By the time the Europeans had subdued the native population, they decided that indigenous Brazilians, who were dying from disease and brutal enslavement, did not provide enough free labor for the extraction of natural resources for export. So Brazil imported almost five million human beings from Africa, far more than the United States did, and equal to almost half of all slaves brought to the Americas. Just as in the US, enslavement in Brazil was unimaginably cruel. In addition to the whip, stocks, and iron collars studded with spikes to prevent escape, slave owners affixed iron masks, which
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