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The End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labor Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961-1988. By Anthony W. Pereira. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. 280p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Recent analyses of Latin American politics-even studies of popular sectors-have focused almost exclusively on urban areas. Anthony Pereira's fine book helps fill this gap through an in-depth case study of the workers' movement in the sugar zone of Pernambuco. This section of Brazil's poor Northeast is of particular interest because it has been the site of one of the most active labor movements in the country.
Pereira sketches the book's theoretical themes in the introduction and first chapter. Like many others, he criticizes the literature on democratic transitions for its "elitism and lack of historical perspective" (p. 8). The author combines state- and society-centered approaches (pp. xviii-xix) to explain the striking transformation of rural mobilization in Pernambuco: Whereas peasant leagues pressing for land redistribution predominated in the early 1960s, rural labor unions demanding wage raises-a much less controversial demand-became ever more active during Brazil's democratic transition. This change stemmed in part from agricultural modernization, which shrank the peasantry and gave rise to rural wage labor. Furthermore, the Brazilian state promoted rural labor unions, which were less radical than the earlier peasant leagues. These unions gained increasing independence from state control and turned more "militant" (p. 4) after 1979.
Chapter 2 reviews the emergence of militant peasant leagues and more moderate rural labor unions during the government of Joao Goulart (1961-64). Chapter 3 analyzes the agricultural modernization stimulated by the development policies of Brazil's military regime (1964-85). It documents the displacement of many...