By: Emir Sader on September 11, 2022, from Río de Janeiro
Tiradentes
It has been 200 years since Brazil ceased to be a colony. The period begins with the invasion of the national territory by the colonizers. But, unlike the vast majority of Latin American countries, Brazil did not go from colony to republic, but from colony to monarchy. Why? What is the meaning of this anomalous passage in the continent? In most Latin American countries, independence meant a break with the European colonizers, as well as the end of slavery. In the case of Brazil, on the contrary, the date signified the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in Brazil, strengthening ties with the country, as Portugal abandoned the Napoleonic troops. Spain, on the contrary, had resisted this invasion, which weakened its military power and favored its defeat against the Latin American countries.
Colonized and colonizers
So Brazil went from being a colony to a monarchy, strengthening, rather than distancing, its ties with the colonizers. So much so that its first monarch was the son of a Portuguese monarch. And in that phrase, which warned that an adventurer should be prevented from appropriating the crown, the adventurers were the Brazilians, among them today’s national hero, Tiradentes. The “independence or death” did not refer to the independence of Brazil, but to the permanence of the link with Portugal. Brazil did not have the heroes of independence such as Bolivar, San Martin, O’Higgins, Sucre, among others, like other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
At the same time, slavery in Brazil did not end with the end of the colony. The two factors were intrinsically linked, according to the analysis of Caio Prado Jr. In 1859, a Land Law was enacted, which formalized the ownership of land by those who had appropriated it. Thus, when slavery ended at the end of the 19th century, the new freemen had no access to land. They ceased to be slaves, but they remained poor, landless.
In this way, the colonial question was linked to the ethnic question and to the social and national question. Brazil was the country in Latin America and the Caribbean that later ended slavery. And the republic was only established at the end of the 19th century, as a kind of military movement, without any kind of popular participation, carried out by the military.
Transit
From the point of view of foreign dependence, there had already been a transition from Portuguese dependence to dependence on England, which was consolidated from that moment on.
Do we have to celebrate that kind of independence? We have to understand its meaning. To understand how that frustrating independence had effects on the future of the country including what is happening today as the elections loom.
First, for having extended slavery for almost another century. Second, for not having initiated the construction of the national state at the time of the end of the colony; with all the consequences that this entails.
As the philospher Spinoza used to say: Neither cry nor smile: just understand.
Emir Sader is a Brazilian sociologist and political scientist, he is coordinator of the Public Policy Laboratory of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ).
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US