History of Brazil

Portuguese Colonization

The land now called Brazil was claimed by Portugal in April 1500, on the arrival of the Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral The Portuguese encountered stone age natives divided into several tribes, most of whom spoke languages of the Tupi–Guarani family, and fought among themselves. Though the first settlement was founded in 1532, colonization was effectively begun in 1534, when King Dom João III of Portugal divided the territory into twelve hereditary captaincies.

Through wars against the French, the Portuguese slowly expanded their territory to the southeast, taking Rio de Janeiro in 1567, and to the northwest, taking São Luís in 1615. They sent military expeditions to the Amazon rainforest and conquered British and Dutch strongholds, founding villages and forts from 1669. In 1680 they reached the far south and founded Sacramento on the bank of the Rio de la Plata, in the Eastern Bank region. This arrangement proved problematic, and in 1549 the king assigned a Governor-General to administer the entire colony.

Independence and Empire

After the Portuguese military had successfully repelled Napoleon's invasion, João VI returned to Europe in April 1821, leaving his elder son Prince Pedro de Alcântara as regent to rule Brazil. The Portuguese government, guided by the new political regime imposed by the Liberal Revolution of 1820, attempted to turn Brazil into a colony once again, thus depriving it of its achievements since 1808. The Brazilians refused to yield and Prince Pedro stood by them declaring the country's independence from Portugal on 7 September 1822.
Despite the loss of Cisplatina in 1828 when it became an independent nation known as Uruguay, Brazil won three international wars during the 58-year reign of Pedro II (the Platine War, the Uruguayan War and the Paraguayan War) and witnessed the consolidation of representative democracy, mainly due to successive elections and unrestricted freedom of the press. Most importantly, slavery was extinguished after a slow but steady process that began with the end of the international traffic in slaves in 1850 and ended with the complete abolition of slavery in 1888. The slave population had been in decline since Brazil's independence: in 1823, 29% of the Brazilian population were slaves but by 1887 this had fallen to 5%.

Early Republic

The "early republican government was little more than a military dictatorship, with army dominating affairs both at Rio de Janeiro and in the states. Freedom of the press disappeared and elections were controlled by those in power". In 1894, following several military and economic crises, the republican civilians rose to power.

Little by little, a cycle of general instability sparked by these crises undermined the regime in a such extent, that by 1930 in the wake of the murder of his running mate, it was possible for the defeated opposition presidential candidate Getúlio Vargas supported by most of the military, led a successful revolt. Vargas was supposed to assume power temporarily, but instead closed the Congress, extinguished the Constitution, ruled with emergency powers and replaced the states' governors with his supporters. Between 1932 and 1938, 3 major attempts to remove Vargas from power occurred. The second one being the 1935 communist revolt which served as an excuse for the preclusion of elections, put into effect by a coup d'état in 1937, which made the Vargas regime a full dictatorship, noted for its brutality and censorship of the press.

By http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil#Portuguese_colonization