First Brazilian Republic
1889–1930 federal republic in South America
The First Brazilian Republic, also referred to as the Old Republic (, ), officially the Republic of the United States of Brazil, refers to the period of Brazilian history from 1889 to 1930. The Old Republic began with the coup d'état that deposed emperor Pedro II in 1889, and ended with the Revolution of 1930 that installed Getúlio Vargas as a new president. During the First Republic, the country's presidency was dominated by the most powerful states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. Because of the power of these two states, based on the production of coffee and dairy, respectively, the Old Republic's political system has been described as "milk coffee politics". At local level, the country was dominated by a form of machine politics known as "coronelism", in which the political and economic spheres were centered around local bosses, who controlled elections.
The country was also marked by a series of rebellions and revolutions against the ruling oligarchies, which culminated into the Revolution of 1930, when the Liberal Alliance, a force of urban middle-class, planters from outside São Paulo and military reformists composed mostly by junior officers (known as "Tenetism"), deposed ruling president Washington Luís (representative of the São Paulo oligarchies) and led to the ascension of Getúlio Vargas as president, heralding the start of the Vargas Era.
Overview.
On November 15, 1889, Field Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca deposed Emperor Pedro II, declared Brazil a republic, and reorganized the government.
According to the new republican Constitution enacted in 1891, the government was a constitutional democracy, but democracy was nominal. In reality, the elections were rigged, voters in rural areas were pressured or induced to vote for the chosen candidates of their bosses (see coronelismo) and, if all those methods did not work, the election results could still be changed by one sided decisions of Congress' "verification of powers commission" (election authorities in the República Velha were not independent from the executive and the Legislature, dominated by the ruling oligarchs). This system resulted in the presidency of Brazil alternating between the oligarchies of the dominant states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, who governed the country through the Republican Party of São Paulo (PRP) and the Republican Party of Minas Gerais (PRM). This regime is often referred to as ""café com leite"", 'coffee with milk', after the respective agricultural products of the two states.
The Brazilian republic was not an ideological offspring of the republics born of the French or American Revolutions, although the Brazilian regime would attempt to associate itself with both. The republic did not have enough popular support to risk open elections. It was a regime born of a "coup d'état" that maintained itself by force. The republicans made Deodoro president (1889–91) and, after a financial crisis, appointed Marshal Floriano Vieira Peixoto Minister of War to ensure the allegiance of the military.
Rule of the landed oligarchies.
The officers who joined Field Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca in ending the Empire had made an oath to uphold it. The officer corps would eventually resolve the contradiction by linking its duty to Brazil itself, rather than to transitory governments. The Republic was born rather accidentally: Deodoro had intended only to replace the cabinet, but the republicans manipulated him into founding a republic.
The history of the Old Republic was dominated by a quest for a viable form of government to replace the monarchy. This quest lurched back and forth between state autonomy and centralization. The constitution of 1891, establishing the United States of Brazil ("Estados Unidos do Brasil"), granted extensive autonomy to the provinces, now called States. A federal system was adopted, and all powers not granted in the Constitution to the Federal Government belonged to the States. It recognized that the central government did not rule at the local level. The Empire of Brazil had not absorbed fully the regional provinces, and now they reasserted themselves. Into the 1920s, the federal government in Rio de Janeiro was dominated and managed by a combination of the more powerful states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, and to a lesser extent Pernambuco and Bahia.
Because the monarchy had been overthrown by the Brazilian military, the history of the outset of republic in Brazil is also the story of the development of the Army as a national regulatory and interventionist institution. With the monarchy suddenly eliminated, the Army was left as the country's only long-lasting and powerful national institution. Although the Roman Catholic Church continued its presence throughout the country, it was not national but rather international in its personnel, doctrine, liturgy, and purposes. The Army assumed this new position strategically; the monarchy had become unpopular with Brazil's conservative economic elite after the abolition of slavery, and the Army capitalized on that shift in opinion to amass support for itself within the upper class. Thanks to their success in this area, the Army's prestige managed to eclipse even other military institutions, like the Navy and the National Guard. The Navy's attempts to prevent such hegemony were defeated militarily during the early 1890s. Although it had more units and men in Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul than elsewhere, the Army's presence was felt throughout the country. Its personnel, its interests, its ideology, and its commitments were national in scope.
In the last decades of the 19th century, the United States, much of Europe, and neighboring Argentina expanded the right to vote. Brazil, however, moved to restrict access to the polls. In 1874, in a population of about 10 million, the franchise was held by about one million, but in 1881 this had been cut to 145,296. This reduction was one reason the Empire's legitimacy foundered, but the Republic did not move to correct the situation. By 1910 there were only 627,000 voters in a population of 22 million. Throughout the 1920s, only between 2.3% and 3.4% of the total population could vote.
The instability and violence of the 1890s were related to the absence of consensus among the elites regarding a governmental model, as the armed forces were divided over their status, relationship to the political regime, and institutional goals. The lack of military unity, and the disagreement among civilian elites about the military's role in society, explain partially why a long-term military dictatorship was not established. Although the military did not directly control Brazil, military men were very active in politics; early in the decade, ten of the twenty state governors were officers. The Constituent Assembly, which drew up the constitution of 1891, was divided between two factions. One group sought to limit executive power, which was dictatorial in scope under President Deodoro da Fonseca; the other was the Jacobins, radical authoritarians who opposed the paulista coffee oligarchy and who wanted to preserve and intensify presidential authority. The constitution created by this assembly established a federation that was officially governed by a president, a bicameral National Congress (Congresso Nacional; hereafter, Congress), and a judiciary. However, the real power was held by the states, and by local potentates called "colonels." The colonels largely controlled Brazil's internal politics through a system of unwritten agreements known as "coronelismo". Coronelismo, which supported state autonomy, was called the "politics of the governors". Under it, the local oligarchies chose the state governors, who in turn selected the president.
This informal but real distribution of power emerged, the so-called politics of the governors, to take shape as the result of armed struggles and bargaining. The populous and prosperous states of Minas Gerais and São Paulo dominated the system and swapped the presidency between them for many years. The system consolidated the state oligarchies around families that had been members of the old monarchical elite. And to check the nationalizing tendencies of the army, this oligarchic republic and its state components strengthened the navy and the state police. In the larger states, the state police were soon turned into small armies. The Head of the Brazilian army ordered that it would doubled so they could defend them.
"Latifúndio" economies.
Around the start of the 20th century, the vast majority of the population lived in communities that were essentially semi-feudal in structure, though accumulating capitalist surpluses for overseas export. Because of the legacy of Ibero-American slavery, abolished as late as 1888 in Brazil, there was an extreme concentration of such landownership reminiscent of feudal aristocracies: 464 great landowners held more than 270,000 km2 of land ("latifúndios"), while 464,000 small and medium-sized farms occupied only 157,000 km2.
After the Second Industrial Revolution in the advanced countries, Latin America responded to mounting European and North American demand for primary products and foodstuffs. A few key export products— coffee, sugar, and cotton— thus dominated agriculture. Because of specialization, Brazilian producers neglected domestic consumption, forcing the country to import four-fifths of its grain needs. As in most of Latin America, the economy around the start of the 20th century therefore rested on certain cash crops produced by the "fazendeiros", large estate owners exporting primary products overseas who headed their own patriarchal communities. Each typical "fazenda" (estate) included the owner's chaplain and overseers, his indigent peasants, his sharecroppers, and his indentured servants.
Brazil's dependence on factory-made goods and loans from the technologically and economically superior North Atlantic diminished its domestic industrial base. Farm equipment was primitive and largely non-mechanized; peasants tilled the land with hoes and cleared the soil through the inefficient slash-and-burn method. Meanwhile, living standards were generally squalid. Malnutrition, parasitic diseases, and a lack of medical facilities limited the average life span in 1920 to twenty-eight years. Because of the comparative advantage system and lack of an open market, Brazilian industries could not compete against the technologically superior Anglo-American economies. In this context the Encilhamento (a Boom & Bust process that first intensified, and then crashed, in the years between 1889 and 1891) occurred, the consequences of which were felt in all areas of the Brazilian economy throughout the subsequent decades.
The middle class was not yet active in political life. The patron-client political machines of the countryside enabled the coffee oligarchs to dominate state structures to their advantage, particularly the weak central state structures that effectively devolved power to local agrarian oligarchies. Known as "coronelismo", this was a classic boss system under which the control of patronage was centralized in the hands of a locally dominant oligarch known as a coronel, who would dispense favors in return for loyalty.
Thus, high illiteracy rates went hand in hand with the absence of universal suffrage by secret ballot and the demand for a free press, independent from the then dominant economic influence. In regions where there was not even the telegraph, far from major centers, the news could take 4 to 6 weeks longer to arrive. In those circumstances, for lack of alternatives, along the last decade of the 19th century and the first of the 20th, a free press created by European immigrant anarchists started to develop, and, due to non-segregated conformation (ethnically speaking) of Brazilian society, spread widely, particularly in large cities.
During this period, Brazil did not have a significantly integrated national economy. Rather, Brazil had a grouping of regional economies that exported their own specialty products to European and North American markets. The absence of a big internal market with overland transportation, except for the mule trains, impeded internal economic integration, political cohesion and military efficiency. The regions, "the Brazils" as the British called them, moved to their own rhythms. The Northeast exported its surplus cheap labor and saw its political influence decline as its sugar lost foreign markets to Caribbean producers. The wild rubber boom in Amazônia lost its world primacy to efficient Southeast Asian colonial plantations after 1912. The nationally oriented market economies of the South were not dramatic, but their growth was steady and by the 1920s allowed Rio Grande do Sul to exercise considerable political leverage. Real power resided in the coffee-growing states of the Southeast— São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro— which produced the most export revenue. Those three and Rio Grande do Sul harvested 60% of Brazil's crops, turned out 75% of its industrial and meat products, and held 80% of its banking resources.
Brazil in World War I.
Preceding.
Political dynamics.
Following the creation of the republic in 1889, there were many political and social rebellions that had to be subdued by the regime, such as the Two Naval Revolts (1891 & 1893–94), the Federalist Rebellion (1893–95), War of Canudos (1896–97), Vaccine Revolt (1904), Revolt of the Whip (1910) and the Revolt of Juazeiro ("Sedição de Juazeiro", 1914). The Contestado War, a rebellion pitting settlers against landowners, also raged from 1912 to 1916. Therefore, with the onset of World War I, Brazilian elites were interested in studying the events of the Mexican Revolution with more attention than those related to the War in Europe.
By 1915 it was also clear that the Brazilian elites were dedicated to making sure Brazil followed a conservative political path; they were unwilling to embark upon courses of action, whether domestically (i.e. adopting the secret ballot and universal suffrage) or in foreign affairs (making alliances or long-term commitments), that could have unpredictable consequences and potentially risk the social, economic, and political power held by the Brazilian elite. This course of conduct would extend throughout the 20th century, an isolationist foreign policy interspersed with sporadic automatic alignments against "disturbing elements of peace and international trade".
Ruy Barbosa was the main opposition leader, campaigning for internal political changes. He also stated that, due to the natural conflict between Brazilian commercial interests and the Central Powers' strategic ones (demonstrated for example in the German submarine campaign as well as in the Ottoman control over the Middle East), Brazilian involvement in the war would be inevitable. So he advised that the most logical way to proceed would be to follow the United States, which was working for a peace agreement but at the same time since the sinking of the RMS "Lusitania" was also preparing for war.
Social Dynamics.
The formation of the operary class takes its place at the end of 19th century, and it was related with the ongoing changes caused by the expansion of the coffee economy. Because of that expansion, the "progress" of the capitalist economy sufficed the conditions for the establishment of a "nucleus" of service and fabril workers at São Paulo. Beyond that, many immigrants from Europe had arrived, and between them were the refugees of the Paris Commune, bringing communist and anarchist ideas. Because of those ideas, problems for the very conservative regime of large estate owners emerged. Further on, masses of industrial workers became unhappy with the "status quo" and began engaging in massive protests, mostly in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. After a General Strike in 1917, the government attempted to brutally repress the labor movement in order to prevent new movements from beginning. This repression, supported by legislation, was very effective in preventing the formation of labor unions considered to be really free by the workers involved.
War.
There were two main lines of thought regarding Brazil's joining the war: One, led by Ruy Barbosa, called for joining the Entente; another side was concerned about the bloody and fruitless nature of trench warfare, nurturing critical and pacifist feelings in the urban worker classes. Therefore, Brazil remained neutral in World War I until 1917. However, as denunciations of corruption exacerbated internal problems in the state, President Venceslau Brás began feeling the need to divert public attention from his government; this goal could be accomplished by focusing on an external enemy and thus stoking a sense of unity and patriotism.
During 1917, the German Navy sank Brazilian civilian ships off the French coast, creating such an opportunity. On October 26 the government declared war on the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. Soon after, the navy was ordered to capture Central Powers' ships found on the Brazilian coast, and three small military groups were dispatched to the Western Front. The first group consisted of medical staff from the Army, the second consisted of Army sergeants and officers, and the third consisted of military aviators, both of Army and Navy. The Army's members were attached to the French Army, and the Navy's aviators to the British Royal Air Force. By 1918 all three groups were already in action in France.
By that time Brazil had also sent a Naval fleet, the Naval Division in War Operations or "DNOG", to join the Allies' Naval Forces in the Mediterranean.
During 1918, protests broke out against the military recruitment; this, in conjunction with the news of the ongoing revolution in Russia, only strengthened the isolationist sentiment among the Brazilian elites. In addition, the devastating advent of Spanish flu further prevented the Brás administration from getting involved more deeply. Ultimately, the armistice in November 1918 prevented the government from carrying out its plan for war. Despite its modest participation, Brazil gained the right to partake in the Paris Peace Conference.
Demographic changes.
From 1875 until 1960, about 3 million Europeans emigrated to Brazil, settling mainly in the four southern states of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Immigrants came mainly from Portugal, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, Poland, and the Middle East. The world's largest Japanese community outside Japan is in São Paulo. In contrast, Brazil's indigenous population, located mainly in the northern and western border regions and in the upper Amazon Basin, continued to decline during this same period; largely due to the effects of contact with the outside world such as commercial expansion into the interior. Consequently, indigenous full-blooded Amerindians now constitute less than 1% of Brazil's population.
Developments under the Old Republic.
In the early twentieth century, demographic changes and structural shifts in the economy threatened the primacy of the agrarian oligarchies. Under the Old Republic, the growth of the urban middle sectors, though slowed by dependency and entrenched oligarchy, was eventually strong enough to propel the middle class into the forefront of Brazilian political life. In time, growing trade, commerce, and industry in São Paulo undermined the domination of the republic's politics by the landed gentries of that state (dominated by the coffee industry) and Minas Gerais, dominated by dairy interests, known then by observers as the politics of "café com leite"; 'coffee with milk'.
Long before the first revolts of the urban middle classes to seize power from the coffee oligarchs in the 1920s, Brazil's intelligentsia and farsighted agro-capitalists, dreamed of forging a modern, industrialized society inspired by positivism— the "world power of the future". This sentiment was later nurtured throughout the Vargas years and under successive populist governments, before the 1964 military junta repudiated Brazilian populism. While these populist groups were somewhat ineffectual under the Old Republic, the structural changes in the Brazilian economy opened up by the Great War strengthened these demands.
The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was the turning point for the dynamic urban sectors. Wartime conditions prevented Britain from exporting goods to Brazil, thus creating space for Brazil's domestic manufacturing sector to grow. These structural shifts in the Brazilian economy helped to increase the ranks of the new urban middle classes. Meanwhile, Brazil's manufacturers and those employed by them enjoyed these gains at the expense of the agrarian oligarchies. This process was further accelerated by the declining world demand for coffee during World War I. The central government, dominated by rural gentries, responded to falling world coffee demand by bailing out the oligarchs, reinstating the valorization program. Valorization, government intervention to maintain coffee prices by withholding stocks from the market or restricting plantings, had some successes in the short term; however, coffee demand plunged even more precipitously during the Great Depression, creating a decline too steep for valorization to reverse.
Paradoxically, economic crisis spurred industrialization and a resultant boost to the urban middle and working classes. The depressed coffee sector freed up the capital and labor needed for manufacturing finished goods. A chronically adverse balance of trade and declining rate of exchange against foreign currencies was also helpful; Brazilian goods were simply cheaper in the Brazilian market. The state of São Paulo, with its relatively large capital base, large immigrant population from Southern and Eastern Europe, and wealth of natural resources, led the trend, eclipsing Rio de Janeiro as the center of Brazilian industry. Industrial production, though concentrated in light industry (food processing, small shops, and textiles) doubled during the war, and the number of enterprises (which stood at about 3,000 in 1908) grew by 5,940 between 1915 and 1918. The war was also a stimulus for the diversification of agriculture. Growing wartime demand of the Allies for staple products— for instance, sugar, beans, and raw materials— sparked a new boom for products other than sugar or coffee. Foreign interests, however, continued to control the more capital-intensive industries, distinguishing Brazil's industrial revolution from that of the rest of the West.
Struggle for reform.
With manufacturing on the rise and the coffee oligarchs imperiled, the old order of "café com leite" and "coronelismo" eventually gave way to the political aspirations of the new urban groups: professionals, government and white-collar workers, merchants, bankers, and industrialists. Increasing support for industrial protectionism marked 1920s Brazilian politics with little support from a central government dominated by the coffee interests. Under considerable middle class pressure, a more activist, centralized state adapted to represent the interests that the new bourgeoisie had been demanded for years — one that could utilize a state interventionist policy consisting of tax breaks, lowered duties, and import quotas to expand the domestic capital base. Manufacturers, white-collar workers, and the urban proletariat alike had earlier enjoyed the respite of world trade associated with World War I. However, the coffee oligarchs, relying on the decentralized power structure to delegate power to their own patrimonial ruling oligarchies, were uninterested in regularizing Brazil's personalistic politics or centralizing power. Getúlio Vargas, leader from 1930 to 1945 and later for a brief period in the 1950s, would later respond to these demands.
During this time period, the state of São Paulo was at the forefront of Brazil's economic, political, and cultural life. Known colloquially as a "locomotive pulling the 20 empty boxcars" (a reference to the 20 other states) and still today Brazil's industrial and commercial center, São Paulo led this trend toward industrialization due to the foreign revenues flowing into the coffee industry.
Prosperity contributed to a rapid rise in the population of recent working class Southern and Eastern European immigrants, a population that contributed to the growth of trade unionism, anarchism, and socialism. In the post-World War I period, Brazil was hit by its first wave of general strikes and the establishment of the Communist Party in 1922.
Meanwhile, the divergence of interests between the coffee oligarchs— devastated by the Depression— and the burgeoning, dynamic urban sectors was intensifying. According to prominent Latin American historian Benjamin Keen, the task of transforming society "fell to the rapidly growing urban bourgeois groups, and especially to the middle class, which began to voice even more strongly its discontent with the rule of the corrupt rural oligarchies". In contrast, the labor movement remained small and weak (despite a wave of general strikes in the postwar years), lacking ties to the peasantry, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the Brazilian population. As a result, disparate social reform movements would crop up in the 1920s, ultimately culminating in the Revolution of 1930. The 1920s revolt against the seating of Artur Bernardes as president signaled the beginning of a struggle by the urban bourgeoisie to seize power from the coffee-producing oligarchy.
This era sparked the Tenente revolts as well. Junior military officers ("tenentes", or lieutenants), who had long been active against the ruling coffee oligarchy, staged their own revolt in 1922 amid demands for various forms of social modernization, calling for agrarian reform, the formation of cooperatives, and the nationalization of mines. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the Tenente revolts illustrated the conflicts that would go on to underpin the Revolution of 1930.
Fall of the Old Republic.
The 1930 general election.
The Great Depression set off the tensions that had been building in Brazilian society for some time, spurring revolutionary leaders to action.
The elections of 1930 pitted Júlio Prestes, of the pro-establishment Republican Party of São Paulo, against Getúlio Vargas, who led a broad coalition of middle-class industrialists, planters from outside São Paulo, and the reformist faction of the military known as the "tenentes".
Together, these disparate groups made up the Liberal Alliance. Support was especially strong in the provinces of Minas Gerais, Paraíba and Rio Grande do Sul, because in nominating another Paulista to succeed himself, outgoing President Washington Luís had violated the traditional alternation between Minas Gerais and São Paulo. Vargas campaigned carefully, needing to please a large range of supporters. He used populist rhetoric and promoted bourgeois concerns. He opposed the primacy of São Paulo, but did not challenge the planters' legitimacy and kept his calls for social reform moderate.
The election itself was plagued by corruption and denounced by both sides: when the victory of Prestes with 57,7% of votes was declared, Vargas and the Liberal Alliance refused to concede defeat, sparking tensions in the country. On July 26, 1930, vice-presidential candidate João Pessoa of the Liberal Alliance was assassinated in Recife, sparking the beginning of the Brazilian Revolution.
The Revolution.
The 1930 revolution began in Rio Grande do Sul on October 3 at 5:25pm. Osvaldo Aranha telegraphed Juarez Távora to communicate the beginning of the Revolution. It spread quickly through the country. Eight state governments in the northeast of Brazil were deposed by revolutionaries.
On the 10th of October, Vargas launched the manifesto, "Rio Grande standing by Brazil" and left, by rail, towards Rio de Janeiro, the national capital at the time.
It was expected that a major battle would occur in Itararé (on the border with Paraná), where the federal troops were stationed to halt the advance of the revolutionary forces, led by Colonel Góis Monteiro. However, on October 12 and 13, the Battle of Quatiguá took place (possibly the biggest fight of the revolution), although it has been little studied. Quatiguá is located to the east of Jaguariaíva, near the border between São Paulo state and Paraná. The battle did not occur in Itararé since the generals Tasso Fragoso and Mena Barreto and Admiral Isaiah de Noronha ousted President Washington Luís on October 24 and formed a joint government.
At 3pm on November 3, 1930, the junta handed power and the presidential palace to Getulio Vargas; the new administration abrogated the 1891 Constitution, dissolved the National Congress and started to rule by decree, ending the Old Republic. A Constituent Assembly was convened in 1934, following the failed Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932: the Assembly enacted a new Constitution and elected Vargas as new President of Brazil, starting the Second Brazilian Republic.
Notes.
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List of presidents of Brazil
The president of the Federative Republic of Brazil is the chief executive of the government of Brazil and commander in chief of the country's Armed Forces. Below is a list of presidents of Brazil.
Brazil before the Proclamation of the Republic.
Brazil had two monarchs during the time of the United Kingdom with Portugal: Maria I (1815–1816) and John VI (1816–1822). When this Kingdom was created, queen Maria I was already considered incapable due to mental illness and the Portuguese Empire was ruled by prince John, later king John VI, as regent. As an independent nation, Brazil had two monarchs, emperors Pedro I (1822–1831) and Pedro II (1831–1889). The second woman to govern Brazil, after Maria I, was Leopoldina of Austria, who acted as regent in 1822 and had a great influence on Brazil's independence process, having been responsible for signing the decree that separated Brazil from Portugal.
Having proclaimed independence of the Kingdom of Brazil from Portugal in 1822, prince Pedro, the son of king John VI, was acclaimed the first Emperor of Brazil on 12 October 1822. After abdicating the throne, on 7 April 1831, he was succeeded by his son Pedro de Alcântara, who reigned as Pedro II of Brazil. The third woman to rule Brazil was princess Isabel, heir presumptive to the throne, who acted as regent of Brazil in various periods (1870–1871, 1876–1877 and 1887–1888) while her father, emperor Pedro II, performed foreign visits. During her last regency she sanctioned, on 13 May 1888, the Golden Law (Imperial Law No. 3,353), which abolished slavery in Brazil. Pedro II was deposed along with the 74-year-old monarchy on 15 November 1889 in a bloodless and unpopular military coup d'état.
First Republic (1889–1930).
In 1889, the Empire of Brazil was abolished and replaced with a republic in a coup d'état led by marshal Deodoro da Fonseca, who deposed emperor Pedro II, proclaimed Brazil a Republic and formed a provisional government. The 15 November 1889 military coup began as an attempt to overthrow the Empire's prime minister, Afonso Celso, Viscount of Ouro Preto, but the unprecedented coup against a prime minister appointed by the emperor and who enjoyed the confidence of the elected Chamber of Deputies quickly escalated to the abolition of the monarchy.
With the proclamation of the Brazilian Republic, the Imperial constitution ceased to operate, the Imperial Parliament (the General Assembly) ceased to exist, and not only was the Viscount of Ouro Preto removed from office, but the position of prime minister itself ceased to exist. As head of the provisional government, Deodoro da Fonseca ruled by decree, holding both the functions of head of state and of head of government. The former provinces of the Empire were reorganized as states and the newly proclaimed republic was declared a federation, formed by the perpetual union of those states.
In 1890, elections for a Constituent Congress were summoned and held, but the decree of the provisional government that created the Congress required it to adopt a Constitution that conformed to the recently proclaimed republican system of government, and that organized the recently declared Federal State. In February 1891, a new Brazilian constitution was adopted, based on the federal republic of the United States of America. The country itself was named the Republic of the United States of Brazil. In accordance with the provisions of the Constitution, the presidents of the Republic were to be elected by direct popular vote, but, for the first presidential term, the president and vice president would be chosen by the Constituent Congress; the Constituent Congress was to elect the first president and vice president immediately after the promulgation of the Constitution.
In accordance with those transitional provisions, Congress elected the then head of the provisional government, Deodoro da Fonseca, as the first president of the republic. Marshal Floriano Peixoto was elected by Congress to be the first vice president. The inauguration of the first president and of the first vice president was held on 26 February 1891, only two days after the promulgation of the new Republican Constitution. Deodoro resigned the presidency ten months later after a coup d'état in which he dissolved Congress was reversed. Floriano Peixoto was then inaugurated as president. In 1894, Peixoto was succeeded by Prudente de Morais, the first president of Brazil to be elected by direct popular ballot. Morais, who was the first president to be elected under the permanent provisions of the Constitution adopted in 1891, was also the first civilian to assume the presidency of Brazil.
Although it was theoretically a constitutional democracy, the Old Republic was characterized by the power of regional oligarchies and the seldom broken alternation of power in the federal sphere between the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. The vote in the countryside was often controlled by local land owners, and less than 6% of the population had the right to vote due to literacy requirements.
In 1930, when Brazil was suffering the effects of the Wall Street crash of 1929, a revolution broke out in the country and the Old Republic ended. President Washington Luís, who was supported by São Paulo oligarchies, broke the expected alternation between São Paulo and Minas Gerais and supported a candidate who was also from São Paulo, Júlio Prestes. Prestes won the 1930 election, but Washington Luís was deposed three weeks before the end of his term and Prestes was never inaugurated.
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Unaffiliated
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Federal Republican Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Paulista Republican Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Mineiro Republican Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Fluminense Republican Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Conservative Republican Party
Vargas Era (1930–1946).
The Vargas Era consists of two different republics: the Second Republic, from 1930 to 1937, and the Third Republic, from 1937 to 1946.
Prior to 1929, Brazilian politics was controlled by an alliance between the two largest state economies; known as "coffee with milk politics", coffee growers in São Paulo combined with the dairy industry centred in Minas Gerais to create an oligarchy, with the presidency alternating between the two states. This practice was broken when the leaders of São Paulo and president Washington Luís nominated their fellow Paulista Júlio Prestes as candidate for the presidential elections in 1930. In response, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul and Paraíba formed the "Liberal Alliance" backing opposition candidate Getúlio Vargas.
When Prestes won the March 1930 Presidential election, the Alliance denounced his victory as fraudulent, while Vargas's running mate, João Pessoa, was assassinated in July. A revolution then began on 3 October 1930 and quickly spread throughout the country; by 10 October, both Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais had announced their support. Washington Luís was deposed on 24 October, and the Brazilian Military Junta of 1930 took over; Vargas assumed leadership of the junta on 3 November 1930, marking the end of the First Brazilian Republic and beginning of the Vargas Era.
The 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution led to the adoption of a new Constitution in 1934. However, the constitution was annulled and Vargas became a dictator in the name of law and order in 1937. His rule occupies two periods of Brazilian history, the Second Brazilian Republic and the Third Brazilian Republic, known as the Estado Novo.
Fourth Republic (1946–1964).
In 1945, Vargas was deposed by a military coup led by ex-supporters. Nevertheless, he would be elected president once again and his influence in Brazilian politics would remain until the end of the Fourth republic. In this period, three parties dominated the national politics. Two were pro-Vargas – in the left, PTB and in the centre-right, PSD – and another anti-Vargas, the rightist UDN.
This period was very unstable. In 1954, Vargas committed suicide during a crisis that threatened his government and he was followed by a series of short-term presidents. In 1961, UDN won national elections for the first time, supporting Jânio Quadros, who himself was a member of a minor party allied to UDN. Quadros, who, before his election, rose meteorically in politics with an anti-corruption stance, unexpectedly resigned the presidency seven months later. Some historians suggest that Quadros was heavily drunk when he signed his resignation letter, while others suggest that Quadros felt that Congress would not accept his vice-president as president, and would ask for his return. Those historians, therefore, see Quadros' resignation as an attempt to return to office with increased powers and more political support. It is possible that both occurred: Quadros was drunk when he resigned, and in that state, he devised the plan to return to power by Congressional request. The plot failed: Congress simply received Quadros' letter, and amid the shock of politicians and of the Nation, the letter was entered into the records of Congress and the presidency was declared vacant. The president of Congress, Senator Auro de Moura Andrade, took the view that the deed of resignation was the province of the elected president, that it was not subject to a congressional vote, needing no confirmation, and that the president's declaration of resignation was final.
At that time, the president and vice president of Brazil were voted into office separately. The vice president was a political enemy of Jânio Quadros, the leftist João Goulart. Goulart was out of the country, and Congress was controlled by right wing politicians. During Goulart's absence, the president of the Chamber of deputies, Ranieri Mazzilli, took office as acting president of Brazil. There was then a plot to block the inauguration of the vice president as president, but Congressional resistance to the inauguration of Goulart led to a reaction by the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, who led a "legality campaign", and to a split in the military (that, during the fourth Republic, intervened heavily in politics). Amid the political crisis, the solution was the adoption by Congress of a Constitutional Amendment abolishing the presidential executive and replacing it with a parliamentary system of government. Under that negotiated solution, Goulart's inauguration was allowed to proceed, but Goulart would be head of state only, and a prime minister approved by Congress would lead the government. The new system of government's continued existence was subject to popular approval in a referendum scheduled for 1963. The result of this referendum restored the presidential executive and a military coup deposed Goulart in 1964, starting the military dictatorship.
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Social Democratic Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Brazilian Labour Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Social Progressive Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  National Labour Party
Military Dictatorship (1964–1985).
The military coup was fomented by José de Magalhães Pinto, Adhemar de Barros, and Carlos Lacerda (who had already participated in the conspiracy to depose Getúlio Vargas in 1945), then governors of the states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Guanabara, respectively. The coup was planned and executed by the most forefront commanders of the Brazilian Army and received the support of almost all high-ranking members of the military, along with conservative elements in society, like the Catholic Church and anti-communist civil movements among the Brazilian middle and upper classes. Internationally, it was supported by the State Department of the United States through its embassy in Brasília.
Despite initial pledges to the contrary, the military regime enacted in 1967 a new, restrictive Constitution, and stifled freedom of speech and political opposition. The regime adopted nationalism, economic development, and anti-communism as its guidelines.
The dictatorship reached the height of its popularity in the 1970s with the so-called "Brazilian Miracle", even as the regime censored all media, and tortured and exiled dissidents. João Figueiredo became president in March 1979; in the same year he passed the Amnesty Law for political crimes committed for and against the regime. While combating the "hardliners" inside the government and supporting a re-democratization policy, Figueiredo could not control the crumbling economy, chronic inflation and concurrent fall of other military dictatorships in South America. Amid massive popular demonstrations in the streets of the main cities of the country, the first free elections in 20 years were held for the national legislature in 1982. In 1985, another election was held, this time to elect (indirectly) a new president, being contested between civilian candidates for the first time since the 1960s, being won by the opposition. In 1988, a new Constitution was passed and Brazil officially returned to democracy. Since then, the military has remained under the control of civilian politicians, with no official role in domestic politics.
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Unaffiliated
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Social Democratic Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  National Renewal Alliance
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Democratic Social Party
Sixth Republic (1985–present).
In the early 1980s, the military government started a process of gradual redemocratization, called "abertura", the final goal of which was democracy. When the term of the last military president was to end, however, no direct elections for President of Brazil took place. For the election of the country's first civilian president since the military coup of 1964, the military maintained the rule that prevailed during the dictatorial regime, according to which an Electoral College made up of the entire National Congress and representatives from State Assemblies was to elect the president. This time, however, the military placed the Electoral College under no coercion, so that its members would be free to select the president of their choice. The Chamber of Deputies and the State Assemblies had been elected, already under the "abertura process" in the 1982 parliamentary election, but the senators were chosen indirectly, by the State Assemblies, under rules that had been passed by the military regime in 1977 to counter the growing support of the opposition: one third of the senators was chosen in 1982, and two thirds had been chosen in 1978. After the 1982 elections, the ruling party, PDS (the successor of the ARENA), still controlled a majority of the seats in the National Congress.
Tancredo Neves, who had been prime minister during the presidency of João Goulart, was chosen to be the candidate of PMDB, the major opposition party (and the successor of the MDB Party, that had opposed the Military Regime since its inception), but Tancredo was also supported by a large political spectrum, even including a significant part of former members of ARENA, the party that supported the military presidents. In the last months of the military regime, a large section of ARENA members defected from the party, and now professed to be men of democratic inclinations. They formed the Liberal Front, and the Liberal Front Party allied itself to PMDB, forming a coalition known as the Democratic Alliance. PMDB needed the Liberal Front's support in order to secure victory in the Electoral College. In the formation of this broad coalition former members of ARENA also switched parties and joined PMDB. So, to seal this arrangement, the spot of vice-president in Tancredo Neves' ticket was given to José Sarney, who represented the former supporters of the regime that had now joined the Democratic Alliance. On the other hand, those who remained loyal to the military regime and its legacy renamed ARENA as the PDS. In the PDS's National Convention, two right-wing supporters of the military administrations fought for the party's nomination: Colonel Mário Andreazza, then Minister of the Interior in General Figueiredo's administration, was the preferred candidate of the incumbent president and of the military elite, but he was defeated by Paulo Maluf, a civilian and former governor of São Paulo State during the military regime. Tancredo's coalition defeated Maluf, and his election was hailed as the dawn of a New Republic. Andreazza's defeat (by 493 votes to 350) and the selection of Maluf as the PDS's presidential candidate greatly contributed to the split in the party that led to the formation of the Liberal Front. The Liberal Front refused to support Maluf and joined forces with the PMDB in supporting Tancredo Neves, thus forging the Democratic Alliance. Without that split in the PDS, the election of the opposition candidate would not have been possible.
Although elected President of Brazil, Tancredo Neves became gravely ill on the eve of his inauguration and died without ever taking office. Therefore, the first civilian president since 1964 was Tancredo's running mate, José Sarney, himself an ex-member of ARENA. José Sarney's administration fulfilled Tancredo's campaign promise of passing a constitutional amendment to the Constitution inherited from the military regime, so as to summon elections for a National Constituent Assembly with full powers to draft and adopt a new Constitution for the country, to replace the authoritarian legislation that still remained in place. In October 1988, a new democratic Constitution was passed and democracy was consolidated. In 1989, the first elections for president under the new Constitution were held and the young Fernando Collor de Mello was elected for a five-year term, the first president to be elected by direct popular ballot since the military coup. He was inaugurated in 1990 and in 1992 he became the first president in Brazil to be impeached due to corruption. However, he resigned before the final verdict.
A referendum held in 1993 (ahead of the 1993 and 1994 Constitutional Revision) allowed the people to decide the form of government of the state (monarchy or republic) for the first time since the proclamation of the Republic in 1889; the republican form of government prevailed. In the same referendum, the Brazilian people was able to choose again, for the first time since 1963, the system of Government (parliamentary or presidential) and the model of a presidential executive was retained. The revision was a unique opportunity to amend the Constitution with a reduced majority. Had a different form or system of government been chosen in the 1993 referendum, the new institutional structure would have been implemented during the Constitutional Revision. Both the Revision and the referendum on the form and system of government were summoned in the original text of the Constitution. The federal model of the state, retained in the 1988 Constitution, is declared by the Constitution as not subject to abolition, even by Constitutional Amendment. According to those tenets and to the results of the popular vote, only minor changes were made to the institutional framework of the State in the Constitutional Revision, including the adoption of a Constitutional Amendment that reduced the presidential term of office from five to four years.
In 1995, Fernando Henrique Cardoso was inaugurated for a four-year term. In 1997, a Constitutional Amendment was enacted allowing presidents of Brazil to be reelected to one consecutive term. In 1998, then President Fernando Henrique Cardoso became the first president of Brazil to be reelected for an immediately consecutive term. In 2003, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was inaugurated. He was reelected in 2006. In 2011, Dilma Rousseff became Brazil's first woman president. In 2015, she began her second term, but in 2016 the Senate of Brazil convicted her on impeachment charges, and she was removed from office, being succeeded by Michel Temer. In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected, taking office on 1 January 2019. In the 2022 elections, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had served as Brazil's president from 2003 to 2010, was again elected president, becoming the first person to win three Brazilian presidential elections. Also in the 2022 elections, Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil's first first-term President to seek reelection for a second term and lose, since the possibility of reelection to an immediately consecutive second term was first created in Brazil in 1997.
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Unaffiliated
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement → Brazilian Democratic Movement
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  National Reconstruction Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Brazilian Social Democracy Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Workers' Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Social Liberal Party
<templatestyles src="Legend/styles.css" />  Liberal Party
Presidents by birth state.
 Minas Gerais: 9 (Afonso Pena, Venceslau Brás, Delfim Moreira, Artur Bernardes, Carlos Luz, Juscelino Kubitschek, "Pedro Aleixo", "Tancredo Neves", Dilma Rousseff)
 São Paulo: 7 (Prudente de Morais, Campos Sales, Rodrigues Alves, "Júlio Prestes", Ranieri Mazzilli, Michel Temer, Jair Bolsonaro)
 Rio Grande do Sul: 6 (Hermes da Fonseca, Getúlio Vargas, João Goulart, Artur da Costa e Silva, Emílio Garrastazu Médici, Ernesto Geisel)
 Rio de Janeiro: 5 (Nilo Peçanha, Washington Luís, João Figueiredo, Fernando Collor de Mello, Fernando Henrique Cardoso)
 Alagoas: 2 (Deodoro da Fonseca, Floriano Peixoto)
 Ceará: 2 (José Linhares, Castelo Branco)
 Bahia: 1 (Itamar Franco)
 Mato Grosso: 1 (Eurico Gaspar Dutra)
 Mato Grosso do Sul: 1 (Jânio Quadros)
 Maranhão: 1 (José Sarney)
 Paraíba: 1 (Epitácio Pessoa)
 Pernambuco: 1 (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva)
 Rio Grande do Norte: 1 (Café Filho)
 Santa Catarina: 1 (Nereu Ramos)
References.
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Works cited.
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General
Biographies
Other resources

History of Brazil

Before the arrival of the Europeans, the lands that now constitute Brazil were occupied, fought over and settled by diverse tribes. Thus, the history of Brazil begins with the indigenous people in Brazil. The Portuguese arrived to the land that would become Brazil on April 22, 1500, commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral, an explorer on his way to India under the sponsorship of the Kingdom of Portugal and the support of the Catholic Church.
From the 16th to the early 19th century, Brazil was created and expanded as a colony, kingdom and an integral part of the Portuguese Empire. Brazil was briefly named "Land of the Holy Cross" by Portuguese explorers and crusaders before being named "Land of Brazil" by the Brazilian-Portuguese settlers and merchants dealing with brazilwood. The country expanded south along the coast and west along the Amazon and other inland rivers from the original 15 hereditary captaincy colonies established on the northeast Atlantic coast east of the Tordesillas Line of 1494 that divided the Portuguese domain to the east from the Spanish domain to the west. The country's borders were only finalized in the early 20th century, with most of the expansion occurring before the independence, resulting in the largest contiguous territory in the Americas.
On September 7, 1822, prince regent Pedro de Alcântara declared Brazil's independence from Portugal and so the Kingdom of Brazil became the Empire of Brazil. The country became a dictatorial republic in 1889 following a military coup d'état. An authoritarian military junta came to power in 1964 and ruled until 1985, after which civilian governance and democracy resumed. Brazil is a democratic federal republic.
Due to its rich culture and history, the country ranks thirteenth in the world by number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Brazil is a founding member of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, Mercosul, United Nations, the G20, BRICS, Organization of Ibero-American States and the Organization of American States.
Pre-Cabraline history.
Some of the earliest human remains found in the Americas, Luzia Woman, were found in the area of Pedro Leopoldo, Minas Gerais and provide evidence of human habitation going back at least 11,000 years.
When Portuguese explorers arrived in Brazil, the region was inhabited by hundreds of different native tribes, "the earliest going back at least 10,000 years in the highlands of Minas Gerais". The dating of the origins of the first inhabitants, who were called "Indians" ("índios") by the Portuguese, is still a matter of dispute among archaeologists. The earliest pottery ever found in the Western Hemisphere, radiocarbon-dated 8,000 years old, has been excavated in the Amazon basin of Brazil, near Santarém, providing evidence to overturn the assumption that the tropical forest region was too poor in resources to have supported a complex prehistoric culture. The current most widely accepted view of anthropologists, linguists and geneticists is that the early tribes were part of the first wave of migrant hunters who came into the Americas from Asia, either by land, across the Bering Strait, or by coastal sea routes along the Pacific, or both.
The Andes and the mountain ranges of northern South America created a rather sharp cultural boundary between the settled agrarian civilizations of the west coast and the semi-nomadic tribes of the east, who never developed written records or permanent monumental architecture. For this reason, very little is known about the history of Brazil before 1500. Archaeological remains (mainly pottery) indicate a complex pattern of regional cultural developments, internal migrations, and occasional large state-like federations.
At the time of European discovery, the territory of modern-day Brazil had as many as 2,000 tribes. The Indigenous peoples were traditionally mostly semi-nomadic tribes that subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering, and migrant agriculture. When the Portuguese arrived in 1500, the Natives lived mainly on the coast and along the banks of major rivers.
Tribal warfare, anthropophagy and the pursuit of brazilwood for its treasured red dye convinced the Portuguese that they should Christianize the natives. But the Portuguese, like the Spanish in their South American possessions, had brought diseases with them, against which many Natives were helpless due to lack of immunity. Measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, gonorrhea and influenza killed tens of thousands of indigenous people. The diseases spread quickly along the indigenous trade routes, and whole tribes were probably annihilated without ever coming in direct contact with Europeans.
Marajoara culture.
Marajoara culture flourished on Marajó island at the mouth of the Amazon River. Archeologists have found sophisticated pottery in their excavations on the island. These pieces are large, and elaborately painted and incised with representations of plants and animals. These provided the first evidence that a complex society had existed in Marajó. Evidence of mound building further suggests that well-populated, complex and sophisticated settlements developed on this island, as only such settlements were believed capable of such extended projects as major earthworks.
The extent, level of complexity, and resource interactions of the Marajoara culture have been disputed. Working in the 1950s in some of her earliest research, American Betty Meggers suggested that the society migrated from the Andes and settled on the island. Many researchers believed that the Andes were populated by Paleoindian migrants from North America who gradually moved south after being hunters on the plains.
In the 1980s, another American archaeologist, Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, led excavations and geophysical surveys of the mound Teso dos Bichos. She concluded that the society that constructed the mounds originated on the island itself.
The pre-Columbian culture of Marajó may have developed social stratification and supported a population as large as 100,000 people. The Native Americans of the Amazon rainforest may have used their method of developing and working in Terra preta to make the land suitable for the large-scale agriculture needed to support large populations and complex social formations such as chiefdoms.
Early Brazil.
In 1493 the papal bull inter caetera divided claims to the New World territories between Spain and Portugal and was revised in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas which moved the dividing line further west.
In late 1499 part of the expedition led by Alonso de Ojeda, in which Amerigo Vespucci took part, sighted Brazil. Shortly after the expedition led by Spanish navigator and explorer Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a Spanish navigator who had accompanied Columbus in his first voyage of discovery to the Americas, reached the Cape of Santo Agostinho, a promontory located in the current state of Pernambuco, on 26 January 1500. This is the oldest confirmed European landing in Brazilian territory. Pinzón was unable to claim the land because of the Treaty of Tordesillas. In April 1500, Brazil was claimed for Portugal on the arrival of the Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral. The Portuguese encountered stone-using natives divided into several tribes, many of whom shared the same Tupi–Guarani language family, and fought among themselves. Early names for the country included "Santa Cruz" (Holy Cross) and "Terra dos Papagaios" (Land of the Parrots). After European arrival, the land's major export was a type of tree traders and colonists called "pau-Brasil" (Latin for wood red like an ember) or brazilwood from which came its final name. It is a large tree ("Caesalpinia echinata") whose trunk yields a prized red dye, and was nearly wiped out due to overexploitation.
Until 1529 Portugal had little interest in settling Brazil as it was focused on its already profitable commerce with India, China, and the East Indies. This lack of interest allowed traders, pirates, and privateers of several countries to poach profitable Brazilwood in lands claimed by Portugal, with France setting up the short-lived colony of France Antarctique in 1555. In response, the Portuguese Crown devised a system to effectively settle Brazil. Through the hereditary Captaincies system, they divided Brazil into strips of land and donated them to Portuguese noblemen, who were in turn responsible for occupying and administering the lands while answering to the King. The system was later substituted for a dual state government in 1572, where the country was divided into the Northern Government based in Salvador and the Southern Government based in Rio de Janeiro.
The Portuguese settlers introduced and propagated old-world cultures such as rice, coffee, sugar, cows, chicken, pigs, bread (wheat), wine, oranges, horses, stonemasonry, metalworking and guitars (and more). There was also a mixing of peoples through intermarriage. Since colonial times Portuguese settlers intermarried with Indigenous and African populations. The most common marriages occurred between white (Portuguese settlers), Indigenous, and African populations. In the present, the largest ethnic groups include: those of mainly European descent (47.7% of the population), people of mixed ethnic backgrounds or mulattos (43.1%), people entirely of African ancestry (7.6%), those with Asian ancestry (1.1%) and indigenous (0.4%).
Iberian Union.
In 1578, the young King Sebastian, King of Portugal disappeared in a crusade in Morocco, during the Battle of Alcácer Quibir. The king had entered the war without much allied support or the necessary resources to fight properly. Since he had no direct heirs, Philip II of Spain, who was his uncle (and whose grandfather was the Portuguese King Manuel I of Portugal), was the only successor and took control of the Portuguese administration in 1580. The 60 year period of his rule is called the Iberian Union, in reference to the Iberian peninsula on which Spain and Portugal are located. It ended in 1640 when John IV of Portugal, Duke of Braganza, restored Portuguese independence and formed the 3rd Portuguese Royal Dynasty, the House of Braganza.
With the merging of the crowns in the Iberian Union, Portuguese/Brazilian settlers were legally allowed to cross beyond the Treaty of Tordesillas line, and thus more interior expansions of Brazil began or were at least officialized and mapped during that period. Sebastian never returned which originated the messianic line of thought Sebastianism, which asserted that the rightful King would return from the mists and restore the Kingdom to its former glory. In Brazil the most important manifestation of Sebastianism was the Proclamation of the Republic, when movements defending a return to the monarchy emerged.
It is one the longest-lived millenarian legends in Western Europe, and had profound political and cultural resonances from the time of Sebastian's death until at least the late 19th century in Brazil.
Indigenous rebellions.
The "Tamoyo Confederation" ("Confederação dos Tamoios" in the Portuguese language) was a military alliance of aboriginal chieftains of the sea coast ranging from what is today Santos to Rio de Janeiro, that lasted from 1554 to 1567.
The main reason for this rather unusual alliance between separate tribes was the need for collective defense against the Portuguese settlers. In the Tupi language, "Tamuya" means 'elder' or 'grandfather'. Cunhambebe was elected chief of the Confederation by his counterparts, and together with chiefs Pindobuçú, Koakira, Araraí and Aimberê, declared war on the Portuguese.
Sugar age.
Starting in the sixteenth century, sugarcane grown on plantations called "engenhos" along the northeast coast (Brazil's "Nordeste") became the base of the Brazilian economy and social structure. Large plantations used slave labor to produce sugar for export to Europe. At first, settlers tried to enslave the natives for these sugar plantations but soon switched to importing slaves from Africa. Portugal pioneered the plantation system in the Atlantic islands of Madeira and São Tomé, with forced labor, high capital inputs for machinery, slaves, and work animals. By 1570, Brazil's sugar output rivalled that of the Atlantic islands. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch seized productive areas of northeast Brazil and took over the plantations. When the Dutch were expelled from Brazil, following a strong push by Portuguese-Brazilians and their indigenous and Afro-Brazilian allies, the Dutch as well as the English and French set up sugar production on the plantation model of Brazil in the Caribbean. Increased production and competition meant that the price of sugar dropped and Brazil's market share along with it. Brazil's recovery from the Dutch incursion was slow since warfare had damaged much of the land and infrastructure used for the plantations. In Bahia, tobacco was cultivated for the African export market, with tobacco dipped in molasses (derived from sugar production) being traded for African slaves. Brazil's settlement and economic development was focused on its lengthy coastline. The Dutch incursion had underlined the vulnerability of Brazil to foreigners, and Portugal responded by building coastal forts and creating a marine patrol to protect the colony.
The initial exploration of Brazil's interior was largely due to para-military adventurers, the "bandeirantes", who entered the jungle in search of gold and native slaves. However colonists were unable to continually enslave natives, and Portuguese sugar planters soon turned to import millions of slaves from Africa. Mortality rates for slaves in sugar and gold enterprises were dramatic, and there were often not enough women or proper conditions for the slave population to increase through reproduction, forced or otherwise.
 Still, Africans became a substantial section of the Brazilian population, and long before the end of slavery (1888) they had begun to merge with the European Brazilian population through miscegenation.
During the first 150 years of the colonial period, attracted by the vast natural resources and untapped land, other European powers tried to establish colonies in several parts of Brazilian territory, in defiance of the papal bull ("Inter caetera") and the Treaty of Tordesillas. French colonists tried to settle in present-day Rio de Janeiro, from 1555 to 1567 (the so-called France Antarctique episode), and in present-day São Luís, from 1612 to 1614 (the so-called France Équinoxiale). Jesuits arrived early and established São Paulo, and began evangelizing the natives. These native allies of the Jesuits assisted the Portuguese in driving out the French. The unsuccessful Dutch intrusion into Brazil was longer lasting and more troublesome to Portugal (Dutch Brazil). Dutch privateers began by plundering the coast: they sacked Bahia in 1604, and even temporarily captured the capital Salvador. From 1630 to 1654, the Dutch set up more permanently in the northwest and controlled a long stretch of the coast most accessible to Europe, without, however, penetrating the interior. But the colonists of the Dutch West India Company in Brazil were in a constant state of siege, despite the presence in Recife of John Maurice of Nassau as governor. After several years of open warfare, the Dutch withdrew by 1654. Little French and Dutch cultural and ethnic influences remained from these failed attempts and the Portuguese subsequently defended the Brazilian coastline more vigorously.
Slave rebellions.
Slave rebellions were frequent until the practice of slavery was abolished in 1888. The most famous of the revolts was led by Zumbi dos Palmares. The state he established, named the Quilombo dos Palmares, was a self-sustaining republic of Maroons escaped from the Portuguese settlements in Brazil, and was "a region perhaps the size of Portugal in the hinterland of Pernambuco". At its height, Palmares had a population of over 30,000.
Forced to defend against repeated attacks by Portuguese colonial power, the warriors of Palmares were experts in capoeira, a martial arts form developed in Brazil by African slaves in the 16th century.
An African known only as Zumbi was born free in Palmares in 1655 but was captured by the Portuguese and given to a missionary, Father Antônio Melo when he was approximately 6 years old. Baptized Francisco, Zumbi was taught the sacraments, learned Portuguese and Latin, and helped with daily mass. Despite attempts to "civilize" him, Zumbi escaped in 1670 and, at the age of 15, returned to his birthplace. Zumbi became known for his physical prowess and cunning in battle and was a respected military strategist by the time he was in his early twenties.
By 1678, the governor of the captaincy of Pernambuco, Pedro Almeida, weary of the longstanding conflict with Palmares, approached its leader Ganga Zumba with a peace offering. Almeida offered freedom for all runaway slaves if Palmares would submit to Portuguese authority, a proposal which Ganga Zumba favoured. But Zumbi was distrustful of the Portuguese. Further, he refused to accept freedom for the people of Palmares while other Africans remained enslaved. He rejected Almeida's overture and challenged Ganga Zumba's leadership. Vowing to continue the resistance to Portuguese oppression, Zumbi became the new leader of Palmares.
Fifteen years after Zumbi assumed leadership of Palmares, Portuguese military commanders Domingos Jorge Velho and Vieira de Melo mounted an artillery assault on the quilombo. On February 6, 1694, after 67 years of ceaseless conflict with the cafuzos (Maroons) of Palmares, the Portuguese succeeded in destroying Cerca do Macaco, the republic's central settlement. Palmares' warriors were no match for the Portuguese artillery; the republic fell, and Zumbi was wounded. Though he survived and managed to elude the Portuguese, he was betrayed, captured almost two years later and beheaded on the spot on November 20, 1695. The Portuguese transported Zumbi's head to Recife, where it was displayed in the central praça as proof that, contrary to popular legend among African slaves, Zumbi was not immortal. It was also done as a warning of what would happen to others who attempted rebellion.
Gold and diamond rush.
The discovery of gold in the early eighteenth century was met with great enthusiasm by Portugal, which had been in economic disarray following years of wars against Spain and the Netherlands. A gold rush quickly ensued, with people from other parts of the colony and Portugal flooding the region in the first half of the eighteenth century. The large portion of the Brazilian inland where gold was extracted became known as the Minas Gerais (General Mines). Gold mining in this area became the main economic activity of colonial Brazil during the eighteenth century. In Portugal, the gold was mainly used to pay for industrialized goods (textiles, weapons) obtained from countries such as England and, especially during the reign of King John V, to build Baroque monuments such as the Convent of Mafra. In Brasil it resulted in the emergence of towns and cities that are today UNESCO World Heritage Sites such as Ouro Preto, one of the largest and most populous towns in the Americas during that period, and many other historical towns with significant architecture: Paraty, Olinda, Congonhas, Goiás, Diamantina, Salvador, São Luís, Maranhão, São Francisco Square, Cathedral Basilica of Salvador and Rio de Janeiro.
Minas Gerais was the gold mining centre of Brazil, during the 18th century. Slave labour was generally used for the workforce. The discovery of gold in the area caused a huge influx of European immigrants and the government decided to bring in bureaucrats from Portugal to control operations. They set up numerous bureaucracies, often with conflicting duties and jurisdictions. The officials generally proved unequal to the task of controlling this highly lucrative industry. Following Brazilian independence, the British pursued extensive economic activity in Brazil. In 1830, the Saint John d'El Rey Mining Company, controlled by the British, opened the largest gold mine in Latin America. The British brought in modern management techniques and engineering expertise. Located in Nova Lima, the mine produced ore for 125 years.
Diamond deposits were found near Vila do Príncipe, around the village of Tijuco in the 1720s, and a rush to extract the precious stones ensued, flooding the European market. The Portuguese crown intervened to control production in Diamantina, the Diamond District. A system of bids for the right to extract diamonds was established, but in 1771, it was abolished and the crown retained the monopoly.
Mining stimulated regional growth in southern Brazil, not just from the extraction of gold and diamonds, but also the secondary and tertiary industries that arose to support the central mining operations. More importantly, it stimulated commerce and the development of merchant communities in port cities. Nominally, the Portuguese controlled the trade to Brazil, banning the establishment of productive capacity for goods produced in Portugal. In practice, Portugal was an entrepôt for the import and export of goods from elsewhere, which were then re-exported to Brazil. Direct trade with foreign nations was forbidden, but before the Dutch incursion, much of Brazil's exports were carried in Dutch ships. After the American Revolution, U.S. ships called at Brazilian ports. When the Portuguese monarchy fled Iberia to Brazil in 1808 during the Napoleonic wars, one of the first acts of the monarch was to open Brazilian ports to foreign ships.
Kingdom and Empire of Brazil.
Brazil was one of only three modern states in the Americas to have a monarchy (the other two were Mexico and Haiti)—for almost 90 years.
As the Haitian Revolution for independence against the French crown was taking place in the late 1700s, Brazil, then a colony of Portugal, was also on the verge of starting its own revolution for independence. In the early 1790s, plots to overthrow the Portuguese colonial government flooded the streets of Brazil. Poor whites, a few upper-class whites, freed persons, slaves and mixed-race natives wanted to revolt against the Portuguese crown to abolish slavery, take power from the Catholic Church, end all forms of racial oppression, and establish a new governmental system that provided equal opportunities to all citizens.
Though original plots had