For the fourth straight year, Lula will travel to Salvador, Bahia’s state capital, to participate in events marking the date commemorating the final expulsion of Portuguese troops in 1823, which will now be officially recognized as the second date of Independence Day.

This decree will mark the true date of Brazilian independence, which was sealed with the victory of the people of Bahia and not with the symbolic and so-called Cry of Ipiranga by Pedro I in 1822.

“There is an independence that was the emperor’s cry, which we don’t even know if he actually gave it. But Brazil’s true independence was the result of the expulsion of the last Portuguese, on July 2nd in Salvador. There was struggle there and there were heroic women,” Lula declared last year.

Although independence was proclaimed in September 1822, Portuguese resistance in Bahia prolonged the conflict. For this reason, many historians consider July 2nd as the true closing of the cycle of national independence.

With this initiative, the government seeks to recognize Bahia’s leading role and decentralize the official narration of history, traditionally focused on the southeast. Furthermore, it strengthens the president’s ties with the northeast, a key bastion of his electoral base.

The first official date of Brazil’s independence is commemorated every September 7th, in allusion to the Cry of Ipiranga, uttered in 1822 by the then-Prince Regent Dom Pedro, on the banks of the Ipiranga River in Sao Paulo, with the phrase “Independence or death.”

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