Brazil’s Amazon: Wealth and Inequality

Brazil holds forty percent of the world's largest rainforest inside its borders. It is massive,

hot, and wet, with the Amazon river stretching over six thousand

kilometers. But the history here is intense. When the Portuguese arrived in 1500,

there were five million indigenous people, but today only about two hundred thousand

remain in the Amazon. The country was built on sugar and slave labor until 1888.

Now, it is a powerhouse exporting beef and oil with a four trillion dollar

economy. The crazy part is that the wealth gap is still huge because kings gave

land as gifts centuries ago.