The 200-year anniversary of Brazil’s Independence highlights as one of its most important milestones the incorporation of the province of Grão-Pará and Maranhão to the emancipation project headed by Patriarch José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, prince D. Pedro and princess Leopoldina.
The epopee of Independence was preceded by the efforts of Portugal to protect and maintain as its property, the geographical space encompassed by the great river’s bay, coveted by the colonial powers that fought in opposition to Portugal for world domination. Spain, England, Holland and France did not succeed against the Lusitanian efforts in keeping control over the Amazon Valley, when they crossed the limits established by the Treaty of Tordesillas.
For Portugal, the importance of the Amazon was clearly established when the decision was made to consider it as an autonomous administrative region, independent from the former capital, Rio de Janeiro, being it subordinate directly to Lisbon, or in the occasion when the powerful minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal, nominated his own brother, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, as governor of the Province of Grão-Pará and Maranhão.
The most significant date was expected to unite the Brazilian people, however, unfortunately, it encounters a Nation divided around a disorienting agenda, which loses the focus on the essential themes for the future of the Nation and, consequently, despises the deeds of the heroes and their memories.
The arrival of the royal family to Brazil, in 1808, was a decisive moment for the events that would determine the relationship between Brazil and Portugal, in 1822. D. João VI, himself, seemed to be able to predict what would happen when he advised the regent prince, D. Pedro I, to put the crown on his own head before some opportunist could take it from him.
We’ve had the good fortune to count on the superior intelligence and wit of José Bonifácio, the Patriarch, who converted the Portuguese colonial empire in the Americas into a single continental country, while Spanish America had been divided into 19 independent states.
The centralizing empire kept the country protected from the political ambitions of self-interested, or romantic, regional warlords. One would only need to remember that, during the Regency period, Brazil had gone through four simultaneous civil wars. One of them, the Farroupilha War, in Rio Grande do Sul, managed to constitute itself as a Republic, even nominating a president. Another one, in Pará, the Cabanagem Riot, spread throughout Belém, where an autonomous government was established.
Pacifying and keeping the Country’s unity was a challenge solved only by the existence of two institutions, equidistant from the imposition and influence of the warlords: the Navy and the Army, bearers of the idea and the vocation for the preservation of the national unity.
Two hundred years later, the task of fully integrating the Amazon into Brazil still persists. It can only become feasible by assuring its full right to economic and social development, in equal basis to the other regions of the country. The protection of the forests and the environment requires the defense of the lives and well-being of all of the individuals who are born and live in the Amazon.
