Banco do Brasil’s slavery past fuels debate on reparations

Viscount José Bernardino de Sá, a Brazilian nobleman who made his fortune by sending kidnapped Africans to America as slavesbecame in 1853 the largest investor in the Bank of Braziltoday the oldest in the country.

170 years later, the institution faces legal action over its historical ties to the slave market, part of growing pressure in Brazil and the world for those who benefited from the slavery pay reparations.

In Brazil, the last country in America to abolish slavery, in 1888, the debate broke out in September, after 14 historians sent the Federal Public Ministry a study detailing the participation of the Banco do Brasil in that trade.

In what historians consider the first case of its kind in the South American giant, prosecutors opened an investigation and demanded reparations from the state Bank of Brazilfounded in 1808 and today the second largest bank in Latin America, with assets of US$380,000 million.

But the stain of slavery went far beyond one bank, as the study makes clear.

“Capital in the form of human bodies was a structural part of the financial system,” says the document, prepared by historians from Harvard, the University of Pittsburgh and several Brazilian universities.

Currently, 56% of Brazil’s 203 million inhabitants identify as black or mixed race.

The scars of centuries of oppression are still visible: Black Brazilians earn, on average, about half those of whites, have lower life expectancies, and face frequent discrimination.

“It is not about the past, but a current problem,” said one of the historians, Martha Abreu, of the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

“Apologies are insufficient”

Prosecutors this month summoned black rights activists, government and Banco do Brasil officials to a public hearing at the Portela samba school in Rio de Janeiro, an emblem of black pride and Afro-Brazilian influence on national culture.

André Machado, executive manager of the Banco do Brasil, He opened the event by reading a public apology for the bank’s role in the “perverse history” of slavery.

The institution asserted that its current executive director, Tarciana Medeiros, is the first black woman in the history of the company in that position.

The bank unveiled plans to address inequality, such as funding for Black women entrepreneurs, accelerated career plans for Black employees and funding research on racial issues.

But the chief prosecutor Julio Araujo considered “insufficient” those proposals, and said his team will continue to seek reparations.

Attendees were also disappointed.

“When we talk about reparations, it can’t just be an apology,” said Silvia de Mendonca, a 62-year-old Unified Black Movement activist.

Mendonca rattled off a list of projects that black communities hope to fund with eventual reparations: education, accessible child care, cultural centers, police reform, job training.

“It’s about empowering and including people,” he pointed.

After the “fingerprints”

Brazil was the world’s largest importer of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade.

It is estimated that 5.5 million slaves were sent between the 16th and 19th centuries to the former Portuguese colony, which became independent in 1822.

Historians highlight the close ties of the Banco do Brasil with slavery.

Bernardino de Sa, its largest individual shareholder, was one of the world’s leading slave traders, transporting some 19,000 Africans to Brazil between 1825 and 1851, even after the trade was banned in 1850.

The bank’s then director, Joao Henrique Ulrich, started out as a slave trader in Angola, while Joao Pereira Darigue Faro, vice president, came from the family that owned the most slaves in the main oil-producing region. Brazilian coffee.

The study also highlighted how Bank of Brazil used its capital – largely from the slave trade – to finance an entire economy based on slavery.

Blacks were not only converted into labor but also into financial assets that guaranteed loans and generated great wealth.

The debate goes beyond Brazil: African nations this month held a pioneering conference on reparations for the devastating legacy of slavery on the continent.

The host, Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo, called on African and Caribbean nations to unite in demanding justice from Western countries.

In Brazil, historians plan to investigate other companies and families whose current wealth is linked to slavery, Abreu said.

“In Brazil, sometimes it seems that slavery has no one’s fingerprints,” Araujo said.

“But a crime against humanity was committed, and we need to talk about how those responsible can make amends.”