930s. Carecas (skinhead) groups operate in Brazil, mainly in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Like their counterparts in Europe, many of them are neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic and xenophobic. The Confederação Israelita do Brasil (CONIB), founded in 1951, represents all the Jewish federations and communities in Brazil and campaigns against anti-Semitism in the media and more generally in Brazil.
Unlike most of Latin America, Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese. Initial relations with the indigenous population were friendly but colonists eager to exploit trade in wood and sugar soon provoked conflict. The massacres and slavery which almost exterminated the coastal Tupi initiated a pattern repeated over the next 500 years. Rival colonial powers, France and the Netherlands, exploited existing hostilities between indigenous groups. Colonists introduced dysentery, smallpox, influenza and plague. Epidemics of these European diseases swept through the reduções (settlements) instituted by Jesuit missionaries, killing many thousands of indigenous and tribal peoples within a few decades. According to the NGO Survival International the indigenous population of Brazil is less than 7 per cent of what it was in 1500. It is thought that during pre-colonial times there existed up to 1,000 distinct tribes, while today only an estimated 197 of these remain.
In the early nineteenth century, Brazil increased its traditional exports of cotton, sugar and coffee, encroaching still further on indigenous lands. A reported 87 indigenous groups were exterminated in the first half of the twentieth century through contact with expanding colonial frontiers. Between 1964 and 1984 foreign companies and international lending banks tightened control over Brazil's economic structure, continuing to expand the colonizing frontier. Roads stretching across the Amazon basin forced the removal of 25 indigenous groups at the time and the same trends continue. Pressures to expand the Brazilian economy have continued to aggressively erode the Amazon.
After the decimation of the local indigenous population in the seventeenth century an estimated 3.65 million enslaved Africans were imported to Brazil, and the majority of these were brought to Brazil's first capital, Salvador da Bahia. Urban slave labour differed from plantation life; slaves were not passive victims of the system and many escaped to found their own 'quilombos'.
Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888. Initially the Portuguese authorities promoted miscegenation as a way of ensuring a Portuguese presence in under-populated regions. But, fearing the rising black population Brazil, subsequently opened its country to white immigrants, who were given preference over black people in jobs, housing and education.
The Brazilian policy of 'whitening' has denied the existence of ethnic minorities. Those unable to express themselves in the national language have been banned from voting. Since the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia and related forms of Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa in 2001, Brazil has taken important steps to recognize the diversity of the nation, although the country still has a long way to go in order to reach racial equality.
Environmental issues dominated the latter part of 1988 and much of 1989 when the murder of Francisco (Chico) Mendes, founder of the National Council of Rubber Tappers Union, brought Brazil's environmental problems to international attention. One of his close followers, Marina da Silva, currently serves as the Brazilian Minister for the Environment. Mendes' efforts led to the creation of 150,000 acres of extractive reserves, which have allowed rubber tappers to extract commercial products from the trees within this territory. As the Brazilian government continues discussions of hydroelectric dams in the Amazon River and other mega-projects, these tappers remain threatened.
International environmental organizations like Greenpeace have condemned the damage caused by large-scale development projects such as cattle ranching, industria