Estado e Revolução Agrária no Alentejo: fundamentos legais e projetos em disputa (1974-1976)

Abstract

In April of 1974 the Carnation Revolution came out in Portugal, movement coordinated for the Portuguese Armed Forces that the salazarista regimen knocked down, reestablishing the democratic freedoms and promoting social transformations in the country. In the mat of this movement, the agrarian reform in the region of the Alentejo assumes great ratios. The first occupations date of 1974 ends. Initially, one was about a prompt reply of the searers and wage-earners how much to the situation of absolute lack of land or work. In 1975 middle, the movement of land occupation gained more intensity in Évora and Portalegre and started to become clearly that they are drawn objective ampler, aiming at already the real transformation of the structure of the property and the agricultural exploration, beyond the alteration of the social relations of production. Between August and September of 1975, the movement of land occupation reaches its apex in Beja and Évora, due to approval for the Government, in July, of decrees law 406-A and 407/75 that they had given the legal support to the occupations. From this moment, the occupations left of being felt as situated actions to the edge of the law, and pass to be seen by the occupants as acts of execution of laws in vigor. In this direction we see the intervention of the State as legislator of the context of the Reformation, becoming, thus, necessary a study of decrees, known as Laws of Expropriation and Nationalization, that had marked the second phase of the Agrarian Revolution when recognizing legally the Cooperatives of Agricultural Production (CPA) and the Collective Units of Agricultural Production (UCP), as way for the full agreement of the paper of the State in the legitimation of the agrarian reform in the region of the Alentejo. Thus, the objective of this work this ruled in the analysis of the performance of the Portuguese State as legislator of the occupations, fixing its attentions basically in the Portuguese Constitution of 1976 and the Laws of Expropriation and Nationalization, having as secular clipping the period of the end of government of Marcelo Caetano and the two first years of the revolutionary Government (1974-1976).