Brazil Brazil. However, the decentralized and unorganized tendencies of the captaincy colonies proved problematic, and in 1549 the Portuguese king restructured them into the Governorate General of Brazil, a single and centralized Portuguese colony in South America. In the first two centuries of colonization, Indigenous and European groups lived in constant war, establishing opportunistic alliances in order to gain advantages against each other. By the mid-16th century, cane sugar had become Brazil's most important export, and slaves purchased in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the slave market of Western Africa (not only those from Portuguese allies of their colonies in Angola and Mozambique),
Argentina–Brazil relations each other once again later, during the Platine War, when a coalition of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentine rebels managed to defeat Rosas (helped in turn by Uruguayan rebels led by Manuel Oribe). Another war almost happened during the 1870s when Brazil refused to accept Argentina's desire to take all the Chaco region for itself after the end of the Paraguayan War (also known as the War of the Triple Alliance) when both countries were allies against Paraguay. Brazil did not settle disputes with Argentina over its precise national boundaries until the early twentieth century. It had settled with Uruguay in