For more than three hundred years, Minas Gerais supported the Portuguese Crown, helped to build the idea of an independent Brazilian nation and always managed to remain influential in Brazilian political decisions.
In the beginning it was the backlands.
In the first centuries of colonization, the territory that we now call Minas Gerais was, in the eyes of the colonizers, a vast expanse of cliffs and impenetrable forests, inhabited by unknown creatures – it is estimated that at the time of the arrival of the Europeans (1500), a hundred indigenous groups lived in the region.
It was a threatening territory, but it was also full of promise: it was hoped that the continent would contain the metals and precious stones that motivated the conquistadors; there would certainly be slaves to work on the sugar cane plantations that were expanding in the coastal areas in the first century of colonization.
And so, in order to trap indigenous people and discover mineral wealth, the epic of the clearing of Portuguese America began.
Expeditions organized by the government and private individuals toured Brazil and expanded its borders.
Departing from São Paulo, explorers climbed the Mantiqueira mountain range, reaching the lands then known as the Cataguás hinterland (named after the region’s Indians); coming from Bahia, they explored the Jequitinhonha river region and the banks of the São Francisco river.
It wasn’t until the end of the 17th century, however, that the first significant sample of gold was found, near the River Velhas, close to present-day Sabará.
The news spread throughout the colony. Minas Gerais was born.
HISTORY OF MINAS GERAIS
1. GOLD EXPLORATION
The announcement of the first finds provoked a desperate rush towards the mining region.
Adventurers came from all parts of the colony, stimulated by the dream of easy wealth: the exploitation of Minas gold, found in the beds of rivers and streams, did not require large capital investments.
The region also received thousands of Europeans; around 600,000 Portuguese landed in Portuguese America in the first sixty years of the 18th century.
The population explosion, coupled with the precariousness of the supply routes, led the land of gold into chaos. Outbreaks of hunger plagued the region, and masters and slaves began to eat pack animals and insects.
In 1707, the Paulistas, the discoverers of the mines, demanding control of the gold-mining area, clashed with the Portuguese and settlers from other captaincies – whom they pejoratively called emboabas, meaning “foreigners”.
The Emboaba War lasted for two years and culminated in the massacre of the Paulistas.
After the confrontation, the Portuguese government created the Captaincy of São Paulo and Minas do Ouro, to guarantee the exploitation of an area that was proving to be unmanageable; many Paulistas, in turn, headed west, towards Goiás, in search of new deposits.
Between conflicts and tensions, a new society was consolidated in the mining region.
Throughout the first half of the 18th century, subsistence farms sprang up and the roads linking the mining territory to the colony’s coast were opened up. Those who didn’t have their own sources of supply were subjected to the very high prices charged by the merchants – tropeiros – who brought food from the south and Bahia.
The integration of the colony was being outlined for the first time.
2. A NEW SOCIAL ORDER
As they found new gold veins, the miners founded settlements, which soon became populous towns: Caeté (1701), Conceição do Mato Dentro (1702), São José del-Rei, now Tiradentes (1702), São João del-Rei (1704), Vila Rica, now Ouro Preto (1711), Mariana (1711), Sabará (1711), Congonhas do Campo (1734), Paracatu (1798).
Merchants, artisans, doctors, lawyers and officials linked to the administration and control of the mines circulated in these towns.
And captives: in the mid-18th century there were around 100,000 slaves of African origin in Minas.
The living conditions of these workers were precarious, but they had some chance of achieving freedom: it was not uncommon for masters to offer small gold prizes to encourage work in the mines; in addition, slaves could obtain the metal by hiding it in their pockets or under their fingernails until they had collected enough to buy their freedom.
Thus, black slaves also became part of the city scene, often becoming small traders.
The influx of Europeans, settlers from various regions, blacks and Indians resulted in a process of mestizaje hitherto unprecedented in the colony.
3. UNDER THE CONTROL OF THE PORTUGUESE CROWN
For almost a century, the Portuguese colony lived around the gold economy.
The Portuguese Crown, immersed in debt, set up a gigantic apparatus for monitoring and collecting taxes.
At first, the miners owed Portugal a fifth of all the gold they found.
Later, the government set a minimum amount to be collected.
If the desired quota wasn’t reached, there would be a derrama – a regime of exception in which collectors would raid homes and confiscate property.
In 1720, the greed of the Portuguese crown resulted in the first rebellion of the settlers of Minas Gerais.
The revolt, which took place in Vila Rica, was quickly crushed and one of its leaders, the muleteer Filipe dos Santos, was executed.
In a new attempt at control, the government separated Minas and São Paulo, creating the captaincy of Minas Gerais, with its capital in Vila Rica, today Ouro Preto.
In 1727 it was announced that diamonds had been found in the arraial of Tijuco, today Diamantina, in the mountains known as Serro Frio.
Probably a decade earlier, the miners had already discovered the stones, but they didn’t disclose the news to throw off the tax authorities.
With good reason: the rules in the area, which became the Diamantino District, were even stricter than in the gold-producing areas.
For a hundred years, no one could move around the district without official authorization.
See also Historic Cities of Minas Gerais
4. MINEIRA INCONFIDENCE
As time went by, the urbanized society of Minas also became culturally richer.
Coming from Europe, Baroque took on its own characteristics in the colony, establishing itself as the first native art form. The sons of wealthy families left for European universities and brought back new ideas – among them, that of the republic.
In 1789, in the same Vila Rica that had witnessed the death of Filipe dos Santos, a group of intellectuals, merchants, miners and landowners, in debt and exasperated by the threat of a tax, conceived a revolt that would establish the independent republic of Minas Gerais. Denounced, the inconfidentes were arrested; some were deported; others had their property confiscated.
Only Ensign Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes, was hanged and quartered in April 1792.
Many years later, the Brazilian Republic elevated him to the rank of martyr, including him in the gallery of homeland heroes.
5. AN AGRICULTURAL STATE
At the end of the 18th century, gold began to run out. The exploitation of deep mineral deposits required capital and technical know-how that did not exist in Brazil.
In search of new reserves of gold and gems or space to raise cattle, explorers entered the backlands, founded towns and delimited the borders of the captaincy: the North and Northeast regions, close to the Jequitinhonha valley, which belonged to Bahia, were annexed to Minas at the turn of the 19th century; the Triangle, disputed with Goiás, became Minas in 1815.
Before long, the captaincy was no longer the land of gold; the towns were emptying out.
The production of goods to supply the former mining towns and Rio de Janeiro, which became the seat of the Portuguese Crown and later of the Brazilian government, drove the local economy.
Livestock farming spread to the south of Minas and was joined by the dairy industry and coffee growing. At the end of the 19th century, the bankrupt mines were acquired by English companies, who exploited them until they were exhausted.
Supported by the rural elite, the province of Minas Gerais continued to exert its influence throughout the 19th century.
In 1842, liberals from Minas Gerais and São Paulo, disgusted with the conservative influence of the rural elite over the central government, triggered the Liberal Revolution.
In São Paulo, the movement was suppressed in June; Minas, under the command of Teófilo Otoni, resisted until August, when it capitulated to the Duke of Caxias’ troops in the city of Santa Luzia.
The strength of the mining oligarchies extended after the Republic.
From 1894 onwards, politicians from Minas and São Paulo took turns in power, in a pact known as the café com leite policy.
In the same decade, the state capital was moved from Vila Rica to the newly built Cidade de Minas, later Belo Horizonte. Between 1898 and 1930, three of the eleven elected presidents were from Minas Gerais.
When the alliance between the rural oligarchies broke down, the miners allied themselves with the gauchos in the 1930 Revolution, which would bring Getúlio Vargas to the presidency and put an end to the First Republic.
In 1937, through a coup d’état, Getúlio Vargas established his dictatorship, the Estado Novo.
Minas Gerais, which supported the rise of Getúlio Vargas, also worked for his downfall, publishing the Manifesto of the Miners in 1943, a document that called for the country to return to democracy, which would happen in 1945.
Still in the 1940s, there was a change in the economic scenario, with the foundation of Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, to exploit iron ore – the state was returning to mining in new ways.
6. JUSCELINO KUBITSCHEK
Between 1934 and 1954, Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, born in Diamantina, was a federal deputy, mayor of Belo Horizonte and governor of the state.
In the capital, he left his mark with the construction of the Pampulha complex, designed by Oscar Niemeyer.
In 1955, he was elected president; the following year, he put into practice an ambitious plan aimed at industrializing the country and developing its automobile industry.
Also that year, Juscelino began building the country’s new capital, Brasília, designed by Lúcio Costa and, again, Niemeyer, and inaugurated in 1960.
The price of the modernizing euphoria was Brazil’s indebtedness and rising inflation.
Even so, Juscelino Kubitschek’s years in government (between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s) marked Brazilian history as one of its most optimistic periods, when people believed in the formation of a modern and democratic country – a dream that would collapse a few years later, in 1964, when a coup d’état established the military dictatorship in Brazil.
The tanks that would end the democratic period came out of the Juiz de Fora garrison.
One of the main instigators of the coup was the governor of Minas Gerais, Magalhães Pinto. During the dictatorship, Minas Gerais experienced a surge in development, with the expansion of the mining and steel complexes and the installation of an automobile plant in Betim.
7. REDEMOCRATIZATION
When, twenty years later, the military dictatorship began to give in to the pressures of Brazilian society, another politician from Minas Gerais was among the leaders in articulating the return of civilians to power: in January 1985, Tancredo de Almeida Neves, Juscelino’s trusted man, was elected president by the National Congress.
Shortly before being sworn in, Tancredo fell seriously ill; the vice-president, José Sarney, took over. The country watched in disbelief as he died on April 21, the day Tiradentes was executed.
A few years later, Minas Gerais would have another president: Itamar Franco, Fernando Collor’s vice-president, took office in 1994 when Collor, accused of corruption, lost his mandate.
Under the Itamar government, then Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso launched the Real Plan to curb inflation. The success of the plan guaranteed Fernando Henrique the presidency in 1996.
In the 21st century, Minas Gerais is the second most industrialized state in Brazil; it is the country’s largest producer of iron ore, niobium, zinc and gold; agriculture and livestock farming prevail in the South and Southeast regions and in the Triângulo Mineiro.
