Hacienda Luisita Belongs to Cojuangco
Tenants, Ex-DAR Exec Says
In a deal with
government funders 46 years ago, Don Jose Cojuangco pledged to distribute
the land now occupied by Hacienda Luisita to tenant farmers. A former
director of the Department of Agrarian Reform says a court order binds the
Cojuangcos to do so.
By Dabet
Castañeda
Bulatlat
The Cojuangco family,
owners of the embattled Hacienda Luisita, Inc. (HLI) and the Central
Azucarera de Tarlac (CAT), is legally bound to distribute the
4,000-hectare land to the sugar farm workers of the plantation, a former
Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) director said. The 4,000 hectares are
what is left of the 6,400-hectare plantation estate whose 2,400-ha portion
is said to have been earmarked as “homelots” for the HLI’s “shareholders.”
Hacienda
Luisita workers
in a mass action for land,
just wages, and rights
Photo by Dabet Castañeda |
|
The former DAR
official, Jose Santos, is one of government lawyers who on April 18, 1980
assisted Solicitor General Estelito Mendoza in filing Civil Case No.
131654 at the Regional Trial Court (RTC) of Manila, Branch XLIII against
the Tarlac Development Corporation (Tadeco), the former company name of
HLI and CAT.
Santos, who is now
retired, is known to his colleagues to be an expert in handling big land
disputes during his tenure at the government’s agrarian agency then known
as the Ministry of Agrarian Reform (MAR). He worked there as director of
the Bureau of Agrarian Legal Assistance (BALA).
In an exclusive
interview with Bulatlat last week,
Santos
said he is breaking his silence to shed light on what actually transpired
since 1958 when the late Cojuangco patriarch, Don Jose, acquired the
hacienda. He also recalled the conditions on why Don Jose Cojuangco was
able to do so, and the court case which government won over the family
that legally binds them to distribute land to the hacienda’s tillers.
Acquisition
Court records from
the Manila RTC show that Don Jose was able to purchase Tadeco on March 31,
1958 using government funds from two agencies, the Central Bank of the
Philippines (CBP) and the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS). The
CBP, under Monetary Board Resolution No. 1240, granted a loan of US
$2,128,480 to Don Jose on the condition that the latter would also buy the
Hacienda Luisita sugar plantation. The patriarch’s original plan was to
only purchase the sugar mill. As part of the condition, the hacienda is to
be distributed to small farmers in line with the administration’s
social justice program, Santos recalls.
But since the dollar
loan was not enough to purchase both the sugar mill and the plantation,
Don Jose again applied for a loan with the GSIS, court records show. The
GSIS Board of Trustees, through Resolution No. 3202 approved the sum of
P5.9 million in loan for the purchase of the 6,400-hectare Hacienda
Luisita on the condition, among others, that the estate should be
subdivided among tenants who shall pay the cost under “reasonable terms
and conditions.“
Tents of sacada (seasonal) workers at
Hacienda Luisita
Photo by Dabet Castañeda
Inquiry
In 1967, Conrado
Estrella of the now defunct Land Authority inquired in writing with the
Tadeco owner whether he has complied with the conditions set by the CBP
and GSIS, citing in particular the distribution of the land among its
tillers. Don Jose answered that when his group took over the hacienda,
they found no tenants and that they had to begin operating the hacienda by
hiring farm workers.
Ten years later, the
CBP made a similar inquiry with the heirs of Don Jose, who by then had
died. In March 1978, the Evening Post daily reported that about 100,000
residents of the 10 barrios comprising the hacienda filed a petition
demanding the expropriation of the hacienda and its distribution to small
farmers.
Consequently in May
of the same year, MAR officials made their own inquiry into the case.
Tadeco vice-president Demetria Cojuangco replied that the condition with
regards the land distribution could not be enforced.
Case
In 1980, Santos
recalls, he assisted Solicitor General Mendoza in filing a case against
the owners of Tadeco before the Manila RTC. Mendoza and Santos asked the
RTC to compel Tadeco to honor its pledge in the 1958 loan deal with the
CBP and GSIS and transfer the 6,400-hectare hacienda to the MAR who shall
then subdivide, distribute and resell the land at cost to small farmers.
Again, Tadeco
insisted the CBP and GSIS conditions could not be enforced first, because
there were no tenants in the hacienda and, second, sugarcane plantations
were not part of the scope of the government’s land reform program. To do
so, Tadeco lawyers said, would be giving in to what could be seen as a
“disguised confiscation of private property.”
The case dragged on
for five years until Dec. 2, 1985
when Judge Bernardo Pardo of the Manila RTC Branch XLIII decided in favor
of government. The Cojuangcos immediately appealed the decision before
the Court of Appeals (CA).
Dismissal
Santos recalls that
the RTC decision vindicated the sugar farm workers’ cause. Before the
appeal could be heard at the CA, however, one of the Cojuangco’s heirs,
Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino (widow of Marcos’ arch-rival Benigno Aquino),
became president of the country on the crest of a popular uprising that
toppled the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986.
But since the new
president was one of the owners of the hacienda, Santos said he began to
lose faith that the court decision would bear fruit. His fears were proven
right when in 1986, President Cojuangco-Aquino appointed Sedfrey Ordoñez,
the Cojuangco family’s own legal counsel in the Hacienda Luisita case, as
solicitor general. As solicitor general, Santos added, Ordoñez was also to
represent government that in the first place, originally filed the case
for expropriation.
As expected, the case
at the CA did not move and out of frustration, Santos resigned on the same
year from MAR, which had been renamed as Department of Agrarian Reform
(DAR).
In 1988, the
appellate court issued a dismissal resolution mainly due to the fact that
President Cojuangco-Aquino had guaranteed that sugar farms would be
included in her agrarian reform program known as the Comprehensive
Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
Francisco Chavez, who
replaced Ordoñez as solicitor general, asked through the CA whether the
CBP, DAR and the GSIS, as parties to the case, were still interested in
following up the appeal, Santos said. The three parties, based on court
records, answered in the negative but pointed out that Hacienda Luisita
should be part of the CARP with the land distributed to small farmers. On
May 18, 1988, the CA dismissed the appeal.
Santos clarifies,
however, that in dismissing the appeal the CA did not actually say that it
was nullifying the RTC Manila decision of 1985 which orders that Hacienda
Luisita should be subdivided, distributed and resold to the hacienda’s
small farmers at cost.
In fact, the CA
dismissal-resolution emphasized “it is not only conditional but also
without prejudice to the reopening/revival of the case if the conditions
of the DAR are not met,” Santos says.
SDO
Saying that agrarian
reform was the centerpiece of her administration, Mrs. Aquino instituted
the CARP stating that land reform can be achieved by either actual land
distribution or through a stock distribution scheme through the Stock
Distribution Option (SDO). Subsequently, the Cojuangcos turned Hacienda
Luisita into a corporation and is now known as Hacienda Luisita, Inc. (HLI),
with the sugar farm workers classified from farm laborers to
“stockholders” or “co-owners” of the said hacienda.
Ed Tadem, associate
professor of Asian Studies at the University of the Philippines in Diliman,
in a statement emailed to Bulatlat said that the SDO was
implemented by the former president, who is part of a landlord clan, to
“evade land reform.”
This scheme was
inserted into the so-called CARP (R.A. 6657) by pro-landlord legislators
during the term of President Aquino, he said, to allow landowners who run
their farms as corporations to distribute shares of stocks to farm workers
in lieu of outright land transfer.
Tadem added that
serious observers and scholars of agrarian reform contend that stock
distribution can never be a substitute for land transfer which is the
heart and soul of any genuine land reform.
Santos, on the other
hand, said that the SDO deprives the farmers’ right to the land they till
which, first and foremost, is a legitimate issue.
Solution
In a Memorandum of
Agreement (MoA) signed by Tadeco, the HLI, DAR and a handful of farm
beneficiaries stated that they have entered into this agreement “in the
spirit of the CARP with the end view of improving the lot of farm
beneficiaries of the stock distribution plan and obtaining for them
greater benefits.’
“The question is: Is
the purpose of the SDO achieved? Has it become successful?” Santos asks.
This question also
rings in the mind of the sugar farm workers who have staged a work
stoppage since Nov. 6 to, among their demands, force the DAR to review the
implementation and effects of the SDO on their daily lives.
Sugar farm workers
say that since the incorporation of the hacienda, they have experienced
greater hardships due to, among others, diminishing mandays caused by
mechanization of sugar cane production and the land use conversion.
In Tadem’s statement,
the Luisita stock option plan had been denounced as "unconstitutional" by
the University of the Philippines
Law
Center in a position paper submitted in
June 1990 to the Senate Agrarian Reform Committee. The memorandum stated
that the "scheme is violative not only of the social justice provisions
but even more so of the specific provisions of the Constitution on
agrarian reform" since it "allows the original owners to remain the
controlling interest at the expense of the supposedly farmer
beneficiaries."
If the SDO does not
actually benefit the sugar farm workers of the HLI, Santos, said it is
imperative for the DAR to nullify the implementation of the SDO at HLI and
pursue the lower court decision against the Cojuangcos.
Under these
circumstance, the former DAR official said, that makes the Cojuangcos
legally bound to distribute the hacienda to small farmers.
Santos also scored
the DAR and the administrations after President Aquino for having no
political will to settle the agrarian unrest in the hacienda. It is sad
that it had to take the lives of the fighting farm beneficiaries to put
this issue into the government’s attention once more, he said. Bulatlat
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