Word: alentejo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...break the political stalemate. "We had to lance the festering wound." A last-minute attempt to save the government failed when Soares' Socialists refused to yield any concessions to the Communists, such as easing up on the government's reclamation of seized lands in the heavily Communist Alentejo province, in exchange for their vote...
...with the opposition on pending legislation could be interpreted as a "privileged relationship" that might erode his ability to govern. But when it became obvious that the Socialists did not have the votes to push through a crucial agrarian reform bill designed to reduce Communist control in the agricultural Alentejo, he had to compromise. While the C.D.S. refused to support the Socialist approach, the P.S.D. was swayed by Scares' offer to include some property-protection guarantees that it advocated and, more important, by a promise to hold "working group discussions" with the party on future legislation. P.S.D. National Assembly...
This is the Alentejo,* a sprawling province of gently rolling hills dotted with olive, cork and eucalyptus trees and punctuated by whitewashed villages, set between the bustling capital of Lisbon, the Spanish border and the Algarve seacoast. Despite its Old World customs and deceptively placid appearance, the region has changed drastically over the past two years. The Alentejo was once a feudal preserve of absentee landlords, poor tenant farmers who worked for as little as $2 a day, vast private hunting estates, and wasted land whose inhabitants often went hungry. Now it is a Communist stronghold...
After the 1974 revolution, Cunhal returned to the Alentejo to receive one of his warmest public welcomes. The latifundiarios (large landowners) got the message quickly. Some fled to Brazil, and their workers took over the unoccupied lands. Others were forcibly evicted. In one incident that has come to be called "the Great Cattle War," some workers were about to sell a landowner's cows when the owner caught them and beat them up. The army was called in, and soon the cows were under military protection in a barracks. Eventually, the military turned them over to the local agrarian...
Today there are an estimated 400 cooperatives in the province, proclaiming their Communist allegiance with names like Red Star Cooperative and First of May Cooperative. Although production costs are criticized as being excessively high, the Alentejo in some ways has become a showcase of the revolution: 50,000 new jobs were created−thanks largely to millions of dollars loaned by the government for equipment and wages. Says Joaquim Pinto Parulas, a tractor driver who used to have to leave his family to work in Lisbon: "Now I am here all year and have plenty of work. The salary...