User:ZanderSchubert/Research Notes

Marshall C. (Craig) Eakin, Brazil: the Once and Future Country (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997)
"One of the continuing themes in Brazilian History has been the struggle to forge the regions into a single nation, a single people." (p2)

"Following the pattern in the East, the Portuguese established trading posts (or factories) along more than 1000 miles of the South American coastline. (Fortunately for the Portuguese, most or eastern South America, as it turned out, lay to the east of the Tordesillas line.)" (p15-16)

"In Brazil, some 65 million people (about 45 percent of the coutnry) have African ancestors." (p19)

"Brazil became the first of many Latin American democracies to fall under military rule in the late sixties and early seventies, and it would be one of the last countries to make the transition back to democratic policies in the eighties." (p55)

"In August and September [1968], Costa e Silva suffered a series of strokes. With the president incapacitated, three militrary cabinet ministers (army, navy, air force) took charge, ignoring the constitutional line of succession. ... The generals saw chaos and communists all around them and they cracked down, initiating repression to crush the opposition. In December 1968, they shut down congress. The military triumvirate issued a new constitution that concentrated power in the executive and named a new president, General Emílio Médici, the former head of the intelligence agency. Between 1968 and 1973, Médici and the hardlines unleashed the systematic and widespread use of torture and repression to silence their opponents. Thousands suffered at the hands of torturers, and hundreds died at the hands of the military. These were the darkest and most sinister years in Brazilian history." (p57)

"The years of repression coincide with the years of the so-called Brazilian miracle, during which the economy grew at an annual rate of 11 percent, faster than any country in the world. Ironically, this phenomenal growth came under a right-wing military regime and through widespread state intervention in the economy. The staunchly nationalistic military wanted to make Brazil a world power and understood that a strong industrial economy held the key to their goal." (p58)

"Each time they allowed any elections, the opposition made impressive gains." (p59)

"Today, the Northeast is the poorest and most backward region of Brazil. A comparison of the Northeast with the Southeast becomes something of a southern hemispheric version of the relationship between Noth and South (which are, in more precise geographic terms, Northeast and Southeast) in the United States. (Everything below the equator, after all, is reversed.)" (p70)

"The legacy of Portuguese colonialism weight heavier on the Northeast than any other region of Brazil." (p71)

Brazilian Census of 1991 classifies 70% of the Northeast as black or mulatto, vs. 33% in the Southeast or 17% in the South. Virtually everyone in Salvador in Bahia, the colonial capital from 1549 to 1763, "virtually everyone has some African ancestry." (p71-72)

"Religion, however, provides the most striking and visible reminder of the Northeast's African heritage. Over centuries, the spiritism of African slaves and their decendants slowly blended with the Roamn Catholicism to produce a powerful religious mixture. As one astute French observer has noted, Catholicism in the Northeast is a white mask over a black face, a fine overlay on a deeply entrenched spiritism." (p72)

Stats on p73 for the Northeast: wages per capita 40% of national average, vs. West-central, next poorest, at ~80%; half of all poor in Brazil; literacy rate 60% vs. national 80%, 88/k infant mort-rate.

"In the 1960s, some 18 million nordestinos abandoned their home, followed by another 24 million in the 1970s. ... The flood of migrants into São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro has helped foster the stereotype of the dark-skinned country bumpkin from the Northeast with a sing-song, drawling accent. Recent sociological surveys havve shown that discrimination and prejudice against the nordestino is stronger than racial prejudice in the predominantly white and economically dynamic South and Southeast." (p74-75)

"While the Southeast forms the transition zone between northeastern [black] and southeastern [white] Brazil, Rio [de Janeiro] is the point at which African and European, traditional and modern Brazil meat. If Brazil's soul is in Salvador, surely its heart is in Rio de Janeiro." (p78)

"A quarter of the population [of Rio] (some 2 million people) live in the favelas [slums]. A quarter of a million people live in the largest favela, Rocinha, reputedly the largest slum in Latin America, it has a population roughly the size of Albany, New York. [~90,000 people] The startling contrasts between wealth and poverty in Brazil is nowhere more striking than in Rio. One North American socialist has described the exclusive beach area as 'two blocks of Paris along the beach with Ethiopia surrounding it.'" (p79)

"Approximately 50 percent of Brazil's industrial output comes from the Greater São Paulo region." (p82)