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History and Advocacy: Brazil in Turmoil

On August 31, 2016, Brazil’s senate impeached embattled President Dilma Rousseff on charges of concealing budget shortfalls with funds from a federal bank. The vote was merely a formality. The decision of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) to abandon its coalition with Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (PT) had sealed the fate of Brazil’s first female president months ago. Dilma’s ouster took place amid a free falling economy and a jarring corruption scandal involving the state oil company, Petrobras, that has implicated roughly two-thirds of the Brazilian legislature and rocked the foundation of Latin America’s largest democracy. Operação Lava Jato or “Operation Car Wash” is a criminal investigation authorized by the Brazilian Federal Police that began as a money laundering probe but has since widened to investigate politicians and Petrobras executives accused of accepting bribes in return for awarding contracts to construction firms at inflated prices. Prominent members of every major party are accused of accepting bribes and stashing public funds in secret accounts in Panama and Switzerland. Brazil’s Supreme Court charged Michel Temer, Dilma’s former vice-president and current president of Brazil, with violating campaign finance laws, preventing him from seeking re-election after his term ends in 2018. His disqualification is probably moot. Temer is so unpopular that he chose not to attend the closing ceremonies of the Rio Olympic Games at Maracanã Stadium to avoid angry spectators who jeered and brandished signs calling for his resignation.

Picture of demonstrators clamor for Dilma Rousseff's impeachment in São Paulo — Demonstrators clamor for Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in São Paulo. Courtesy Al Jazeera.

While cabinet ministers, legislators, and former presidential candidates are accused of stealing from public coffers, prosecutors have failed to bring similar charges against Rousseff. Many observers allege that her impeachment was a conspiracy to prevent further investigation into the Car Wash scandal and to remove the Workers’ Party from power after thirteen years. They suspect that Dilma’s predecessor and presumptive favorite to win the presidency in 2018, Luiz Ignácio “Lula” Da Silva, was the target of the federal investigators all along. Michel Temer and his all white male cabinet represent a stark repudiation of the PT coalition, an alliance of working people, students, intellectuals, social movement activists, women, and people of color. The administration’s proposal to slash social programs responsible for lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty has led to violent clashes between police and demonstrators in major cities across the country September 2016. Once again, the poor and vulnerable will pay a heavy price for the sins of Brazil’s political class.

What does the fallout mean for Brazil’s traditional peoples- namely indigenous groups, rubber tappers, and rural black communities descended from fugitive slaves called quilombos? Two weeks before Dilma’s impeachment, I traveled to São Paulo’s Atlantic Rainforest to visit my friends and colleagues at the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), an NGO that defends the social and environmental rights of traditional peoples in Brazil. I attended the Ninth Annual Quilombo Seeds Festival, a farmers’ market and seminar organized by ISA in the heartland of the Ribeira Valley, a region that is home to 88 quilombo communities and the last preserves of endangered species and wildlife in Brazil’s most heavily industrialized state. Each year, farmers and fishermen from the quilombos gather in the town of Eldorado to exchange seeds, roots, crops, livestock, fish, and oysters to promote food security and to defend against cultural loss resulting from environmental restrictions on subsistence farming and the intrusion of mineral companies on their lands.

Quilombos and spectators gather for the Ninth Annual ISA Quilombo Seeds Festival in Eldorado, São Paulo. Photo courtesy Claudio Tavares-ISA — Quilombos and spectators gather for the Ninth Annual ISA Quilombo Seeds Festival in Eldorado, São Paulo, August 2016. Courtesy Claudio Tavares-ISA

Dilma’s impending trial cast a shadow over the event. Quilombolas (individuals who identify as quilombo-descendants) feared the ouster of PT would embolden their enemies: corporate farmers, cattle ranchers, and proponents of hydroelectric dams. They also worried that Temer’s government would impose new limitations on quilombos’ constitutional rights to land. Dilma Rousseff was hardly an ardent defender of traditional peoples’ rights. Davi Pereira Júnior, a doctoral student in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas and activist from the quilombo community of Itamatatiua in Maranhão, has criticized Rousseff’s government for “closing its eyes to the assassinations of dozens of quilombo leaders who were killed in cold blood while defending their communities’ rights to land.” During Dilma’s presidency, Brazil fast tracked approval of several hydroelectric dams, including the Belo Monte project in Xingu, Pará, that will displace more than 20,000 people, including indigenous groups like the Juruna and Arara, and destroy 250 square miles of protected rainforest in the Amazon. Her administration also did little to resolve the bureaucratic impasse that has prevented thousands of quilombos from obtaining land and recognition from the government. Still, many acknowledge the situation could get worse. Much worse.

Michel Temer’s government has already curbed traditional peoples’ rights in significant ways. First, his administration axed the Ministry of Culture that previously was in charge of approving communities’ petitions for recognition as quilombo-descendant and stripped responsibility for titling quilombo lands from INCRA, the federal agency in charge of agrarian reform. Now the task of certifying quilombos and conferring land titles falls to the Ministry of Education, which lacks the funds, personnel, or expertise to carry out its responsibilities. “In this political climate, how will our communities obtain recognition? Who will take responsibility? Who is responsible for recognizing our rights?” asked Zé Rodrigues, a leader from Quilombo Ivaporunduva. Temer’s administration has eliminated the Secretary for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR), an agency that oversaw public policies to promote education, health care, social services for quilombo communities across the country.

Quilombola activists gather in Eldorado for a seminar on climate change hosted by Instituto Socioambiental. Courtesy Claudio Tavares ISA. — Quilombola activists gather in Eldorado for a seminar on climate change hosted by Instituto Socioambiental in August 2016. Courtesy Claudio Tavares-ISA.

The new government also endorsed PEC 215, a proposed amendment to the constitution that seeks to delegate the Brazilian Congress, dominated by the agribusiness lobby, with the duty of recognizing and demarcating indigenous and quilombola territories. “PEC 215 represents an instrument of repression against original and traditional peoples in Brazil,” affirmed Ewerton Lobório, a human rights lawyer and staffer for Nilto Tatto, a Workers’ Party congressman from São Paulo. “The right wing has seized power by demonizing the poor and enacting legislation that takes away their guaranteed rights.” Temer’s actions have emboldened his ally, Governor Gerardo Alckmin of São Paulo, who signed a bill privatizing São Paulo’s state parks and giving mineral companies a blank check to drill for lead, zinc, and baryte in environmentally sensitive areas used by quilombos and indigenous communities for subsistence farming and fishing. In sum, Temer’s rise to power represents an assault on the hard fought rights and privileges achieved by indigenous communities, Afro-Brazilians, and traditional peoples following the return to democracy in 1985.

How can the academic community express solidarity with traditional peoples’ activists and their allies? I posed the same question on this blog last January and I’m still no closer to arriving at a definitive answer. Still, I’m convinced that the university has a role to play, at the very least, in speaking out against these violations of human rights. One way researchers can help is by organizing workshops and conferences to provide quilombola activists with a platform to publicize their struggle for rights and inclusion. Next February, LLILAS and IHS will be co-sponsoring a conference about food security and quilombos’ ongoing struggle to restore subsistence farming rights in the Atlantic Rainforest. Panelists will include representatives from the Instituto Socioambiental, experts on sustainable agriculture, and quilombola farmers fighting to restore access to subsistence garden plots called “roças.” We hope that the event will enable our guests to forge partnerships with researchers at the University of Texas who are interested in agriculture, sustainability, traditional peoples’ rights, and climate change in tropical rainforests. We also hope to apply pressure on Brazilian authorities to comply with their constitutional obligation to respect the rights of quilombo communities. “What can we do about this?” asked Davi Pereira. “Well, we can do what we’ve always done: fight to defend our rights. These rights are nonnegotiable for they guarantee the social, economic, cultural, political, and religious survival of our communities.”

Author’s note: Brazilian Federal Judge Sergio Moro brought charges against Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva on September 20, 2016, for alleged involvement in the Car Wash Scandal.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Slavery and Race in Colonial Latin America

Roughly 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas between 1500 and 1900. As Emory’s Slave Trade Database shows, a huge proportion of Africans ended up in Colonial Latin America, shaping the emerging societies there and leaving a lasting legacy on race relations today.

Not Even Past has published numerous articles and book reviews on Slavery and Race in Colonial Latin America, covering a wide range of topics. What hierarchies conditioned the relations between Africans, Europeans, and native groups? How did these socio-racial systems work on the day-to-day of life in Colonial Latin America? And, how did racially discriminated groups resist? These are some of the key questions addressed in the articles below.

Spanish America:

Susan Deans-Smith discusses the eighteenth-century Casta paintings, depicting different racial mixtures derived from the offspring of various unions between Spaniards, Indians, and Blacks.

Casta painting from Luis de Mena.

The Casta paintings reveal an idealized hierarchical socio-racial system, but in practice some mixed race populations achieved social mobility by purchasing whiteness. Ann Twinam discusses.

Reviewing Joanne Rappaport’s Disappearing Mestizo, Adrian Masters highlights the gap between the rigid caste system and the reality of day-to-day life in Colonial Latin America and discusses his own work on the evolution of the Mestizo category.

Fluidity and malleability of racial identity was a defining feature of Latin American colonialism as Kristie Flannery discovers reading essays from Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America.

In the early modern Caribbean, individuals not only crossed socio-racial boundaries within the Spanish Empire but also shaped religious identities to move between Catholic Spanish and Protestant English worlds. Ernesto Mercado-Montero reviews Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, by Kristen Block.

For further reading on the way identity worked in Colonial Latin America see Zachary Charmichael’s reviews of David Weber’s

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment and Jane Mangan’s

Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí.

Brazil:

As the slave trade database shows colonial Brazil was one of the principal destinations for slaves transported from West Africa, creating an unique Luso-phone Atlantic world. In her review of studies by Mariana Candido and Rocquinaldo Ferriera, Samantha Rubino highlights the cultural exchange between Portuguese and Africans, altering the way historians conceptualize creolization and the formation of slave societies.

Portuguese officials meet with the Manikongo, who ruled the African Kongo Kingdom (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Michael Hatch discusses the story of Brazil most famous slave rebellion, the Muslim uprising of 1835 in Bahia, emphasizing the plurality of African ethnic identities in the development of Afro-Latino cultures rooted in the Atlantic slave trade.

Also focused on Brazil’s North East, Edward Shore reviews Glenn Cheney’s Quilombo dos Palmares, unveiling the history of Brazil’s nation of fugitive slaves.

For more on casta paintings:

Magali M. Carrera, Imagining identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (2003)

María Concepción García Saiz, Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico americano (1989)

Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (2004)

Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil’s Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves, by Glenn Cheney (2014)

By Edward Shore

In November 1695, townspeople in Recife, Brazil, observed Portuguese soldiers attaching a severed head to a stake in the central plaza. The skull belonged to Zumbi, the last warrior-king of Palmares, a “quilombo,” or fugitive slave community, hidden in the rugged backcountry of the Brazilian Northeast. Palmares was home to twenty thousand runaway slaves, free blacks, Indians, and settlers of mixed ancestry who repelled the repeated assaults of European slavers for almost a century. Although the Portuguese managed to defeat Zumbi’s guerrillas, memories of Palmares evolved into myths that powerfully shaped Brazilian politics and popular culture. They fanned the flames of slave resistance and inspired future generations of black activists and intellectuals who challenged racism, capitalism, and military rule in modern times.

Glenn Cheney’s new book, Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil’s Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves, retraces the maroon community’s origins and casts new light upon the lived experiences of its diverse inhabitants. Drawing upon a range of colonial documents and secondary sources, Cheney advances a number of compelling claims about the nature of Palmares and its century-long struggle for survival. First, he argues that the quilombo represented a viable alternative to plantation slavery and Portuguese colonialism. Fugitive slaves established a collective economy based upon subsistence agriculture, trade, and communal land ownership. They raided plantations and sugar mills in search of new supplies and recruits. Palmarians rejected Portugal’s rigid caste system and mixed freely with Africans, crioulas (Brazilian born blacks), mulattos, Indians, and even poor whites. The author also suggests that women were socially, economically, and militarily empowered and that marriage and sexual morality were established by “necessity and efficiency” rather than by religious edict. Religion in the quilombo was syncretic, an amalgamation of beliefs and practices pulled together from Bantu (Central African), indigenous, and Catholic traditions.

Second, Cheney contends that Palmares functioned like a sovereign state. He observes that the quilombo was not, at least initially, a single political entity, but rather a collection of mocambos (“hideouts”) that stretched across a territory that was two hundred miles long and fifty miles inland from the coast of what is today the Brazilian state of Alagoas. Ultimately, these communities recognized a common enemy, the Portuguese, and integrated the various mocambos into a unified military brotherhood. Inhabitants elected village leaders to a council and the council selected a head of state. There is also evidence to suggest the Portuguese monarchy had recognized the quilombo’s autonomy and even attempted to broker a truce between planters and maroons in the 1670s.

Painting of a battle at Palmares. Image via Black Women of Brazil.

Cheney concludes that Palmares grew strong enough not only to frustrate, but also to seriously challenge Portuguese control of Brazil. Following the decline of sugar production and the Dutch invasion of Pernambuco, Zumbi and his army of fugitive slaves threatened to deliver a crushing blow to Portugal’s fragile colonial ambitions. Cheney alleges that Palmares signaled the beginning of a long-term movement toward independence from colonial rule and foreshadowed the rise of Toussaint L’Overture and the “Black Jacobins” in Haiti. The Portuguese, though weakened, resolved to destroy the quilombo. Armed with an influx of capital, weaponry, and manpower from Lisbon and São Paulo, colonizers assembled an army of mercenaries, Indians, and slaves that sacked Palmares in 1693 and captured and executed Zumbi two years later.

Bust of Zumbi of Palmares in Brasilia. Via Wikimedia Commons.

However, the destruction of Palmares failed to stem the emergence of hundreds, perhaps thousands of smaller quilombos throughout Brazil. Nor did it prevent countless other acts of resistance that undermined planter domination even after the abolition of slavery in 1888. Cheney describes how the legend of the Quilombo dos Palmares inspired a 1988 constitutional amendment that extended land rights to the descendants of fugitive slaves. Thousands of “modern quilombos” have petitioned for government recognition while organizing mass movement in the countryside that has won concessions from local landowners and pressured elected officials to implement affirmative action policies in other areas. In 2015, the specter of Palmares looms large over Brazil.

Capoeira or the Dance of War by Johann Moritz Rugendas (1825). The Brazilian dance of Capoeria is often associated with the Palmares quilombo. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Cheney’s new book claims many strengths but its effort to separate “myth” from “fact” represents its greatest achievement. Portuguese colonizers sought not only to destroy Palmares but also to expunge its existence from the historical record for fear that it would incite future slave rebellions. As a result, no artifactual evidence of the quilombo exists while surviving documentation reports precious little about Palmares, its people, and their points of view. Cheney nevertheless manages to shed light on Palmarians’ lived experiences by extrapolating meaning from among the colonizers’ exaggerations, inconsistencies, and omissions. By combining gripping narrative with first-rate scholarship, Cheney provides the most accessible and comprehensive study in English about “the most important historical event ever ignored by the world outside of Brazil.”

Glenn Alan Cheney, Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil’s Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves (New London Librarium, 2014)

Spanish America:

Brazil:

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