Peasant leagues (Brazil)

The peasant leagues (Portuguese: ligas camponesas) were social organizations composed of sharecroppers, subsistence farmers and other small agriculturalists.

[2] Brazilian communists founded the leagues, who believed that the latifundia, which had always dominated the Brazilian economy, were in a semicolonial relationship with the United States and were conspiring to oppress the working class by forcing rural workers to produce cash crops instead of food for native consumption and refusing to develop land which could not support those crops,[3] a belief partly shared by outsiders to communism.

His attempts to unify the leagues and resistance to registering them as unions conflicted with their own goal of attaining legitimacy, and his use of violent revolutionary rhetoric made them worry about retaliation from the military and police.

[6] The populist Brazilian government's attitude towards the leagues varied from neutral to positive over time, while that of the military and police was uniformly negative.

[7] The Catholic Church established organizations in the Northeast that functioned similarly but were conservative and anti-communist in their outlook; the armed forces crushed these groups alongside the peasant leagues following the 1964 coup.