Next Sunday a Brazilian air force plane will take off from Portugal with an exceptional passenger, a heart. It will cross the Atlantic inside a glass bottle and protected, they say, by the maximum security measures. It will be the third time in more than 200 years that this heart crosses the ocean and the first time it does so without beating. And a fourth journey can be added, the one made by the other parts of the body 50 years ago. They were from the remains of Emperor Pedro I of Brazil and King Pedro IV of Portugal. The city of Porto temporarily gives the heart to the Brazilian authorities for the commemoration on September 7 of the 200 years of independence.
The uniqueness of the trip is accompanied by controversy. It is the first time that the relic leaves the temple where, under five keys, it was kept to fulfill the monarch's wish that his heart lay in Porto. There are misgivings about possible effects on conservation and the somewhat necrophilic nature of the initiative, as well as its contribution to the construction of a story of the emancipation of Brazil as a process of elites and authoritarian overtones. These are complements to the great controversy, that this temporary transfer to Brazil, weeks before elections that has more than an uphill climb, is taken advantage of by the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro to try to come back, when the polls give as decided the return to the power of the leftist Lula da Silva.
The conquest and independence of Brazil constitutes one of the most fascinating accounts of the opprobrious processes of colonization, in addition to containing a very significant part of the universal criminal history of slavery. In 1494, in Tordesillas, Portugal managed to move the line dividing the world with Spain towards the west, without it being known in theory what was in that space won by the Portuguese. Six years later, a fleet commanded by Pedro Alvares Cabral and headed in theory for India discovered Brazil by a supposed accident.
As in the case of the American Spanish colonies, the seizure of the Iberian Peninsula by the French troops of Napoleon Bonaparte acted as a catalyst for independence, with the great difference that at the end of 1807 the Portuguese royal family fled, to move to Rio de Janeiro, which thus became the new capital of the empire. King John VI would not return to Portugal until 1821, long after the expulsion of the French thanks to the English troops, and he did so under the obligation of the courts. In Rio de Janeiro, he left his son Pedro in charge, who on September 7, 1822, proclaimed independence with the well-known cry of Ipiranga, of "independence or death", which is what will be commemorated in a few weeks. . He became Emperor Pedro I of a Brazil emancipated from Portugal.
The comings and goings across the Atlantic of the house of Bragança, the Portuguese and now also Brazilian royal family, continued when the very exhausted Pedro I abdicated his son in 1831, to return to Portugal, of which he had briefly been king in 1826 as Pedro IV, on the death of his father. In Portuguese lands he won the civil war against his absolutist brother Miguel, patriarch of Miguelism, the Portuguese equivalent to Spanish Carlism. Although he was born in 1798 and died in the same room of the Queluz Palace, on the outskirts of Lisbon, at only 35 years of age, a victim of tuberculosis, the figure of Pedro I is polyhedral, ambivalent and not at all consensual, but rather the object of long controversy.
"Leave Don Pedro's heart in Porto, Brazilian intellectuals ask," headlined the Lisbon newspaper Público a few weeks ago. "It's a ridiculous and laughable project," said University of São Paulo historian Lilia Schwarcz. The images of the relic, preserved in formalin, also fuel criticism. “I saw the photos and it is not a pretty thing. I can't imagine children and adolescents excited to see a heart that stopped beating almost two centuries ago,” said the philosopher Renato Janine Ribeiro, a former minister with Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor in the presidency. In the Brazilian electoral climate, the actions of the mayor of Porto, the independent Rui Moreira, have been highly questioned. He this responded to what he considers a campaign of the Portuguese and Brazilian left, denying any electoral intention, but of brotherhood. Although Brazil and Portugal have been republics for more than a century, the ancient royal family is still floating around the ocean.
