Peasants and Rural Laborers in Pernambuco,1955-1964

Abstract

In November of 1963, a general strike paralyzed the entire sugar industry in the state of Pernambuco. An estimated 200,000 rural workers took part in the strike movement which encompassed forty municfpios (municipalities) in the sugar zone and lasted three days. Planning was centralized in Palmares (about one hundred miles southwest of Recife) at the rural union, which claimed to be an umbrella organization for unions in twenty-one municipios. When the strike was over, the sugar workers had won an 80 percent wage increase. Despite its unique scope and success, the general strike was but one manifestation of a wider rural movement that had developed in Pernambuco in the early to mid-1950s. After 1950, landowners had responded to increased demand on the internal market and higher prices for sugar and other foodstuffs by expanding and concentrating production in certain commercial products. They evicted tenants who had cultivated their land for decades and, in an effort to compete with the more capital-intensive agriculture in the South, cut costs by firing high percentages of their permanent wage-labor force. This process had an especially damaging effect on the densely populated sugar region where, in spite of the continuing stream of migrants toward Recife and the southern states, the size of the dislocated rural population grew dramatically. Many of the rural dwellers, particularly the tenants, fought eviction. Some simply refused to leave, fighting unequal battles with landowner-controlled police. Others travelled to Recife to seek legal counsel. A large portion of them, however, were forced to leave and seek out marginal lands they could clear and plant with subsistence crops, only to be evicted once again. But whatever their particular situation, both peasants and rural workers took part in a movement that radically challenged the region's social and economic structure. Writers interested in peasants and peasant movements have devoted substantial attention to this movement, engaging in a series of controversies over interpretation. Among these, the most important disagreement has been over how to analyze the different participation and importance of the rural small producer and rural proletarian sectors. Some scholars (Forman, 1971; Huizer, 1972; Moraes, 1970) have argued that the peasant small producers were the most radical because they demanded land and participated in militant land invasions. The rural laborers, on the other hand, pressed for wage increases and