The case for the freedom of GMA and Hacienda Luisita

There are two cases for justice crying to be resolved. One is the former president’s imprisonment for more than three years without due process of law. She is simply imprisoned because President Aquino wants her imprisoned. Period.  The two are related.

President Aquino has been able to get away with his acts and incompetency by using the rhetoric of reform and an alleged popularity being propagated by doubtful surveys.

On the other hand, the former president is locked and under guard in a hospital room, without a cellphone, deprived of a computer or allowed to watch CNN, BBC, or Al Jazeera and other world news channels. She is not allowed to walk to the chapel for daily mass.

She is barred from traveling and treated for a sickness that needs surgery abroad. Why this persecution?

The answer is Hacienda Luisita. In a wider sense, it is the story of class struggle in the Philippines. One does not have to be a Marxist to see that this government is using its power to continue with a centuries-old practice of depriving farmers to own the land they till.

That was why former Chief Jusice Renato Corona was impeached. He was appointed chief justice by the former president to continue to carry out the program of land reform in Hacienda Luisita, a sugar plantation in Tarlac province, controlled by the family of President Benigno Aquino.

We are diverted from this central fact with other accusations against former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The publicized charges  against her are for electoral fraud and corruption. 

Whether one is a GMA supporter or not is not the point. The issue is that these accusations should be  pursued under the rule of law and proved beyond reasonable doubt in court. Still these issues do not constitute the  big issue for the conflict.

Corona as chief justice led the Supreme Court to give the massive plantation back to the farmers in a 14-0 decision. The decision stipulated that the Cojuangco family should distribute Hacienda Luisita to some 6,296 farmer-workers who have tilled the land for decades.

In the same decision the Supreme Court ruled that the stock distribution option (SDO) exercised by the family did not comply with the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform law.

To the dismay of many of her progressive supporters, Cory Aquino avoided her own law with her stock option proposal. The law covered all other lands except her family’s. To this day with her son as president the injustice continues.

Just a few days before Christmas, conflict broke out once more between farmers and authorities of Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac. Eight farmers were arrested for protesting the alleged clearing of farmlands recently.

The farmers were supported by the Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (UMA). The eight farmers were from barangays Balete and Asturias in Hacienda Luisita. They were arrested after confronting the guards of the Tarlac Development Corp. (TADECO). UMA alleged that TADECO ordered the clearing of agricultural land already distributed to the farm workers.

Had the Supreme Court decided with finality its own decision in 2012 we would have made a giant step towards creating a more equal society. It has not been acted upon. 

The societal injustice is muted because although oppositionists have taken up the cause of the farmers they also attack President Aquino for his incompetence and dictatorial tendencies which make it look like a purely political squabble.

We now know why President Aquino was desperate to remove CJ Corona  even if it meant bribing the senators with the PDAF. We also know that he will fight tooth and nail for the continuation of his own pork barrel, DAP in his fight for Hacienda Luisita. The impeachment case was brought against Chief Justice Renato Corona to get him out of the Supreme Court.

But there is another battleground in which the Supreme Court is not at a disadvantage. It is not helpless as the final arbiter of the law. It should proceed with its Constitutional mandate.

The justices voted to direct the “total distribution” of the 6,000-hectare sugar plantation run by the Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) to the 6,296 farmworker-beneficiaries. They must implement their own decision with finality as provided by law.

Others have said that it is all down to money and that the Cojuangcos would rather be paid handsomely for the land than to be burdened with it. But there is a difference in calculations by the justices.

Under the 1989 valuation, the hacienda’s lands were valued at P40,000 per hectare by Hacienda Luisita Inc. itself. Therefore, the Supreme Court in its decision adopted their valuation, and the “just compensation” for the Cojuangcos would be P196 million. The SC also ordered the Cojuangcos to pay the farmers some P1.3 billion from the sales of land in the estate.

The Cojuangco owners now want more money. Justice Sereno’s “concurring and dissenting opinion” on the Hacienda Luisita decision supports their new asking price. In her 19,000 word opinion she asks the government to “pay the Cojuangcos using its 2006 market price of P5 billion.”

Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura  asked the justices not to be affected by Corona’s impeachment in resolving their case with finality.

The SC is a collegial body and even with Corona out of the way, there are still the other justices. “We urge them to stay in the path of justice by affirming their collective decision ordering the distribution of Hacienda Luisita and dismiss HLI’s motion for clarification and reconsideration,” UMA said. 

Last year, I wrote that Hacienda Luisita was the reason why CJ Renato Corona had to be impeached. With Corona out of the way former President GMA has taken the brunt of President Aquino’s defense of oligarchic rule of the country. The problem is about the few against the many. The word for the few is the oligarchy to which President Aquino belongs.

If the Supreme Court upholds its own decision on Hacienda Luisita we will be as close to a revolution without the pain and violence that some, out of despair, think is the only way to get out of the morass.

But how do we bring out this truth when it is being pushed out of sight. We are distracted by many issues and fail to see that our nation will not shape up unless we confront that truth of a lopsided society where the country’s land and resources are for the few.

Neither is it down to fighting corruption in the past government as it has been made to appear by the Aquino government. There is corruption then and now. Unfortunately the accusations are down to personalities and not on a flawed system. The system favors the wealthy and powerful because they also hold the levers of government.

Hacienda Luisita is both a place, and a symbol. It is also the reason why former president GMA languishes in a hospital jail. By the way she is the daughter of the late Diosdado Macapagal, the first president to push for land reform.