Struggle for Land, Justice Continues Under Aquino as More Luisita-Like Cases Emerge

Struggle for Land, Justice Continues Under Aquino as More Luisita-Like Cases Emerge

By JANESS ANN J. ELLAO
Bulatlat.com

MANILA — The year 2010 marked the end of nine years of the bloody struggle for land and justice of Filipino peasants under former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Their struggle, however, continues under a new administration, who promised to take the right path yet undermines, if not ignore, the peasants’ right to the land they till.

When Benigno Aquino III declared his bid for the presidency, peasant groups expressed their fear that no genuine agrarian reform would be implemented if Aquino won, considering the long-standing agrarian dispute in Hacienda Luisita, a 6,453 hectare land, which he co-owns. True enough, when he was elected, Aquino did not mention anything about agrarian reform in his Inaugural speech nor in his first State of the Nation Address, “as if there is no agrarian unrest in the country,” Antonio Flores of Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas said.

Aquino has also opted to keep a ‘hands-off’ policy on the issue of Hacienda Luisita, when the peasants’ call for the distribution of the land intensified. But such ‘hands-off’ policy of the president, according to KMP secretary general Danilo Ramos, is already a political statement: that he is “unwilling to implement genuine agrarian reform” as it contradicts his own interest because he, himself, is a haciendero or a big landlord.

The Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC) had already ordered the distribution of Hacienda Luisita in 2005. According to PARC, the Stock Distribution Option, a landless distribution scheme under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law that is being implemented in the hacienda for some 20 years now, is unconstitutional because it failed to improve the lives of farmer-beneficiaries. To stop the distribution of the land, the Cojuangco-Aquino family filed a temporary restraining order before the Supreme Court, which was granted the following year.

Hacienda Luisita 

Later this year, however, the agrarian dispute at the Hacienda Luisita was in the limelight yet again when the Cojuangco-Aquino family and the farmer-beneficiaries were supposed to have arrived at a ‘compromise agreement’ just before the scheduled oral argument before the Supreme Court. Peasant leaders said the purported compromise agreement is just one of the tricks being used by the Cojuangco-Aquino family to keep Hacienda Luisita from being distributed to its real owners, the farmworkers..... MORE

Source:  Bulatlat

URL: http://bulatlat.com/main/2011/01/06/struggle-for-land-justice-continue-under-aquino-as-more-luisita-like-cases-emerge/