A native of Santa Vitória, in the municipality of Beja, he returned months later and was one of the workers to occupy the Herdade do Monte do Outeiro, near the village and which belonged to the agrarian José Gomes Palma.

"I experienced April 25 in Germany, with great joy, with my Portuguese colleagues. And some Germans too", António Merêncio, 77, tells the Lusa agency, with a fresh memory.

"A group of unemployed people got together and we wanted to go to work", he says. But the overseer refused and they went back.

After a meeting with the Union of Agricultural Workers of the District of Beja, they insisted and, with the boss in Lisbon and the overseer persisting, this time they did not "budge" and occupied the land. But "without violence", Merêncio assures.

The estate, with more than 700 hectares, was the first to be occupied, on December 10, 1974, marking the beginning of the Agrarian Reform, according to the book "Agrarian Reform -- The Revolution in Alentejo", by José Soeiro, one of the "protagonists" of the entire process.

"It was a disgrace", with trees that had not been cleaned for "almost 20 years", and "it was practically only used for hunting", recalls Merêncio, stressing that everything changed: "We started to clean, to work and to live at our own expense."

The occupation "was not out of revenge", he justifies. That, like others that followed, "was out of necessity to earn some money, there was no money to feed the family".

Having returned from France as soon as news of April 25 "reached his ears", through his six-battery Mediator radio on which he listened to the BBC and Russian channels, Fernando Guerreiro also recalls the "high unemployment" in Alentejo at that time.

The task he "embraced" was to help distribute the unemployed "from estate to estate", but "some [bosses] accepted and others did not".

Fernando, now 74 years old and living in Mina da Juliana, which is not far from Santa Vitória, recalls that, in Monte do Outeiro, if José Gomes Palma "met the workers' objectives, they probably would not have occupied the property".

The boss "was not even one of the worst there", he admits, but the people, besides wanting work, yearned for something as simple as a bathroom in the estate's ceramic factory.

"He was the one who was in charge of the property and no one else" and there was no bathroom. "That is why people went ahead with the occupation", he says.

In those early days of the Agrarian Reform, "the union told people not to go ahead like that, no one knew what was going to happen", he recalls. But "it is difficult to control the people, they would occupy at 10 am and at 12 pm and no one could control it anymore".

According to José Soeiro, after the Herdade do Monte do Outeiro, more occupations took place in Santa Vitória. And it was here that, on October 17, 1975, 184 workers, at the union's proposal, decided to create the first Collective Production Unit (UCP), the "Vanguarda do Alentejo", to manage the occupied estates.

On the other 'side of the barricade', Augusto Casadinho, today the owner of the Herdade da Chaminé, with about 370 hectares, also in Santa Vitória, has darker memories of those times.

He recalls to Lusa that, in 1975, when he was 13 years old and lived and studied in a boarding school in Lisbon, the estate, then owned by his father, was occupied: "My father showed up there in Lisbon crying".

"They started from nothing, it had been bought little by little, there was no money, life in the past was totally different", he recalls, stating that the Agrarian Reform only served to make people "angry with each other".

During the occupations, "they ended up destroying everything", but his estate, returned to the family in the early 1980s, was not even one of the worst: "The machines [were] somewhat destroyed, but there were cases in which not even a screw was left".

"April 25 was useless, it only served to destroy, as they destroyed companies", he stresses.

The Agrarian Reform gained strength in 1975 and continued until 1976, occupying more than 1.1 million hectares of land (25% of Portugal's arable land) in Alentejo, Setúbal and in municipalities of the districts of Lisbon, Santarém, Faro and Castelo Branco.

The "Barreto Law", approved in parliament in 1977, authored by António Barreto, then Minister of Agriculture of the I Constitutional Government of Mário Soares (PS), began to change this "revolution" in the countryside.

The diploma imposed limits on the Agrarian Reform, opened the doors to the end of the UCPs and to a long process of evictions and returns of land and compensations, which 'gained momentum' with the governments of the Democratic Alliance (AD). In 1988, during Cavaco Silva's government, the new Agrarian Reform Framework Law was passed, but the regularization of the use of expropriated or nationalized land was only concluded in 2000, by the then Minister of Agriculture Capoulas Santos (PS).

Today, 50 years after April 25, the Agrarian Reform, which witnessed episodes of violence, such as the death of two agricultural workers in Santiago do Escoural, in Montemor-o-Novo, remains an "open wound" between workers and agrarians.

"As long as this generation, which is mine, is alive, it will not heal", assures António Merêncio, with Augusto Casadinho agreeing with him, but recalling that "the older people are dying" and with "the younger people it is different, they do not have that notion" of what April 25 was.

Fernando Guerreiro, on the other hand, believes that the Agrarian Reform would only have been worthwhile "if it had continued". And, 50 years after April 25, he still sees Portugal with "a very stuck future". What is left, then? "We must continue to fight", he argues.

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