Brazil and Argentina: From conflict to agreement, now under threat

For much of their two-century history, Argentina and Brazil looked in opposite directions. Both emerged from the Iberian world and shared Latin America’s peripheral position, yet they developed sharply different political traditions, social structures and ideas of national identity.

Brazil became independent from Portugal in 1822 but kept its monarchy. The Empire of Brazil was the only durable monarchy in a largely republican New World, and it rested on a strong slave system that survived until 1888. Brazil became the last Western country to abolish slavery, 23 years after the American Civil War ended that system in the United States.

Argentina’s independence, by contrast, came with a political revolution. From the beginning, it embraced republicanism, and its civic life was guided by an ideal of equality. Slavery, although significant during the colonial period, began to disappear after the revolution.

Those differences extended beyond institutions. Argentina was shaped by European immigration, while Brazil’s population included Black people forcibly brought from Africa. Geography reinforced the contrast: tropical forests and Atlantic coasts on one side, temperate plains and broad rivers on the other. Each country built its identity with one eye on Europe and another on what was happening across the Uruguay and Río de la Plata, where its principal rival for South American supremacy stood.

It took a century and a half for the two countries to reverse a history of disputes and suspicion and begin constructing a durable bilateral relationship based on shared interests and values. The article presents that achievement as fragile, now threatened for reasons it calls petty. The supplied excerpt ends as it begins to develop the contrast between Argentine republicanism and disorder.