Agrarian reform in southern Portugal

Abstract

This paper has two main purposes: (a) to present some preliminary results from S. McAdam Clark’s recent research on the agrarian reform and related developments in Southern Portugal, and (b) to set forth a critique of José Cutileiro’s specific interpretation of the course of the agrarian reform within the context of the Portuguese Revolution as a whole.2 Cutileiro’s analysis of the post-revolutionary agrarian reform in one region of the Alentejo province in south-eastern Portugal has only recently been published in Portuguese as the “postscript” to the 1977 Portuguese translation3 of his earlier monograph A Portuguese Rural Society (1971). The fundamental dilemma of this postscript (based upon three short return visits in March and September of 1975, and September of 1976) lies in Cutileiro’s portrayal of the weak response to the agrarian reform by villagers of the region he studied. Given the meticulous detail and analytical depth with which he dissected the local functioning of the Portuguese political system during late fascism in his earlier book, one is confronted by a series of points made in his 1977 postscript which define its major theme as one of resignation. Since Cutileiro took a distinct stand (although this was not always explicit) in his original study of the plight of the Alentejan landless labourers during the last years of Salazar’s regime, how is it that he arrived at a position of such pessimism after the fall of that regime and the inception of a process of political and social revolution?