🛂 Brazil’s border issues

News of the international reach of Brazil’s drug-trafficking factions, arms smuggling and cross-border environmental crimes has underscored the fragility of the country’s frontiers. Yet this violent reality stands in stark contrast to the fact that Brazil has remained at peace with all 10 of its immediate neighbors for more than a century.

The borders that define modern Brazil were secured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries without a single shot being fired. 

Diplomacy, not warfare, preserved or expanded the country’s territory. A late 19th-century dispute with Argentina, for example, was resolved in Brazil’s favor through arbitration by US President Grover Cleveland. The Amazonian state of Acre was bought from Bolivia in the early 1900s. And an earlier territorial disagreement with French Guiana was settled through arbitration by Swiss President Walter Hauser — curiously, France’s longest land border is actually with Brazil.

Between the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889 and the two decades that followed, Brazil engaged in at least nine major territorial negotiations…

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