History of Pernambuco
Not to be overlooked, however, are the established indigenous peoples of the region, numerous revolts and short-lived independence movements, French incursions, and a Dutch occupation.
[citation needed] In the past, Pernambuco was believed to be a distortion of the Tupi words para-nã (wide river) and Mbuka (hollow or broken), referring to its coastal reefs.
With the men doing the heavy work of clearing ground and the women planting and harvesting crops,[11] indigenous peoples traded large quantities of Brazilwood with the Portuguese.
The Captaincy of Pernambuco was formed and granted to Duarte Coelho, consisting sixty leagues along the Atlantic Coast from the island of Itamaracá in the north to the River Sao Francisco in the south.
[20] While few historical documents exist to the exact nature of Coelho's governance, it is clear that Pernambuco was decidedly the most successful of all the initial captaincies in Brazil.
Duarte Coelho, and later his heirs, enjoyed relative autonomy in developing the captaincy as a major producer of sugar and Portugal's richest Brazilian colony throughout the 16th century.
Portugal experienced competition from other foreign powers throughout its colonial history, and preventing these rivals from expanding in the New World was one motivation for its colonization of Brazil.
Additional Dutch colonies in the Caribbean were also developed and began producing sugar, providing fierce new competition for Parambuco within Brazil and internationally.
[26] These two factors had led to the 18th century Mascate War, which can be viewed as an early indicator of the strife which would continue to occur between native born Brazilians and the Portuguese reinóis.
[27] Several early rebellions among the intellectual class of Brazil achieved little and had minimal impact on Brazilian history, including the 1801 Inconfidencia of Pernambuco.
[25] The territorial extent of Pernambuco was fluid during the colonial period, and the current borders were roughly set in the 19th century after Ceará and São Francisco were removed from the state.
The elites of the state consisted of government officials appointed by an external ruler, the senhores de engenho (sugar mill owners), and colonels (local landowners, especially inland).
[32][33][34] During the colonial era, printing presses were outlawed in Brazil and education was extremely limited, with only around 3,000 colonists receiving degrees in Coimbra and a low literacy rate of 15% even among the free population.
[43] As such, while abolition was not hampered in the region, the condition of freedmen in Pernambuco was not greatly improved, as they mostly melded into an existing labor supply of impoverished workers.
This coffee was mainly grown in the central and southern regions of Brazil and not in Pernambuco, and the state became increasingly unable to compete with these new agricultural producers.
Aid to the periodically drought stricken Northeast provides a window into understanding the negative effects of regionalism on Pernambuco throughout much of the states history.
[61] At the end of Cavalcanti's rule in 1937, the continued primacy of the declining sugar economy left Pernambuco dominated by the local aristocracy with little or no improvement for the lower classes.
Although the military coup of 1964 would interrupt this plan, SUDENE, and the peasant leagues, were significant elements in developing a political voice for the poor of Pernambuco.
While treatment of this period at the national level is beyond the scope of this article, the military government frequently resorted to violence in the state of Pernambuco.
[72] Under the military dictatorship, almost all of the change-oriented movements and organizations established during the Second Republic were halted or dismantled in the name of the regime's fiscal stabilization policy.
[75] These cooperatives directly addressed one hurdle in the development of Pernambuco, which was the practice of only growing sugar can on traditional plantations and having to import food form other Brazilian states.
[77] The church in Pernambuco was not the only center of resistance in the state, nor was Archbishop Hélder Câmara the only bishop in Brazil to oppose the military dictatorship.
Toward the end of the military dictatorship, along with unions and squatters, the Catholic Church in Brazil participated in organizing the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST).
Future president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a native of Pernambuco, led a series of strikes in São Paulo.
Particularly important were advances in communication and transportation, but also the centralization of the Vargas era governments and the military dictatorship that came to have greater influence than Brazil's centuries old regionalism.
In the 1970s observers pointed to Pernambuco as part of the least developed region in the Western Hemisphere with an infant mortality rate variously described as 25 to 50%[87] or that as many as 40% of children died prior to reaching school age.
[89] During military rule one earlier effort to improve the lot of the rural poor, the Ligas Camponesas (peasant leagues) was suppressed.
[90] After the military dictatorship, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST), which had been organized in 1984 in the far South of Brazil, had some success in providing land to the rural poor.
However, the due to the shrinking of the market for sugar that began in the 1980s and continued through the 1990s, MST was successful in organizing in Pernambuco and would execute land occupations especially during the 1990s.
[98] While attempts to address land ownership in Pernambuco experienced limited success affecting land tenure in the last half of the Twentieth Century through organizations such as the ‘Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra’ (MST) and the ‘Ligas Camponesas’ in the city of Recife a fifty-year effort to resolve squatter's rights in the city center came to fruition in the 2014 granting of titled ownership of homes in Ponte Maduro to residents of this favela (slum).
