History
The Northeast was the first part of Brazil to be settled by Europeans on any scale. The Portuguese were quick to recognize the potential of the coast, and by the end of the sixteenth century sugar plantations were already importing African slaves. Salvador and Olinda developed into large towns while Rio de Janeiro was no more than a swampy village. Indeed, Salvador became the first capital of Brazil, and by the end of the sixteenth century the Northeast had become Europe's main supplier of sugar . The merchants and plantation owners grew rich and built mansions and churches, but their very success led to their downfall. It drew the attention of the Dutch , who were so impressed that they destroyed the Portuguese fleet in Salvador in 1624, burnt down Olinda six years later and occupied much of the coast, paying particular attention to sugar-growing areas. It took more than two decades of vicious guerrilla warfare before the Dutch were expelled, and even then they had the last laugh: they took their new experience of sugar growing to the West Indies, which soon began to edge Brazilian sugar out of the world market. The Dutch invasion, and the subsequent decline of the sugar trade, proved quite a fillip to the development of the interior. With much of the coast in the hands of the invaders, the colonization of the agreste and sertao was stepped up. The Indians and escaped slaves already there were joined by cattlemen ( vaqueiros), as trails were opened up into the highlands and huge ranches carved out of the interior. Nevertheless, it took over two centuries, roughly from 1600 to 1800, before these regions were fully absorbed into the rest of Brazil. In the agreste, where some fruit and vegetables could be grown and cotton did well, market villages developed into towns. However, the sertao became, and still remains, cattle country, with an economy and society very different from the coast. Life in the interior has always been hard. The landscape is dominated by cactus and dense scrub - caatinga - the heat is fierce, and for most of the year the countryside is parched brown. But it only takes a few drops of rain to fall for an astonishing transformation to take place. Within the space of a few hours the sertao blooms. Its plant life, adapted to semi-arid conditions, rushes to take advantage of the moisture: trees bud, cacti burst into flower, shoots sprout up from the earth, and, literally overnight, the brown is replaced by a carpet of green. Too often, however, the rain never comes, or arrives too late, or too early, or in the wrong place, and the cattle begin to die. The first recorded drought was as early as 1710, and since then droughts have struck the sertao at ten- or fifteen-year intervals, sometimes lasting for years. The worst was in the early 1870s, when as many as two million people died of starvation; 1999 was also a particularly bad year. The problems caused by drought were, and still are, aggravated by the inequalities in land ownership. The fertile areas around rivers were taken over in early times by powerful cattle barons, whose descendants still dominate much of the interior. The rest of the people of the interior, pushed into less favoured areas, are regularly forced by drought to seek refuge in the coastal cities until the rains return. For centuries, periodic waves of refugees, known as os flagelados (the scourged ones), have poured out of the sertao fleeing droughts: modern Brazilian governments have been no more successful in dealing with the special problems of the interior than the Portuguese colonizers before them.
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