Reparations Push in Brazil

Last year, public prosecutors started investigating Bank of Brazil’s historical links to the slave trade. The large, government-owned bank was founded in 1808. There are indeed links. For one, the bank’s largest shareholder at one point was José Bernardino de Sá. From the 1820s to the 1850s, the slave trader made a fortune from transporting around 19,000 Africans to Brazil. The institution also allowed clients to declare enslaved black people as financial assets. They were used as collateral to guarantee loans. That’s an example of how “slavery is central to Brazil’s formation,” says historian Thiago Campos Pessoa. The investigation is part of an emerging push for reparations in Brazil. Brazil enslaved more people from Africa than any other country. Nearly five million kidnapped Africans arrived in Brazil. That’s more than 12 times the number taken to mainland North America, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database. In 1888, Brazil became the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. The country has so far mostly dealt with slavery’s legacy through affirmative action. For example, a 2012 law required public universities to reserve a certain number of spaces for black people. But now there is a larger call for reparations,...