Word: alentejo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...endanger the political and economic stability of the country." Yet the pattern of the voting showed that the country is politically divided and dangerously polarized. The conservative Catholic north and the islands of Madeira and the Azores went overwhelmingly to the Social Democrats and the C.D.S., while the agricultural Alentejo region in the south is under the control of the Communists. The Socialists' strength stems primarily from urban areas, where workers' pay and their fringe benefits have been markedly improved...
...Communists' strong hold on the Alentejo (see box) seems certain to hamper the government's control of agrarian reform in the area; attempts to return some farm lands seized by dissident workers to their original owners have already led to violence. Last week five Communists were arrested and charged with defying government authority for organizing demonstrations; in Beja, the newly elected parish council threatened a general strike unless they were released. So far, 2.5 million acres have been nationalized or expropriated under the program and turned into cooperatives and collective farms; another 1.8 million acres are slated...
...Communists, while running behind the C.D.S., managed to increase their share of the vote modestly from 12.5% to 15%. They did so by holding on to their small but ardent constituency in the Lisbon industrial belt and among the landless peasants in the southern rural district of Alentejo, while picking up new strength as a result of a decision by a Communist splinter party to withdraw from the election...
...government's response to the economic problems of small businessmen and peasant proprietors will finally determine the power of counterrevolutionary opposition in both the short and long run. So far, the government has no plan to collectivize inefficient small holdings--only immense landholdings in the southern region, the Alentejo, have been nationalized...
...Communist Party's strongest following has traditionally been in the impoverished Alentejo region south of the Tagus River, an area of huge farms owned by absentee landlords. There, tenant sharecroppers and migrant workers barely subsisted producing cork, olives, a few pigs and some wheat. Laborers frequently went hungry in the midst of unworked estates that had been turned into private hunting preserves...