Brazil

One of the most openly Christian countries in Latin America is Brazil. It is also the only Portuguese speaking country in Latin America. The reasons Brazil is different from its Latin neighbors is that not only was it a Portuguese colony, unlike the rest of Latin America that was Spanish, but the entire Portuguese royal family fled Portugal in 1807 and moved to Brazil.

The flight of the Portuguese royal family, the Braganas, took place at a critical time in western European history, when the Peninsular war was heating up. Eclipsed by Britain and France, Portugal was in decline. Napoleon’s army was advancing from the north. The deposed kings of France and Holland had both gone into exile in England; the British fleet was blockading the Tagus in an attempt to counter the French advance. As the French army drew closer to Lisbon, the Portuguese prince regent, Dom Joao, under pressure from the British envoy, took a decision that would be fateful not just for the Portuguese crown, but also for Brazil, the new world colony that was the mother-country’s major source of revenue.

On November 29, 1807, a day before the French army entered the city, Dom Joao and his Spanish Borbon queen, Dona Carlota, fled by the only route available to them: the sea. The scene was reminiscent of the fall of Saigon. A convoy of three-dozen frigates, brigantines, sloops, corvettes and ships-of-the-line, with the entire Portugese court on board 10,000-strong, set sail for Brazil with a British escort.

The Portuguese court stayed in Brazil for 13 years. They returned to Europe after the British defeated Napoleon and wanted to restore royal authority in Europe. However, Dom Pedro, the son of Dom Joao and Dona Carlotta, whose paternity was disputed, decided to stay in Brazil and declared himself Emperor Pedro I of Brazil – establishing the first European Catholic monarchy of the new world.