The Agitator
Is Quiet

It was in Cuernavaca, Mexico, the same city that became famous in the beginning of the 20th century for being the center of Emiliano Zapata's uprising for agrarian reform, where Brazilian leftist revolutionary and House Representative Francisco Julião chose to live and ended up dying on July 10, 1999 from a heart attack at age 84 while in the kitchen preparing spaghetti his favorite dish for a friend. Accused of subversion, the lawyer and leader of the Peasant Leagues together with Pernambuco governor Miguel Arraes was jailed, stripped of his political rights and forced into exile after the 1964 military coup.

He used to defend agrarian reform forcefully arguing that it had to be done "by law or by force." Julião went into exile to Mexico City and stayed there until 1979 when he was amnestied by the military regime. Back to Pernambuco he once again tried unsuccessfully to be elected a representative. His old friends from the left abandoned him and Julião, disappointed, in 1987, once again headed to Mexico.

The Peasant Leagues originated in the little town of Vitória de Santo Antão in the interior of Pernambuco state in 1954. Peasant José Ortêncio, who with 140 other families leased the Engenho Galiléia farm, created with his colleagues the SAPP (Sociedade Agrícola de Plantadores e Pecuaristas de Pernambuco—Agricultural Society of Planters and Cattle Raisers of Pernambuco). Harassed and roughed up by the police they looked for help among their House Representatives. Francisco Julião from the PSB (Partido Socialista Brasileiro—Brazilian Socialist Party) offered his support. He had been elected to the post of deputado federal (House Representative) first in 1950.

The press started calling the new organization led by Julião Peasant League since it looked like a similar movement from the '50s, which had that name. Their main demand in the beginning was merely that peasants got minimum wage and that women were paid the same as men. By 1962 the movement had spread to 13 states under the leadership of Julião. The next year they created the Conferência das Ligas Camponesas do Brasil and had planned a national congress for 1964, but then the military took over in April and the leagues became extinct.

At the time, despite laws on the books assuring their rights to wages, peasants were "hired" through a method called "regime de cambão", in which the landowner acquired the worker for a low price in an auction similar to those used to sell black slaves in the past. The hired hand was then forced to work just for food during ten days.

Julião was writing his memories and kept on writing them until the day before his death. The first volume, which tells how the Peasant League started, is finished and should be published at the end of the year. He had moved to Cuernavaca three years ago where he lived with his Mexican wife Marta, whom he had met soon after going into exile. Both were divorced and had children from their previous marriages. He, six; she, ten.

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