Por Tales Pinto
One of the main social and political movements that supported João Goulart's Grassroots Reforms were the Peasant Leagues . Raising support from small rural producers and families of landless workers who lived by paying rent to large landowners, the Leagues were the main drivers of the Agrarian Reform movement in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s.
The purpose of the Peasant Leagues was to distribute land to peasants in Brazil through Agrarian Reform
Formed initially as Sociedade Agrícola e Pecuária de Pernambuco (SAPP), in the state of Pernambuco, the Leagues had as their first action the organization of 140 tenant families in Engenho Galileia, whose lands did not produce more sugar. The objective at that time was to assist, in a welfarist way, the technical improvement of the production of the mill families.
However, this organized nucleus in the engenho started to bother the owner, who decided to contain the action of the lavradores with the increase in the income of the lands. This measure would end up expelling the families from the place. One solution tried was to find support from a lawyer in the capital, Recife, to help them in the fight against the large landowner who owned the mill. Francisco Julião (1915-1999) accepted the challenge and started to represent the movement. The first result came in 1959, with a decision in favor of the lavradores, expressed in the judicial decision in favor of expropriating the mill and distributing their land to families.
From then on, the action of the Peasant Leagues intensified, influencing peasant mobilizations for Agrarian Reform and forming committees of the Leagues in several Brazilian states. In the institutional political aspect, the Leagues managed to elect Francisco Julião state deputy twice and once federal deputy for Pernambuco. Becoming the leader of the movement, Francisco Julião traveled to Cuba, together with Jânio Quadros, which evidenced the international recognition of the struggle for land carried out in Brazil.
The leagues defended a profound agrarian reform in Brazil, resorting in some cases to armed actions against repressive and authoritarian measures of some landowners. This characteristic aroused concern in the US, whose press pointed to the Leagues as a political threat to Brazil.
However, during the 1960s, the leagues began to share space in the organizations of rural workers, when the government extended the labor rights provided for in the Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT). ) to rural workers, seeing a series of rural workers' unions flourish.
But the 1964 military coup put an end to the land reform movement in Brazil. In the same year Francisco Julião had his mandate as federal deputy revoked, in addition to having been arrested. In 1965, he was granted asylum in Mexico.
Despite the elimination of the Peasant Leagues, the civil-military regime established in 1964 failed to end the desire of Brazilian rural workers for the distribution of land. The maintenance of agricultural production based on the exploitation of large estates excluded a large number of workers from accessing this means of production, contributing to the maintenance of extreme social inequality in Brazil. From the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, new land occupations would be carried out by rural workers who again demanded Agrarian Reform, giving rise, in 1983, to the Landless Workers Movement (MST).