>>213854024Because it's a symbol of Brazil. Brazilians do not think of themselves as a settler people. They don't think they killed the natives. They think of themselves as the natives, in a way.
They talk about the Portuguese as colonizers. When they refer to something that happened or was done during colonial times, they say "it's the fault of the Portuguese".
You see this everywhere in Latin America where people have a complete amnesia and distance themselves completely from Europeans and vaguely think of themselves as being the locals of the lands, without particularly thinking of themselves as the indigenous population. For the Brazilian, Brazil more less always existed, and one time, the Brazilians were always victims of the Portuguese colonizers. What counts as Brazilian is pretty much anything: the natives that were erased, the blacks that were enslaved, the Europeans that settled, because Brazilians are mixed and therefore imagine themselves to incarnate all of those ancestries equally.