of cash crop exports; traditional Guinean economies were disrupted both by the imperative to cultivate export crops and by Portuguese taxation. Moreover, Portugal was attached even to its most "dispensable" colony, viewing its maintenance as integral to Portugal's hold on other more economically important colonies, particularly Angola and Mozambique. Formation of PAIGC The revolutionary insurgency which ultimately launched the war was led by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Portuguese: Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, PAIGC), a liberation movement founded in 1956 by Rafael Barbosa and nationalist intellectual Amílcar Cabral. From the outset, its main objectives were the unity of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde and their independence from Portuguese rule. In its first three years, PAIGC was preoccupied with mostly fruitless exercises in constitutional-legal agitation, concentrated in Bissau and other major cities and sometimes involving collaboration with local trade unions. However, on 3 August 1959, PAIGC was involved in organising a major dockworkers' strike at the Port of Bissau. The Portuguese authorities broke up the strike by force, leading to what became known as the Pidjiguiti massacre, in which at least fifty people were killed and several hundreds wounded. The massacre led PAIGC to rethink its policies: in the aftermath, it reiterated its commitment to national liberation, but with a new emphasis on the political mobilisation of the rural peasantry. Cabral ordered the party to go underground and its political cadres to organise in exile in Conakry, the capital of the newly independent Republic of Guinea on the southern border of Portuguese Guinea. Between 1960 and 1963, PAIGC was "totally transformed" as it prepared for armed struggle against the Portuguese regime. Scores of cadres were trained in Conakry and sent to the Guinean countryside to mobilise the population, while the political leadership launched a diplomatic offensive that secured the full cooperation of the government in Conakry, the "tacit support" of the Senegalese government, and contacts with several other liberation movements and left-wing political parties. On April 18, 1961 PAIGC together with FRELIMO of Mozambique, MPLA of Angola and MLSTP of São Tomé and Príncipe formed the Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP) during a conference in Morocco. The main goal of the organization was cooperation among the different national liberation movements in the Portuguese Empire. Also in 1961 PAIGC commenced sabotage operations in Guinea-Bissau. At the start of