Contested Ground: French Land-Grabbers, Communists, Peasant Leagues, and Populist Politicians in Early 1960s Brazil

When public health concerns led the Brazilian government to address swamps near the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Campos dos Goytacazes, the newly accessible lands that drew real estate speculators and squatters included the 210,000-hectare plot of “Imbé.” Adam Nunes, a former doctor and Communist politician, remembered hundreds of former sugar workers, “expelled by the mechanization of agriculture” flocking to Imbé from urban and riverside shantytowns. “Since foreign companies and rich people from other states were doing it, why wouldn’t they, the poor, follow suit?” Nunes was most likely referring to the French owners of the Cupim sugar-factory (the Société de Sucreries Brésiliennes) and João Cleofas, a politician from the state of Pernambuco who had purchased the adjacent Sapucaia sugar-factory. Both had recently fired workers en masse, replacing them with machines and contract labor for planting, harvesting, and transportation. Squatter families at Imbé planted corn and beans, hunted, fished, and extracted hearts of palm and hardwood to survive, selling food to local markets. The sugar-factory managers wanted Imbé lands for future cane-planting and for activities that included camping, hunting, and fishing for leisure. The managers pitted local authorities against national agrarian reform surveyors, sending in police to destroy family huts, putting up fences, hiring armed guards to block access to streams and creeks, and blocking access to the roads necessary for transporting crops to markets. They also removed fences, allowing cattle to destroy settlers’ crops. Using company documents, French and Brazilian archival material, memoirs, and newspaper coverage, this paper describes the contests between the Société, Cleofas, and the six-hundred workers who occupied Imbé. Communist Union, Peasant League, and populist political leaders jockeyed for power over the movement, rendering the story a useful window onto local and national politics in the years leading up to Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985).