 They were organized by the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), and were later picked up by Francisco Julião, a member of the Democratic Labor Party (PDT) and other socialists.Founded to improve the standard of living for rural workers, their later objective became to oppose the power of latifundia in the region.The leagues were founded by Brazilian communists, 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, a belief partly shared by outsiders to communism.