Brazil's Dance With the Devil : Fight for Democracy (9781608464333)

by Zirin, Dave

  In 1500, when Europeanss first arrived, Indigenous cultures comprised more than a hundred language groups. Anthropologists disagree about the size of Brazil’s Indigenous population, but estimates range from five hundred thousand to two million people, with some estimates as high as eight million. These numbers dropped dramatically after the Portuguese conquerors reached their shores. The smallpox and measles that traveled with them thinned the ranks of Indigenous people dramatically. Then there were the more direct means of subjugation. Indigenous tribes who resisted conquest were slaughtered without mercy. While this brutality took place, Portugal’s King Manuel I wrote, “My captain reached a land where he found humans as if in their first innocence mild and peace living.”6

  A land does not plunder itself, however. The Portuguese explorers needed workers and attempted to transition Brazil’s Indigenous population into slave labor. This did not exactly work. Brazil’s tribes were horizontally organized hunter-and-gatherer tribes. They responded to efforts to enslave them and pound work discipline into them by escaping, which they did not find to be especially difficult. They ventured into the interior, deep into the Amazon rain forest, an area that the Portuguese regarded with atavistic fear. Instead, as the saying goes, they “clung like crabs to the coast.”7 This fear of the interior meant lucrative work for specialized trackers who could brave the interior and bring back the body parts of native rebels. For the Indigenous people, thus began a life defined by the inconvenience of their existence. As ­Eduardo Galeano wrote, “Exiled in their own land, condemned to an eternal ­exodus, Latin America’s native peoples were pushed into the poorest areas . . . as the dominant civilization extended its frontiers. The Indians have suffered, and continue to suffer, the curse of their own wealth; that is the drama of all Latin America.”8

  For the Portuguese court and its emissaries, the need for labor became an obsession. It was a question not only of the conquerors’ mission but of their very survival as an impatient, sybaritic Portuguese court awaited its promised riches. The conquerors turned, just as their counterparts in North America would, to Africa and the transatlantic slave trade. While there were strong similarities between the North American slave trade and Brazil’s—not least of which were the identical cruelties of the Middle Passage—we should not be blind to their differences, chiefly those of size and scope.9 It is a fool’s errand to try to quantify the relative inhumanities of different slave trades, yet we can say with confidence that there has never been a slave trade on earth that rivaled the scale as well as the brutality of the slave trade to Brazil and the conditions in which slaves there lived. The trade itself lasted almost three centuries, from 1580 to 1850, and the need for labor was so profound that, by the nineteenth century, African slaves and their descendants made up the majority of the country.

  No country in the Western Hemisphere brought in more slaves than Brazil: estimates start at three and a half million. Half died during the voyage, creating a genocidal situation even beyond that of the United States. Once in the country, the life expectancy of the average slave was eighteen—three to four times less than in the United States. This was linked to both labor conditions and the appalling rates of infant mortality.10 The brutality on display was justified through a series of newly formed ideologies about “inferior” and “infected” races that required subjugation in the name of human progress.11

  The main barrier to genocide was resistance. Slave traders purposefully sought Africans from a variety of tribes and regions and then mixed them so that language barriers would hinder their ability to organize resistance and revolts. Yet the history of resistance is as long as slavery itself. The number-one method of revolt in Brazil was running away in groups and forming autonomous communities, known as quilombos, in the interior. One settlement lasted more than a century, until 1694, when it was conquered by Portuguese security forces.

  This was far more possible in Brazil than in North America; in Brazil, incursions into the interior by settlers were infrequent. Unlike the United States, Brazil also never offered incentives for “settling” Indigenous land to upwardly mobile European indentured servants, making ventures into the Amazon for small-scale farming nearly nonexistent. By 1800, less than 5 percent of Brazil’s land had been conquered by the Portuguese and the rest was home to escaped slaves and the Indigenous population.

  Meanwhile, the developing oligarchy started to systemize what became its recurring pattern of monocultural agriculture, farmed by slaves and located primarily in the northeast of the country. This pattern of jumping from single crop to single crop, draining resources, and then moving on had the awful cost of extreme booms and busts. From 1600 to 1650 the key crop was sugar, which made up 90 to 95 percent of exports. Then in 1690, after gold was discovered in the Minas Gerais and Mato Grosso regions, Brazil went all-in on the mining industry.12

  In the eighteenth century diamonds and gold became the national obsession, once again at an awful human cost. In the diamond and gold mines, under threat of whipping, torture, or death, slaves worked the mines until they died where they stood. This created a greater demand for slave labor, increasing a slave trade that resembled a meat grinder. In the United States, where the primary slave crop was King Cotton, there was a financial incentive to keep slaves alive: they were the most valuable “equipment” in the production process. After the United States banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, creating a sustainable family structure and a religious hierarchy that preached obedience in the slave community was especially important; the slave community had to be stable enough to reproduce its own labor. In Brazil, however, the primary “crops” were diamonds and gold. Sustaining the lives of slaves was secondary to getting as many of the precious stones and minerals out of the ground as humanly possible. If slaves died in the mines, they were dumped and new slaves brought in. That is why the life expectancy of slaves in Brazil was so cruelly brief by comparison to the United States.

  This system generated wealth unlike anything ever seen. Yet, to the gnawing frustration of the settlers, that wealth did not go toward industrializing or modernizing their settlements. It also did not go toward buying new equipment, which would have dramatically cut the death tolls of the slaves in the mines—slaves being a very expensive part of the operation. Instead, the Portuguese royal court poured this unprecedented capital, mined at an unprecedented human cost, into conspicuous consumption. In order to pay off its mounting debts, the Portuguese court also used Brazil like a piggy bank, borrowing money from its treasury or cutting deals on its back. They saw Brazil’s riches in the same way the oligarchs saw African slaves: as disposable, irrelevant, and replaceable. This practice had terrible long-term effects on the country’s development. In 1703, Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty, assuring England a guaranteed place for its goods in Brazil. This calcified the monoculture economies that ensured the boom-bust cycles. Until 1715, the Portuguese royal court banned sugar refineries. In 1729, it was against the law to construct new roads that would facilitate mining. In 1785, if you owned your own spinning mill or loom, you were ordered to burn it or the state would do it for you. Let us be clear about why this was happening: forced industrial underdevelopment. Deliberately stopping Brazil from industrializing ensured that European industry would reign supreme and Brazil would be used almost exclusively as a source of raw material. This also meant that issues like education went unaddressed. Fear of a nonwhite majority and the absence of the need for an educated workforce meant that schooling was not on anyone’s agenda. The Church banned printing presses until 1808. By 1818 only 2.5 percent of adult men had spent time in school.13 Because of this dynamic Brazil was, as Galeano put it, “inexorably condemned to poverty so that foreigners might progress.”14

  The Beginning of the “Mosaic”

  People in the United States are taught to think about race, racism, and what constitutes a “person of color” in a very rigid fashion. It is worth outlining how Brazil’s conceptions of race have historically differe
d from those of the United States. The differences are dramatic, with profound implications for Brazilian social and cultural development. Brazil was predominantly settled by Portuguese men who made the journey across the ocean without wives or children (unlike North America, where settlers often voyaged with their families). As these men built settlements, the question of sex needed answering. The solution was seen as interracial coupling and procreation. In the United States, interracial sexual relations usually involved white settlers raping slaves and Indigenous women or keeping them as mistresses; in extremely rare cases, they built families with women of a different race. Brazil, on the other hand, celebrated the idea of European men procreating with Indigenous women as well as African slaves. This took every possible form, from voluntary marriage to using rape as a tool of social control. “There is no sin below the equator” was a popular saying among settlers.

  These differences shaped how ideas of “race”—and practices of racism—formed in Brazil. Unlike in the United States, where even “one drop” of nonwhite blood consigned you to a lower status, Brazil had a host of color designations. Your color and your parentage, on a sliding scale, determined both status and access to economic opportunity. People designated as mamelucos, caboclos, or mulattoes (meaning mixed European and Indigenous or African heritage) developed a specific status as “intermediaries between whites and Indigenous or slave communities.” As Henry Louis Gates described it, “In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it’s almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.”15 This visible and respected mixing in society, not to mention the minority status of whites, meant that the mixing of African and Indigenous influences, including through music, dance, and sports, was a part of Brazilian culture well before independence.

  Twenty-first-century Brazil chooses to market itself in ways that imply that it has always celebrated African, European, and Indigenous culture in a progressive, beautiful, and even antiracist fashion. As one saying goes, “There are racists in Brazil. But Brazil itself is not racist.” This mirrors the deeply influential work of Gilberto Freyre, whose 1933 book Masters and Slaves described Brazil as a “racial democracy” that would thrive precisely because it would grow to embrace its Indigenous and, particularly, its African heritage. As Freyre said,

  Every Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair-haired one, carries about him on his soul, when not on soul and body alike, the shadow or at least the birthmark of the aborigine or the negro, in our affections, our excessive mimicry, our Catholicism which so delights the senses, our music, our gait, our speech, our cradle songs, in everything that is a sincere expression of our lives, we almost all of us bear the mark of that influence.16

  There was quite a lot of history to overcome to achieve this reality as a “racial democracy.” The formal goal of the Catholic Church, which the Portuguese settlers took to heart, was to wipe out Indigenous culture. Their treatment of African slaves brought the barbarism of the practice to new heights. But because slaves from Africa were rapidly becoming the majority of Brazil’s population, the settlers needed these different racial rules.

  Rumblings of Independence

  Portugal had become dramatically dependent upon Brazil, exhausting its resources to pay the debts of the crown. Among Brazil’s colonists, the belief became widespread that their country only existed to be exploited by European powers. In 1788, the first plot to overthrow the “royal plantation” was led by wealthy landowners who were strongly influenced by the writings of Thomas Jefferson—explicitly because they saw him as a great leader who could preach freedom while practicing slavery. That was a message they could get behind.

  Yet the liberatory language of the struggle, even in a country where less than 3 percent of the population could read, did inspire many more people than just the oligarchs. The Haitian revolution of “Black Jacobins,” in particular, inspired slaves and “mulattoes” to revolt. There were slave revolts in several cities, but the experience of Haiti was not repeated in South America, where escaped or assassinated slaves were just replenished with more imports.17

  Then came a happenstance so bizarre and so seismic that it altered Brazil’s road to independence ineffably: its decolonization efforts against the Portuguese royal court were led by its king.

  In 1808, the royal court of Portugal’s King Dom João VI relocated to Brazil after Napoleon invaded Portugal to rule from exile. In 1822, after the constitutionalist Liberal Revolution in Portugal, João was called to return. Upon leaving Brazil, he told his son Pedro that if he were ever called upon to choose between returning to Portugal and remaining in Brazil, he should choose Brazil and rule this wealthy land as king. In 1822, this came to pass, and on January 9, Pedro made the iconic statement that now symbolizes Brazil’s founding and opens its own Declaration of Independence: “Diga ao povo que fico!” (“Tell the people I’m staying!”) With this, according to national lore, Brazil announced its autonomy. This was an unparalleled moment historically: a monarch would be leading a colony’s movement for independence from what was technically his family’s own monarchy.18

  Brazil was able to establish its independence without a titanic conflict. There was no Bunker Hill, no Valley Forge, no grand battles against Portugal etched into the nation’s psyche. All it required was a series of skirmishes across the coast before a financially overleveraged Portugal finally folded. Independence from Portugal was a victory, but it also cemented the power of the oligarchs. It also did not come without cost. Adding insult to injury, part of the peace treaty required Brazil to assume the debt that Portugal owed England. Portugal had accrued this debt because it needed funds to squelch Brazil’s independence movement. In other words, the Brazilians were paying the British for the arms Portugal had just used against them. In addition, as part of its deal with Portugal, Brazil had to privilege imported British goods with miniscule tariffs, even at the expense of its own domestic goods. Nineteenth-century US ambassador James Watson Webb summed up the two countries’ relationship:

  Britain supplies all the capital needed for internal improvements in Brazil and manufactures all the utensils in common use, from the spade on up, and nearly all the luxury and practical items from the pin to the costliest clothing. British pottery, British articles of glass, iron, or wood are as common as woolens and cotton cloth. Great Britain supplies Brazil with its steam and sailing ships, and paces and repairs its streets, lights its cities with gas, builds its railways, exploits its mines, is its banker, puts up its telegraph wires, carries its mail, builds its furniture, motors, wagons.19

  In addition, Brazil was required to import goods from Great Britain for no other reason than that they were made in Great Britain. The Brazilians were compelled to import wallets even though they possessed no paper money. They were also compelled to import ice skates, which didn’t exactly suit anyone’s needs. And, when visiting, Englishmen could live as imperial supermen, with truly “no sin below the equator”: by law, Brazilian courts had no jurisdiction over anything British citizens did on Brazilian soil. Foreign debt was also beginning to smother Brazil economically. By 1850, debt payments comprised 40 percent of its budget. Most of the nation’s borrowing was going toward building railroads to connect the ports with the centers of production, with scant resources aimed at internal development. This was a situation that can only be described as forced underdevelopment. Brazil had become not only a source of natural resources for industrializing Europe, but also a captive market for their manufactured goods.

  Brazil as a Free State

  Independence did not spark a flowering of education, emancipation, and urbanization, as in some other countries. The country was still ruled by the same monarchy, with the king now magically Brazilian instead of Portuguese. It remained an agricultural, slave-based economy, dominated by large-scale mines and plantations. There were very few artisans and small-scale independent landowners in the new Brazil; the oligarchs made it difficult to do anything other than either work for them or
join the new standing Brazilian army. Beneath the oligarchy, you had a symbolic royal court, an army (with mixed-race officers), Indigenous tribes in the interior, and slaves.

  From the very beginning, there were tensions. The idea that a former colony of Portugal would be led by its royal family was too heavy a contradiction for the country to bear. Dom Pedro I attempted to mediate that by dividing independent Brazil into eighteen provinces, each led by a president—an oligarch—appointed by the king. Pedro was forward-thinking for a royal and had progressive ideas, but, in a twist of fate, the wealth and expanse of the country worked against his family’s rule as the exploding coffee and then rubber trades enriched the oligarchs. Dom Pedro II managed to remain in power until the eventual end of the slave trade also signaled the end of royal rule.

  Slaves were, it was said, “the hands and feet of Brazil.”20 There were sporadic slave uprisings during the nineteenth century, as the memory of the Haitian Revolution lived on in stories of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s victory. These uprisings were squelched with a shocking level of brutality. Torture and mutilation, followed by your head being displayed on a pike as a warning to other slaves, was the punishment for “treason.” 21 In this climate, “runaway slave hunter” became a burgeoning profession. Escaped slaves were hunted by the bandeirantes—their name derived from the fact that they organized themselves as part of a “band” of trackers and killers. Their expeditions were for slaves and gold, depending on which export was the more valuable at any given time. The bandeirantes could be recognized on sight because they were known to wear the ears of those they captured as necklaces.22