Movements in the U.S. and United Kingdom to vandalize and remove statues deemed to be glorifying those countries’ colonizing and slave-trading past have now spread to Brazil. Last week, a group which calls itself the Peripheral Revolution set fire to a controversial statue of famous pioneer Borba Gato in the southern zone of São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city.
Borba Gato is among the best-known of Brazil’s Bandeirantes, a group of explorers and fortune hunters credited with the inland expansion during the country’s colonial period. Stretching the borders of Brazilian territory to lands unexplored by settlers, the Bandeirantes captured,...