Brazil

Long before European contact, the territory now known as Brazil was inhabited by a wide range of indigenous peoples, including Tupi and Guarani speakers along the coast and Atlantic forest, Jê groups across the central plateau, and Arawak and Carib communities in the Amazon basin. Population estimates for the eve of European arrival vary widely but commonly fall between two and five million. These societies ranged from semi nomadic hunter gatherer bands to sedentary agricultural communities cultivating manioc, maize, and tropical fruits, and in parts of the Amazon they sustained substantial earthworks and complex riverine settlements.

Portuguese navigators under Pedro Alvares Cabral landed on the Bahian coast in 1500, and the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 placed the territory within the Portuguese sphere. Colonisation initially relied on coastal trade in brazilwood and a system of hereditary captaincies, before consolidating around sugar plantations in the northeast, particularly Pernambuco and Bahia, worked by enslaved Africans and indigenous people. The discovery of gold and diamonds in Minas Gerais during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shifted economic gravity southward and prompted the transfer of the colonial capital from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. When Napoleonic armies invaded Portugal in 1807, the Braganza court fled to Rio, and in 1815 Brazil was elevated to a kingdom united with Portugal.

Independence followed in 1822, when Prince Pedro declared separation from Lisbon and was crowned Pedro I of a constitutional empire. His son, Pedro II, presided over a long reign that saw the war with Paraguay (1864 to 1870), gradual abolitionist reforms, and finally the Golden Law of 1888 that ended slavery, the last such abolition in the Americas. A military coup in 1889 deposed the emperor and established the First Republic, dominated by coffee oligarchies in Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais under an arrangement known as cafe com leite politics. The 1930 revolution led by Getulio Vargas closed that order; Vargas governed in various forms until 1945, including the authoritarian Estado Novo proclaimed in 1937, and oversaw rapid industrialisation and centralisation.

After a democratic interlude, including the inauguration of the planned capital Brasilia in 1960 under President Juscelino Kubitschek, the armed forces seized power in 1964 and ruled through a succession of generals for two decades. The regime pursued state led growth and infrastructure expansion while suppressing political opposition. A gradual liberalisation, the abertura, culminated in indirect civilian elections in 1985 and a new democratic constitution in 1988. Hyperinflation was tamed by the Plano Real of 1994 under Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the subsequent decades saw alternation in power among the Workers Party, beginning with Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2003, and centre right and right wing coalitions, including the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the single term of Jair Bolsonaro from 2019 to 2022.

Brazil today is a federal presidential republic organised under the 1988 constitution, comprising twenty six states and the Federal District of Brasilia. Executive authority rests with a directly elected president, legislative power with a bicameral National Congress of Senate and Chamber of Deputies, and judicial review with a Supreme Federal Tribunal, framing the institutions described in the remainder of this dossier.