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BRAZIL

Development for Whom?

With an area of more than 3 million square miles, Brazil occupies nearly half of South America. Land ranges from the semiarid northeast, plagued by recurrent droughts, to the rich forests and fertile plateaus of the cen- ter and the south. The country abounds in natural resources, including iron and other industrial minerals, and it has long been regarded as a po- tential world power. Perhaps because of this anticipation, Brazilians tend to have an optimistic, ebullient outlook on life. One saying sums it up: “God is a Brazilian.”

Brazil’s relatively nonviolent acquisition of independence from Portugal in 1822 left the country with an auspicious start. The lack of large-scale conflict meant that physical and economic destruction was minimal, espe- cially in comparison to the devastation wrought in the Río de la Plata re- gion, in Venezuela, and in central Mexico. Nor did Brazil have to cope with the problems of demobilizing a massive military apparatus in the post- war period. And most important, the transition of the Portuguese monar- chy to Brazil provided a coherent political structure endowed with the au- thority of time-tested tradition. There were struggles, to be sure, but Brazil did not face the same kind of instability that other Latin Americans faced at the outset of independence.

The economy was mainly agricultural, and sugar was by far the largest commercial crop. By 1822 the population included about 4 million in- habitants, roughly half of whom were slaves of African birth or descent. The social order consisted principally of two tiers, the landowning aristo- crats and the labor-producing slaves, a dichotomy that would come to be aptly and sympathetically described by Gilberto Freyre in his classic book, The Masters and the Slaves. There were some merchants and lawyers and other professionals, mainly in the cities and especially in Rio de Janeiro, but society was dominated by the forces of the countryside.

Dom Pedro I (1822–1831)

In nineteenth-century Brazil, many basic social issues were bound up with the fate of the crown. Most obvious was the consolidation of Brazil’s in-

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dependence. Related issues involved the centralization or decentralization of authority and executive versus legislative power. These questions had to be faced immediately after independence because both the elite and the emperor wanted to write a Brazilian constitution.

Dom Pedro I had become the first emperor of a newly independent Brazil in 1822, when the Brazilian aristocracy forced a break with Portu- gal. A year earlier Pedro’s father, Dom João VI, had left Brazil to resume the throne in Portugal, but only after advising his son to remain in Brazil (to which the royal family had become very attached), even if it meant cre- ating a separate monarchy. Dom Pedro I called for a constituent assembly, and the resulting elections in 1823 revealed several political divisions. Most basic was the split between the Brazilian Party and the Portuguese Party, the latter consisting of those who had opposed Brazilian independence and wanted to resubordinate Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon. Its leaders were pri- marily Portuguese born, mostly military officers, bureaucrats, and mer- chants. The Brazilian Party was led by José Bonifácio Andrada e Silva, a São Paulo landowner who was the leading spokesman for Brazilian liber- alism and the leading minister of Dom Pedro’s government.

Despite majority support in the assembly, José Bonifácio’s cabinet had to resign after three months because the emperor continually endorsed the Portuguese Party’s protest over the government’s anti-Portuguese mea- sures. Heated polemics continued and street fights broke out, as an extremist faction of the Brazilian Party called for decentralized rule and piled abuse on the crown. Amid the furious debate the emperor simply dissolved the assembly in November 1824. Shortly thereafter he unilater- ally decreed a constitution for Brazil. It included many features from a draft prepared by Antonio Carlos Andrada e Silva, José Bonifácio’s brother, but reserved greater powers for the Poder Moderador (the “Moderating Power”), which was to be the monarch himself. Most important was the power to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies and to appoint and dismiss ministers. Citizen voting was tied to a high minimum-property test, thereby severely limiting public participation in an imperial government that was to be highly centralized. Ironically, this unilaterally decreed constitution included passages from France’s 1789 Declaration of Human Rights.

The story of this constitution demonstrated several things about the new nation of Brazil: (1) the monarch had seemingly preserved his absolutist initiative by dissolving the elected assembly and imposing his own consti- tution; but (2) the constitution, while favoring the crown in the division of powers, was more liberal than absolutist, more akin to the contempo- rary English parliamentary system than to the French; and (3) the com- mitment to human rights, however qualified by the real intentions of Dom Pedro and his loyalist advisers, thenceforth became a lodestar in Brazilian history, an ideal to which libertarians and reformers would continuously repair. The struggle over the new country’s political structure had ended ambiguously: a liberal charter imposed by an emperor who was thereby es- tablishing limits on all future governments.

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The absolutist aspects of events in Rio stirred concern in the Northeast, the region that had proved most receptive to the liberal ideas of abolition, federalism, and republicanism. Back in 1817 republican conspirators in Pernambuco province had stubbornly resisted the discipline of Rio. Dom Pedro’s imposition of the constitution in 1824 provoked a new rebellion, which dramatized the key issues at the heart of Brazilian politics for the rest of the empire.

The Pernambucans declared their independence anew. After gaining the support of other northeastern provinces, the rebels called for their own constituent assembly. The movement split apart on the slavery issue, how- ever, as one leader shocked his colleagues by calling for an end to the slave trade. Most of the rebel organizers feared a mobilization of the lower or- ders, and not without reason. Discontent of marginal free persons, many of color, was threatening to turn the anti-Portuguese, anticentralist agita- tion into a social revolution.

The rebels’ internal divisions in Pernambuco came as the military pres- sure from outside was growing. The emperor had hired English and French ships and mercenaries, and they taught the insurgents a bloody political lesson. Most of the rebel leaders were executed. There were limits to the range of permissible social protest in Brazil.

Rio’s domination came only with British help, and that aid had its price. Having secured a favored foothold in the Brazilian economy since 1810, Britain now found itself underwriting the transition to Brazilian independence.

Britain could help consolidate the newly independent Rio government by facilitating diplomatic recognition from the world’s principal powers. That goal was achieved by a series of 1825 agreements that Britain nego- tiated with Portugal and Brazil. They provided that the Portuguese king, now Dom João VI, was to recognize Brazil as a separate kingdom; that British exports to Brazil would continue to receive a preferential tariff rate; and, not least important, that Brazil would pay Portugal an indemnifica- tion of 2 million pounds sterling for damages suffered in the struggle for independence. (This was exactly the debt that Portugal owed to Britain; the negotiators kept this provision secret.)

The following year, 1826, Britain got from Brazil a treaty commitment to end the slave trade by 1830. The British wanted this commitment be- cause they feared that slave-produced sugar from Brazil would prove cheaper in the world market than sugar from the British West Indies, where slavery had recently been abolished. Another reason was the pres- sure on the British government from British abolitionists. The new Brazil- ian government, with little enthusiasm and less genuine commitment, gave the British the clause they demanded. Further concessions to the British were made in an 1827 trade treaty which put Brazilian exports to England at a disadvantage with exports from British colonies. Much of the Brazilian elite saw the concessions as excessive and only explica- ble by Dom Pedro’s apparent desire to retain British goodwill toward

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Portugal, which desperately needed continued British economic help. Criticism would have been even more strident if the 2-million-pound pay- ment had been made public.

In the end, Dom Pedro’s loyalty to Portugal proved his undoing in Brazil. His new constitution had not ended the struggle over the division of gov- ernmental powers. In 1826 the emperor became the target of new attacks, from the “moderates” wanting more power for the legislature and revisions in the treaties with Britain, to the “extremists” demanding autonomy for the provinces. The emperor’s critics dominated the expanding press with their drumfire of invective.

In this same period Dom Pedro suffered a serious reverse in foreign pol- icy. What is modern-day Uruguay had been annexed to Portuguese Amer- ica in 1821 as the “Cisplatine Province.” But in 1825 local guerillas seized power and proclaimed union with the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (present-day Argentina). The resulting war between Brazil and the United Provinces ended in 1828 with a treaty that created an independent state, Uruguay. The British, again intermediaries in arranging the treaty, hoped for a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil. This setback to Brazilian ambitions in the Río de la Plata soon faded in significance when compared to the quagmire of the Portuguese royal succession into which Dom Pedro had been drawn since 1826.

When Dom João VI died, in 1826, Dom Pedro, his legal successor, had become increasingly absorbed in trying to protect his daughter’s succes- sion rights in Portugal. That made him less able to deal with the aggres- sively antiabsolutist political forces in Brazil. He found his position in- creasingly untenable, as his opponents mobilized street crowds to protest his preference for an absolutist ministry. On April 7, 1831, Dom Pedro I abdicated, departing the land whose independence he had helped to se- cure less than a decade earlier.

Dom Pedro’s abdication was a victory for the Brazilian Party and a de- feat for the beleaguered absolutists. It also created a power vacuum be- cause the emperor’s son, later to become Dom Pedro II, was only five years old. His father had left him behind in order to maintain the Bra- ganza family’s claim to the Brazilian throne. Who would exercise power in his name? Would the huge and thinly settled lands of this former colony hold together? Or would Portuguese America follow the exam- ple of Spanish America, which immediately fissured into the patchwork of nations we see today?

For nine years after Dom Pedro I’s abdication, a regency exercised ex- ecutive power. In 1834 the constitution was amended (by the “Additional Act”) to give increased powers to the provinces, partly in response to sep- aratist sentiments. The most violent separatist movement was in the province of Pará in the Amazon valley; the most dangerous, because of its location in a province bordering Argentina, was the Guerra dos Farrapos in Rio Grande do Sul.

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Dom Pedro II (1840–1889)

Dom Pedro II’s accession to the throne in 1840 unified the divided elite. Brazil had survived the separatist challenges and halted the drift toward social revolution. The emperor assumed the wide powers (the “Moderat- ing Power”) in the 1824 constitution. The young emperor and the poli- ticians now settled into an era of relatively harmonious parliamentary politics.

The two decades after midcentury were the golden years of the empire. Executive power was exercised by the emperor and his ministry, the latter dependent upon retaining the confidence of the lower house. Yet the leg- islature’s ultimate power was more apparent than real, because the em- peror could dissolve the Chamber at will, thereby necessitating new elec- tions. Until the late 1860s, however, Dom Pedro II exercised his power discreetly, and the system seemed to function well.

By 1850 two distinctive political parties had emerged—both owing their origin to the Brazilian Party of the 1820s. The parties were Conservative and Liberal, although historians have long cautioned against taking these labels too seriously. In 1853 the two parties collaborated to form a “conciliation cab- inet,” which held power, except for the 1858–62 interval, until 1868.

The empire’s most important test in foreign policy came in the Río de la Plata basin, the site of a long-time rivalry among Paraguay, Uruguay, Ar- gentina, and Brazil. The Brazilian government became alarmed over the strength and intentions of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the autocratic ruler of Argentina, who was claiming the right to control all traffic on the Río de la Plata. This was a grave threat to Brazil, since the economics of its south- ern provinces relied heavily on access to the Plata basin river system.

At the same time Brazil was being drawn into a dangerous political bat- tle in Uruguay, where Brazilians had gained a financial and commercial foothold. Brazilian troops were sent into domestic Uruguayan battles on the side of the “Colorado” faction, which prevailed. The Brazilians then turned to face Rosas. They were encouraged by the French and British, who chafed over the tough terms Rosas had imposed for economic access to Argentina. The anti-Argentine coalition prevailed. Foreign troops, as- sisted by Argentine rebels (the latter representing the soon-to-be dominant liberals), defeated the Rosas forces in 1852, sending Rosas to a permanent exile in England.

But even with Brazilian support the Colorados lost control in Uruguay. Since the victorious Blancos could no longer look to Rosas for help, they turned to Francisco Solano López, the dictator of Paraguay. Argentina, now controlled by the liberals, joined Brazil in support of the Colorados in Uruguay. Solano López wanted to expand his rule by allying with the Uruguayan Blancos to conquer the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul. He invaded both Argentina and Brazil in 1865, pushing them and the Colorado government of Uruguay into a military alliance.

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The ensuing war lasted five years. The Paraguayan army proved to be well trained, superbly disciplined, and extraordinarily brave. The Brazil- ians bore the brunt of the fighting on the other side. At first they suffered humiliating reverses, but then triumphed after greatly expanding their army.

The Paraguayan War had important consequences: (1) access to the Río de la Plata river network was guaranteed; (2) the two major powers, Ar- gentina and Brazil, cemented close relations; (3) Brazil consolidated its po- sition in Uruguay; and (4) Paraguay was left with half (it is thought) of its population dead and the country in ruins.

The war also had a profound effect on politics within Brazil. It forced Brazil to enlarge its army, whose officers soon became important actors in Brazilian politics. It had also provoked the emperor into unprecedented steps in asserting his authority. Pedro II demanded Paraguay’s uncondi- tional surrender, while the Liberals, who held a majority in Chamber, wanted by 1868 to negotiate. He dismissed the Liberal cabinet, which had strong majority support in the chamber, and called for new elections. Some radical Liberals reacted angrily by forming a splinter group that in 1870 became the Republican Party. And the war threw a new light on slavery. The slaves recruited for the Brazilian army performed well in battle and were given their freedom in compensation. Their combat effectiveness must have given pause to the white officers who were later called on to hunt down fugitive Brazilian slaves.

The End of the Empire

The final two decades of the empire were dominated by debate over the legitimacy of two institutions: slavery and the monarchy. Both came under scrutiny during the Paraguayan War.

Although the slave trade effectively ended in 1850, slavery was by no means dead twenty years later. The rapidly growing coffee plantations de- manded labor, and the planters turned to an obvious source: slaves from the economically decadent Northeast. Even if every slave in the Northeast had moved south they could not have furnished the labor needed in the coffee economy of the late 1880s.

The only solution, according to the coffee planters, was increased im- migration. In 1886 the province of São Paulo launched a major effort to attract European immigrants to Brazil, but the paulistas found themselves unable to attract the amount of cheap labor they needed. Why? Partly be- cause of the persistence of slavery. This led some of the elite to become abolitionist on the pragmatic grounds that immigrants could never be re- cruited unless Brazil’s retrograde image in Europe was transformed. Abo- lition would be the most obvious step.

The manner in which Brazil carried out abolition was unique in the Amer- icas. Brazilian slavery was a nationwide institution, thus preventing the kind of sectional conflict that occurred in the United States. Furthermore, Brazil-

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ian slaves had worked in virtually every job category, including many “skilled” ones. No less important, a large number of free persons of color had already established themselves economically, providing examples to the newly freed. Brazil had also escaped the extreme racist view that dismissed all persons of color as irremediably inferior. The large mixed-blood population, a few of whose members had reached prominent national positions by 1889 (such as the novelist Machado de Assis and the engineer-abolitionist André Re- bouças), showed that some mobility was possible.

Abolition in Brazil was a seventeen-year process marked by three laws. The first came in 1871, which provided freedom for all children thence- forth born of slave mothers. But the masters were given the option of re- taining labor rights over these children until the age of twenty-one.

It was not until the 1880s that the abolitionist movement was again able to force slavery to the center of the political arena. The abolitionists were led by urban professionals, especially lawyers. Prominent among them was Joaquim Nabuco, a Pernambucan deputy of impeccable social origins. Led by such orators as Nabuco, the abolitionists became the empire’s first na- tionwide political movement. They raised significant sums to finance their propaganda and to buy the freedom of local slaves.

This mobilization had its impact on the parliament, which in 1885 passed the second abolitionist law. This one granted freedom to all slaves sixty or

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The Realities of Slavery

Much historical writing on Brazil has emphasized the allegedly benev- olent nature of its race relations. But it is worth remembering the na- ture of the institution that brought Africans to Brazil. In the late nine- teenth century the French wife of a Brazilian described her visit to a Brazilian plantation:

Here it was that the miseries of slavery appeared to me in all their hor- ror and hideousness. Negresses covered in rags, others half naked, hav- ing as covering only a handkerchief fastened behind their back and over their bosoms, which scarcely veiled their throats, and a calico skirt, through whose rents could be seen their poor, scraggy bodies; some negroes, with tawny and besotted looks, came and kneeled down on the marble slabs of the veranda. The majority carried on their shoul- ders the marks of scars which the lash had inflicted; several were af- fected with horrible maladies, such as elephantiasis, or leprosy. All this was dirty, repulsive, hideous. Fear or hate, that is what could be read on all these faces, which I never have seen smile.

From Adèle Toussaint-Samson, A Parisian in Brazil (Boston: James H. Earle, 1891), reprinted in Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God’s Fire (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 83.

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older, without compensation. Cynics pointed out that if any slaves survived to such an age their masters would be delighted to be freed from caring for them. The new law did little to defuse the agitation of the abolition- ists, some of whom began inciting slaves to flee from or rebel against the masters. By 1887 slavery was visibly disintegrating. The army, charged with catching and returning fugitive slaves, found their job more and more re- pugnant. In 1887 army officers formally refused to carry out this mission any longer.

By 1888 slave owners had had ample time to prepare for the transition to free labor. The final step was the “golden law,” passed in May of that year, which freed all remaining slaves without compensation. The law was approved by an overwhelming vote in both houses. The political elite had managed to preserve a consensus while dealing with a volatile socioeco- nomic issue. This success at incremental reform helped to perpetuate the Brazilian elite’s self-image as conciliatory. Remarkably enough, this image has come to be shared by many of the nonelites.

The other major drama of the late empire was the rise of republican- ism. It had erupted earlier in the century, usually linked to regional de- mands for autonomy. The Republican Party, founded in 1871, also had a strong regionalist cast, especially in São Paulo. The birth of this party could be traced to Liberal deputies’ reaction to Dom Pedro II’s imposing, in 1868, a Conservative ministry in the face of a Liberal majority in the Cham- ber. In 1870 a group of indignant ex-Liberals founded the Republican Party.

At first the Republicans appeared harmless. Up to 1889 they had a very uneven following. It was strongest in São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, and Minas Gerais and weakest in the Northeast. The Republicans wanted a re- public headed by a directly elected president, governed by a bicameral leg- islature, and organized on federalist principles. In effect the Republicans wanted to trade Brazil’s English-style constitutional monarchy for a U.S.- style federal republic.

During the 1880s republicanism made great inroads among the younger generation—the university-educated sons of planters, merchants, and pro- fessional men. Often they combined republicanism with abolitionism. Both sentiments were reinforced by the teachings of the Brazilian Positivists, a dedicated group that had penetrated faculties of higher education, espe- cially in military colleges. Thus the 1880s saw a convergence of movements that were eroding support for the monarchy and for slavery.

However, it was not high-minded debate that sealed the empire’s fate. It was the army. In the late 1880s recurring friction mounted between army officers and civilian politicians—often over the officers’ rights to express publicly their political views. Because of the Paraguayan War, Brazil had created a much larger military than was wanted by the politicians, who pro- vided meager financing for modernization of the army. By the 1880s there was a disproportionately high ratio of officers to troops. That led to frus- tration over delayed promotions among junior and middle-level officers,

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who became especially receptive to the abolitionist and republican senti- ments that were so influential among their civilian counterparts.

The final agony of the empire came in 1889. The emperor had insisted on trying to rule with a Conservative ministry, despite its minority position in the Chamber. In June the emperor invited the Viscount of Ouro Preto to form a cabinet. He succeeded and formulated an ambitious reformist program. But it was too late. A military plot developed in November. Led by Marshall Deodoro da Fonseca, the conspirators demanded that the monarch abdicate. Dom Pedro II and his family calmly left for exile in Por- tugal. The republic was proclaimed the next day, November 16, 1889.

The empire had fallen with little upheaval. Although the planters had long feared that abolition would doom agricultural exports, they soon came to their senses. They now realized they could preserve their economic (and therefore political) dominance in a world without monarchs or slaves. Nei- ther the abolition of slavery nor the overthrow of the empire in themselves brought structural change in Brazil.

Overview: Economic Growth and Social Change

In the mid-nineteenth century the Brazilian economy began a fundamen- tal transition, not tied to any legal or constitutional changes, that has con- tinued well into the twentieth century. It has also had a profound impact on Brazilian society and on relations between social classes.

Like most of Latin America, Brazil has exported a few primary products to the North Atlantic economies. But in contrast, Brazil has passed through a sequence of dependence on the exportation of different …