Brazil

Indigenous People

There are over 200 indigenous groups in Brazil, with varied histories, languages, and cultures. They do share in common that most of the indigenous in the Amazon are often regarded as obstacles to economic development, including logging, ranching, and mining. State policies have varied from supplying communities with consumer goods to relocation of groups to small preserves.

Gold mining led to many deaths of the Yanomami tribal group in 1989 and 1990 as they came into contact with foreign diseases, oil, mercury, and other wastes. Numerous organizations began work on the behalf of the Yanomami, including the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the World Bank. In more recent decades, indigenous groups have fought for the creation and legal titling of reserves.

Slavery

Following Pedro Alvares Cabral's “discovery” of Brazil in 1500, the Portuguese began colonizing Brazil. For 3 centuries, Brazil's economy was built on the transportation and labor of slaves in sugar plantations, coffee groves, and silver mines. In the early years, African slaves in Brazil survived less than a decade. For many years, there was a myth alleging that slavery in Brazil was “softer” or milder than [Page 201]elsewhere. That myth has been debunked by many historians. Although Brazil ended the importation of slaves in 1850, it did not abolish slavery as an institution and free the slaves until 1888, the last country in Latin America to do so.

Slaves in Brazil were predominantly from Africa's Yoruba culture, but other languages were also retained. Given their large population size and continuous arrivals, African Brazilians retained their culture more than slaves in the United States were able to do. Slaves and their descendants hid images of their African spirits inside statues in Catholic churches.

Many slaves escaped and formed independent colonies of runaway slaves called quilombos. In Bahia, slave revolts were more common among slaves of Muslim origin. The most famous was the Quilombo dos Palmares, in which escaped slaves, mixed-race people, and indigenous warriors fought against the Portuguese and Dutch colonizers for 65 years.

Slavery was abolished in 1888, but rights to land of the descendants of slaves were not recognized until the 1988 constitution, which gave descendants of the quilombos the right to land titles for these tracts of land. Quickly, Worker Party members in congress, historians, attorneys, anthropologists, sociologists, and others began discussing and working on land rights issues.

...