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),
Brazil–Uruguay relations and in 1828 the Treaty of Montevideo, fostered by the British Empire, gave birth to Uruguay as an independent state. The political scene in Uruguay following its independence from Brazil became split between two parties, the conservative "Blancos" and the liberal "Colorados". The "Colorados" were led by Fructuoso Rivera and represented the business interests of Montevideo; the "Blancos" were headed by Manuel Oribe, who looked after the agricultural interests of the countryside and promoted protectionism. In 1838, the Kingdom of France started a naval blockade over the port of Buenos Aires, in support of the Peru–Bolivian Confederation, who had declared