Did the Supreme Court order the distribution of Hacienda Luisita to its farm workers in order to spite President Be-nigno Aquino 3rd whose family owns the sprawling sugar-cane plantation?
Veteran court watchers say they don’t think so. On the contrary, the President may have experienced a great deal of relief—or as we say in Tagalog, nabunutan ng tinik—upon learning of the Supreme Court ruling.
His mother’s family’s ownership of Hacienda Luisita has been the single biggest chink in the political armor of Mr. Aquino who has been slammed again and again for not doing anything to liberate tens of thousands of plantation workers from their bondage to the soil.
If, as common wisdom puts it, magistrates remain beholden—or, at the very least, sympathetic—to the presidents that had named them to the high tribunal, what are we to make of the fact that all three of P-Noy’s SC appointees voted in favor of the ruling to carve up the Cojuangco plantation?
Eleven of the 14 justices who voted unanimously to order the distribution of 4,915.75 hectares in the plantation owned by Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) to the 6,296 registered “farmworker-beneficiaries” (FWBs) were appointees of former President Gloria M. Arroyo.
Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio—widely seen as pro-Aquino despite being a GMA nominee because she appointed another magistrate, Renato Corona, as Chief Justice just before she stepped down in 2010—had chosen not to take part in the deliberation. In inhibiting himself from the case, Carpio pointed out that he used to be a lawyer of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., which had bought a portion of the disputed plantation. Such delicadeza the public would like to see more of from the other magistrates.
The unanimity of the GMA and P-Noy appointees in voting for distribution, court watchers said, showed that they all were convinced that the full application of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law was the right thing to do. It did seem though that with their 14-0 vote, the magistrates allowed neither personal loyalties nor partisan considerations to stand in the way of what was immediately hailed as a wise landmark decision.
The unanimous vote also makes unlikely a reversal of their ruling even if HLI’s lawyers do file—as announced while this was being written Friday—a motion for reconsideration to question, for one, the valuation of the farmland that the SC has ordered distributed to the plantation workers. The announcement of the court ruling gave cause for much celebration among the workers, but the fight is not over.
Court watchers said they expect the process to extend for at least one more year—unless, of course, the magistrates expedite the submission of motions and counter-motions from the HLI and government lawyers as well as the resolution thereof. That would be another welcome development, indeed.
But while the Hacienda Luisita ruling has met widespread approval, the SC still has some way to go in rehabilitating its less-than-unblemished image. Its critics are not yet willing to forgive it for its tendency to “flip-flop” on its decisions, such as those pertaining to the cityhood status of over a dozen municipalities, the illegally laid-off flight attendants and stewards of Philippine Airlines and the controversial watch-list order imposed on Pampanga Rep. Gloria M. Arroyo.
In the case of Hacienda Luisita itself, the SC had at one time disallowed the so-called stock distribution option (SDO) only to order a “referendum” of plantation workers to determine their sentiment on the scheme, which had allowed HLI and other plantation owners to circumvent the spirit, if not the letter, of the agrarian reform law.
Nonetheless, the more moderate critics of the high tribunal feel that the November 22 ruling indicates the potential for change—hopefully for the better—in the judicial branch of government. In truth, the court’s active support for genuine land reform is now more crucial than ever before.
One million or so hectares of farmland that fall under the coverage of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) have yet to be distributed to the farmers who work on them. However, a little over two years are left to the amended law, known as CARP Extension with Reforms (CARPER), that in 2009 added five years to the timetable of the program’s land distribution component.
“The law may now be on the side of the farmers, but time is not,” Akbayan pointed out in a recent press statement. In 2007, it was then-Akbayan Rep. Risa Hontiveros—along with Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman—who filed the bill that would later become the CARPER Law.
For this reason, the party-list group said, the immediate distribution of farmland should be the next crucial step that the government must take.
Aside from Hacienda Luisita, there are several plantations in other parts of the country—such as those belonging to the family of GMA’s husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo, in Negros Occidental—that have been able to get around land reform since it was launched in 1988 as “the centerpiece program” of then-President Cory Aquino.
Akbayan also urged the current President Aquino to support House Resolution 253 filed by the party-list group’s congressional deputies, Kaka Bag-ao and Walden Bello, calling for an investigation of all the other SDO schemes implemented in plantations aside from Hacienda Luisita.
Mr. Aquino, Akbayan said, “must show resolve in handling this issue by using the HLI case as a strong precedent for other estates around the country to be justly distributed to the farmers.”
Land reform advocates were greatly encouraged by the SC’s ruling last week, but the fact remains that the decades-old struggle for social justice and the empowerment of the landless peasantry continues.
Meanwhile, someone should tell TV and radio news reporters, readers and commentators that the “h” in hacienda—Spanish for “estate”—is silent.
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