Change Comes to the Alentejo

At 5 o'clock every weekday afternoon, the tractors begin returning to the Cacebres Cooperative near the Portuguese town of Alcacer do Sal. Behind them, through the gates decorated with the hammer and sickle, come truckloads of workers returning from the fields. Many of them are women, attired, as they have been for centuries, in full black dresses over thick trousers, their hair covered by black kerchiefs knotted under black felt hats. "This cooperative has 10,000 acres, and it all used to belong to two men who only hired a few workers when they needed them," says Francisco Antonio Pombinho, 42, a worker in the co-op's machine shop. "Now there are 300 of us, and we work all the year round."

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.

Such poverty provided a fertile ground for Communism as far back as the 1930s. Party Leader Alvaro Cunhal, 62, spent many years in the Communist underground there organizing farm workers. Through the clandestinely published party newspaper Avante, which was surreptitiously dropped on doorsteps at night, the party organized a series of strikes in the 1950s -then a daring affront to the Salazar regime.

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 reform organization. But the angry owner had decided to give the cows to another town as a gift. Soon the two towns were doing battle. The affair finally ended when a committee of workers decided to divide the cows between the two villages.

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 is not as high as in Lisbon, but we are happier on the land."

* The name means "beyond the Tagus"--alem do Tejo--and dates from the 1200s when the Moors occupied the territory south of the Tagus River.

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