With the Northeastern oligarchies now incorporated into the ruling coalition, the government focused on restructuring agriculture. To placate friendly agrarian oligarchs, the modernizing state not only left the impoverished domains of the rural oligarchs untouched, the government even helped the sugar barons cement their control over rural Brazil. The peasantry, to the surprise of many accustomed to overlooking Brazil's peripheral regions, was not that servile. Banditry was common. Other forms included messianism, anarchic uprisings, and tax evasion, each of which was already common practice before 1930. The state crushed a wave of peasant revolts in the Northeast known as the "cangaço", marking the reversal of the drastic but gradual decline of the Northeastern "latifundios" from the 1870s to the 1930 revolution. At the expense of the indigent peasantry—85 percent of the workforce—not only did Vargas renege on his promises of land reforms, he denied agricultural workers in general the working class' gains in labor regulations. Likely to the detriment of that region's long-term economic development, Vargas' static conservatism on matters of the countryside arguably exacerbated the disparities between the impoverished, semi-feudal Northeast and the dynamic, urbanized Southeast to this day.