Brazil

• 1. Introduction

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  Brazil borders every country on the South American continent except two, Ecuador and Chile, and its coastline along the Atlantic Ocean stretches for 7,491 kilometers. Inside those borders sit more than 213 million people, most of the Amazon basin, and the largest river system on Earth. It ranks first among the world's 17 megadiverse countries. Yet the name itself comes from a tree. Pau-brasil, the brazilwood that once grew thickly along the coast, produced a deep red dye prized by European textile makers. How does a colony harvested for timber become the largest economy in Latin America? Who were the people here before the Portuguese arrived, and what happened to the empire, the slave system, and the dictatorships that shaped the country in between? The answers move through rainforests, royal courts in exile, and a capital city built from nothing in the middle of the country.

• 2. Before The Portuguese

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  Luzia Woman, some of the earliest human remains found in the Americas, turned up near Pedro Leopoldo in Minas Gerais, evidence of habitation reaching back at least 11,000 years. The oldest pottery in the Western Hemisphere came out of the Amazon basin near Santarém, radiocarbon dated to over 8,000 years ago, around 6000 BC. The Marajoara culture flourished on Marajó in the Amazon delta from AD 400 to 1400. Its people built mounds, sustained large populations, and organized themselves into chiefdoms with sophisticated pottery and social stratification. Around the time the Portuguese arrived, an estimated 7 million Indigenous people lived in the territory, mostly semi-nomadic, living by hunting, fishing, gathering, and migrant agriculture. The Tupi, Guarani, and Gê were among the largest groups, and the Tupi split further into the Tupiniquins and Tupinambás. Wars between these groups arose from differences in culture, language, and moral belief. These conflicts ran across land and water and sometimes ended in cannibalistic rituals on prisoners of war. Leadership was won over time rather than inherited through fixed succession. In the Guarani language, the land was called Pindorama, meaning land of the palm trees.

• 3. Sugar And Bondage

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  On the 22nd of April 1500, the Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral arrived and claimed the land, following the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. The first settlement, São Vicente, was founded in 1532, but real colonization began in 1534, when King John III divided the territory into fifteen private captaincies. That decentralized system failed, and in 1549 the king restructured it into the Governorate General of Brazil, with Salvador as the capital of a single centralized colony. By the mid-16th century, cane sugar had become the colony's most important export. Enslaved Africans, purchased in the slave markets of Western Africa, became its largest import to work the sugarcane plantations. Brazil received more than 2.8 million enslaved people from Africa between 1500 and 1800. When sugar exports began to fall at the end of the 17th century, gold took their place. The discovery of gold by bandeirantes in the 1690s set off a rush that drew thousands of new settlers from Portugal and its colonies worldwide. Those same Portuguese expeditions, the bandeiras, pushed the colonial frontier outward toward Brazil's roughly current borders. The administration fought to crush slave resistance, such as the Quilombo of Palmares, and to suppress independence movements like the Inconfidência Mineira of 1789.

• 4. Court In Exile

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  In late 1807, with Spanish and Napoleonic forces threatening continental Portugal, Prince Regent John moved the royal court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in the name of Queen Maria I. There the Crown founded some of Brazil's first financial institutions, including local stock exchanges and a National Bank, and opened Brazil's ports to other nations. The end of the Peninsular War in 1814 brought demands across Europe that the queen and prince return, since a colony was deemed unfit to house an ancient European monarchy. In 1815 the Crown answered by elevating Brazil, creating the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves after the court had thrived there for six years. Portugal resented the new status of its larger colony and kept demanding the return of the court. In 1821, bowing to revolutionaries who had taken the city of Porto, John VI departed for Lisbon and left his son, Prince Pedro de Alcântara, as Regent of the Kingdom of Brazil. When the Portuguese Cortes tried to reduce Brazil to a colony again, Prince Pedro sided with the Brazilians instead.

• 5. Empire And Abolition

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  On the 7th of September 1822, Prince Pedro declared Brazil's independence from Portugal, and a month later he was proclaimed the first Emperor as Dom Pedro I. The last Portuguese soldiers surrendered on the 8th of March 1824, and Portugal officially recognized independence on the 29th of August 1825. On the 7th of April 1831, worn down by political dissent, Pedro I abdicated in favor of his five-year-old son, Dom Pedro II, and left for Portugal. Because the new emperor could not exercise his powers until he came of age, a regency governed, and a series of regional rebellions broke out. The Cabanagem, the Malê Revolt, the Balaiada, the Sabinada, and the Ragamuffin War all flared, the last supported by Giuseppe Garibaldi. The upheaval was overcome only at the end of the 1840s, after Pedro II's early coronation in 1841. Slavery dominated the final phase of the monarchy. The Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1850 through the British Aberdeen Act and the Eusébio de Queirós Law. The institution itself was formally abolished only in May 1888, with the Golden Law. During Pedro II's 58-year reign, Brazil won three foreign wars, including the devastating Paraguayan War, the largest war effort in its history. On the 15th of November 1889, a military coup overthrew the monarchy, and that date is now Republic Day.

• 6. Strongmen And Generals

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  Getúlio Vargas, the defeated opposition presidential candidate, led the Revolution of 1930 after the murder of his running mate, backed by most of the military. Meant to hold power temporarily, Vargas instead closed Congress, scrapped the Constitution, and ruled with emergency powers. Three attempts to remove him failed: the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932 led by São Paulo's oligarchy, a Communist uprising in November 1935, and a fascist putsch attempt in May 1938. The 1937 coup formalized Vargas as dictator and opened the Estado Novo. Brazil stayed neutral in World War II until August 1942, when retaliation by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy over the South Atlantic pushed it onto the Allied side. It joined the battle of the Atlantic and sent an expeditionary force to the Italian campaign. With the Allied victory in 1945, Vargas was overthrown by the same army that had brought him in. He returned to power by election in 1950 and died by suicide in August 1954. Juscelino Kubitschek became president in 1956, and his greatest achievement was building the new capital, Brasília, inaugurated in 1960. After João Goulart was deposed in April 1964, a military dictatorship took hold. It hardened into full dictatorship with the Fifth Institutional Act in 1968, reaching peak popularity during the early-1970s economic miracle. The Amnesty Law of 1979 began a slow return to democracy, completed during the 1980s.

• 7. Republic Reborn

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  José Sarney took the presidency in 1985 as civilians returned to power, but he grew unpopular through his failure to control the hyperinflation inherited from the military regime. The almost-unknown Fernando Collor was elected in 1989 and impeached by the National Congress in 1992. His successor's finance minister, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, devised the Plano Real in 1994, which finally stabilized the economy after decades of failed plans. The peaceful handover of power from Cardoso to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, elected in 2002, was read as proof that Brazil had reached lasting political stability. Dilma Rousseff, who succeeded Lula, was impeached in 2016 halfway into her second term and replaced by Michel Temer. In 2017, the Supreme Court requested the investigation of 71 lawmakers and nine ministers linked to the Petrobras corruption scandal. Jair Bolsonaro won the contested 2018 election with 55.13% of the valid votes. Brazil then became one of the hardest-hit countries in the COVID-19 pandemic, with the second-highest death toll worldwide after the United States. Lula returned, taking 50.90% in the 2022 runoff. On the 8th of January 2023, a week after his inauguration, a mob of Bolsonaro supporters attacked federal government buildings in Brasília.

• 8. Land Of Superlatives

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  Brazil is the only country in the world with both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn running through it, spanning four time zones across a total area of more than 8.5 million square kilometers. It holds 60% of the Amazon rainforest, which alone accounts for roughly one-tenth of all species on Earth, and is considered to have the greatest biodiversity of any country. It has the most known plant species at 55,000, the most freshwater fish at 3,000, and over 689 mammal species. The country also leads the world in renewable energy share, drawing 45% of its energy matrix and 83% of its electricity from renewable sources, far above the global averages. The Itaipu Dam is the world's largest hydroelectric plant by energy generation. Brazil has been the world's largest coffee producer for the last 150 years and leads the world in sugarcane, soy, coffee, and oranges. It is the world's third-largest aircraft producer, primarily through Embraer, and the only country in the Southern Hemisphere involved in the International Space Station. Its first nuclear submarine is expected to launch in 2029, a milestone for a nation that became self-sufficient in oil in 2006-2007.