Peasant leagues (Brazil)

Meeting of peasants who participated in the Leagues from 1955 to 1964

The peasant leagues (Portuguese: ligas camponesas) were social organizations composed of sharecroppers, subsistence farmers and other small agriculturalists. They originated in the agreste region of Northeastern Brazil in the 1950s, organized by the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB),[1] and were later picked up by Francisco Julião, a member of the Democratic Labor Party (PDT) and other socialists. The leagues were founded to improve rural workers' living standards; their later objective was to oppose the region's power of latifundia.[2]

  1. ^ Welch, Cliff. Keeping Communism Down on the Farm: The Brazilian Rural Labor Movement during the Cold War, Latin American Perspectives Vol.33, pg. 29.
  2. ^ Welch, Cliff. Keeping Communism Down on the Farm: The Brazilian Rural Labor Movement during the Cold War, Latin American Perspectives Vol.33, pg. 28-50.