I must say that God truly intervenes when we pray to him for guidance and our needs. In the past months, the impeachment trial against Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona has hogged the headlines because of the black propaganda that the Aquino regime has thrown at him, including the proverbial kitchen sink. This included surveys from the Social Weather Station (SWS) and Pulse Asia, which have already been exposed as owned by a Cojuangco, and therefore, considered part of Pres. Benigno “PNoy” Aquino, III’s propaganda machine.
But last Tuesday, when the SC came up with the 14-0 en banc decision to distribute with finality the more than 5,000 hectare Hacienda Luisita that has caused a great divide between the rich and the poor, between the powerful and the powerless, the decision was welcomed by a great majority of the Filipino people. The Supreme Court acted independently without fear of future impeachment reprisals from PNoy himself.
Suddenly, there is a massive outpour of support by the masses that bestowed upon CJ Corona the honored title as “Champion of Land Reform” and I can only concur with these people. Just imagine what would have happened if CJ Corona was already impeached or convicted by the senator-judges. The decision by the Supreme Court could have been favorable to the Cojuangco family and perhaps it could have resulted in another massive demonstration and another Hacienda Luisita massacre.
Yes, too many poor farmers have been killed; some were even murdered in the name of the Cojuangcos keeping the Hacienda Luisita from falling into the hands of the farmers. We wrote during the elections that the head of security of Hacienda Luisita during the massacre was then Sen. Noynoy Aquino, hence we said that the President has blood in his hands! You cannot be a worthy head of security of this sugar estate if you don’t know who were the people who fired those guns and killed the farmers.
But then the Aquinos and Cojuangcos are not only rich, they are very powerful and no one would dare dig deeper into who was responsible for the Hacienda Luisita massacre. Today, it remains one amongst the hundreds of thousands of unsolved crimes in this country and please don’t blame the judiciary on this because these cases were never investigated or if they were, they ended up in a blank wall. Blame is squarely in the hands of police investigators who chose not to pursue any further leads on the massacre.
Meanwhile, many poor farmers lauded the Supreme Court for its final decision. Justice, after all, has triumphed even after a decades-long trial. Lest you already forgot, the Cojuangco side of former Amb. Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco or the family of former Defense Sec. Gilbert “Gibo” Cojuangco do not have a single square meter of land inside the Hacienda Luisita as they were excluded in the 1957 deal. So this land was originally held by the side of Cory Aquino’s family only.
But wait! Until now, PNoy has been strangely quiet about this SC decision that affects his whole family. When PNoy is quiet, I’m sure that he is boiling mad inside. He may claim that he has divested himself from all his shares in the Hacienda Luisita, but he could have quietly arranged for those shares to be held under the names of his sisters. This is what many people do in family corporations.
But while PNoy has been silent on this issue, I don’t think we shall be seeing the immediate distribution of the Hacienda Luisita even after the unanimous decision by the Supreme Court. The Philippine Star headline yesterday blared that the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) is under the Office of the President. Is this the response of PNoy by defying the Supreme Court once more?
According to Malacañang spokesman Edwin Lacierda, “They could not take the word of SC spokesman Midas Marquez regarding the amount of compensation for the Luisita owners since they have not yet read the decision, which Marquez made public on Tuesday.” What Mr. Lacierda is telling us is he doesn’t believe what the Court Administrator told the public about what the Supreme Court decided. You can smell the contempt in his words and since he is the alter ego of PNoy, I’m sure that we are in for another fight between the Executive Branch and the Judiciary.
This news only proves that despite what the Hacienda Luisita lawyer or presidential sister Viel said that they would abide by the Supreme Court decision, you already know that they won’t give up the sugar estate without a fight and I suspect that they will use the vast powers of the Presidency to delay this distribution in the hope that they could still squeeze more money from the farmers in payment for this sugar estate. So in a way, this issue is not over yet until the farmers really get possession of the land.
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Email: vsbobita@mozcom.com