Living on the Edge: The Sacadas of Hacienda Luisita

Published on December 19, 2004

After several minutes of searching in the shadows, we finally find them, with lights from their gas lamps flickering through sack-covered bunkhouses. They stay by the edge of the Cojuangcos’ sprawling sugar plantation in Tarlac, far from the estate’s factories and barrios.

By LISA CARIÑO ITO AND RONALYN OLEA
Bulatlat.com

HACIENDA LUISITA, Tarlac – We set off to seek them on the night of Nov. 28, passing by jeepneys and tricycles as they ramble down dusty paths. We find ourselves weaving through fields of sugarcane. It is barely 6 p.m. but darkness has set in.

For decades, they have been called “outsiders” – the non-union members in the Nov. 16 tragedy.

Barely a day after the Hacienda Luisita massacre, Benigno “Noynoy” C. Aquino, Jr., fifth-generation scion of the landowning Cojuangco family, tried to tone down the magnitude of the carnage, saying that those killed, injured, and arrested by the police and military during the dispersal were merely “outsiders.”

Indeed many “outsiders” were killed or maimed as hundreds of policemen and Army troops launched an assault on striking workers that afternoon. The human rights alliance Karapatan-Tarlac states that half of 108 workers arrested by the military hail from different provinces: 48 from Negros island, 14 from Isabela, and four from Bataan. Their ages range from 17 to 61. Out of the 114 victims of physical assault and injuries, Karapatan also said, almost half are not from the hacienda: 45 are from Negros, and the rest are from Bataan, Nueva Ecija, and Isabela.

We came face to face with some of these itinerant migrant sugarcane cutters as rain began to fall that night.

The sacadas (seasonal workers) were inside the makeshift bunkhouses nestled on the vast fields of cane. We huddled into one of the bunkhouses made of old wood and branches of trees. Cramped inside were close to a hundred sacadas: without water or electricity, with partitions of sacks serving as individual quarters less than a square meter each. This is their home for the months-long kabyawan (milling season) and planting season.

Contractors

At first the sacadas seemed wary at our arrival. It is not surprising: their employers – a group of contractors – are under the payroll of the Central Azucarera de Tarlac (CAT) management, they say. After the Hacienda Luisita massacre, word spread about soldiers “visiting” the bunkhouses nearer the CAT compound, of sacadas being shuffled or herded and brought to other parts of the hacienda. We sensed that many of them do not want any more trouble befalling them. Some, however, obliged to our questions and started to talk about their lives and ordeals.

Their stories reveal appalling labor conditions unseen by the rest of the world.

Like the striking workers and farm-workers of the United Luisita Workers Union (ULWU) and the Central Azucarera Labor Union (CATLU), sacadas are chained into the web of oppression at the vast sugar estate, where the extremes of wealth and poverty stretch to astounding proportions.

Sacadas are the hacienda’s living proof that colonial-period migrant labor in the Philippines persists in the “new millennium.” The ordinary sacada is the oppressed worker, migrant, and peasant twice over. Receiving abysmally-low wages and denied benefits, many of the sacadas hail from the Visayas, where many haciendas owned by the Cojuangcos and other landowning families are found.

Some of the sacadas bring their wives and children with them. Bulatlat interviewed the wife of a sacada living in the bunkhouse. She breastfeeds her two-month old child and takes care of another two-year old son. She said she had no choice but to come along. “Wala rin naman kaming titirahan sa Bais.” (We don’t have a place to stay in Bais.) Bais is their hometown in Negros Oriental in central Philippines.

In their tiny quarters, we see their oldest son sleeping, unperturbed by the mosquitoes and incessant rain.

The sacadas do their cooking by using pieces of wood put in a hole dug from the soil. A day’s supply of food includes a kilo of rice, a can of sardines, a pack of instant noodles, cooking oil and salt. They say they can only eat viands if they have money. Planting vegetables for their personal subsistence is prohibited in this hacienda where land is largely reserved for sugar cane, light industry parks for foreign investors, a golf course and exclusive residential units.

Pages: 1 2