Brazil: the fate of never being liberal
One of the most vilified words in the Brazilian vocabulary is "liberalism," associated in the country with free-market thinking. Yes, the word is vilified, because deep down discussing its actual meaning, the idea, doctrine or the model of operation of an economy, doesn't matter. In Brazil, even in universities, place by definition for the debate of ideas, you don't go very far in the discussion of the subject. Why? Because economic liberalism, textbooks teach us since childhood, is a thing of unbridled capitalists, evil businesspeople and predatory bankers, as well as of two groups whose existence, for the anti-liberals, needs no adjectives: stock investors and foreign investors.
History tells us why we are this way, since the hereditary captaincies, the way found by the already-decadent kingdom of Portugal to occupy this huge "island," before somebody else did it. "Discovered" in 1500, Brazil only began being actually settled 34 years later, when Dom João III divided the territory using a scale - without taking into consideration the geographical features that usually delimit cities, states and even countries - into 15 captaincies. Since the kingdom was broke, each area was granted to one donee who had funds to occupy and manage their land, which didn't belong to them, but to Portugal.
The occupation was urgent because the French came in droves in the first three decades of existence of the Portuguese America to sweep the vast Atlantic Forest to extract brazilwood, resistant wood used in the manufacture of furniture, musical instruments and also to dye fabric in red. Before the captaincies there were trading posts known as feitorias, a monopoly granted by the Portuguese kingdom to the explorers and traders of brazilwood. Later, in 1550, the French tried to take by fight part of the Brazilian territory from the Portuguese domain?
The donees of the captaincies began developing sugarcane crops and the production of sugar, main product of the colony from that time and for more than two centuries. There was created the infamy that characterizes us as society: slavery of indigenous peoples and Africans. In the time of the trading posts, natives did the heavy work of cutting brazilwood trees, getting in exchange European trinkets from the feitores, the chiefs of the feitorias. It was a type of slavery, but this was only officially put into practice with the beginning of sugarcane planting. As sugarcane growing advanced, the traffic of African...
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