The oddness of Brazil

TO A northern-hemispheric eye something is missing from Brazil's public squares. Where are the monuments to liberators and heroes? São Paulo, the main metropolis, has one for the bandeirantes, who subdued the interior and pressed Indians into service as slaves. Tiradentes, an 18th-century rebel against imperial Portugal, is remembered by a holiday, but he was martyred for a movement as aristocratic as the system it was trying to overthrow. Brazil, which in 1822 became independent under the emperor's son and, later, republican through the machinations of the army, has avoided epics of conquest and liberation, the shapers of history elsewhere.