Maceio

Maceió sells itself as the Caribbean of Brazil — turquoise water, coconut palms, reef-sheltered beaches that rival anything in the actual Caribbean. What the tourism brochures omit is that this coastal paradise is the capital of Alagoas, which has ranked dead last among Brazil's 27 states on the Human Development Index for decades running.

The explanation is a monoculture that never released its grip. Sugar plantations arrived in the sixteenth century, and sugar still dominates the state's agricultural economy four hundred years later. The coronelismo system — plantation oligarchs doubling as political bosses — concentrated land, power, and export revenue in the same families across generations. Maceió's port shipped sugar, tobacco, coconut, and leather to the world from its founding. The wealth flowed out. The poverty stayed.

The numbers tell the parasitism story clearly. Since 1995, Brazilian authorities have rescued nearly eight thousand workers from slave-like conditions on sugarcane and ethanol plantations in the Alagoas region. The state's ethanol industry — marketed globally as clean biofuel — runs on labour practices that predate the Republic. Meanwhile, thirty kilometres from the plantations, international tourists pay resort prices for beachfront that generates service jobs at minimum wage.

This geographic segregation is the city's defining feature. Coastal Maceió operates as a tourism economy with international flights, craft beer bars, and Instagram-ready lagoons. Inland Maceió operates as an extraction economy where sugarcane workers earn less in a month than a tourist spends in a night. The two economies share a city but not a century.

The lock-in runs deeper than politics. Sugar thrives in Alagoas's climate and soil. The flat coastal plain is ideal for mechanised harvesting. The port provides direct export access. Every advantage that makes sugar profitable also makes diversification irrational for landowners — a textbook path-dependence trap where the optimal individual decision perpetuates collective poverty. Researchers have documented that when global sugar prices rise, sugarcane workers benefit, but low-education service workers in the same region suffer as resources flow toward the plantation sector.

Maceió's economy has the structure of a tapeworm infection: the parasite extracts maximum nutrition from the host while delivering just enough to keep the host alive and productive. The sugar oligarchy extracts land value, labour, and tax revenue. The host — Alagoas's population — remains Brazil's poorest, its most unequal, its most dependent on federal transfers to fund basic services that four centuries of export agriculture never funded locally.