education and health needs were seen as going unmet. In mid-June 2013 Brazilians across the country took to the streets to protest that as well as a raft of other issues, including government corruption, the administration’s handling of the struggling economy, and recent examples of heavy-handed police response to demonstrations. The public outcry spread from São Paolo—where police used rubber bullets on June 13 to quell protests over public-transportation fare hikes—to scores of other Brazilian cities. On June 20 some one million people demonstrated in towns and cities throughout Brazil.
In the wake of that turmoil, Rousseff’s approval rating tumbled from 65 percent to 30 percent at one point in 2013. Her popularity rebounded as the staging of the World Cup itself went largely according to plan in summer 2014, but a loss by the Brazilian team to Germany in a semifinal match (arguably the worst defeat in Brazil’s proud World Cup history) seemed to return national attention to the country’s social and economic woes (including the economy’s slide into recession early in 2014). In September the Brazilian delegation chose not to join more than 150 other countries in signing an anti-deforestation pledge at the climate-change summit in New York City, claiming that the pledge had been drafted without Brazilian participation. That refusal occurred as Rousseff faced a formidable challenge from the candidate of the Brazilian Socialist Party, green activist Marina Silva, in the first round of voting in the presidential election in early October.
Rousseff fended off Silva’s challenge with an aggressive negative campaign and finished atop the first-round candidates with nearly 42 percent of the vote (Silva took only about 21 percent). The president, however, did not reach the 50 percent level necessary to prevent a runoff, which would pit her against the surprising second-round finisher—the Brazilian Social Democratic Party’s Aécio Neves, the former governor of Minas Gerais state, whose late surge garnered him about 34 percent of the vote. The runoff in late October proved to be one of the closest presidential elections in recent Brazilian history: Rousseff won a second term by capturing more than 51 percent of the vote against more than 48 percent for Neves.
In early 2015 Brazil’s economy continued its slide, inflation rose, the deficit grew, and the Rousseff government’s efforts to combat those problems were complicated by its embroilment in arguably the country’s biggest political scandal to date. By March a mounting investigation of corruption had resulted in the indictment of dozens of politicians and businesspeople. Petrobas officials, the Workers’ Party and some of its members, and members of its coalition partner, the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), were accused of having received kickback payments for Petrobras contracts from a number of prominent companies, including a cartel of construction firms. Although an investigation by the attorney general cleared Rousseff of any involvement in the affair—she had served as the chairman of the board for Petrobras for much of the period during which the alleged kickbacks were made—many Brazilians doubted her ignorance of the alleged malfeasance. On March 15 some one million Brazilians took to the streets throughout the country to protest the government, its handling of the economy, and the scandal. On April 12 more mass demonstrations were held, and, though the crowds were not as large, their focus shifted to calls for Rousseff’s impeachment.
May marked the first reported appearance in Brazil—and in South America—of Zika fever, which is caused by a mosquito-borne virus similar to the one that causes dengue and which has been associated with neurological complications. The Zika virus was especially dangerous for pregnant women. Between October 2015 and January 2016 nearly 4,000 babies born with microcephaly (abnormal smallness of the head) were reported in Brazil; the mothers of many of those babies were presumed to have been infected with Zika virus. Concerned not only about the health of its citizens but also about the effect that the virus might have on the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in August 2016, the Brazilian government undertook aggressive measures to combat the outbreak of the virus.
But those concerns largely took a backseat to politics and economic matters in 2016, as the Petrobras scandal mushroomed and the Brazilian economy remained mired in its worst recession since the turn of the 20th century. The tentacles of the scandal reached so far as to ensnare Lula, who was formally charged with money laundering in March 2016. Although Rousseff was not implicated in the scandal, she came in for withering criticism when she sought to appoint Lula to her cabinet, a step that was decried as an attempt to protect him from prosecution. The outcry for Rousseff’s ouster spread through the public and the government, and her partners in the ruling coalition began to desert; the PMDB, the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies, left the government first. On April 17 the Chamber of Deputies voted to recommend impeachment on charges that Rousseff had manipulated public bank funds to mask budget shortfalls in the run-up to her reelection in 2014. On May 12 the Senate voted to suspend Rousseff and to consider impeachment. Vice Pres. Michel Temer of the PMDB became acting president. On August 10 the Senate voted to hold an impeachment trial of Rousseff, which began on August 25. After Rousseff answered questions for more than 14 hours on August 29, the Senate voted 61–20 on August 31 to permanently remove her from office. Temer stood to complete Rousseff’s term, which was to end in January 2019.
Temer sought to revive the economy by promoting pro-market policies, calling for austerity measures, and pushing for pension and labour-law reform. By May 2017, however, his efforts were increasingly undermined by growing accusations of his own involvement in the Petrobras scandal. In July Lula was convicted of corruption and money laundering, the first of five charges that he was facing. He was sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison but remained free pending appeal. When an appellate court in Porto Allegre upheld his conviction on January 24, 2018, it not only pointed to Lula’s imminent incarceration but appeared to prevent him from running for president in October 2018 under the prohibitions of the Clean Record law. Lula, however, still had the option of appealing the appellate court’s ruling to the Supreme Court. There was also speculation that he would appeal the prohibition on his candidacy. Even with the conviction hanging over his head, opinion polling showed Lula to be the leading candidate for the presidency by a large margin.
On April 5, 2018, however, the Supreme Court voted 6–5 to deny Lula’s request to remain free while he pursued his final appeal options. Lula was ordered to turn himself in the next day to begin serving his prison sentence. Instead, surrounded by a large crowd of supporters, he took refuge for two days outside São Paulo in the headquarters of the union where he had begun his political career. On April 7, after delivering an impassioned speech in which he once again protested his innocence but affirmed his belief in the rule of law, Lula gave himself up and began serving his sentence.
Despite Lula’s incarceration, the Workers’ Party chose him as its presidential standard bearer at the party’s national convention in early August. After the Superior Electoral Court ruled on August 31 that Lula was “ineligible” to run for the presidency, the former president announced on September 11 that he was ending his candidacy, and he threw his support behind his running mate, Fernando Haddad, former mayor of São Paulo. In the process, Lula’s position as the front-runner was taken over by Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist whose law-and-order anti-corruption rhetoric seemed to resonate with much of a Brazilian electorate that was fearful of rising crime and violence, disenchanted with the country’s widespread political corruption, and weary of Brazil’s still-struggling economy.
The Bolsonaro presidency
Bolsonaro, a former army captain and seven-term legislator who expressed controversial admiration for Brazil’s past military rulers, also won the support of the country’s considerable Evangelical Christian population with his steadfast opposition to abortion. At the same time, his history of having made remarks that were interpreted by some as homophobic, misogynist, and racist evoked strong opposition to his candidacy from many on the left. At a campaign appearance in Juiz de Fora on September 6, Bolsonaro was the victim of an assassination attempt in which he was stabbed. His wounds, which required lifesaving surgery, forced him to campaign from a hospital bed and then at home, and he finished far ahead of the rest of the 13-candidate field in the first round on October 7, though he did not capture the 50 percent of the vote necessary to preclude a runoff. Bolsonaro took about 46 percent of the vote, compared with about 29 percent for Haddad—who would be his opponent in the October 28 contest—and some 12 percent for Ciro Gomes of the Democratic Labour Party. Bolsonaro then went on to win the runoff convincingly, taking more than 55 percent of the vote, with about 45 percent going to Haddad and the remainder blank or invalid votes.
Bolsonaro’s presidency was controversial and politically polarizing. Presidential actions that delighted his supporters frequently infuriated the opposition. Bolsonaro rang up a big policy win by making good on his campaign promise to reform Brazil’s national pension scheme, but his all-but-official support of deforestation in the Amazon region was much less broadly popular. His government ignored the illegal loggers who slashed and burned trees on protected land, clearing the way for cattle ranching and mining but undermining the rainforest’s beneficial effects on the climate. When forest fires in the region blazed in July and August 2019 at levels not witnessed for a decade, there was an uproar both within Brazil and from the international community. By October the threat had abated, but some 2,930 square miles (7,600 square km) of rainforest had been destroyed in the first nine months of the year.
Many observers blamed Brazil’s tragically inadequate response to the spread of the potentially deadly disease COVID-19 squarely on Bolsonaro’s shoulders. In March 2020, soon after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (which caused the disease) a global pandemic, state and local governments in Brazil instituted aggressive social-distancing and lockdown measures to combat the disease. However, a Brazilian health-care system that was generally well positioned to combat the pandemic faltered badly, largely because of the federal government’s lacklustre response, driven by Bolsonaro. He repeatedly downplayed the disease’s severity, mocked protective mask wearing (even after he himself contracted COVID-19), and blocked attempts to lock down elements of the economy to try to contain the public health crisis.
Still, Brazilian hospitals and health-care workers weathered that first wave of the pandemic relatively well. By August 2020 the number of virus cases and virus-related deaths had dropped dramatically, but a second wave of the virus began crashing down on Brazil in November, partly because many Brazilians had relaxed their adherence to prevention protocols but also because of the slow rollout of the country’s vaccination program, which was undermined by Bolsonaro’s specious claims that the vaccinations posed health hazards. As the disease spread in Brazil, it mutated, producing a new, more easily transmissible strain, P.1, which reached throughout the country after originating in Manaus late in 2020. Brazil became the raging epicentre of a massive outbreak that extended throughout Latin America. By mid-May 2021 more 15,000,000 Brazilians had contracted the coronavirus and more than 428,000 individuals had died from COVID-19-related causes. Janeiro to ward off future attacks.al rate may be much higher.
Crime in Brazil
Crime in Brazil involves an elevated incidence of violent and non-violent crimes.[1] Brazil possesses high rates of violent crimes, such as murders and robberies. Brazil's homicide rate was 27.4 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants according to the UNODC,[2] placing Brazil in the top 20 countries by intentional homicide rate.[3] In international crime rankings however, Brazil is generally not considered amongst the top 20 most dangerous countries in the world but top 50 with many homicides being between gangs and not effecting the general populace and no large scale wars.[4][5] Brazil is the country with the highest number of intentional homicides in the world, with 57,358 in 2018, or possibly second to Nigeria which lacks accurate data but was estimated at 64,201 in 2016. In recent years, the homicide rate in Brazil has begun to decline. The homicide rate was 20.64 per 100,000 in 2020 with 43,879 killings, similar to 2019, but down from 30.67 per 100,000 in 2017.[6]
Brazil is part of the international drug routes.[7] Arms and cocaine, crack, and other drugs employed by criminals are mostly locally produced.[7][8]
Brazilian Portuguese
Portuguese is the 9th most-spoken language around the world in 2020, with over 252 million speakers. Most of them are Brazilian. In fact, 98% of Brazil’s population speaks Portuguese, the official language. While different dialects exist within the country, this is the language that unites Brazilians in school, business, literature, entertainment and the media. It is also a unique trait that makes Brazil stand out from other Latin American countries, as it is the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas!
Libras – Brazilian Sign Language
Deaf communities in urban regions of Brazil use Libras, or Língua Brasileira de Sinais. Similarly to other sign languages around the world, Libras is not just a translation of Portuguese into gestures. It is an independent language in its own right, recognized by the government as a means of communication with the possibility of professional translation and interpretation. In fact, Libras has its own dialects too, depending on which region of Brazil you find yourself in. More than 5 million Brazilians are estimated to use Libras to communicate!
More than 274 indigenous languages in Brazil
Due to the lengthy period of colonisation of Brazil by the Portuguese (which started in 1500 and continued until the first half of the 19th century), countless indigenous languages were erased from history. Before the arrival of the Portuguese, an estimated 1273 indigenous languages were spoken by the natives. But in a matter of 500 years, about 75% had been eradicated. Despite this tragic fact, Brazil historical and cultural heritage of Rio Grande do Sul still preserves an estimated 274 indigenous languages spoken by 305 indigenous ethnicities, among them Guarani, Nheengatu, Pirahã and Ye’kuana. Unfortunately, many of these are under serious threat of extinction.
German in Brazil
What? German spoken in Brazil? Yes, that’s right! Around 3 million speakers in the southern region of Brazil communicate in a dialect derived from the Hunsrückisch dialect of West Central German. It is so relevant to the cultural heritage of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, that two of its municipalities have declared it a co-official language! In Espírito Santo, Pomeranian German is also considered a crucial part of linguistic heritage. Speaking regular German in Brazil might not be the best option, though. Hunsrückish German has been so deeply influenced by Portuguese and several indigenous languages, that it has its own unique sound and vocabulary!
Talian, or Brazilian Venetian
Talian is a dialect of the Venetian language mostly spoken in Rio Grande do Sul, a state in the southern region of Brazil. Talian is actually a co-official language in some municipalities, which comes quite as a surprise to foreigners! Why does a language spoken in Italy exist in Brazil? Well, by the end of the 19th century, there was a wave of immigration from Italy, with 60% of settlers coming mainly from Veneto. Nowadays, about 30% of Rio Grande do Sul’s population is still of Italian ancestry! One more reason to celebrate Brazil’s cultural diversity and rich linguistic background!
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Spanish speakers in Brazil
Portuguese speakers do not necessarily speak Spanish (it is not the same language!). In fact, 4% of Brazil’s population is estimated to speak Spanish. Nevertheless, Brazilians who live closer to borders with Spanish-speaking countries are likely to speak it. Learning Spanish is also mandatory in the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, so you might meet Brazilian Spanish speakers there, too! However, Spanish-speaking immigrants are the most responsible for the presence of the language in Brazil, with Spaniards, Bolivians, Argentinians and Venezuelans as main groups. In total, about 460.000 Spanish speakers existed in Brazil in 2018, according to the Ethnologue.
French is spoken in Brazil
Visiting the state of Amapá? Located in the North, Amapá is relatively isolated from the rest of the country, at the very northeastern corner, but its motto says everything we need to know: “Brazil starts here”. Because this state shares borders with French Guiana, its interactions with French-speaking populations is frequent. In fact, only two years ago, the state of Amapá received more than 33.383 tourists, of which 65% were French. Having said that, learning French in public schools has become mandatory in Amapá since 1999. A creole blending French and Portuguese is also frequently spoken in daily life – the karipuna.
Japanese
Japanese immigration had its beginnings in 1908. Today, Brazil is home to the largest community of Japanese outside of Japan, with Paraná and São Paulo being the largest Brazilian states to accommodate Japanese and Brazilian-Japanese citizens. While the community is still not widely visible on Brazilian media (something that is regularly criticized), it has had a significant impact on Brazilian culture through food traditions, cultural events, arts and comics, modeling, sports and even religion. So now you know – you can also brush up on your Japanese once in Brazil!
Is English spoken in Brazil?
English is still not a popular language in comparison to Spanish, German, Italian and Talian. According to the British Council, only 5% of the Brazilian population could communicate in English in 2019 (about 10,425 million speakers from a total of 208 million). Also in 2019, Brazil had its worst score in 5 years in an English proficiency exam. Those results were true for both schools and business environments. This is definitely not due to a lack of interest or curiosity, but due to a system that fails Brazilians with a poor curriculum, lack of challenging materials and expensive private courses that not many people can sign up for. Luckily, the internet, educational apps, online lessons and social media might help make English more accessible from now on!
Dreaming of visiting Brazil?
Then you already know Portuguese is a must. English might save you in touristy places or among more privileged populations, but it is wise to brush up on your Portuguese before departing…out of courtesy for the locals, too! Apart from that, be ready for a multicultural experience, where you’ll get to connect with different languages and communities. Where do we sign up?!
What is Brazil Famous for?
#Amazon Rainforest and Amazon River
First up on our list of What is Brazil famous for is the Amazon. You probably know that Amazon Rainforest is spread across 9 countries in South America. But did you know that more than half of it has its presence in Brazil? That is correct! Almost 60% of the Amazon Rainforest is in Brazil. Brazil is also home to the Amazon River, one of the mightiest rivers in the world. The best way to explore this massive jungle is through an Amazon River cruise, where you can spot pink dolphins and many of the thousands of fish species. It also that takes you through the dense forests, where you can spot many of the 10 million species that call the Amazon home!
#2. New 7 Wonders of the World: Christ the Redeemer
Brazil is home to a New 7 Wonders of the World: Christ the Redeemer Statue. Located at the summit of Mount Corcovado in Rio De Janeiro, it was completed in1931. This magnificent structure stands 98 feet tall, weighs about 635 tonnes and is the largest Art Deco-style sculpture in the world!
#3. Caipirinhas
Brazil’s national cocktail ― the Caipirinha ― might be just what you are looking for! if you are bored with the regular Mojitos or Margaritas, try this simple cocktail made of cachaça, lime and sugar. It is just as refreshing as it sounds and certainly very delicious. Here is an easy and quick recipe that will help you make the best Caipirinhas in the world!
#4. Carnival
Of course Carnival would be on a list titled What is Brazil Famous for!!! Brazil’s Carnival is the most famous celebrated carnival festival in the world. Witness lively Samba dance performances, a variety of food, beverages, colorful costumes and an extremely lively atmosphere. Carnival originally began in the 1830s as a Portuguese tradition of celebrating Lent. Lent is the 46-day period observed in preparation for Easter. With time, street musicians and dancing were introduced. More than 300 bands and 100 parades take part in Rio’s Carnival.
#5. Soccer
Next up on our list of What is Brazil Famous For is Football. Soccer is the most popular sport in Brazil with the National Team consistently among the best in the world. They have won the World Cup 5 times! Brazil is famous for some huge soccer stars, namely Pele, Ronaldo, and Ronaldinho. Football is like passion for Brazilians, who often refer to their country as “o País do Futebol” (“the country of football”). Why not add a soccer game to your dream Brazil tour? It will make for the ultimate Brazil tour experience!
#6. Impressive Architecture and UNESCO World Heritage Sites
Known for its impressive and astounding Architecture, and mesmerizing natural wonders, Brazil has more than 15 UNESCO recognized World Heritage Culture Sites and more than 5 UNESCO recognized World Heritage Nature Sites. These gems are must-see UNESCO Sites in Brazil: Cultural: Brasilia, Historic Centre of Salvador de Bahia, Historic Centre of São Luís, Historic Centre of the Town of Diamantina, Historic Centre of the Town of Goiás, Historic Centre of the Town of Olinda, Historic Town of Ouro Preto and many more! Natural: Iguaçu National Park, Pantanal Conservation Area, Atlantic Forest South-East Reserves and more.
But wait! Here are some more things in our life of What is Brazil Famous For?
#7. Gorgeous Coastlines and Beaches
No list titled What is Brazil Famous for would be complete without beautiful beaches! If you are looking to experience exotic beach location, Brazil is a great destination. It is said that Brazil has the largest coastline in the world at 4,655 miles. It is also said to have some of the most gorgeous and best beaches in the world. Brazilians take pride in the country’s beach culture. Surfers head to Arpoador Beach in Rio, while Baia do Sancho in Fernando de Noronha is famous for its beauty. Cacimba do Padre in Fernando de Noronha gets the most sun, while Copacabana Beach in Rio is famous for partying and having fun. Ipanema Beach in Rio is another top beaches to visit in Brazil. These are just a few out of the hundreds of exotic beaches in Brazil!
#8. Colorful Cities
Next up on our list of What is Brazil Famous for are the rich and beautiful cities. Brazil has hundreds of towns and cities for travelers to visit and enjoy, and across the country, you can find a huge variety in terms of culture, scenery, and attractions. Here are the must-see cities in Brazil: Rio de Janeiro: Rio has truly got it all. Wonderful beaches, scenery, a variety of attractions, and a bustling metropolis that includes great shopping, dining and entertainment make Rio a destination not to miss while in Brazil. Sao Paulo: This city is the ultimate urban vacation destination. Skyscrapers with observation decks, museums, parks, the largest zoo in Brazil, and one the largest aquariums are just a few of the attractions here in Sao Paulo. Recife: Offering abundance of attractive beaches and colonial architecture with historic flair, Recife is a perfect spot to experience the culture. The nearby town of Olinda is the best place to see colorful colonial architecture and cultural livelihood of the area. Paraty: Located on the Green Coast, Paraty is surrounded by mountains and coastline. Gold was once funneled from the mining regions of inland Brazil through Paraty. Evidence of the city’s historical past stands today in the form of beautiful colonial architecture and cobblestone streets. Salvador: a port city strategically located on a peninsula of the northeast coast boasts its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture. Salvador is famous for fun-loving outdoor parties and the world’s largest Carnival.
#9. Samba
Next up on our list of What is Brazil Famous for is… Samba! While Brazil’s most popular sport, its national rhythm is Samba. Samba is essentially a vast array of dance and music styles with complex lineage. It includes everything from partnered dance styles through to the individually-danced intricate footwork and rapid hip movements.
#10. National Parks
Last up on our list of What is Brazil Famous for is National Parks! Brazil is the most bio-diverse nation on the planet, having an amazing variety of plants and animals. The vast national parks system in Brazil provides the best places to explore its natural beauty. Brazil is home to 69 national parks, featuring impressive rock formations, massive mountain ranges, incredible waterfalls and more. Amongst all the parks, Tijuca National Park is the most visited, with about 2 million visitors a year, followed by the Iguaçu National Park, with 1.5 million visitors a year. Other famous parks amongst tourists are Chapada Diamantina, Pantanal National Park and Itatiara National Park.
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