Through enforcing this narrative, state propaganda attempted to hide the repressive character of the dictatorship, whose police persecuted, tortured and murdered members of the opposition, while keeping large parts of the population in misery and ignorance.

In a similar way, the disturbing romanticization of Portugal’s colonial history has shielded us from a confrontation with the reality of colonialism and how it still lingers on today.

Yes, we can be a welcoming and warm-hearted people. But if we are to achieve profound societal change, we need to shed light on our history and arrive at a deeper understanding of what could be described as the psychological make-up of modern-day Portugal.

Our Colonial Legacy

Portuguese ranks as the fifth most spoken language in the world. Can we imagine what lies behind such a fact? How can it be that up until this day, we’ve settled for a narrative of having been benevolent colonizers, raising monuments to the “discoveries” and paying tribute to its protagonists?

Portugal was the initiator of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 15th century, subjugating native Black populations from West Africa and shipping them as slaves to Brazil.

From the 16th to the late 19th century, we became one of the most prolific slave traders globally, kidnapping, enslaving and deporting approximately 5.8 million people overseas, more than any other colonizing nation.

Despite Portugal’s withdrawal from slave trade activities in the wake of the abolitionist movement, little more than 200 years ago, its colonial endeavor was far from over.

Portugal’s colonial empire, one of the longest-lived empires in world history, existed for almost six centuries — crushing Indigenous cultures of Brazil, of the West and East coasts of Africa, and imposing its rule in parts of India, Malacca (Malaysia), the Maluku Islands (formerly known as “the Spice Islands”), Macao (China) and Nagasaki (Japan).

Little more than 40 years ago, Portugal was still fighting a colonial war, repressing emerging independence movements in its African colonies – Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.

What is written in history books and taught in school is the continuation of a narrative that served as the foundation for colonialism: the idea of the racial and cultural superiority of White Christian Europeans over “primitive” Indigenous and Black populations, coupled with the romanticized image of the Portuguese colonial empire as a somewhat peaceful form of entrepreneurship and intercultural exchange.

In reality, colonialism was nothing more than the atrocious enslavement and genocide of other peoples for resource extraction and cheap labor, or in other words, greedy economic self-interest. There can be little doubt today that the White Western world owes its unparalleled wealth and “proud legacy” of civilizational “progress” largely to the violent coercion of colonialism.

Throughout history, we have witnessed several attempts to justify the “colonial project” and dissociate ourselves from the consistent and unspeakable cruelties behind it.

In the 1930s, with the slogan “Portugal is not a small country,” Portugal’s ruling dictatorship cultivated a sense of national pride derived from the dimensions of Portugal’s colonial empire.

However, in the 1950s, at a time when colonial empires were collapsing all over the world, the regime faced the need to justify its colonial presence in Africa.

Therefore, it amplified a narrative of “luso-tropicalism” – an imaginary sense of Portugal as a multi-racial, pluri-continental nation with an innate capacity for friendly and nonviolent colonization and a liberal attitude towards interracial sexual relations and marriage.

Suppressing the realities of racism and colonialism, state propaganda became concretized in statues, monuments and history books, ensuring that a perfectly alienated version of history was set in stone.

The Racial Hierarchy Behind Colonialism

Colonialism goes hand in hand with a felt sense of racial hierarchy and with the ongoing dehumanization of the oppressed. This serves to perpetuate a power relation between different races which continues to steer our social behavior to the extent that it remains unacknowledged.

In 1444, when the Portuguese Prince, Henry the Navigator, became the first European to sail to sub-Saharan Africa, seizing captives directly, rather than buying slaves from North-African middlemen, the King of Portugal hired Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Chief Chronicler of the Kingdom of Portugal, to write a biography on Prince Henry.

As John Biewen, in the podcast How Race was Made, explains, “[Zurara] claimed that Prince Henry’s main motive was to bring [sub-saharans] to Christianity. So Zurara portrayed slavery as an improvement over freedom in Africa, where, he wrote, ‘They lived like beasts.’

They ‘had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in bestial sloth.’ Zurara’s writings were widely circulated among the elite in Portugal. In the coming years, the Portuguese, and their ideas about Africans, led the way as the African slave trade expanded among countries like Spain, Holland, France and England.”

Ideas of White Supremacy and “development” came in handy when colonizing nations were looking for ideologies that would justify this kind of ruthless subjugation; as the African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates notes, “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” In other words, “race” as we know it today — with no reference to modern biology or anthropology — was manufactured by the early ideologues of colonialism to justify the unjustifiable.

Referring to Portugal’s confrontation with the true face of colonialism, Grada Kilomba, Portuguese writer, artist and psychologist, states, “we continue to feed on a romantic past, without associating it with guilt, shame, genocide, exclusion, marginalization, exploitation, [or] dehumanization.”

Her analysis continues: “We’re not past denial yet. [Racism] has to do with a psychological process that goes from denial to guilt, from guilt to shame, from shame to recognition and from recognition to reparation. […] I feel that we are completely in denial.”

Broadening Our Understanding of Racism

With the growth of the anti-racist movement in Portugal, our entire national narrative is being challenged, confronting us with the possibility of racism as a structural reality in Portugal. “Are we a racist country?” – the question strikes us as shocking.

Rui Rio, leader of Portugal’s leading center-right opposition party (PSD), says that “there’s no racism in Portuguese society”. Similarly, Jerónimo de Sousa, secretary-general of the Communist Party (PCP) says that “the overwhelming majority of the Portuguese people aren’t racist.”

Here, we’re dealing with two different definitions of racism.

One is based on the stereotype of a racist as an individual, intentionally carrying out acts of meanness motivated by racial hatred.

Another definition describes racism as “a system that encompasses economic, political, social, and cultural structures, actions, and beliefs that institutionalize and perpetuate an unequal distribution of privileges, resources and power between White people and people of Color” (Asa G. Hilliard) – a system into which we’re all socialized and that trickles down to every level of society, from the functioning of institutions to a concealed mindset of racial hierarchy, right up to explicit acts of racism.

Confronting White people with the historical system of White superiority and with their own internalized racism can be extremely challenging, triggering numerous evasion and defense mechanisms often described as “White fragility” (Robin diAngelo).

In the words of Layla F. Saad, “You will assume that what is being criticized is your skin color and your individual goodness, rather than your complicity in a system of oppression that is designed to benefit you at the expense of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] in ways that you are not even aware of.”

National Identity And Islamophobia

In this article, I’m mainly focusing on Portugal’s historical oppression of and subsequent systemic racism towards African populations. However, addressing other long-standing power relations could also explain much of what is currently normalized in terms of ethnic and racial tensions.

A key piece is Portugal’s erasure of its Islamic influences, ever since the gradual reconquest of Moorish territory carried out by Christian rulers of the Iberian Peninsula, concluded in the 13th century.

Marta Vidal, journalist, writes, “Since then, Portuguese identity has been constructed in opposition to the Moors, historically depicted as enemies”. These times were shaped by the construction of a European identity that defined itself “in opposition to Muslims, and a crusading mentality that depicted Christian-Muslim relations in conflictive terms.”

During Portugal’s dictatorship, these cultural and religious divisions were reignited and amplified, as Vidal affirms, “With Catholicism at the core of nationalist narratives, the ultraconservative dictatorship depicted Muslims as invaders and ‘enemies of the Christian nation'”.

Currently in Portugal

In 2018, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), a human rights monitoring body of the Council of Europe, issued warnings about the infiltration of far-right and neo-Nazi groups inside Portuguese police forces and the political sphere.

Manuel Morais, vice-president of the largest police trade union (Associação Sindical de Profissionais de Polícia), was forced to resign, after condemning the presence of racist and xenophobic elements inside the police forces, accusing the monitoring organs of turning a blind eye to it.

In the national elections of 2019, André Ventura, head of the newly formed far-right political party “Chega” won a seat in the Portuguese national parliament.

In August, the brutal killing of Bruno Candé, a 39-year-old Portuguese Black man murdered in broad daylight by a White 76-year-old veteran from the Portuguese Colonial War showed the reluctance of several political figures and parts of the general population to accept the blatant racism motivating the crime.

What was our role in the systematic destabilization of the economy and livelihoods of these former colonies, so that people needed to leave behind everything they’ve known and set off to a new and uncertain start?

But beyond straightforward signs of a churning atmosphere of racism, where all alarms are sounding, Black, Indigenous and People of Color and other ethnicities, are generally at a loss at every level of society – from access to housing and healthcare, to poor prospects in education and employment.

The majority of Afro-Portuguese citizens have immigrated or are descendants of immigrants from former Portuguese colonies which still use Portuguese as their official language (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea).

Many of them have come seeking a dignified life and end up settling in cheap peripheral areas which they can afford. Many of these are highly segregated neighborhoods with a high concentration of both Afro-descendants and other marginalized populations, such as Roma people, who share similar socioeconomic difficulties.

In these areas, there’s little investment of public money in the improvement of public services such as education, healthcare, or culture.

As a result of the historical oppression these populations have been subject to, it’s much more likely that they will suffer from poverty and experience severe limitations to both their educational and professional prospects.

It’s clear that socioeconomic constraints are at work here, and we can witness the pull of a vicious cycle that binds generations to the lower end of society – race is surely not the single conditioning factor.

But we could also ask – why did Africans need to leave their homelands in search of a dignified life abroad in the first place? What was our role in the systematic destabilization of the economy and livelihoods of these former colonies, so that people needed to leave behind everything they’ve known and set off to a new and uncertain start?

Cristina Roldão, sociologist, states that “to speak of racism is not to hide other forms of inequality – gender, class, among others. These power relations are articulated.”

At every level of society, there’s a convergence of different systems of oppression that interlink to shape our daily life – be it through racism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, anthropocentrism – structurally benefiting Whites over Black, Indigenous and People of Color, men over women, rich over poor, cisgender heterosexuals over LGBTQ, and humans over animals, plants and the Earth.

Reparation

Just as the present system still upholds the ideological and psychosocial conditions that produced and sustained the colonial reality, we might also find in us that which allowed this land to embrace diversity and enable the coexistence of different cultures and religions.

Repairing the historical legacy of White Supremacy and colonialism involves moving from denial to recognition in order to collectively transform the systemic forms in which it still lingers on – ideologically, institutionally and psychosocially.

For this reason, this work points to a fundamental process of societal renewal – ultimately, toward the creation of a society which is free of oppression and is truly capable of peaceful coexistence, not only between different cultures and ethnicities, but perhaps also with the wondrous and deeply interconnected community of living beings that inhabits this Earth.

This article appeared originally in Open Democracy – https://www.opendemocracy.net/

For much of the English-speaking world, the term “triangular trade” refers to one thing only: the transatlantic slave trade. Many school history books feature maps with arrows linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with mindboggling figures and icons representing the commodities exchanged.

From the perspective of Britain, France and the Netherlands, “triangular trade” is an apt descriptor. But from the perspective of Brazil, Cuba, and others, the term has much less validity. When the European powers abolished their slave trades, merchants in the Americas built on many years of experience in their own bilateral trades to keep it going.

According to the latest figures from Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, an authoritative source which contains information on over 80% of all slaving voyages, nearly 40% of all enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas aboard vessels that had sailed to Africa directly from New World ports. That means that almost two-fifths of the entire slave trade traced a bilateral, rather than a triangular pattern.

Read more:
A digital archive of slave voyages details the largest forced migration in history

So there was no single “transatlantic slave trade”. And this makes it very difficult to generalise about the slave trade. Understanding this dimension also underscores the global nature of the trade, which was organised by merchant networks spanning not only the Atlantic but also the Indian Ocean.

Brazil’s trades

By far, the most important of the bilateral traders was Brazil. This is hardly surprising, since Brazil imported more captives than any other New World region, receiving just under half of all of the Africans transported across the Atlantic. While many of these Africans arrived aboard vessels sailing from Portugal, the vast majority – perhaps nine in ten – came aboard vessels that had originally sailed from Brazil. Merchants in Brazil began trading in earnest in the 1630s, when parts of the colony were occupied by the Dutch, but increased participation dramatically after the Dutch expulsion in 1654.

After British abolition in 1807, Britain went on a crusade to get other countries to end the slave trade, pressuring them to sign treaties. But Brazil’s ability to supply its own market for captives helped it to resist British pressure to stop slave trading – even after Brazil, which declared independence from Portugal in 1822, formally renounced slave trading in 1830.

Brazilians managed to do this by trading their plantation surpluses for slaves in Africa. The most important of these was cachaça, the Brazilian sugarcane spirit, but tobacco also played a key role, along with gold. Traders supplemented these goods with Indian textiles, which they obtained via the global Portuguese mercantile networks, and with sophisticated financial instruments that allowed them to transfer credits around the globe.

Portuguese-Brazilian merchants in south Atlantic ports such as Luanda in Angola played a key role in assembling trade goods and procuring captives, which they often shipped on freight to Brazil. Unlike the north Atlantic model, in which the organisers of a voyage owned the vessel, the trade goods, and captives, Brazilian traders were often shipowners whose vessels carried captives as freight for multiple owners from Africa to Brazil.

Caribbean merchants build their own trade

Although Brazil was by far the largest bilateral slave trading power, it was not alone. As my own ongoing research is showing, merchants in the British Caribbean, Barbados especially, also participated, although at much lower levels. Their trade was concentrated in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, motivated by the chronic inability of the Royal African Company, the British slave trading monopoly, to deliver enslaved African labourers in the numbers they desired.

Like the Brazilians, British Caribbean merchants monetised their plantation produce in the form of rum and traded it for captives. And like the Brazilians, they supplemented their rum cargoes with textiles, British woollens more than Indian cottons.

Merchants in the New England colonies, principally Newport, Rhode Island and Boston, Massachusetts, began a similar trade. Theirs was unique in that it ran in triangular fashion from New England, to Africa, to the Americas – the only New World-based trade to do so. During the colonial period, most of these captives were taken to the British Caribbean, but after independence in 1776 Americans supplied captives to their own markets, as well as to Cuba.

As a slave-trading power in its own right, the Spanish colony of Cuba was a latecomer. Large-scale plantation slavery only emerged there in the second half of the 18th century. Few there had any experience slave trading, largely because the British and Americans supplied most of the captives. However, when those two nations abolished their slave trades in 1807-8, Cuban traders became more involved. For a few years they served an apprenticeship of sorts, then began operating their own slave trade, establishing commercial connections on the African coast. Like the other traders, they exchanged cane spirits and tobacco for captives, but also British textiles and manufactures, and even some silver.

After 1820, all of this was illegal under an Anglo-Spanish treaty, in which Spain committed to ending its slave trade, but by then merchants had created a multinational, polyglot network of traders, bankers, shipbuilders, and traders that operated illegally. This network operated for four more decades before finally succumbing in the 1860s.

The common denominator in all of these trades was an ability for these colonies to turn slave-grown plantation produce into goods that were exchanged for captive slaves. Cane spirits – rum, cachaça, aguardiente – was the backbone for most, but tobacco figured in some of them. All but the Americans supplemented these goods with manufactured products, textiles for the most part. Most of these came from Asia via trade networks that extended into the Indian Ocean, but Britain was also a major source, especially in the 19th century.

Even when restricted to the British, French, and Dutch trades, the term “triangular trade” conveys the false impression that it was a closed system. In reality, the slave trade was a vast enterprise, assembling goods from across the globe, exporting and re-exporting them to Africa for captives who were then carried to the New World to labour at a variety of tasks. Geometry doesn’t even begin to capture it.

Sean Kelley, Senior Lecturer in Global History, University of Essex

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Brazil ranks as the fourth country with the highest number of internet users in the world. Portuguese is Brazil’s only official language and the majority of its population do not speak English.

While most of the internet is decidedly Anglophones, Brazilians have carved out a large Portuguese-speaking digital territory of their own. And they mainly use it to speak on their own terms — which means, a lot of memes.

The truth is, in order to understand anything about Brazil in 2017, from soap operas and daily news, to politics and the economy, you must take a look at its memes.

Brazil takes its memes so seriously that the country launched the 1st Meme World War against Portugal in 2016, after finding out that a Portuguese Twitter user had appropriated a dearly loved meme.

Even though memes from any culture can be difficult to explain to outsiders, Brazilian researcher Gabriela Lunardi embraced the challenge.

She is a research student at QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Australia and is currently working on a project that, as she explains, “tries to understand why Brazilian memes are different from other memes, how they express specific aspects of Brazilian culture, and why they matter.”

“Brazil is very active on the internet, not only because of the number of users, but also because Brazilians have a very specific way of behaving online. […] Brazilians don’t care if you don’t understand their language and their jokes, they will talk to you as if you were Brazilian”, Gabriela says in an essay about former Brazilian singer and dancer Gretchen — aka the queen of memes, in Brazil — who recently starred in Katy Perry’s Swish, swish lyric video.

We talked to Gabriela to understand “why Brazil’s memes matter”.

Why have you decided to study memes in your dissertation?

My final paper for my undergrad studies was about a YouTube channel called “Porta dos Fundos” [“Backdoor”, a Brazilian comedy-sketch channel]. I loved studying the Brazilian internet, so I’ve decided to go deeper into the relationship between humor and online Brazilian culture.

I’ve always thought that Brazilian memes were wonderful. They say so much about Brazil, and this became even clearer after I moved to Australia and found out that Australians have a completely different sense of humor and had trouble understanding ours.

How do Brazilian memes differ from other countries’ memes?

Each country or region has different memes that reflect their own culture. Brazilian memes portray the Brazilian people and how we deal with popular culture, politics and social reality.

They are amazingly difficult to understand, for those seeing them from the outside, because we have this unique way of talking about our problems through humor.

A saying that I really like to mention to those who are not Brazilian is that “we laugh so we don’t cry”. I think it perfectly describes our unique way of making humor.

How do you describe this unique Brazilian language?

Self-irony. While we criticize our problems as a country and our behavior as a society, we also make fun out of it, as if laughing were the only way to face such a reality. Our memes present themselves as genuinely Brazilian because they are paradoxical and complex, just like our own culture. When we laugh at Brazil’s expense, it is as if we were both ashamed and proud of being Brazilian.

What are the challenges of translating Brazil’s memes to other contexts?

One of my greatest challenges was to try to “translate” our memes culturally. The biggest difficulty is that some memes only make sense if you are Brazilian – and those were the most interesting to me.

So, in my dissertation, I delved into a little bit of Brazil’s history and tried to explain our culture before trying to explain our memes. I’ve also tried to find comparisons with Australian culture and chose to discard those that were too culturally specific.

How did Brazil’s meme culture begin?

There are no official records of “Brazil’s first internet meme”. Actually, scholars do not have a general consensus for when the word “meme” began to be used on the web.

Originally, this word comes from a 1976 theory by biologist Richard Dawkins in which he defines “meme” as a transference of ideas from person to person, through repetition.

On the internet, a meme is an idea, phrase, image or video that keeps repeating and changing itself. That’s why Brazil was already a meme producer way before the internet, with popular rhymes that kept changing over time or catch phrases from soap operas that are used in real life in different contexts.

One of the first successful Brazilian memes online was “Tapa na Pantera” [“slap on the panther”, meaning taking a hit off a joint], from 2006, that had several parodies, a funk version and excerpts that turned into punch lines.

How do memes drive change in the overall Brazilian culture?

Memes are helping us build our cultural identity, which is extremely complex and abstract. Memes that satirize political scandals of the past few years illustrate how Brazilians face their country’s problems and their own political views.

When “we laugh at the disgrace”, we are expressing ourselves in the most Brazilian way possible. This way of facing problems may not be new, but network communication can turn it into a portrait of Brazilian reality. It’s as if specific language, use of humor and behavior define what it is to be a Brazilian on the internet.

This also makes Brazilian internet users recognize themselves as being part of the same culture, no matter how different their political and social opinions are.

In your article about Gretchen, you mentioned how some international pop stars have embraced Brazilian memes. Is this common to observe with other countries’ memes or are Brazilians masters of the internet I’m-messing-with-you kind of thing?

Yes, Brazil is conquering more space online. Today, we are the fourth country in the world with the largest online presence and — more than having a high number of users — we are VERY active online, especially in social media. Our memes are, undoubtedly, a source of national pride.

Brazilians insist on sharing them with the “gringos” (slang for foreigners), an attitude that is also part of our cultural identity. Brazilians are increasingly being perceived as part of an internet that is intensely dominated by the United States. This happens, mainly, when Brazilian memes are validated by US culture, such as the case with Gretchen performing in the Katy Perry music video.

If you could define Brazil with one meme, which one would you choose?

Mission impossible! Not even if I organize a meme catalog, would I be able to define such a unique and complex country. But there is a comment (not a meme specifically) that I think says a lot about how we use humor to criticize Brazilian issues while, at the same time, building our cultural identity.

I think it perfectly shows this paradox of having shame and pride at the same time, something that is in our meme DNA. It’s the reply of a Brazilian girl to Azealia Banks, who was so annoyed by the bombing of replies in Portuguese she received after criticizing Brazil.

Azealia wrote: “I didn’t know they had internet in the favela”. Débora’s answer couldn’t have been more Brazilian than this.

Singer Azealia Banks got into a fight with Brazilians on Facebook (and allegedly had her account suspended) after calling them “third world freaks”. This was Débora Oliveira’s reply: “Here we have internet even in prison, my love”.

Fernanda Canofre is a journalist, with a master’s degree in History. She was born in southern Brazil. While wandering around, Canofre uses reporting as an excuse to listen to people and to tell stories about all types of people.

This article appeared originally in Global Voices – https://globalvoices.org/

It had a quasi-parliamentary government, a complex defense system, a standard of living higher than that of most Europeans on the coast, and an egalitarian society that respected women and all races. Its last king, Zumbi, is reputed to have been well educated, having been raised by a Jesuit.

The population of Palmares may have reached or exceeded 20,000. Its citadel fortress atop a remote mountain was finally overrun in 1694, and today, nothing – not one artifact – remains.

Here is the introduction to Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil’s Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves, by Glenn Alan Cheney. For more information on New London Librarium’s Brazil Series on the history, culture, literature, and issues of Brazil, see NLLibrarium.com/brazil

Introduction to Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil’s Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves

Sometime in the late 16th century, forty “rebellious Negroes” are said to have somehow escaped captivity at a sugar mill near Porto Calvo in the captaincy of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil.

Sebastião da Rocha Pita, the Brazilian historian who reported this incident more than a hundred years later, gave no details of the escape, whether it was a violent uprising of slaves armed with no more than the tools of their trade – machetes, axes, hoes, scythes – or a silent slipping away into the dark of night.

He did not report whether women and children joined the exodus, whether anyone took food or tools, whether they ran with shackles on their ankles. About all we can surmise is that they ran in bare feet and instinctively headed west, away from the coast – away from the civilization that had enslaved them – and into the dense mata atlântica forest.

The forest and terrain worked to the advantage of people who carried little and had no destination other than away. At the same time, nature hindered anyone carrying weapons, ammunition, armor, supplies, and chains. The people fleeing could go in any direction; the people chasing them had any number of directions to choose from, only one of which was correct. Even barefoot people in the remnants of shackles could outrun soldiers lugging the baggage of war and enslavement.

The fugitives, who could have been Africans or Indians, ran until they reached the hills of the interior – steep, long ridges that punched up out of generally level terrain. Like fugitives everywhere, they found security in the higher elevations. They settled in a place of palm trees, fertile soil, plentiful water, and an abundance of game.

Over the years, more fugitives arrived, some quite likely from Bahia, the captaincy to the south. The population grew to hundreds and, by the turn of the century, thousands. Palmares became known to the Africans as a quilombo, from a word in the Mbundu language of Africa that meant war camp.

Settlements grew into villages, and more villages took hold on more mountains. Sharing a common purpose, common problems, and a common enemy, the villages – called mocambos, a Mbundu word for hideout – formed relationships that would evolve toward a common government. The polity became known as Palmares for the region’s many palms.

Palmares became a refuge for more fugitives, and its men became bold enough to attack farms and sugar mills to steal what they needed and to liberate more slaves. By 1603, Palmares was a problem that the Portuguese colonizers knew they had to resolve. A society dependent on slavery could not survive alongside a society of former slaves.

Palmares thrived while the colony on the coast struggled against disease, corruption, and the inefficiencies of an autocratic, hierarchical government led by a distant king. While Pernambuco depended on slavery, the nation of fugitives proved that free people, even free black people, could sustain themselves without agricultural commodity production based on forced labor.

Having formed a government and a religion that served its purposes, Palmares proved that the New World did not need the king of Portugal or the pope of Rome. Palmares also became a community of several races, not just blacks and Indians but whites who were fleeing society or the law. Palmares was a viable alternative to plantation slavery and Portuguese society.

It was an attractive nuisance that lured slaves away from slavery and gave European plebeians reason to question the status quo. It was also an aggressive enemy that threatened public safety and the colonial economy. It had to be eliminated.

Over the next ninety years the Portuguese and, briefly, the Dutch, sent two dozen military excursions to Palmares with the objective of exterminating it. To say that these militias were “white” or European would not be accurate, though they were defending white European interests.

Their ranks included black slaves and regiments of free blacks and free Indians. Judging by race alone, it would be hard to distinguish the defenders of the “black” nation from the defenders of the “white” outpost of Europe. The real battle was not only between an empire and rebels but between the wealthy and the poor, the enslavers and the free, the feudal past and an enlightened future that no one had even dreamed of yet.

Almost all the Dutch and Portuguese excursions failed miserably until 1694, when a massive army, much of it mercenaries of mixed race, surrounded the Palmarian citadel of Macaco. After a month-long siege, they killed, captured, or dispersed its defenders, effectively eliminating Palmares as a nation, effectively erasing it from the face of the earth.

Today, not one bit of physical evidence remains from Palmares. The precise locations of all but one of its villages and cities are unknown. Historical information about Palmares depends entirely on documents produced by the invaders, and their version of reality is suspect.

They recorded little about the society they were attempting to render extinct, and their reports were corrupted with ulterior motives. They had no concept of history, culture, or sociology, no interest in Palmares except its elimination. They wanted it not just dead but forgotten.

But Brazil did not forget. The memories of the Quilombo dos Palmares evolved into myths, and the myths fed into the political dialectic. Just as Palmares had offered an alternative to colonial society of the seventeenth century, it offered an alternative to socioeconomic problems of the 20th century.

As a people on the losing end of civilization’s perpetual struggles, the rebel nation was a useful symbol for later generations who opposed military rule, capitalism, class division, racism, and injustice. Thus myth became confused with fact, and, true or not, became an active and ongoing argument in the modern Brazilian culture.

Palmares was the largest and one of the most long-lived quilombos in Brazil but by no means the only one. There were thousands, and thousands remain in Brazil today, far-flung communities of people with complexions darker than average who still share communal land as their ancestors did.

Many of these communities are under siege just as Palmares was. The invaders aren’t militias but farmers, mining companies, developers, and others claiming land of undocumented ownership. The war that Palmares fought for nearly a century continues in myriad manifestations three centuries later.

This book recounts the struggle between Palmares and the European colonizers on the Brazilian coast. It depends extensively on the dubious documentation those colonizers left us. Those colonizers had little regard for the Palmarians as people or Palmares as a new and practical culture. The reports of militia commanders and government agents tend to focus on issues of battles, funding, and the threats Palmares represented.

They report precious little about the Palmares way of life, its language and religion, its people and their point of view. The reports are also tainted with political efforts to wrest money and privilege from higher powers. This book reports what they said happened.

The book goes on to explore the struggle in modern times. That struggle has evolved with the times, yet it is remarkably similar. And, similarly, the truth is still hard to discern. Archaeologists, historians, and sociologists find it hard to detach fact from myth.

Political activists struggle to use the symbol of Palmares to justify their positions. People who live in today’s quilombos struggle for recognition and respect even as they struggle to hold on to land that has been passed down to them.

A similar struggle, in fact, pervades Brazilian society, with its attempts to more equitably share revenues and land, provide justice for all, and, yes, still, end the modern equivalent to slavery.

Palmares was real, and its myths have become their own reality. The story and the history of Palmares are over 400 years old, and they have yet to reach their end.

Vivo, controlled by PT and by the Spanish Telefonica, is one of the main mobile telephony companies in Brazil.

"Yes, I believe it. That was what I was referring to," stated José Sócrates, about whether he defends the establishment of a large Portuguese-Brazilian telecommunications company and referring to an address he had given minutes earlier, during the ceremony for signing of a protocol between Portugal Telecom and Bahia state.

Noting the existence of a "dispute" between the main languages in the world, José Sócrates added that "it is the state's obligation to promote a language," something which "should also be done through partnerships" between telecommunications companies.

"The Portuguese language is the most important asset we have, the greatest," said the prime minister, adding that it is the "responsibility of all" to defend and promote the maternal language.

Without specifying whether the creation of this great player should take place through consolidation or strategic partnerships between sector companies, José Sócrates returned to stating the need to establish a company that may compete with the large sector giants on the international market.

Before that, during his participation in the ceremony and addressing an audience of Brazilian journalists and politicians, Sócrates nicknamed Portugal Telecom the "jewel of the crown" among companies in his country, guaranteeing that the operator led by Zeinal Bava – in which the Portuguese government has a 'golden share' that guarantees special rights – "is in Vivo and in Brazil to stay". "The responsibility is large and starts in telecommunications," he defended.

This statement was made at a moment in which the future of the partnership between PT and Telefonica in the control of Vivo seems uncertain, due to the support of the Spaniards to the takeover bid by Sonaecom over PT, in 2006, which practically reduced the strategic partnership between the two Iberian operators to a convenience marriage. Both PT and Telefonica refused to sell their half of Vivo, stating, on the contrary, that they were buyers.

Sócrates' statements, therefore, represent a clear signal of public support of the Portuguese executive to the refusal of selling the Portuguese half of Vivo to the Spaniards, an operation that is defended by the hardcore shareholder group at the operator.

On the other hand, analysts who follow the sector believe that a new Brazilian telecommunications group that is going to be born with the merger of Telemar (Oi) and Brasil Telecom could be an alternative for PT investment, through exchange of participation, a movement that the government of Brazil has already said it would consider with appreciation.

Another possible scenario is the purchase of TIM Brazil from Telecom Italia by Telefonica, which has disclosed as a possibility by the Italian press and would oblige the Spaniards to leave Vivo, opening way for a takeover by PT.

Speaking at the closing of the Council of Ministers, the Portuguese minister for the Presidency, Pedro Silva Pereira, said that the government hopes that by the end of 2009 "the projects may be in progress on the land."

"These investment contracts are of great importance and are turned to the installation of two industrial units in the region of í‰vora: one for production of metallic structures for the production of aircraft and another for the production of composite materials, lighter and more resistant," specified the government member.

According to the Portuguese minister for the Presidency, Embraer investment should not only have a "strong impact on regional development, but also on the structuring of an aeronautics 'hub' in Portugal."

"There will surely be an effect of growth of the Portuguese economy, generating advantages to small and medium companies that supply services in the area," he pointed out.

Pedro Silva Pereira recalled that the Embraer investment in Portugal was announced recently, during the last summit of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP), in the presence of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and of the prime minister of Portugal, José Sócrates.

"It is a proposal that has the support of politicians in the government of Portugal and of Brazil," said the minister for the Presidency.

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í‰vora was chosen due to access to qualified labour, logistics infrastructure and to the existence of a technological park turned to the aeronautics industry. According to Embraer, the units should have a high level of industrial automation and innovative processes. Investment should reach US$ 231 million in six years.

The investment had already been forecasted in the company's planning, according to an Embraer press statement. "We are pleased to announce new investments in Portugal, which represent another important strategic step towards improving Embraer's productivity and competitiveness, whilst also supporting the company's growth and its global presence," said the company's president and CEO, Frederico Fleury Curado.

According to Curado, í‰vora, Portugal and the European Union are benefited by the operations. The European Union, pointed out the company's president, is one of the largest and most important markets for Embraer, both for the purchase of equipment and inputs and for the sale of aircraft.

Embraer is the world leader in commercial jets for up to 120 passengers and one of the main Brazilian exporters. The company is headquartered in the city of São José dos Campos, in the interior of the state of São Paulo, and also has operations in the United States, France, Portugal, China and Singapore.

Anba

António Mexia said, during the presentation of the company's quarterly results, that Brazil needs more electric production and that, along with wind and water energy, "combined cycle centers play an important part".

"We are studying the model they use for gas supply and evaluating the possibility of participating in projects for the construction of liquefied natural gas terminals," he said to journalists at a press conference.

António Mexia also revealed that EDP is discussing "the available natural gas" with Brazilian oil company Petrobras, but added that it is necessary to "purchase gas abroad". "Up to the end of the year, we will have news," he added.

He had already mentioned that a partnership with Sonatrach for the Iberian Peninsula could be extended to other areas.

EDP also added that they currently have a series of projects under study in Brazil in several technologies (water, combined cycle, biomass and wind) corresponding to a capacity of 4,000 megawatts.

With regard to partnerships with the International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC), from Abu Dhabi, António Mexia added that "projects in which we may operate in partnership" have been identified. "It is an area that presents good perspectives for us," he said.

With regard to auctions for barrages in Portugal and possible partnerships, António Mexia stated that EDP is currently working on "economic and technical viability studies" and that only after they are completed will partnerships be defined.

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Most of the Portuguese investment (US$ 324 million) went into the service sector, with a special highlight to the financial area, with Bradesco bank receiving the largest volume of funds coming from Portugal – US$ 143 million.

Bradesco is a partner of Portuguese group Espí­rito Santo (BES). Both banks have a partnership that includes crossed participation of approximately 3% of their capital. Apart from that, Bradesco has 20% of BES Investment Brazil.

In Brazilian industry the Portuguese invested US$ 53 million and in agriculture, US$ 4 million. Operations under US$ 1 million are not listed specifically, but they totaled US$ 80 million.

Prominent last year was Portuguese investment by Aero LB Participações, in the transport sector, which invested US$ 32 million in the country, Alnilan, a rubber and plastic product maker (US$ 31 million) and White Martins Industrial Gas (US$ 18 million).

Portugal rose from the 15th main foreign investor in Brazil in 2006 to the 14th place last year, losing only to the Netherlands, the United States, Luxembourg, Spain, Germany, they Cayman Islands, Bermuda, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Canada, Chile and Bahamas.

The return of investment to Portugal totaled US$ 230 million, of which US$ 160 million were from Bradesco.

Foreign direct investment in Brazil reached a record US$ 34.6 billion last year, 84.3% over the US$ 18.7 billion that entered the country in the previous year.

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The announcement of the partnership was made on Tuesday, July 3, An agreement signed on Wednesday, in Lisbon, in the sidelines of the Brazil-European Union Summit, forecasts that both companies should have 50% in the new partnership, to promote the investments.

Of the total volume of funds to be put into the project, Ferreira de Oliveira said that approximately 650 million reais (US$ 340 million) will be turned to the adaptation of Galp refineries for the processing of biofuels.

Apart from production of second-generation biodiesel in Galp refineries, from vegetable oils produced in Brazil, the project also includes, production for export and the sponsoring of agricultural production of oleaginous plants, both in Brazil.

In the industrial project in Brazil, investment will be between 260 million reais and 312 million reais (US$ 140 million and US$ 160 million), according to Ferreira de Oliveira.

In the third dimension of the project, agriculture, investment will be "made by the farmers themselves", supported by contracts for sales to the new joint venture, stated the executive.

The project involves the farming of around 600,000 hectares of land in Brazil and a total annual production of 600,000 tons of vegetable oil. Half will be processed in Galp refineries and the other half in Brazil, for later export to Portugal or other European countries.

To Galp, the agreement is "a decisive process to concretize the biofuel strategy and contributes to the positioning of Portugal at the forefront of production of second-generation biofuels."

Petrobras points out that the Brazilian production of biofuels forecasted for 2008 should generate produce for "almost immediate" export.

Apart from that, according to a statement disclosed on Wednesday, demand on the Portuguese market is guaranteed due to the engagement that Portugal has taken on with the European Union, forecasting that by 2010, one tenth of the fuel used in the country will be "green".

Ag. Lusa