An unending quest for social justice?

As I listened for five hours last Wednesday to the oral arguments of the Hacienda Luisita lawyers, followed by sharp questioning by the Supreme Court justices probing into the controversial stock distribution option, my mind kept racing back to the long historic struggle of the Filipino peasants to own the lands they till.

The core element of agrarian reform, as we know, is social justice. Yet throughout the four centuries of Philippine colonial and neocolonial history, which is up to the present, the quest for social justice as regards the ownership of agricultural land has remained elusive.

The first social justice decree issued by the First Philippine Republic in 1899, promulgated by Apolinario Mabini, placed all lands held by the Spanish friars under administration by the government pending their distribution among the Filipino tenants through a process that had yet to be defined.

That social justice intent, however, was truncated by the outbreak of the Philippine-American war. It was frustrated altogether by the defeat of the poorly-armed Filipino forces and the imposition of US colonial rule.

Under the American colonial administration, the friar lands were given back to the Catholic Church. As a “benevolent” gesture of enabling Filipinos to own lands, the US colonial government under Governor-General William Howard Taft, bought 550,000 hectares of friar lands from the Vatican and offered these for sale to Filipinos. Of course, only the very rich families were able to afford it. The project led to the establishment of the big landed estates in the hands of these few families.

The Commonwealth government did not initiate an agrarian reform program. But President Manuel L. Quezon enunciated social justice as a vital aspect of governance. By way of setting an example, Quezon voluntarily gave to the tenants some of his agricultural landholdings in Central Luzon. That gesture did not provoke the landed elites to imitate him.

During the Japanese occupation, agrarian unrest was a powerful motivation for the peasantry especially in Central Luzon to take matters into their hands and drive out their abusive landlords while waging armed resistance against the hated foreign invaders. After the war, the landlords returned and, backed by the Americans, were able to “restore peace and order.”

In 1957, loans from a foreign bank and the Government Service Insurance System financed the purchase by the family of Jose Cojuangco Sr. (father of Cory Aquino) of 6,000 hectares of farmlands from Tabacalera. Social justice was invoked by President Carlos P. Garcia in imposing the condition for a national government guarantee for these loans. After 10 years (or in 1967), he said, the land — the Hacienda Luisita estate today — must be turned over to the farmworkers. This never happened.

Twenty-eight years later, in 1985, the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos tried to compel the Cojuangcos to comply with the Garcia conditionality through the Manila regional trial court. The court ruled in favor of the government, and the Cojuangcos elevated the issue to the Court of Appeals. Then came the ouster of Marcos and the installation of Cory Aquino through People Power. Declaring agrarian reform to be the “centerpiece” of her administration, the new president caused the enactment of RA 6657 (the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program) in 1988. The following year, the Cojuangcos asked the Court of Appeals to set aside the Manila court ruling, on the ground that the disputed lands had been placed under the CARP. They got what they wanted. The case was dismissed.

In its declaration of principles and policies, the CARP law states: “The welfare of the landless farmers and farmworkers will receive highest consideration to promote social justice and to move the nation towards sound rural development and industrialization, and the establishment of owner-cultivatorship of economic-sized farms as the basis of Philippine agriculture.” Further, the law sets as objective “to provide farmers and farmworkers with the opportunity to enhance their dignity and improve the quality of their lives through greater productivity of agricultural lands”.

To the great disappointment of the majority of farmers and farmworkers all over the country, the CARP has failed to realize its declared policies and attain its objective. This was because multiple loopholes were provided in the law, as well as exemptions and alternative modes of implementation instead of outright land distribution.

One of these alternative modes is the stock distribution option (SDO) preferred by the management of Hacienda Luisita. Upon petition by the farmworkers in 2005 the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC) revoked the SDO that it had approved in 1989. After 16 years, the PARC said, SDO had not caused any improvement at all in the lives of the farmworkers. It ordered the land to be distributed to the farmworkers as originally envisioned by President Garcia. However, the “compromise agreement” entered into recently between the hacienda and the farmworkers apparently intends to counter before the Supreme Court the conclusion that SDO has failed to benefit the farmers.

This is the case that the Supreme Court is now hearing. How will the outcome affect the men and women who have toiled the land, grown old, in Hacienda Luisita? How will it affect the millions of Filipinos who today remain “bowed by the weight of centuries” of struggle to own their piece of soil? Is this really just a dream, an impossible dream?