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 Lances ("Revolución de las Lanzas") (1870–1872), and later with the uprising of Aparicio Saravia, who was fatally injured at the Battle of Masoller (1904). On 30 July 2010, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Uruguays' José Mujica signed cooperation agreements on defence, science, technology, energy, river transportation and fishing with the hope of accelerating political and economic integration between these two neighbouring countries. The Brazil–Uruguay border extends . The close geographic proximity of some Brazilian and Uruguayan cities or urban centers have led them to be called "twin cities". These cities usually share close demographic, economic, and