Word: alentejo
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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...
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...
...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...