After
a 50-year struggle, they get to own their land
When news broke that the Philippine Supreme
Court had decided to break up Hacienda Luisita and distribute the sprawling
sugar plantation to farmers, 80-year-old Virginia Paligutan wept.
She shed tears of joy because hacienda
workers, who had been caught in the vortex of a decades-long period of peasant
unrest over a feudal land ownership system, would finally get a piece of the
vast estate straddling Tarlac City (north of Manila) and the towns of Concepcion
and La Paz.
Virginia recalled that one of her sons,
Valentino, who was retrenched from the hacienda after it encountered worker
protests over a stock distribution arrangement in lieu of land distribution
under the 1988 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), had gone to the
hills and joined the New People’s Army.
Valentino, then 52, died of a gunshot wound in
an encounter with government troops in 2005.
"My child, we have won," she
remembered saying on hearing the Supreme Court ruling.
"We have worked so hard for this,"
Virginia told the Inquirer outside the Supreme Court building, where she had
joined scores of Luisita farmers to thank the magistrates for their ruling.
"This is not for me," said the
grandmother of 13 children, including three of Valentino’s under her care.
"I am already old."
Sword
pointed at CARP
The long-pending Hacienda Luisita impasse had
been described by antipoverty advocates as a “sword” pointed at the heart of
the agrarian reform program that then President Corazon Aquino had promulgated
in 1988—two years after she was installed in the Palace following the ouster of
the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
The estate was acquired from Spanish owners in
1958 on loans guaranteed by the government on condition that it would be
distributed at cost to tillers under the Ramon Magsaysay administration’s
counterinsurgency program.
The democracy icon’s failure to fulfill an
election campaign promise to undertake agrarian reform as the centerpiece of a
social justice program to alleviate poverty and remove one of the major causes
of unrest led to a demonstration outside the Palace in January 1987—11 months
into her presidency. Thirteen protesters were killed by government troops.
Virginia has spent all her life as a worker at
Hacienda Luisita. “I did not even own a pot of soil before,” she said at the
Supreme Court, thinking back on all those years that she had toiled at the
Tarlac estate.
Now, she said, she has something to pass on to
the next generation of her family.
Though she walks a little slowly, she was
still sharp and spunky, braving the morning heat to be able to express her
gratitude.
A
new day
Virginia was up at 2 a.m. on Thursday, raring
to travel from Tarlac to the Supreme Court building in Manila. Her relatives
had been apprehensive about her plan, fearing she might not be up to it given
her age.
But she was adamant. It was also her first
time to join a mass action in Manila.
Virginia said her family planned to continue
planting rice on their land. She also hopes her family would not sell the land
in the future. She said workers at the hacienda shared her joy at the Supreme
Court ruling.
"Everybody was dancing," she said.
“It feels like a new day for us.”
The ruling was hailed as a victory for
peasants who have long struggled to break the stranglehold of powerful
political clans on the country’s rich agricultural lands.
"This has been a 50-year struggle already
and this is a victory not only for these farmers, but for the many who are
similarly situated,”"said Romeo Capulong, a lawyer for the farmers.
“This gives hope to thousands of farmers who
are continually being oppressed, that they too can dream to one day own the
land they till,” he added.
President
Aquino divestment
But Capulong said he expected President
Aquino’s relatives would file an appeal, and that no distribution of land on
the estate would happen until the case was deemed “final and executory”.
The battle over the estate’s ownership has
allowed Aquino’s critics to portray the popular President’s family as a greedy
political dynasty.
Its resolution could send a signal that owners
of some 1 million hectares of the nation’s prime agricultural land who have
evaded coverage would also be subjected to agrarian reform with three years
left before the program’s mandated completion under a 2009 law.
The CARP was meant to give farmers ownership
of the land they worked on, but it was watered down from tougher intended
legislation.
This allowed the Aquino-Cojuangco clan and
other powerful families to use controversial exemptions and loopholes to keep
the land.
Presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda
emphasised on Thursday that the President had sold his 1 per cent stake in the
farm shortly after taking office.
But it remains under the control of the family
of Aquino’s late mother, the Cojuangcos—one of the most influential clans in
Philippine politics.
Leila B. Salaverria, Tonette Orejas
Philippine Daily Inquirer
With a report from AFP
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