majority of the population is of African descent. ERIC VAN BEMMEL And the Amerindian population? MARSHALL EAKIN The Amerindian population has largely been pushed into the interior, what's left of it.  So Brazil, which is this enormous place, is regionally very diverse in terms of ethnicity.  If you look at Brazil today, the north-eastern coast around Salvador and Recife, the old sugar plantation slave areas are the places which are overwhelmingly of African descent.  If you move up into the far north in the Amazonian Basin which is much more sparely populated, it's largely of Europeans mixing with Indians so that population looks very different.  As you move down into the south-east, which today is the core of Brazil; Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Sao Paulo, it's a sort of mix, it's a transition zone.  As you move into the far south of Brazil, it's overwhelmingly populated, at the end of the nineteenth century, be peoples from Europe and in particular from eastern and central Europe.  So it's a very white-European population. ERIC VAN BEMMEL Now, in those early days of the republic, the Old Republic as it's called, toward the end of the nineteenth century, how equitable were the politics? MARSHALL EAKIN Not at all.  I mean, typically what happens in Brazil happens in much of Latin America in the nineteenth century after independence.  They're no longer colonies but they're still ruled by a relatively small elite of largely people of European descent.  To give you a sense of