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Case studies on the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP)
should start in Lubao, Pampanga. There is no other place in the
country that is as richly associated with agrarian reform as this
town.
The first organized agrarian reform strike took
place in Lubao, at the Hacienda del Prado. The first Philippine
president to implement agrarian reform (though not on a sweeping
scale) was a Lubao native—Diosdado Macapagal.
Through generations, Lubao was a feudal town of
a few landowning families and a teeming mass of tenants and farm
workers. Except for a few enlightened landowners, the relationship
was basically between masters and serfs. There was no significant
professional class and no sizable middle class to soften the
exploitative nature of the town’s feudal structure.
The big landowners were predominantly mestizos.
Isabel Arrastia Preysler, who was once married to singer Julio
Iglesias and a former finance minister of Spain of noble lineage,
came from one of such landowning families, the Arrastias. Several
Arrastias are part of Maurice Arcache’s crowd of “dahlings”
who are rich and beautiful people.
In the late 30s, Lubao was already a fertile
recruitment ground for the Sosyalistas, the left-wing group that
advocated agrarian justice and land distribution. The Sosyalistas
organized the strike at Hacienda del Prado. In the 40s, 50s and the
60s, several top Huk commanders came from Lubao.
While much of the milestone events in the long
and turbulent history of agrarian reform took place in Lubao,
students of agrarian reform circa 2008 will not find many things
uplifting about the state of agrarian reform in the Pampanga town.
Some of their findings will be utterly
depressing—the worst of both worlds. Agrarian reform has pushed
landowning families into the poorhouse. The landless tenants given
land under the program have not made progress in their lives either.
The Dimsons, the Lubao-based family that used to
own 3,000 hectares (spread out in Pampanga, Bataan, Laguna and
Isabela), had lost much of that land to agrarian reform. While
several of the third-generation Dimsons are still living comfortable
lives, some cannot pay their electric bills on time.
Some have gone overseas to work as OFWs. Some,
it is said, are now dirt-poor.
That this can happen to a family that used to be
the 2nd biggest landowner in Central Luzon after the Cojuangcos is
unimaginable. During the peak of the sugar boom, the family dictated
the schedules of the milling season at the Pampanga sugar mills, had
two-seater planes as playthings. The big hacienda house had a pair
of machine gun turrets (equipped with machine guns) at the
guardhouse.
The tenants of the Dimsons, the Arrastias and
the other big landowners—the beneficiaries of land
distribution—cannot also claim that agrarian reform has improved
their lives after the break-up of the big haciendas and the
distribution of the broken-up land to the tenants.
The present-generation agrarian reform
beneficiaries in Lubao, with land sizes of one to three hectares,
still live off marginal farming. Their lives are just slightly
better than the lives of their landless fathers and grandfathers.
The certificates of land ownerships that they got from the
Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) cannot be used as collateral for
loans.
Many are now back to being landless. Lacking
production and loan support, they have sold the land ownership
certificates to agri-business people, dealers of construction
supplies, and rich professionals. The architect of actress Sharon
Cuneta acquired a huge track of land very near the old hacienda
house of the Dimsons.
A brother of mine, who now tills a piece of land
awarded to my late father (my late father was a tenant of the
Arrastias) is concentrating more and more on small-scale rice
milling and trading just to survive.
The agrarian reform program was expected to
create pockets of rural Utopias. When it was declared the
centerpiece state program in 1986, after the first EDSA Revolution,
hopes were high that if would truly transform lives, create thriving
agrarian reform communities and dent the crippling face of rural
poverty.
The experiences of Lubao suggest dashed hopes
and failed dreams. This sacred ground for those who laid their lives
for agrarian justice showcases nothing but the epic failure of a
centerpiece state program.
mvrong@yahoo.com
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