For whom the Yulo bell tolls?
WHERE public service begins, vested interest must end. There is no debate on the issue, and it must smack of superfluity to even make it the opening piece in this undertaking. Simply stated, no need to emphasize the obvious. If only for delicadeza’s sake, no one steeped in the basics of good manners and right conduct is expected to squander civilized decorum, all for preserving one’s evidently vested interests.
The subject here is Maria Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga, the secretary heading the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). Toni, as friends and relatives call her, is the court-designated executor of the vast kingdom called the Yulo estate, which consists of not just the immense Canlubang farm in Calamba, Laguna, but also of the 40,000 hectares of farmland comprising the Yulo King Ranch (YKR) straddling Coron and Busuanga in Palawan. There is much more it seems as alleged land-grabbing activities by one Greggy Araneta of a certain San Cristobal Realty Corp. are also attributed to the Yulo estate.
That said, tenants of YKR, whose families have been battling for implementation of Republic Act (RA) 6657, or the “Comprehensive Land Reform Law” (CARP Law), have been agitating for the replacement of Secretary Yulo-Loyzaga, invoking conflict of interest. As environment and natural resources secretary, she has to authorize the partitioning of 2,000 hectares from the YKR, but how can she do that when she is in fact mandated not to do it by her law-designated task as executor of the Yulo estate?
This column has had the privilege of closely observing the transitions of stewardship at the DENR, at least since the days of Mike Defensor, a comrade of mine in the national democratic movement along with former senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan; the three of us were among the group chosen to comprise the national council of Sanlakas, foremost carrier on the legal plane of the banner of struggle against the de facto continuing martial law administration. When peace reigned, so to speak, and Mike had the opportunity to serve as DENR secretary, my personal struggle for a modest piece of property in Antipolo fell into good graces. But lest this statement be misunderstood, I hasten to add that what I mean is that I had the fortune of having my case personally attended to by somebody honed on the principle of uprightness that always is the hallmark of children of the First Quarter Storm.
Tough luck for the tenants of the YKR, Mike is not at the helm of the Environment and Natural Resources department any longer. If he were, I would not hesitate bringing to his attention the plight of tenants of the 40,000-hectare premium farmland now that the matter has been brought to my attention. I’m pretty sure Mike would have gladly accommodated their complaint. As we always pride in once an activist, always an activist.
Tougher luck is that sitting at the post that Mike occupied several administrations ago is a lady who, as per a favorite cliché goes, I would not touch with a 10-foot pole.
Environment Secretary Toni Yulo-Loyzaga is the daughter of the famed cacique lord Jose Yulo, who not only was a top henchman of President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., but also one whose brood had intermarried into the ultra powerful Aranetas of Philippine aristocracy. And this last cited attribute just has to turn me into jelly, albeit flaming in revolutionary nostalgia.
It was summer of 1971 when to chants of “Makibaka, huwag matakot!” from the rank-andfile employees of the Makabayan Publishing Corp., I acquiesced to their popular demand for me to head the newly formed labor union Katipunan ng mga Makabayang Obrero (Kamao). Housed in what decades later would be known as Araneta City in Cubao, Quezon City, the company was owned by J. Amado Araneta, father-in-law of the first president of the Philippine Republic, Manuel Roxas, and a close kin of Gregorio Araneta, patriarch of the family whence came the cousins Greggy and Liza that married the Marcos children, Irene and now President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.
According to narratives reaching my desk, the marriages of Yulos and Aranetas have accomplished a formidable union of landholdings said to approximate the size of one region, i.e., Southern Luzon or Central Visayas, the most widely known being the Canlubang estate in Southern Tagalog.
Accordingly, therefore, as land is concentrated in the hands of the few social elites, it is necessarily denied the great bulk of the unpropertied toiling class, the workers and farmers. Thus, have the peasants of the Yulo-Aranetas been reduced virtually to the status of their very forebears in the colonial period — groaning endlessly under the yoke of the exploitative cacique system.
The story of the Coron-Busuanga farmers, as well as those of tenants in the Yulo Canlubang estate and in the allegedly Greggy
Araneta-land-grabbed properties in Southern Luzon, all have a way of making me rage in reminiscences of the violence, injuries and even deaths similarly suffered by Kamao in contending with the Araneta strike-breaking tactics carried out by 300-strong Araneta Center security personnel beefed up by an equal number of Quezon City police.
And all of a sudden, as in an exquisite filmic juxtaposition, for every footage of the struggle of the Yulo tenants, a flashback of highlights of the Kamao strike: the insulation from public patronage of the entire Araneta Center through the Araneta Commune segues to Yulo farmers agitating for implementation of RA 6657; the Congress massacre in 1971 intercuts with the burning of a whole community of peasants in Sitio Buntog, Barangay Canlubang, Calamba, Laguna, by the Yuloowned San Cristobal Realty Corp. in 2021; and the Kamao members carrying the body of Liza Balando, dead from M16 slug that rammed her chest in the 1971 Congress massacre, a scene that appears in a composite with that of a slain Arnel Figueroa shot dead while protecting his small farm lot in 2016 by a Yulo King Ranch “blue guard.”
Oh, how every beating the Yulo farmers got has been as the terrific lashes Araneta struck at the Kamao workers which forced them to strike. The fight of the Yulo farmers has been my fight as well and will carry it through to the end.
As the poet John Donne wrote: “Every man’s death diminishes me, for I am a part of mankind. And therefore send no one to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”