Uma revolução na revolução: a legitimação da reforma agrária do Alentejo através da aplicação das leis de expropriação/nacionalização e da imprensa portuguesa (1974 1976)

Abstract

In Portugal, in April 1974, the Carnation Revolution took place, a movement coordinated by the Portuguese Armed Forces that ousted the estadonovista dictatorship, thus reestablishing democratic freedoms and promoting profound social transformations in the country. After this event, a series of political clashes occurred and several instances of society underwent changes, among them agrarian reform and the decline of the latifundium. Soon, at the end of 1974 the first occupations took place, when some rural workers began to exploit the latifundia on their own, later supported by agrarian laws. In the middle of 1975, the movement of land occupation gained more intensity in Évora and Portalegre and began to become clear that they were seeking broader objectives, aiming at the real transformation of the structure of property and farm, in addition to changing the social relations of production. Between August and September 1975, the land occupation movement reached its peak in Beja and Évora, due to the approval by the government in July of the decrees 406-A and 407/75 that gave legal support to the occupations. Therefore, in order to understand the process of the Alentejo’s Agrarian Revolution, it is important to understand the actions of the Portuguese State, since agrarian reform had the support of the Armed Forces Movement Portuguese and provisional governments, factors which came to corroborate with the limitation of the class power of the big landowners, thus leading to a revolutionary break, which on the Legislative level inspired a new legality on the issues of land tenure and use. Given this, with this research we propose to investigate government initiatives in order to regulate land occupations, and understand the actions of rural workers, through the publications of the Portuguese newspapers Diário do Alentejo e Combate, as well as the Expropriation/Nationalization Laws from 1974 to 1976.