A Brief History of Brazil: Sugar, Gold, Empire, and the Unfinished Republic

Companion piece: If I Was Born in Brazil: Warmth, Jeitinho, and the Joy of Community (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way).

On 25 October 2026, an 80-year-old former metalworker who had lost a finger to a factory press as a young man won Brazil's presidency for the fourth time. He had come second in the first round three weeks earlier. The man he beat was the son of a president who was, that same autumn, serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup. The loser refused to concede, flew out of the country and announced himself the "president-elect" from Florida, then deleted the post. His own party recognised the result the next day.

You could read that as chaos. Brazilians mostly read it as a test their institutions passed, again. Either way, none of it makes sense without the five centuries behind it: an economy built on enslaved labour for longer than almost anywhere else in the Americas, a monarchy that survived independence, a republic founded by soldiers, a dictatorship that ended by negotiation rather than collapse, and a constitution written in 1988 by people who had lived through all of that and wanted it never to happen again.

This is that history, told at length.

In this history

1. Before Brazil: the peoples of the land (to 1500)
2. Brazilwood, sugar and slavery (1500–1690)
3. Gold, rebellion and a court in the tropics (1690–1822)
4. An empire in the Americas (1822–1889)
5. The First Republic: coffee, colonels and Canudos (1889–1930)
6. Vargas, Brasília and the road to the coup (1930–1964)
7. The military dictatorship (1964–1985)
8. The New Republic: the 1988 Constitution and the Real (1985–2002)
9. Lula, Dilma and Lava Jato (2003–2018)
10. Bolsonaro, 8 January, and Brazil in 2026 (2018–2026)
11. How to understand Brazil today

Part 1 — Before Brazil: the peoples of the land (to 1500)

Start with the size of the thing. Brazil covers about 8.5 million square kilometres, nearly half of South America. It borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador. Most of its history, though, happened within a few hundred kilometres of the Atlantic, and for a reason worth remembering: for most of the last five centuries, the people who wrote Brazil's history were facing the sea, looking at Europe and Africa. The people who were already there were facing inland.

Humans reached what is now Brazil many thousands of years before any European. The skeleton nicknamed "Luzia", found in the Lapa Vermelha cave in Minas Gerais, belongs to a woman who lived roughly 11,000 years ago or more, and is one of the oldest human remains in the Americas. Some archaeologists argue for much older occupation at sites such as Pedra Furada in Piauí; others think the "tools" there may be broken by nature rather than by hands. That argument is still open.

What is no longer in doubt is that pre-contact Brazil was not an empty forest with a few scattered hunters, as European chroniclers and later Brazilian elites liked to imagine. Along the Amazon, people built large, long-lived settlements. On Marajó Island at the river's mouth, the Marajoara culture raised earth mounds and made elaborately painted pottery for centuries before the Portuguese arrived. Across the basin, archaeologists keep finding terra preta, "black earth": dark, fertile soils deliberately enriched with charcoal, pottery shards and waste. The forest itself, in places, is partly a human garden.

How many people lived there in 1500? Nobody knows, and the estimates are a good lesson in how history handles uncertainty.

Source: Library of Congress, Brazil: A Country Study (1997), summarising the scholarship.

Even the lowest figure is larger than the population of Portugal at the time, which was about a million.

The peoples of the coast were mostly speakers of Tupí–Guaraní languages, who had been migrating along the shore and pushing earlier Gê-speaking peoples inland. Further in lived Gê, Arawak and Carib speakers and many others whose languages belonged to no large family at all. These were not one nation but hundreds of societies: farmers of manioc (cassava), maize, beans and peanuts; fishers; hunters; some semi-nomadic, some settled in villages of several hundred to a few thousand people. Warfare between them was common, and among some Tupí peoples captives taken in war were ritually killed and eaten, a practice that Europeans seized on as a justification for conquest and that modern anthropologists study as part of a whole system of vengeance, honour and kinship.

Source: Library of Congress, Brazil: A Country Study (1997).

The Tupí migration down the coast had set off continual warfare with non-Tupí peoples. As the Library of Congress study notes, the Portuguese, like the Spanish in Mexico and Peru, profited from arriving in the middle of that turmoil: they found allies among some peoples against others, and traded with them for captives.

Much of everyday Brazilian life still comes from these peoples. The national staple of farinha (toasted manioc flour), the hammock, words like jacaré (caiman), mandioca, capim (grass) and thousands of place names (Itaquera, Ipanema, Paraná) are Tupí. So is the very first Brazilian food fusion: Portuguese settlers who survived did so by eating what Indigenous women cooked.

The conquest of Brazil was not the toppling of one empire, as in Mexico or Peru. It was a slow, uneven war against hundreds of separate peoples, fought over centuries and thousands of kilometres.

What happened to them is the first great fact of Brazilian history. European diseases (smallpox, measles, influenza) spread along Indigenous trade routes, often ahead of the Europeans themselves. Enslavement and war did the rest. By the 20th century, the Indigenous population had fallen to a few hundred thousand. It has since recovered: in the 2022 census, about 1.7 million Brazilians identified as Indigenous, and the census before it counted more than 300 peoples speaking more than 270 languages. Their land rights, written into the 1988 Constitution, are one of the hottest political arguments in the country today, as Part 11 explains.

Part 2 — Brazilwood, sugar and slavery (1500–1690)

A line on a map

Brazil was Portuguese before any Portuguese had seen it. In the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, Spain and Portugal divided the non-Christian world along a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Everything east of it went to Portugal. Nobody knew yet that a bulge of South America stuck out across that line.

On 22 April 1500, a thirteen-ship fleet under Pedro Álvares Cabral, bound for India, anchored off the coast of what is now Bahia. Whether Cabral stumbled on Brazil or was quietly aiming for it is an old debate; the evidence does not settle it. His scribe, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, wrote the king a long, curious letter, often called Brazil's birth certificate, describing people who laid down their bows when asked, traded a feathered headdress for a sailor's cap, and watched Mass with interest. The fleet stayed nine days, left two convicts behind to learn the language, and sailed on.

For three decades Lisbon barely cared. India's spices and silks were worth far more than a coast of parrots and naked people. What Brazil did have was a tree: pau-brasil, brazilwood, whose red heartwood made a prized dye for European textiles. The country is named after a commodity. That turns out to be a fitting start.

Captaincies and a capital

By around 1530, French ships were loading brazilwood too, and Portugal faced a choice: occupy the coast or lose it. In 1532 Martim Afonso de Sousa founded São Vicente, the first permanent Portuguese town. In the mid-1530s the crown carved the coast into hereditary "captaincies", strips of land handed to private lords who were supposed to settle them at their own expense. Most failed, through poor management, lack of money, and wars with the peoples whose land it was. Two prospered, São Vicente and Pernambuco, and both did so largely through marriage alliances with Indigenous chiefs' families, which brought food, labour and military allies.

In 1549 the crown took direct control and sent Tomé de Sousa as the first governor-general, with orders to build a capital at Salvador on the Bay of All Saints. With him came the Jesuits. Their mission villages (aldeias) gathered Indigenous people for conversion, and in 1554 one of them, on a plateau above São Vicente, became São Paulo. The Jesuits defended Indigenous people from settlers who wanted to enslave them and, at the same time, broke up their societies and exposed them to epidemics. Both things are true. A wave of smallpox and measles in 1562–63 killed huge numbers in the villages around Bahia, and the famine that followed drove survivors to sell themselves or their children into slavery to eat.

Sugar

The real colony was built on sugar. Sugar cane had been grown with enslaved labour on Portugal's Atlantic islands, and the hot, wet coast of the Northeast suited it perfectly. By 1585 Pernambuco alone had more than sixty mills (engenhos). Sugar made a few planter families extraordinarily rich; there was a saying that Pernambuco had more luxury than Lisbon.

A sugar mill was a factory in the fields. Cane had to be cut and crushed within hours or it spoiled, and the juice boiled down in a chain of copper cauldrons, day and night, through the harvest. It needed a large, disciplined and expendable workforce. Settlers first tried to enslave Indigenous people, who resisted, fled into the interior and died of disease. The planters turned to Africa.

Brazil's colonial economy was, in the historian Caio Prado Júnior's phrase, one vast commercial enterprise, and its engine was enslaved Africans.

The largest slave society in the Americas

Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other place in the world. The numbers come from the SlaveVoyages database, which historians have built voyage by voyage from shipping records over several decades.

Source: SlaveVoyages, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Estimates (accessed 31 October 2026). Estimates, not counts; they are revised as new voyages are documented.

Read that table slowly. More than twelve times as many enslaved Africans landed in Brazil as in what became the United States. Roughly 670,000 people died in transit on ships bound for Brazil alone. And the Brazilian trade did not peak in the colonial era but after independence: between 1801 and 1850, more than two million Africans arrived, more than in any other half-century.

The largest share came from West Central Africa (the coasts of today's Angola and the two Congos), which supplied more captives than any other region to the Atlantic trade as a whole, and many others from the Bight of Benin, especially to Bahia. Portugal held Luanda, and Brazilian merchants ran much of the trade directly, trading tobacco, cachaça and gold for captives without the goods ever touching Portugal. The South Atlantic was, in effect, one economy, with Brazil at one end and Angola at the other.

Life expectancy for enslaved workers on sugar estates was brutally short, and planters often calculated that it was cheaper to buy new captives than to keep people alive and let them raise families. That is part of why the trade had to keep running at such scale. It is also why Brazil's African heritage, from Yoruba religion to the rhythms behind samba, is so deep: it was renewed directly from Africa until 1850.

Resistance: quilombos and Palmares

Enslaved people resisted in every way available: slowing work, sabotage, flight, revolt. Runaways formed communities called quilombos or mocambos in the forests and hills. The largest, Palmares, in the hills of what is now Alagoas, lasted for most of the 17th century, governed by its own leaders; one estimate puts its population around 20,000 in the 1690s, though recent scholarship questions that figure. Portuguese and colonial forces, with Indigenous allies, attacked it repeatedly before overrunning its main settlement in 1694. Its last leader, Zumbi, was killed on 20 November 1695. That date is now Brazil's Black Consciousness Day, a national holiday.

The Dutch interlude

Sugar also attracted rivals. Between 1580 and 1640, Portugal and Spain shared one king, which made Brazil a target for Spain's enemies, above all the Dutch. The Dutch West India Company captured Pernambuco in 1630 and held much of the Northeast until 1654. Under Count Johan Maurits of Nassau (governor 1637–44), Dutch Recife built canals and bridges, tolerated Jews and Catholics alike, and brought painters and naturalists who made some of the first scientific records of Brazilian nature. The Dutch also seized Portuguese slaving ports in Angola. When planters, soldiers, Indigenous allies and Afro-Brazilian fighters finally drove them out, the Dutch took their sugar know-how to the Caribbean, which became a cheaper competitor. Brazilian sugar never fully recovered its dominance.

The bandeirantes

Meanwhile, in São Paulo, a poorer, rougher frontier society was forming, heavily mixed between Portuguese men and Indigenous women and speaking a Tupí-based "general language" more than Portuguese. Its men organised expeditions called bandeiras deep into the interior, hunting Indigenous people to enslave, raiding Jesuit missions in Spanish territory, and searching for gold. São Paulo today celebrates the bandeirantes with statues and highway names; Indigenous and Black activists see them as slave raiders. Both descriptions are accurate, which is why the statues are contested. What is not contested is the result: the bandeiras pushed Portuguese claims far west of the Tordesillas line, and Brazil's eventual borders owe a great deal to them.

Part 3 — Gold, rebellion and a court in the tropics (1690–1822)

The gold rush

Somewhere between 1693 and 1695, Paulista prospectors found gold in the mountains of what became Minas Gerais, "General Mines". It seemed that every stream glittered. Around 1730, diamonds were found further north, near what became Diamantina. The rush that followed was the greatest the world would see until California in 1849.

It pulled Brazil's centre of gravity south. Tens of thousands of fortune-seekers poured in from the Northeast and from Portugal, with enslaved Africans to do the digging. By 1709 there were perhaps 30,000 people in the mining district; tax records for 1735 counted more than 100,000 enslaved people there. Fighting between the Paulista pioneers and the newcomers (the "War of the Emboabas", 1708–09) gave the crown its excuse to take control. In 1763 the colonial capital moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, the port through which the gold flowed out.

The mining towns became something new. Ouro Preto, Mariana and Sabará filled with baroque churches carved and painted by local artists, many of them of mixed African and European descent. The greatest was Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, "the little cripple", whose soapstone prophets at Congonhas are among the masterpieces of colonial American art. Some 3,000 musicians, mostly mulatto, played and composed sacred music in the region in the later 1700s. By 1782, Minas Gerais held about a fifth of Brazil's roughly 1.56 million people.

Where the gold went

Very little of it stayed. In 1703 Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty with England, swapping cheap English woollens for a favourable tariff on Portuguese wine. Brazilian gold went to Lisbon and straight on to pay for English goods. Many historians argue that it helped finance Britain's industrial take-off while Portugal's own industries withered. Some wealth stayed in Brazil in churches, fountains and bridges, but it did not build schools: the crown forbade universities and even printing presses in the colony. Brazil's first universities date only from the 20th century.

From 1750 the Marquis of Pombal, Portugal's reforming chief minister, tried to squeeze more out of the colony and modernise it at once. He created trading monopolies, encouraged new crops, made Portuguese compulsory over the Tupí-based general language, and in 1759 expelled the Jesuits, destroying the colony's best schools in the process. As gold output fell after about 1750, the crown pushed harder, threatening a collective head tax (derrama) to make up the shortfall.

The Minas Conspiracy and Tiradentes

That squeeze produced Brazil's most famous failed rebellion. In 1789 a group of officials, priests, poets, officers and mine owners in Minas Gerais plotted to break with Portugal, inspired partly by the American Revolution. Some had studied at Coimbra; one had sounded out Thomas Jefferson in France. They were betrayed before they acted. Lisbon chose to make an example of only one: a junior officer and part-time dentist, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, nicknamed Tiradentes ("tooth-puller"), who was hanged in Rio on 21 April 1792 and his body quartered.

He might have been forgotten. Instead, 19th-century republicans made him a martyr and a counter-symbol to the monarchy, and after 1889 the republic put his face everywhere. 21 April is a national holiday. The plot itself was, as the Library of Congress's history of Brazil puts it, more a conspiracy of indebted oligarchs than a people's revolution; it proposed freeing only enslaved people born in Brazil, not ending slavery. A more radical plot followed in Salvador in 1798, the "Tailors' Conspiracy", led largely by free and enslaved men of colour who did call for equality. Four of them were hanged. The Haitian Revolution of the 1790s, where enslaved people overthrew their masters, terrified Brazil's elite and made most of them want independence, if at all, without social upheaval.

The court that crossed the ocean

Then history did something it has done nowhere else. In November 1807, as Napoleon's army marched on Lisbon, the Portuguese royal family and court boarded ships under British escort and sailed for Brazil. The prince regent, Dom João, ruling for his mentally ill mother Queen Maria I, brought with him the government, the treasury and thousands of courtiers and officials; the royal library followed. Nearly 10,000 people embarked. They landed in Salvador on 22 January 1808 and went on to Rio de Janeiro, which became the empire's capital.

For the first and only time, a European empire was ruled from one of its colonies.

The effects were immediate. In Salvador, within days of landing, João opened Brazil's ports to friendly nations, ending Portugal's trade monopoly (in practice, opening them to Britain). He founded a national bank, a printing press, a royal library, a botanical garden, military and medical schools and a fine-arts academy. Foreign ships anchoring in Rio rose from 90 in 1808 to 354 in 1820. In 1815 Brazil was raised from colony to kingdom, an equal partner in a "United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves".

Brazil became independent largely because the metropolis had moved in, and then tried to move back out.

When the Portuguese, having driven out the French, demanded their king's return and the colony's demotion, João (now King João VI) sailed home in 1821, leaving his son Pedro as regent. The Lisbon parliament ordered Pedro back too. On 9 January 1822 he refused, with a phrase every Brazilian schoolchild learns: Fico, "I'm staying". On 7 September 1822, by the Ipiranga stream near São Paulo, after receiving more hostile orders from Lisbon, he declared independence. The famous cry was reported as "Independence or death!" He was acclaimed Emperor Pedro I in October and crowned on 1 December 1822.

Independence was not bloodless. Portuguese garrisons fought in Bahia, Maranhão, Pará and the Cisplatine province (today's Uruguay), and Bahia's Independence Day is still 2 July 1823, when the Portuguese left Salvador. But compared with the long, ruinous wars of Spanish America, it was quick, it kept the territory in one piece, and it kept a European royal on the throne. That made Brazil unique in the hemisphere, and conservative in a particular way: the people who ran the colony ran the new country.

Part 4 — An empire in the Americas (1822–1889)

Pedro I and the 1824 Constitution

Pedro I was impulsive, liberal in talk and autocratic in practice. When the constituent assembly drafted a constitution limiting his powers, he dissolved it and imposed his own, in 1824. It lasted 65 years, longer than any Brazilian constitution since. It created an elected parliament with a narrow, income-based franchise, and gave the emperor a "moderating power" above the other three branches, allowing him to dismiss cabinets and dissolve the chamber. The Catholic Church was the state religion.

Pedro lost a war with Buenos Aires over the Cisplatine province (Uruguay became independent in 1828), clashed with parliament, and was distrusted as too Portuguese. In April 1831 he abdicated in favour of his five-year-old son and sailed to Portugal, where he fought and won a civil war to put his daughter on that throne.

The Regency: the empire nearly breaks

The nine years of regency that followed were the most dangerous in the country's history. With no adult emperor, provincial elites, the urban poor and the enslaved all tested the centre.

The government responded with force and, in 1840, with a constitutional shortcut: parliament declared the 14-year-old Pedro II of age. It worked. He reigned for 49 years.

Pedro II and the coffee empire

Pedro II was studious, cautious and genuinely interested in science and the arts; he was Brazil's first photographer, spoke several languages, and counted Louis Pasteur, Richard Wagner and Alexander Graham Bell among his correspondents. Under him, a stable two-party parliamentary system emerged, Conservatives and Liberals rotating in office as the emperor dismissed one cabinet and called the other. Critics noted that elections reliably produced whatever result the government wanted.

The economy ran on a new crop. Coffee spread from the hills around Rio into the Paraíba Valley and then onto the red soils of São Paulo. Coffee shipments along one route from Minas to Rio rose from 2 tonnes in 1792 to about 82,000 tonnes in 1850. By the 1840s coffee was half of Brazil's exports, and by the 1870s close to 60 percent. And coffee, like sugar before it, was grown by enslaved people. The 1850 Land Law, which ended the old ways of acquiring land by squatting or royal grant and required purchase, kept the frontier in the hands of those who already had money, a pattern that shaped Brazilian landholding to this day.

The Paraguayan War

The empire's great war was fought against Paraguay from 1864 to 1870, alongside Argentina and Uruguay. After Brazil intervened in Uruguay's civil war, Paraguay's ruler, Francisco Solano López, invaded Brazilian and then Argentine territory; the allies took five years to defeat him. Paraguay was devastated: scholarly estimates of its losses range from under a tenth to more than two-thirds of its pre-war population, and historians still argue over the figures. Brazil lost tens of thousands of men, many from disease. The war mattered at home for two reasons. It created a large, self-confident army that would soon see itself as the nation's guardian. And it put enslaved men in uniform: some were freed to fight, which made it harder to argue that Black Brazilians were fit to die for the country but not to be free in it.

The slowest abolition

Britain had been pressing Brazil to end the slave trade since independence. A law of 1831 declared it illegal; it was so openly ignored that "for the English to see" (para inglês ver) became a Brazilian phrase for laws made for show. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were imported illegally after it. Only in 1850, under British naval pressure, did the Eusébio de Queirós law actually stop the trade.

Slavery itself took 38 more years to die, in stages:

By the 1880s abolition had become a mass movement, with lawyers like Luís Gama (himself sold into slavery as a child), journalists like José do Patrocínio, the politician Joaquim Nabuco, and above all enslaved people themselves, who fled plantations in such numbers that the system was collapsing. The army refused to hunt runaways. Princess Isabel, regent while her father was abroad, signed the two-article law. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery.

The Golden Law has only two articles. The first declares slavery extinct. The second revokes anything to the contrary. There is no third article about land, schools or wages.

That silence matters. Freed people received nothing. Within a few years the state was paying to bring European immigrants to work the coffee farms instead, partly from an explicit belief that they would "whiten" the population. Many freed families moved to the edges of cities, into the hillside settlements that would become favelas. Historians on all sides agree that much of Brazil's racial inequality today runs straight back to the way abolition was done.

The fall of the monarchy

The empire outlived slavery by eighteen months. It had lost the support of the planters, who felt betrayed by uncompensated abolition; of the Church, after a quarrel over Freemasonry; and of the army, whose officers, many influenced by the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, despised the civilian politicians. On 15 November 1889, Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca led troops in Rio in a coup that proclaimed a republic. There was almost no fighting and little popular involvement; a famous contemporary remark had the people of Rio watching "bestialized", not understanding what was happening. Pedro II went into exile in France, where he died in 1891.

Part 5 — The First Republic: coffee, colonels and Canudos (1889–1930)

A republic of the states

The 1891 Constitution, modelled on the United States, created a federal republic, separated church and state, and gave the states wide powers, including their own militias and the right to borrow abroad. It also dropped the income requirement for voting but kept a literacy requirement, which in a country where most adults could not read excluded the majority. Turnout in presidential elections was a few percent of the population.

After two military presidents, civilian rule settled into what Brazilians call the café com leite ("coffee with milk") arrangement: the presidency rotated, mostly, between the coffee state of São Paulo and the dairy-and-coffee state of Minas Gerais. In the countryside, local bosses called coronéis ("colonels", from old militia titles) delivered their dependants' votes to the state governor in exchange for patronage, and governors delivered their states to the president. Ballots were open; fraud was routine.

Canudos

The republic's founding trauma came from the backlands of Bahia. In the 1890s a wandering lay preacher, Antônio Conselheiro, gathered thousands of poor followers at a settlement called Canudos, which grew into one of the largest towns in the state. Republican politicians in Rio, seeing monarchist plots everywhere, sent expedition after expedition against it. The first three were defeated. The fourth, in 1897, used thousands of soldiers and artillery and destroyed the town completely, by then home to perhaps 30,000 people; many prisoners had their throats cut. Estimates of the dead vary widely. The journalist Euclides da Cunha, who covered the campaign, put the toll at about 30,000, attackers included, and wrote Os Sertões (1902; in English Rebellion in the Backlands), which began as a celebration of the republic's civilising army and ended as an indictment of it. It is still one of the essential Brazilian books, and its most famous line is a tribute to the people the army had come to destroy:

"The man of the backlands is, above all, a strong man." — Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões (1902)

Immigration and the coffee economy

The republic was built on coffee, and coffee on immigrants. São Paulo subsidised the passage of millions of Europeans, above all Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards, and from 1908 Japanese, who now form the largest Japanese-descended community outside Japan. Germans and Italians settled the southern states. Arabic-speaking Christians from Ottoman Syria and Lebanon became merchants across the country. São Paulo grew from a provincial town into an industrial city, and the first factories, mostly textiles and food, brought the first strikes, led largely by Italian and Spanish anarchists; a general strike in São Paulo in 1917 shut the city down.

Brazil was also the world's coffee. By the early 20th century it supplied most of the planet's coffee, and the government repeatedly bought and stored surplus beans to hold up the price. Meanwhile the Amazon had a boom of its own: rubber, tapped by migrant workers from the drought-stricken Northeast under conditions close to debt slavery, made Manaus rich enough to build an opera house in the jungle. Then rubber grown from smuggled Brazilian seeds in British Malaya undercut it, and the Amazon boom collapsed in the 1910s.

Source: Library of Congress, Brazil: A Country Study (1997).

Restless cities and young officers

Rio de Janeiro, the capital, was rebuilt on Parisian lines in the 1900s, with tenements torn down and the poor pushed uphill. A compulsory smallpox vaccination campaign in 1904, carried out with heavy-handed inspections of homes, set off the "Vaccine Revolt", days of rioting. In 1910 sailors, mostly Black and mixed-race, mutinied against the navy's use of the whip, in the "Revolt of the Lash", and won its abolition before many were later killed or imprisoned.

In 1922, the centenary of independence, two things happened that pointed to the future. In São Paulo, a Week of Modern Art announced a new Brazilian culture that would "devour" European influences and make something its own (the poet Oswald de Andrade later called it "cannibalism"). In Rio, young army lieutenants (tenentes) rose against the oligarchic republic and were crushed. Their movement continued through the 1920s, including the Prestes Column, which marched some 25,000 kilometres through the interior between 1925 and 1927 without being defeated or winning over the peasantry. Its leader, Luís Carlos Prestes, would become head of the Communist Party.

The Great Depression broke the system. The price of coffee collapsed in 1929. When the outgoing president, a Paulista, broke the rotation by backing another Paulista in the 1930 election, the losing candidate, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, rose in revolt with the backing of Minas Gerais and the young officers. His name was Getúlio Vargas.

Part 6 — Vargas, Brasília and the road to the coup (1930–1964)

No one has shaped modern Brazil more than Getúlio Vargas, and no one is harder to sum up. He ruled for 15 years as a provisional president and then a dictator, came back for nearly four more as an elected one, and left office by shooting himself in the heart. He was a gaúcho rancher-lawyer from the far south who created the Brazilian welfare state, and a dictator who jailed and tortured opponents. Brazilians still argue about which of those is the real Vargas. The answer is both.

From revolution to dictatorship

The "Revolution of 1930" put Vargas in power as provisional president. He replaced elected governors with appointed "interventors", started building a national state on top of the old federation, and in 1932 issued an electoral code with the secret ballot and votes for women, among the earlier such reforms in Latin America. That same year São Paulo rose in the "Constitutionalist Revolution" demanding a return to constitutional rule; it was defeated militarily after about three months, but a new constitution followed in 1934.

Politics then polarised between a communist-led front and the Integralistas, Brazil's green-shirted fascist movement. A failed communist uprising in 1935 gave Vargas the pretext for emergency rule. In November 1937, citing a supposed communist plot (the "Cohen Plan", later shown to have been forged), he closed Congress and declared the Estado Novo, the "New State", with a constitution modelled partly on authoritarian European ones. Political parties were banned. The press was censored by a Department of Press and Propaganda. The political police imprisoned and tortured communists and others; the German-born communist Olga Benário, Prestes's partner, was deported, pregnant, to Nazi Germany, where she was killed in 1942.

The father of the poor

The same regime built the institutions that still define work in Brazil. It created a Ministry of Labour, a minimum wage (1940), labour courts, state-recognised unions under government tutelage, pensions for many urban workers, and in 1943 the Consolidation of Labour Laws (CLT), a labour code that still governs formal employment. A carteira de trabalho, the worker's booklet stamped with each job, became for millions the document that made them full citizens. Rural workers, the majority, were left out.

Vargas also built a national economy: a state steel mill at Volta Redonda, financed with US help in exchange for Brazil joining the Allies, a national oil council, and a determined push for industry. He built national culture too, with radio, the promotion of samba and carnival as national symbols, and football as a national passion. His propaganda called him the pai dos pobres, "father of the poor", and many poor Brazilians agreed.

War, fall and return

Brazil was the only Latin American country to send ground troops to fight in the Second World War. After German submarines sank Brazilian ships, Brazil declared war in 1942, and a Brazilian Expeditionary Force of about 25,000 fought in Italy in 1944–45. The contradiction was obvious: soldiers sent to fight dictatorship in Europe came home to one. In October 1945 the army removed Vargas.

He came back. Elected president by a large margin in 1950, he governed as a nationalist and labour champion. "The oil is ours" (O petróleo é nosso) became a mass slogan, and in 1953 he created Petrobras as a state monopoly. But inflation, a fierce opposition press led by the journalist Carlos Lacerda, and a scandal in which Vargas's bodyguard organised an attempt on Lacerda's life that killed an air force major brought the military to demand his resignation. On the morning of 24 August 1954, Vargas shot himself in his bedroom in the Catete Palace. He left a letter accusing foreign interests and domestic enemies, ending with a line Brazilians still quote:

"I leave life to enter history." — Getúlio Vargas, farewell letter, 24 August 1954

The suicide turned public anger against his enemies and made his successors' path harder. It also froze Brazilian politics into a shape that lasted decades: for or against Vargas's legacy of a strong state, labour rights and economic nationalism.

Fifty years in five: Juscelino and the new capital

The democratic republic of 1946–64 is often remembered through one man and one city. Juscelino Kubitschek, a doctor and governor of Minas Gerais, was elected president in 1955 promising "fifty years of progress in five". His Target Plan poured money into roads, power plants and industry, and invited foreign carmakers to build factories around São Paulo. Volkswagen Beetles rolled off Brazilian lines. The economy grew fast.

And he built a capital. Moving the capital inland had been proposed since the 19th century and written into the 1891 Constitution. Kubitschek did it in under four years. The urban planner Lúcio Costa designed a city shaped like an aeroplane or a bird, with government in the "body" and housing superblocks along the "wings"; the architect Oscar Niemeyer designed its white, curving modernist buildings; the landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx did the gardens. Brasília was inaugurated on 21 April 1960, Tiradentes Day, on what had been empty savanna.

Brasília was a statement that Brazil would stop facing the sea and start facing its own interior. The bill was paid in inflation and foreign debt.

The construction workers, mostly migrants from the Northeast called candangos, were not part of the plan; they settled in satellite towns outside it, which today hold most of the Federal District's people. The cost fed inflation and debt that the next governments inherited.

The 1950s also gave Brazil a new image of itself. Brazil won its first football World Cup in Sweden in 1958, with a 17-year-old Pelé. Bossa nova, born in Rio's beach neighbourhoods with João Gilberto's guitar and Antônio Carlos Jobim's songs, went round the world. The film movement Cinema Novo began to film the poor Northeast with a hard, political eye. For a few years Brazil seemed to be inventing modernity on its own terms.

Crisis and coup

The next two presidencies collapsed. Jânio Quadros, elected in 1960 on an anti-corruption platform with a broom as his symbol, resigned after less than seven months in August 1961, apparently hoping to be begged to return with greater powers. He was not. The military tried to block his vice-president, João Goulart ("Jango"), a Vargas protégé they considered a leftist. A compromise let Goulart take office under a hastily created parliamentary system, which a 1963 referendum abolished.

Goulart governed amid high inflation, a slowing economy and the Cold War, months after the Cuban Revolution had alarmed Washington and Latin America's right. He pushed "base reforms": land reform, votes for illiterate people and enlisted soldiers, controls on foreign profits. Peasant leagues in the Northeast were occupying land; sergeants and sailors were organising. On the right, conservatives, much of the Catholic middle class, business leaders and most of the press feared a communist takeover; in March 1964 hundreds of thousands marched in São Paulo in a "March of the Family with God for Liberty". On the left, Goulart's allies believed the reforms were long overdue and that he was being blocked by the same elite that had blocked every reform since abolition.

On 31 March 1964 troops moved from Minas Gerais toward Rio, and within two days Goulart's government fell. He went into exile in Uruguay. The United States, which had funded opposition groups, recognised the new government almost immediately and had prepared naval support ("Operation Brother Sam") in case of civil war; declassified documents released decades later confirmed this. Whether the coup was a defensive move against an imminent left-wing takeover, as its supporters said, or a pre-emptive strike against democratic reform, as its opponents said, is still argued. What came next is not in dispute.

Part 7 — The military dictatorship (1964–1985)

Many of the civilians who backed the coup expected a short intervention and elections in 1965. They got 21 years of military rule.

How the regime worked

Brazil's dictatorship was unusual in keeping a façade of constitutional government. Congress usually stayed open, with two permitted parties: the pro-government ARENA and the tolerated opposition MDB (Brazilians joked they were the parties of "Yes" and "Yes, sir"). Generals took turns as president, chosen by the high command and ratified by a Congress purged of opponents. The regime ruled through "Institutional Acts" that overrode the constitution, stripped politicians of their rights, and dissolved the old parties.

The turning point was Institutional Act No. 5, decreed on 13 December 1968 after a year of student protests and strikes. AI-5 closed Congress, suspended habeas corpus for political crimes, imposed censorship and gave the president near-unlimited power. Some on the left had already turned to armed struggle, with urban guerrilla groups robbing banks and, in 1969, kidnapping the US ambassador to exchange him for political prisoners. The regime's answer was a system of repression in which torture became routine.

The "miracle"

At the same time, the economy boomed. From 1968 to 1973 growth averaged more than 10 percent a year, peaking above 12 percent, driven by state investment, foreign borrowing and industry. Brazil built giant dams, highways into the Amazon, a nuclear programme, and a car industry. In 1970 it won its third World Cup with what many consider the greatest team ever, and the regime's propaganda rode the victory ("Brazil: love it or leave it").

The miracle had costs that the propaganda left out. Wages for the poorest fell behind; inequality widened sharply. The finance minister, Antônio Delfim Netto, was paraphrased as saying the cake had to grow before it could be shared. And it was financed by debt. When the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 and soaring US interest rates hit, Brazil was left with one of the developing world's largest foreign debts, and the 1980s became a "lost decade" of stagnation and spiralling inflation.

What the Truth Commission found

For decades the regime's defenders described repression as limited excesses against armed terrorists. In 2012, under President Dilma Rousseff (herself a former guerrilla who had been tortured), Brazil created a National Truth Commission (Comissão Nacional da Verdade, CNV). It delivered its final report on 10 December 2014. Its findings are the most authoritative official account:

Source: CNV, Relatório, vol. I, ch. 18 (conclusions), and vol. II, text 5 (2014).

The commission stressed that 434 is not the total, only the number it could prove, given that the armed forces said their records had been destroyed. It also found that violence against peasants and Indigenous peoples, largely in the countryside, had produced far more victims than the urban political cases. Many thousands of Brazilians were detained, and many of them were tortured; thousands went into exile, among them future presidents and ministers. Compared with neighbouring Argentina, where the dictatorship's victims number in the many thousands (see A Brief History of Argentina in this series), the number of political killings in Brazil was smaller; the system of torture was not.

"The repression and elimination of political opponents became state policy." — National Truth Commission, final report, vol. I (2014)

The CNV's conclusions remain contested by some former officers and many on the right, who emphasise the guerrillas' violence and regard the 1979 Amnesty Law as a settled bargain. That law, which pardoned political crimes by both sides, still blocks almost all prosecution of state agents; Brazil's Supreme Court upheld it in 2010, even as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled the same year that it could not bar investigation of grave violations.

The negotiated exit

Opening came from inside the regime, under pressure from outside it. President Ernesto Geisel began a "slow, gradual and safe" political opening and revoked AI-5 at the end of 1978, while hardliners resisted with bombings and murders. In 1975 the journalist Vladimir Herzog died in an army intelligence centre in São Paulo; the official story of suicide was disbelieved, and an ecumenical service in his memory became one of the first mass acts of protest.

The opposition grew through the cracks. Metalworkers in the industrial suburbs south of São Paulo, the "ABC" region, staged huge strikes from 1978, led by a union leader from Pernambuco named Luiz Inácio da Silva, known as Lula. In 1979 the Amnesty Law let exiles return. In 1980 Lula and others founded the Workers' Party (PT). In 1984 millions filled the streets for Diretas Já ("Direct elections now"), the largest demonstrations in Brazilian history to that point. The constitutional amendment they demanded failed in Congress. But in January 1985 the regime's own electoral college chose an opposition politician, Tancredo Neves, as president. Then, on the eve of his inauguration, he fell ill. He died on 21 April 1985 without taking office. His vice-president, José Sarney, a former regime ally, became the first civilian president in 21 years.

Part 8 — The New Republic: the 1988 Constitution and the Real (1985–2002)

The Citizens' Constitution

The defining act of the new democracy was a constitution. A Constituent Assembly, elected in 1986, worked for 20 months, under intense lobbying from every group in the country, and promulgated the new text on 5 October 1988. Its president, Ulysses Guimarães, called it the "Citizens' Constitution". It is long, detailed and ambitious:

• Direct elections for president, votes for illiterate people and optional voting from age 16.
• Racism defined as a crime without bail or statute of limitations, and torture as a crime without bail or amnesty.
• Health as a "right of all and a duty of the state", creating the Unified Health System (SUS), today one of the largest public health systems in the world, free at the point of use.
• Indigenous peoples' "original rights" to the lands they traditionally occupy, and a duty on the state to demarcate them; land titles for the descendants of quilombos.
• A powerful, independent Public Prosecutor's Office (Ministério Público), a strong Supreme Court and electoral courts.
• Pensions and social-security rights, extended to rural workers, written into the constitution itself.

Its defenders see it as the foundation of everything Brazil got right after 1988: falling poverty, universal health care, the resilience of elections. Its critics argue that it locked so many spending commitments and special interests into the constitution that Brazil became hard to govern without constant amendment (it has been amended well over a hundred times) and that it baked in fiscal problems. Both are serious arguments.

Hyperinflation

What ordinary Brazilians remember about the late 1980s and early 1990s is prices. Inflation had been high for decades; by the late 1980s it was out of control. Shops relabelled goods daily, sometimes twice a day. People were paid and rushed to the supermarket the same afternoon. Anyone with a bank account kept money in overnight indexed deposits; the poor, who did not, lost the most. Five currencies came and went between 1986 and 1994. Annual consumer inflation exceeded 2,000 percent in 1993.

Plan after plan failed. Sarney's Cruzado Plan (1986) froze prices, briefly made him the most popular man in Brazil, and then collapsed into shortages. Fernando Collor de Mello, a young governor elected in 1989 in the first direct presidential vote since 1960 (narrowly beating Lula), took office in March 1990 with inflation running at about 90 percent a month and on his first day froze every bank account above 50,000 cruzeiros, then about US$500. It wrecked his credibility without ending inflation. In May 1992 his own brother, Pedro Collor, accused him of condoning an influence-peddling scheme run by his campaign treasurer, Paulo César Farias; students with painted faces filled the streets, and the Chamber voted to impeach him. He resigned in December 1992 as the Senate was trying him. The process was messy but constitutional, and it set a precedent.

The Real Plan

The fix came, unusually, from a team of economists working for Collor's vice-president and successor, Itamar Franco, under his finance minister, the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The trick was psychological as much as economic. From March 1994, prices and wages were expressed in a virtual unit, the URV, that tracked inflation daily, while people kept using the old money. The URV was set at roughly one US dollar, so for four months Brazilians saw two prices on every label: one in cruzeiros reais that rose every day, and one in URVs that stayed still. Once everyone was thinking in URVs, on 1 July 1994 the URV became a new currency: the real. People already trusted the number that did not move. The poor felt the difference first: they had never had indexed bank accounts to shelter them, so for millions the end of runaway prices worked like the largest pay rise of their lives. Combined with high interest rates, an open economy and later a commitment to fiscal discipline, it worked.

The Real Plan changed what people expected before it changed the money in their pockets. That was its genius.

Sources: IBGE IPCA series as reported by Brazil's Central Bank and Agência Brasil; figures rounded.

Cardoso rode the success to two presidential victories, in 1994 and 1998 (a constitutional amendment allowed re-election). His governments privatised steel, mining (including the giant Vale do Rio Doce), telecoms and much of the electricity sector, created independent regulators, passed a Fiscal Responsibility Law in 2000, and introduced the first targeted cash-transfer programmes. Supporters credit him with building the macroeconomic foundations that every later government relied on. Critics on the left accused him of selling public assets cheaply and keeping interest rates crippling; the 1999 currency crisis, which forced a devaluation, and slow growth made him unpopular by the end.

Part 9 — Lula, Dilma and Lava Jato (2003–2018)

This is the most contested stretch of recent Brazilian history, and it is impossible to tell in a way that pleases everyone. What follows tries to set out what is established, then the main competing readings.

The Lula years

On his fourth attempt, Lula won the 2002 election with 61.3 percent of the valid vote in the runoff, still the largest share of any president since 1989. A metalworker who had left school early, trained as a lathe operator, lost a finger in a factory accident and known hunger as a child became president of one of the world's ten largest economies. To markets' surprise, he kept Cardoso's macroeconomic framework: an inflation target, a floating currency, primary budget surpluses.

Inside that framework, his governments did three things that changed millions of lives. They merged earlier programmes into Bolsa Família, a cash transfer paid mainly to mothers on condition that children attend school and get vaccinated, which by the end of the decade reached about a quarter of the population at a cost of around half a percent of GDP. They raised the minimum wage well above inflation year after year. And credit, formal jobs and a commodity boom driven by China's demand for iron ore and soya lifted tens of millions into what Brazilians call the "new middle class". Extreme poverty fell sharply, and in 2014 Brazil was taken off the UN's Hunger Map for the first time (it fell back on, and left again in 2025). Lula left office in 2010 with approval near 83 percent.

There was another side. In 2005 the Mensalão scandal revealed that the PT's operation had paid monthly sums to allied congressmen for votes. Lula said he had not known; his chief of staff and others were eventually convicted by the Supreme Court. Critics on the right saw proof that the PT had captured the state; critics on the left saw a party that had adopted the old methods of Brazilian politics to govern in a fragmented Congress.

Dilma, the streets and the recession

Lula's chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, an economist and former guerrilla, won in 2010 and narrowly again in 2014. Her first term coincided with the end of the commodity boom. Her government expanded state lending, cut energy prices by decree and tried to push down interest rates. In June 2013, protests that began over a bus-fare increase in São Paulo exploded into nationwide demonstrations, by some counts more than a million people on a single night, against corruption, poor public services and the cost of the 2014 World Cup.

Then the economy fell off a cliff. Brazil's GDP shrank by around 3.5 percent in both 2015 and 2016, one of the worst recessions in its history. Unemployment nearly doubled. Defenders of Rousseff blame the commodity collapse and a hostile Congress that blocked her adjustment; critics blame her own interventionist policies and budget manipulation.

Lava Jato

In March 2014, federal police investigating a money-laundering operation at a petrol station and car wash in Brasília pulled a thread that led to Petrobras. Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) uncovered a cartel of construction companies that had paid bribes to Petrobras executives and to politicians from many parties, including the PT, its coalition partners and the opposition, in exchange for inflated contracts. It became one of the largest anti-corruption investigations in the world, spreading across Latin America after the construction giant Odebrecht admitted to paying bribes in a dozen countries. Hundreds of people were charged; billions of reais were recovered; senior executives and politicians went to prison. The investigating judge in Curitiba, Sérgio Moro, became a national hero to many.

The impeachment

In this atmosphere, Congress impeached Dilma Rousseff. The formal charge was not personal corruption, of which she was never accused, but fiscal manoeuvres: delaying payments to state banks to make the budget look better (pedaladas fiscais) and issuing spending decrees without congressional approval. On 31 August 2016 the Senate removed her by 61 votes to 20. Her vice-president, Michel Temer of the MDB, took over and pushed through a constitutional cap on federal spending and a labour reform.

To her supporters, the impeachment was a parliamentary coup dressed in accounting language. To her opponents, it was the constitution working against a government that had broken fiscal law and lost all support. Both camps still use those words.

The Lula case

In July 2017 Moro convicted Lula of corruption and money laundering, finding that a construction company had reserved and refurbished a seaside apartment for him in exchange for contracts. An appeals court upheld and increased the sentence, and in April 2018 Lula went to prison in Curitiba, where he spent 580 days. As a convicted person he was barred from the 2018 election, in which he had been leading the polls.

Then the case unravelled. In 2019 The Intercept Brasil published leaked messages showing Moro advising prosecutors on strategy, which is incompatible with a judge's role. Moro had by then become justice minister in the government of the man who won the 2018 election. Lula was released in November 2019 after the Supreme Court ruled that sentences could not be served before all appeals were exhausted. In March 2021 a Supreme Court justice annulled his convictions on the ground that the Curitiba court had never had jurisdiction, and the court later ruled that Moro had been biased. Lula's political rights were restored. Note what this means: the courts did not declare Lula innocent; they declared his trials invalid, and the cases were not retried.

Lava Jato's legacy is a live argument. For its defenders, it was the first time Brazil's powerful were held to account, and it was dismantled by the political class it threatened. For its critics, including many jurists who are not on the left, it became a political project that broke rules, used pre-trial detention to extract plea bargains, damaged major companies and helped elect a far-right president, whose justice minister its judge became. Both accounts rely on real facts.

Part 10 — Bolsonaro, 8 January, and Brazil in 2026 (2018–2026)

The outsider

Jair Bolsonaro was a former army captain who had spent nearly three decades as a backbench congressman, known mainly for defending the dictatorship and for provocative remarks about women, gay people and Indigenous Brazilians. In 2018, amid recession, Lava Jato, record violence and fury at the political class, he ran as the anti-system candidate. He was stabbed at a campaign rally in September and nearly died, and campaigned largely from hospital and social media. He won the runoff with 55.1 percent.

His supporters saw a plain-spoken patriot who defended family, faith, gun ownership and free enterprise against a corrupt left. His government passed a long-blocked pension reform in 2019, granted the central bank formal independence and pursued deregulation. Evangelical Christians, now more than a quarter of the population, were central to his coalition.

His critics saw an authoritarian who praised torturers, attacked journalists and the courts and undermined environmental enforcement. Amazon deforestation rose sharply on his watch. His handling of COVID-19, in which he dismissed the virus as a "little flu", promoted unproven drugs and resisted vaccines, became the main charge against him: Brazil recorded more than 700,000 COVID deaths, among the highest totals in the world, and a Senate inquiry in 2021 recommended charges against him.

The 2022 election and 8 January 2023

In the 2022 runoff Lula, now free to run, beat Bolsonaro with 50.9 percent, the narrowest margin since redemocratisation. Bolsonaro had spent months claiming without evidence that Brazil's electronic voting machines could be rigged. He never clearly conceded. His supporters blocked highways and camped outside army barracks, calling for the military to intervene.

On Sunday 8 January 2023, a week after Lula's inauguration, thousands of them marched on Brasília's Three Powers Square and stormed and ransacked the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace, smashing windows, artworks and furniture. Security forces regained control the same day; more than a thousand people were detained. The attack was widely compared to the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol.

In June 2023 the Superior Electoral Court barred Bolsonaro from running for office until 2030 for abusing his power by attacking the voting system before ambassadors. Federal police investigations then went further, alleging an organised plot, involving senior officers, to keep him in power after his defeat. On 11 September 2025 the Supreme Court convicted Bolsonaro of leading an attempted coup and sentenced him to 27 years and 3 months in prison. It was the first time a former Brazilian president, or the military officers convicted with him, had been punished for trying to overthrow democracy. His supporters called it political persecution by a Supreme Court that had become too powerful; his opponents called it the moment Brazil finally broke its habit of amnesty for coups. That argument continues.

Lula's third term

Lula's third government (2023–2026) restored and expanded Bolsa Família, relaunched housing and infrastructure programmes, oversaw a steep fall in Amazon deforestation (satellite alerts for August 2025–July 2026 were the lowest since that series began in 2016, according to the space agency INPE), hosted the UN climate conference COP30 in Belém in November 2025, and faced a hostile, conservative-leaning Congress. It also faced Washington: in 2025 the US administration imposed tariffs of up to 50 percent on many Brazilian goods, explicitly linking them to Bolsonaro's prosecution, which Lula's government denounced as interference.

Where things stood in late October 2026, by the numbers:

The criticism of Lula's economics from investors and the centre-right is that it has kept growth going on public spending and credit while debt rises and interest rates stay among the highest in the world; the defence is that record employment and falling inequality show the strategy working for ordinary people. Growth forecasts for 2026 were being cut toward 1.5–2 percent.

The 2026 election

In the first round on 4 October 2026, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair's eldest son and his endorsed heir, finished ahead of Lula, and no candidate who had come second in a first round had ever won a runoff since 1989. In the runoff on 25 October, Lula came from behind and won with 51.8 percent of the valid vote, 64.3 million votes, the most any candidate has ever received in Brazil. Turnout rose between rounds, and abstention was the lowest in two decades. He became the first person elected president of Brazil four times, and the first to win a runoff after finishing second in the first round. Flávio Bolsonaro took 48.2 percent.

Election day was messy. Transport shortages in several states led a Supreme Court justice to extend voting until 7 p.m. at stations still open, at the request of both campaigns. Flávio Bolsonaro cited the extension to refuse to concede and demand annulment, though the electoral court counted fewer than 35,000 votes cast after the normal closing time, against a margin of more than 4.4 million. His own Liberal Party, his campaign coordinator, the governor of São Paulo and the main centre-right parties all recognised the result within days. He then left Brazil, reaching Florida, and briefly proclaimed himself "president-elect" on social media before editing the post.

Lula's fourth term begins on 5 January 2027, under a constitutional amendment that moved the inauguration from New Year's Day. He will be 81.

All 2026 facts in this part come from Agência Brasil, the Buenos Aires Times and the official figures they report, dated 13–31 October 2026. Brazil's story is moving fast; check the latest before quoting any of it.

Part 11 — How to understand Brazil today

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. The shadow of slavery is long, and recent. Brazil imported nearly half of all the Africans who survived the Atlantic crossing, kept slavery until 1888, freed people without land or schooling, and then subsidised European immigrants to replace them. More than half of Brazilians now identify as Black (preto) or mixed (pardo). The gaps in income, schooling, policing and political representation between them and white Brazilians are documented in every census. The old national story of "racial democracy", popularised from the 1930s by the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, celebrated real mixture and real cultural fusion; the data show it was never an equality of outcomes. Since the 2000s Brazil has adopted racial quotas in universities and public jobs, a policy its supporters credit with transforming who goes to university and its critics argue sorts a mixed people into rigid categories.

2. Land is still the deepest argument. From the captaincies to the 1850 Land Law to today's soy and cattle frontier, Brazilian land has been concentrated in few hands. The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) occupies unproductive estates to demand redistribution; agribusiness, which produces a large share of exports and is backed by one of Congress's strongest lobbies, defends property rights and productivity. Indigenous land demarcation sits at the same fault line: one side sees constitutional rights and the protection of the forest; the other sees vast areas closed to farming and mining. The Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly clashed over where to draw the line.

3. The state is both mother and obstacle. Vargas's labour laws, Petrobras, the SUS, Bolsa Família and public universities are cherished by millions. So is the complaint that the state is expensive, slow and captured by insiders: the endless bureaucracy that the jeitinho (the creative workaround) exists to get round. Every Brazilian election since 1950 has been in some way a vote about how big that state should be.

4. The military and the courts are political actors. The army proclaimed the republic in 1889, removed Vargas in 1945, took power in 1964 and supervised its own exit in 1985. After 1988, power shifted toward courts and prosecutors, who impeached, jailed and freed presidents. Whether the Supreme Court's role in 2019–2026 saved democracy from a coup or overreached into politics is the central constitutional argument in Brazil today.

5. Brazil is a continent with a single language. Its regions are as different as European countries: the industrial, Italian-and-Japanese-flavoured Southeast; the Afro-Brazilian, deeply religious, poorer Northeast that votes heavily for Lula; the German- and Italian-settled South; the Amazon North, where evangelical churches are now the largest group; the agribusiness Centre-West. Yet it has held together since 1822, speaking Portuguese, watching the same telenovelas, singing the same samba and suffering together over the same national football team. That unity, against the odds, is perhaps the most remarkable fact in this whole history.

Brazil has been called "the country of the future" so often, starting with Stefan Zweig's 1941 book of that title, that Brazilians add the punchline themselves: "and always will be." The joke is self-mocking. The history above suggests a different reading: the future keeps being postponed by the same few unsolved questions from the past.

The takeaway

Brazil was built by the Atlantic economy: on Indigenous land, with the labour of nearly five million enslaved Africans, for sugar, gold and coffee sold abroad. It became independent without a revolution, ended slavery last in the Americas, and alternated between oligarchic democracy, populism and dictatorship until 1985. Since its 1988 Constitution it has tamed hyperinflation, cut poverty, and survived impeachments, a vast corruption scandal and an attempted coup whose leaders were convicted. The arguments that drive its politics now (land, race, the size of the state, the power of courts and soldiers) are the same ones its history keeps returning to.

Try this: pick one Brazilian thing you already love (a song by Jobim or Gilberto Gil, a plate of feijoada, a Pelé clip, a cup of coffee) and trace it back through this history. Which era made it? Who worked to produce it? You will usually find all three of Brazil's founding peoples in a single object, and one of the unresolved questions above.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- SlaveVoyages, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Estimates (Emory University and partners), accessed 31 October 2026: embarkations and disembarkations by region, 1501–1866.
- Comissão Nacional da Verdade, Relatório (December 2014), vol. I ch. 18 (conclusions and the 434 confirmed deaths and disappearances) and vol. II text 5 (violations against Indigenous peoples); Human Rights Watch, World Report 2016, Brazil chapter (377 named perpetrators).
- Rex A. Hudson (ed.), Brazil: A Country Study (Library of Congress, 1997), historical chapters: Indigenous population estimates, colonial economy, gold, the court, the empire and republic.
- Maddison Project Database 2023 (University of Groningen): long-run GDP per capita.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026): GDP, population, Gini.
- Agência Brasil (Brazil's public news agency) reports of IBGE, Central Bank and Superior Electoral Court data, 2025–26: census results (religion, quilombola population), unemployment, inflation, public debt, and the 2026 election results; Buenos Aires Times reporting of the 2026 runoff and of Bolsonaro's sentence.
- Indigenous population and language counts for 2022 follow IBGE's census as summarised in secondary sources; IBGE's own site could not be reached for this piece.

Go deeper
- 📘 Brazil: Five Centuries of Change — Thomas E. Skidmore (the classic single-volume English history; clear on the 20th century)
- 📘 Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz & Heloisa M. Starling (a vivid, recent history by two leading Brazilian historians, strong on race and culture)
- 📘 Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões) — Euclides da Cunha (the eyewitness epic of Canudos, and a founding text of Brazilian self-examination)
- 📘 The Masters and the Slaves — Gilberto Freyre (the 1933 book that shaped the idea of "racial democracy"; read it alongside its critics)
- 🌐 SlaveVoyages (explore the voyages to Bahia, Pernambuco and Rio yourself)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: If I Was Born in Brazil; The Columbian Exchange; A Brief History of Argentina (this series)