Brazil enslaved more people from Africa than any other country; nearly 5 million kidnapped Africans disembarked in Brazil, more than 12 times the number taken to mainland North America, according to estimates from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888.
Discrimination remains, and Black and biracial Brazilians are more likely to be poor, imprisoned and die violently. Fewer than a third of managerial positions are held by those groups, and they comprise one quarter of representatives in Brazil’s Lower House of Congress.